CHAPTER 1 | Weightless
“So, do you actually know this guy you’re taking off with?”
Jaime looked at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were hidden behind his dark sunglasses, but I could tell he was teasing. The “guy” I was taking off with was his old college roommate, Jeff, who was sitting right next to him in the front passenger seat of the Volvo station wagon. The three of us were winding through the cement maze of Houston morning traffic on the way to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where Jeff and I were scheduled for a flight.
“Jaime, no,” said Jeff. He said it with a half smile, like a reprimanding mother trying to hide her amusement over a childish misdeed.
“Just saying,” continued Jaime, “that as one of the few people who’s had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling abroad with you, I think she deserves to know what she’s getting into.” He took a hand off the steering wheel, grinned, elbowed Jeff, and then returned to my reflection in the rearview mirror, waiting for an answer. Do you actually know this guy?
I didn’t know how to answer the question. I evaded instead. “Is there anything I should know?”
“How many hours do you have?” joked Jaime. “I bet he ‘forgot’ to mention the time he ripped the saline IV out of his arm and jail-broke out of that hospital in Paris. It was the morning after Bastille Day. Jesus, he was running down the hallway in one of those little paper gowns. You know—the kind where you can see the ass? Didn’t even stop to put on clothes, just barreled out the door and booked it right out of France.”
“Jaime, no!” yelled Jeff, with pretend horror. “That was twenty years ago. Our balls had barely dropped.”
“I don’t know, man,” said Jaime, shrugging his shoulders, “Let’s just say my rosary is going to get a workout during the next three weeks.”
I sat in the backseat, running my fingers along the embroidered hem of my dress. Out towards the horizon, past the half-built subdivisions and empty cement lots, I could see a line of tiny planes lifting off into the smoggy morning sunrise. We were getting close. In a few hours my plane—our plane—would be taxiing onto the runway. It was a fair question: did I actually know the man who would be sitting beside me as the wheels lifted off the tarmac?
Yes. And no.
I knew Jeff was a science professor and a sixth-generation Texan with a wild glint in his eye. I knew I’d thought, “Oh, you again,” when I met him for the first time, like I’d just bumped into an old friend. I knew our relationship had escalated into a flashing, tilt-a-whirl circus after a single round of tequila. I knew he liked chocolate with flecks of sea salt. I knew that he’d been married six years and separated for two, that he had a five-year-old daughter with bright, brown eyes, and that he chased the unconventional life like a migratory bird flying north for winter instead of south. I knew he was a sparkling provocateur, but Tupac’s “Dear Mama” made him cry and he occasionally stopped the car to gently lift dead cats from the road and deposit them under bushes—a tender-hearted joker, if there was such a thing.
But did I truly know him? I had no earthly idea. How well can you know someone you just met online?
Maybe time and circumstance didn’t matter so much in this story. In the handful of weeks since our first irreverent online dating emails—batted back and forth like tennis balls—Jeff had managed to penetrate my formidable wall of reserve. A rare feat. After a week, I agreed to meet him in person. Our first date was more like a reunion than an introduction.
Given our stark differences, the connection was surprising. I spent the first thirteen years of my life in rainy Portland, Oregon. There were seven of us: my parents, my three sisters, my brother, and me. We lived in a 100-year-old, one-bathroom Victorian house on Tillamook Street, named after an indigenous tribe in the Pacific Northwest. My parents chose to homeschool us, partially out of concern over our quality of education and partially out of a deep religious conviction. (I genuinely imagined the local middle school as a den of iniquity littered with condoms and needles.) My mother was devout, but she ensured that all five of us were well educated and socially competent. We bore no resemblance to the breed of Christian homeschoolers who were clad in long skirts and denim and forbidden to date or dance. The summer that the Twin Towers fell, we moved to Fort Worth, Texas. I came of age in Cowtown, where a storm could turn the sky boiled spinach green and snakes rattled in the grass. People loved football (almost) as much as Jesus.