Flight 1409 out of Denver was thirty minutes into rough air when my chest decided to stop working right. I had my knees pulled up as high as the economy legroom would allow, and my fingernails were biting into the grain of my leather purse until my knuckles turned the color of lard.<\/p>\n
The woman in 12A was snoring softly against the bulkhead, her neck bent at an angle that looked painful. Nobody else in the row was paying attention to the way my breathing had gone all shallow and hitched up in my throat.<\/p>\n
That is usually how panic attacks go when you are fifty-one years old and traveling alone. You just sit there and pretend you are reading a magazine article about home gardening while your heart hammers against your ribs like a trapped bird.<\/p>\n
My husband had been gone for two years, three months, and six days, though I had stopped counting the hours by the time I packed my suitcase in Cheyenne. He was the kind of man who could fix an alternator with a bent butter knife and talk me down from a bad spell just by keeping his voice low and steady.<\/p>\n
When the plane dropped six feet in an air pocket, my stomach didn’t just flip; it felt like it dissolved into cold water. I dropped my magazine on the floor. It slid under the service cart track with a cheap paper rustle.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t get a full breath no matter how hard I forced my shoulders down against the seat back. My throat felt like it was lined with dry wool, and the hum of the jet turbines seemed to be pressing down on my skull with the weight of a wet shingle.<\/p>\n
Across the narrow aisle, in seat 12C, a man with graying hair cropped close to his scalp was looking out the small double-paned window at the gray expanse of clouds. He was wearing a faded flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, showing forearms tanned dark from outdoor work.<\/p>\n
He didn’t make a big production out of looking over at me. He just turned his head slowly, like he had felt the shift in the air pressure before the plane even dropped again.<\/p>\n
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat and turn my face toward the aisle so he wouldn’t see the mess I was making of myself. My fingers were shaking so badly I had to tuck them under my thighs to keep them from twitching.<\/p>\n
He didn’t ask if I was okay. People who ask if you are okay on airplanes usually just want you to lie and say yes so they can go back to their crossword puzzles.<\/p>\n
Instead, he reached his right hand across the aisle, palm open and resting flat on the armrest between us. It was a broad hand with calloused skin across the knuckles and a small faded grease stain near the thumb.<\/p>\n
I looked down at his hand for three full seconds before I did anything. My brain kept telling me that reaching out to a stranger in row twelve was the sort of thing people on the news got talked about for later.<\/p>\n
The cabin lights flickered as the captain turned the seatbelt sign back on for another patch of chop. The woman in front of us stirred and muttered something about her luggage connection in Chicago.<\/p>\n
I laid my palm against his without a word passing between us. His skin was warm and dry, completely steady against the cold sweat running down my own fingers.<\/p>\n
He didn’t squeeze hard or try to shake. He just closed his fingers over the back of my hand and held it there, anchored to the armrest like a post set deep in hard clay.<\/p>\n
The vibration of the engines kept right on shaking the floorboards under our boots, but the tight knot behind my breastbone started to let go, just a little bit at first, then all at once.<\/p>\n
We sat like that for the next forty minutes while the stewardesses strapped themselves into their jump seats for the final descent into O’Hare. Neither of us pulled away, even when the landing gear dropped with a heavy hydraulic thud that made the whole metal tube shudder.<\/p>\n
When the tires finally hit the tarmac and the reverse thrusters kicked in with that high-pitched whine, he let go of my hand and picked up his canvas duffel bag from the floor without looking up.<\/p>\n
I reached down and grabbed my magazine from the track, my fingers still tingling where his had been.<\/p>\n
As the line in the aisle started to shuffle forward toward the exit door, I stood up and adjusted the strap of my purse over my shoulder. I looked down at him while he waited for the row ahead to clear out.<\/p>\n
“Thank you,” I said, and my voice sounded clearer than it had since I boarded in Colorado. “I don’t usually fall apart like that.”<\/p>\n
He looked up at me then, and his eyes were the pale blue of a washed-out denim shirt that had spent ten years hanging on a clothesline in the wind.<\/p>\n
“My wife had anxiety during flights,” he said, and his voice was lower than I expected, rough around the edges like he hadn’t used it much lately. “I used to hold her hand every time the air got choppy like that.”<\/p>\n
I waited for him to keep going, but he just stared down at the gray carpet by his boot heel for a second.<\/p>\n
“She’s gone now,” he said quietly. “Holding your hand helped me, too.”<\/p>\n
Before I could find something to say back to that, the crowd surged forward toward the jetway door, carrying him away in the rush of people trying to make their connecting flights.<\/p>\n
I stood in the terminal corridor for a long minute watching the backs of the passengers move toward baggage claim, my hand still resting against my coat pocket where the warmth had finally started to fade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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