35
Airport Analysis
DEFINITION: The act of introspection that naturally occurs upon watching planes take off and land.
BENEFITS: Intense self-reflection, leading to life changes.
HAZARDS: Intense self-reflection, leading to life changes. Also charges related to last-minute flight changes.
The flight to Montreal was scheduled to depart on time, which, naturally, meant that they had to arrive two hours early. They had never traveled much when Norris was young, but he remembered that his father liked to leave plenty of time to get through security. Judith had hugged him twice outside the airport. Once in the car, stretching into the back seat to kiss his neck while reassuring him that she wasn’t mad.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” Norris had said, one last time.
“I just want you to be happy. You know that,” she answered, as if he’d said the silliest thing.
They hauled their bags from the trunk, triple-checked passports, and made for the automatic doors.
“Norris!” His mother shouted through the passenger window. She unbuckled and left the engine idling to wrap her arms around him. “I love you.” She turned to Felix. “You: look after our kid, all right?”
Only a mother could say something in a manner that was both heartfelt plea and unspoken threat.
Something had been nagging Norris ever since they left the apartment, and it stayed with him through security check. They stopped at Hudson News for overpriced bags of caramel M&M’S and mixed nuts: preventative measures against airplane “food.” Settling in at their gate, the anticipatory exhaustion Norris always felt at airports washed over him as he watched hurried passengers ebb and flow in a sea of neck pillows and overstuffed carry-ons. There would be jetlag and cabin pressure, baggage claim roulette, followed by the transit shit show of catching a cab to look forward to, but that wasn’t what weighed on him as he struggled to find a comfortable position on the ergonomically sadistic airport chair.
“Janet’s going to be thrilled to have me hanging around for a few weeks,” he quipped, trying to give voice to it. Maybe that was it: dread at living with Stepmommy Dearest, and her crying spawn, to boot.
“You’re my son. She knows that.” Felix waved it off. “I’m kind of looking forward to having my boys together.”
No, it wasn’t dread. Norris still couldn’t explain that feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t anger at his dad for trying to make everything sound so easy, or even guilt from his mother being bend-over-backward accommodating. It was something else. It was . . . sadness. A double-decker burrito-size sadness, right there in his gut.
“Are you going to miss your Austin friends?” Felix offered. His paternal sixth sense must have noticed something was wrong. “Your mom mentioned something about a sports team.”
“Oh. That.”
Norris pulled out his phone and found a picture of the players out on the ice. He tilted his screen to throw off the glare coming in the airport’s beaming windows. Maddie had taken that picture during their first game.
“They’ve gotten pretty good,” Norris said. “I mean, some of them. They can stand up.”
“You know.” Felix nodded. “The first thing I did when we got to Montreal was find that bar, Lakaye, since it was the only one that broadcast Haitian football. It was a way for me to feel connected to home, even in Montreal. I guess you starting a hockey team in Texas is kind of the same thing. Who’s that?” His father pointed to the screen.
“Liam.” Norris smiled as he began to narrate the next photo. “Liam Hooper. The dude I started the league with. Or, I guess he started it. Really I just tagged along.”
Another photo of Liam.
“That’s him fly-fishing. He has this bucket list of . . . stuff he just wants to do, and he kind of just does them.”
“Sounds fun,” Felix said.
Inspiring. That sadness-burrito wasn’t getting any better.
“You always seemed like such a lone wolf as a kid. . . .”
“I wasn’t a lone wolf, Dad,” Norris said. “I just didn’t have friends.”
“Who’s that?” Felix asked, clearing his throat like he always did when he couldn’t joke something away, intrigued by the next photo that came up. They’d fallen into playing a game of swipe-and-tell now.
“She’s cute! Is she your girlfriend?”
“Aarti? No. Well, we were kind of going out, not really, though . . . anyway that’s over now.”
“Do you know how to use prote—”
“Please stop talking.”
“Okay,” Felix simply said. “Were you nice to her? This girl?”
“I thought I was. But maybe I could have been nicer,” Norris confessed after a moment.
Neither of them said anything for a while. Norris noticed that the M&M’S wrapper had been flattened into a sheet and folded around Felix’s anxious fingers like a long ring.
“It feels like I’ve missed a lot in a really short window,” Felix eventually admitted. “Your first hangover, your first girlfriend . . . I had speeches prepared for all of these.”
“You did?”
“Well, I have one ready for your first time. I can tell you all about that.”
“God, Dad.” Norris groaned. “Please don’t.”
“Nothing graphic. You’re never going to be a porn star, so forget all that stuff your mother and I pretended you didn’t browse when you got your own laptop. Just be in the moment, and pay attention to her needs, and—”
“I will scream,” Norris warned. He swiped to a new photo to change the subject.
“Okay, okay. Who’s that?” Felix asked. “Another girlfriend? Jesus, kiddo.”
“No, not a girlfriend either . . . She worked at the restaurant with me.”
“She looks nice.” Felix observed. It was a photo someone had snapped on the dance floor at the prom, before everything had gone so wrong. Maddie was grinning with him. She looked happy. He looked happy.
“She is nice,” Norris said. The nicest.
“She likes you,” Felix observed, pointing to the screen. “You can definitely tell.”
The thing was that Norris really couldn’t. He had revisited the chain of events over and over in his mind but he just couldn’t track it. When had Maddie become interested in him? When had Aarti figured it out? When had he started liking Maddie back? Was there an alternate reality where he didn’t get into it with Aarti and Ian, and left the after-party as Maddie suggested, happily on her arm? That alternate reality felt both as likely and as impossible to Norris as the one he was stuck in right now. Nothing about moving back to Canada felt right in the moment: one more alternate reality away from the real thing. He tried to put the thought out of his head and shoved the phone into his pocket. She might have liked him when the photo was taken, but that was then.
“It doesn’t matter, Dad. They’re just photos.”
“Here.” Felix reached into his pocket, pulling out his own phone along with a wad of old receipts. He opened an album to show Norris.
“Cute,” Norris offered. Babies were cute as a general population, but he did not get much out of individualizing them. Felix swiped to another photo of the same baby.
“He’s fat,” Norris couldn’t help but note. “Still definitely cute, but watch out for those candy snacks or that thing will chub up on you so fast.”
Felix laughed out loud. “That’s you, actually.”
“That fat-headed baby is me?”
“Your head was always this exact size,” Felix said. “You just grew into it, thank God.”
“There weren’t smart phones when I was a baby,” Norris pointed out.
“No, but I had all the old family albums digitized. Easier to carry around.”
Norris just nodded. He hadn’t expected that.
“It looks like you had a pretty good life here,” Felix continued. “All things considered.”
“I messed it up.”
“I know I’m a shit dad,” Felix said. “I know that. We all mess things up. It’s what you do with the mess that matters.”
Norris nodded, and on impulse, fished his little notebook out from his backpack. For some reason, he hadn’t been able to part with it, even after all the mess it had caused. He casually flipped through it, wondering if Kolb knew what she’d started when she’d simply handed him the nearest notebook from a bin.
Flipping through the entries, Norris started to feel sick to his stomach. What had Aarti found funny in any of these? They were bitter rants, mean asides. This guy was homesick, insecure, bitter, and so fucking lonely he spent his lunch hours walking around without going anywhere. Patrick Lamarra might say the authorial voice behind this notebook was “kind of a little bitch.”
“What’s that?” Felix asked.
“Excuses,” Norris answered after taking a moment to consider.
He wanted to tear out the pages, one by one, crumple them, and in doing so erase all the crap that this thing had caused him. But, as his father had said: It doesn’t matter if you make a mess. It matters that you fix it. Maybe the whole point of approaching life as origami that the documentary had missed was learning to fold your sharp edges.
“Dad?”
“Yes, kid?”
“Can I please stay?”