Nomad (11 page)

OCTOBER 19
^th

11

F
IUMICINO
A
IRPORT,
I
TALY

“THEY ANNOUNCED THE boarding gate,” Celeste said to Jess, nudging her shoulder.

Jess nodded and looked up at the departures board:
New York 10:00 AA1465 - Go to Gate C23
. She looked back at her phone.

The man sitting beside them looked up at the board as well, then folded his newspaper and stood, smiling at Celeste and Jess. He walked off. A young woman in heels and a short skirt immediately took his place. The food court waiting area of the International Terminal of Fiumicino Airport was packed with people buzzing around. In front of them was an empty Gucci store, its sales staff standing at attention next to the entrance. The recycled air smelled of carpets and coffee, the same as airport terminals the world over.

Celeste put her latte down and unzipped her suitcase. “Call him again.” She stuffed her Economist magazine into her carry-on.

“I just did, he’s not answering.” Jess dialed her father’s number again anyway. She’d arrived with Celeste at the airport the evening before and stayed at the Hilton next door. One ring, then two. It went to voice mail. She jerked the phone away from her ear, hung up and threw it into her purse.

Jess’s father, Ben, was supposed to meet them at the Hilton last night, but he called to say he would arrive in the morning. Then he sent a text and email saying he’d meet them in the International Terminal food court. Now he wasn’t answering his calls or messages.

“Maybe he’s at the gate,” Celeste suggested, standing to knock the crumbs of her croissant breakfast off her blouse and jeans.

A man pushing a baby stroller eyed Jess and Celeste. He wanted their seats. Jess shrugged aggressively at him,
what?

Celeste saw it and smiled at the man. “Yes, we’re leaving.” She turned to her daughter. “Come on, let’s go.”

Shaking her head, Jess stood and grabbed her carry-on. “Fine.”

She ran a hand through her hair and rubbed the back of her neck. She’d left most of her things at a friend’s house in Rome, said she would call when she knew where she was headed. This didn’t surprise anyone. After nearly a year in Italy, all she was leaving with was this one small carry-on. And that didn’t surprise her, either.

“
Grazie
,
grazie
,” said the man with the stroller, angling in behind them to get the seats.

Celeste pointed down a hallway to their right, past the Gucci store, to the “C” concourse. “This way.”

Jess’s phone buzzed in her hand. She looked at it right away, thinking it was her father, but it was a message from Giovanni: “If you stay in Italy for any reason, feel free to come back.” Even in her deepening frustration, she managed a small grin.

“I’m sure Ben’s on his way,” Celeste said as they walked down the concourse, passing gate C1. “Your father and I may have—”

Jess’s phone rang. She checked the screen. “It’s him.” She pushed the
answer
button. “Dad, where are you?”

Ben Rollins cringed. He knew his daughter wasn’t going to like this. “I’m on the next flight, right behind you. I’m sorry honey, but normalizing the data is taking longer than we thought. We need certainty before we make an announcement.”

He put one hand over the receiver. “How much time, Roger? What do you think, another hour?”

Sitting in the growing nest of papers on Ben’s hotel bed, Roger nodded. “Maybe two, tops. You can be out of here by noon.”

Ben took his hand off the receiver. “Sweetheart, I’m leaving in an hour, two maximum.

“But you said that last night,” Jess complained on the other end.

“I know I did, but I promise. I’ll be right behind you.” He pulled up a list of flights on his laptop screen. “There’s a direct flight on United at 3 p.m. I can catch. I’m booking it now.”

No response.

“Jessica, honey, please, promise me you're getting on that plane.”

“Okay,” came the quiet reply.

“Good. Listen, if I want to finish this, I need to go. Love you, and give your mother a kiss for me.”

Another pause. “Love you, too.”

Ben took a deep breath and hung up.

“By the way, your boxes arrived.” Roger pointed in the corner of the room. “Just got here.”

Ben looked at them. Mrs. Brown might be an old horse, but she was reliable. “Roger, we need to get this done—”

The door to his room opened. He hadn’t given anyone else a key. “We don’t need any room service…”

But it wasn’t a maid. It was one of the sunglass-wearing security goons from the top floor. “Dr. Ben Rollins, I need you to come with me.”

“What?” Ben slapped his laptop closed. “I’m not going anywhere, I need to finish—”

“This is not a request,” the big man said in a flat voice, his accent vaguely Swiss. Another man appeared behind him.

Jess stared at the phone in her hand. She hadn’t put up much of a fight, but then there was no winning an argument with her father. Not when he set his mind to something.

“What did he say?” Celeste asked.

They’d arrived at C23, and the waiting area was jammed. An American Airlines Boeing 777 sat hunched on the tarmac in front of the gate.

“He’s not coming.”

“At all?” Celeste frowned.

“On the next flight,” Jess corrected. “He said he’d be on the United flight at 3 p.m.” She put her phone back in her pocket and looked up at the ceiling. Black signs with orange letters indicated directions, “
Trasiti
- Transfers,” said one, and next to it, “
Uscita
- Way Out
-
Roma
.” She stared at the sign.
Roma
. Rome
.
Way out.

A three-chime tone played over the public address system. “American Airlines flight 1465 now pre-boarding,” announced the flight steward at the check-in desk. “Families and anyone needing assistance can now—”

“That gives us a little more girl time, no?” Celeste said with a smile. “Come on, we can watch a romantic movie, have a few glasses of wine. It’ll be fun.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Jess closed her eyes. She opened them to see a young family pressing through the crowd, the mother and father loaded down with bags; the father held his little girl’s hand, the mother held her tiny son in one arm. The two children batted at each other, the girl smacking the little boy with an inflatable dolphin. The boy erupted into tears.

“Susanna,” scolded the mother, “if you can’t play nice, there’s going to be quiet time.”

Jess watched them disappear past the check-in and down the gangway. Again the image of two children playing in a field of snow flitted through her mind. The tears seemed to come by themselves, running down Jess’s face. She gritted her teeth, tried to hold it back, but she couldn’t. She sobbed, bending over, stepping to the row of seats behind her and sitting. People around her backed away.

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Celeste knelt beside her. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s my fault,” Jess gasped between sobs. “Everything is my fault.”

“What’s your fault? Do you mean what happened with Ricardo?”

“No.” Jess clenched her jaw. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “You and Dad splitting up, all of it.”

“Oh, sweetheart, come here.” Celeste put an arm around her daughter. “You were a child, it’s not your fault. It was an accident. You can’t blame yourself.”

Jess nodded, but she knew it wasn’t true. She’d never been honest, had never been able to admit what she did, even to herself, certainly not to her mother and father. Closing her eyes, the image of the small boy’s face disappearing into the black hole, ringed in brilliant white, floated into her mind. She opened her eyes. “I want us to be a family again.”

The three-chime tone played again. “Now boarding all rows,” said the airline steward over the public address.

“Baby, it’s okay. We
are
a family. There’s a reason your father and I never divorced. We just needed space.”

“He’s not coming.” Jess breathed deep and regained control of herself. “You know how he is. When he gets a thing stuck in his head.”

“He’ll come,” Celeste insisted, but then hung her head and nodded. “But maybe you’re right. Why don’t we go and get him, then? You just talked to him. He’s at the hotel, right?”

Jess nodded.

“An hour in a taxi and we’ll be back in Rome. Then we can all go together at 3 p.m. Is that what you want? You decide.”

Wiping her tears away, Jess nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

Celeste stood. “I’ll cancel our reservation.” She pointed at the check-in desk, an attendant standing and talking to passengers. “We have no checked luggage. I can just cancel this flight, and we’ll go meet your father.”

Taking a deep breath, Jess pushed her long blond hair back from her eyes. She felt ridiculous. With the back of one hand she dried her cheeks. “Yes, let’s cancel it.”

Nodding, Celeste strode off purposefully toward the check-in desk. Jess rubbed the tears from her eyes. In what seemed a minute later her mother returned. “Done. Why don’t you give Ben a call, tell him we’re coming?”

The crowd of people around them faced toward the gate, waiting to board, but some of the people had turned. The noise in the concourse hushed, then people started talking loudly, a wave of noise rising up from the lower gates. More people in front of Jess turned around. She had her phone out, was about to dial her father, when she looked up to see what was going on.

People pointed at the television monitors lining the center of the concourse. Standing, Jess turned to see what was going on. In bold letters on the screen behind: “Massive Object on Collision Course for Earth.” A BBC news anchor filled half of the screen above the headline. The people crowded around Jess shushed each other to be quiet.

“We are joined now by the head of the Swiss Astronomical Society,” the anchor said. “Dr. Menzinger, what can you tell us?”

In the other half of the split screen, a diminutive man, balding with wire frame glasses, chewed on his lip. “Exactly what I’ve already said. A massive object, many times the size of our sun, is heading directly into the solar system. The government has been hiding it.”

“The government?” asked the news anchor. “Which government?”

“Any of them,” Dr. Menzinger replied, still mashing his lip. “All of them.”

“This is an incredible claim. Can you back it up?”

Dr. Menzinger laughed. “Go and look yourself. Any amateur can point their telescope into the skies tonight and look at the position of Uranus or Neptune. Are they where they’re supposed to be? The gravity of this object—they’re calling it Nomad—is already pulling the planets away.”