Once out of security, in the echoing corridor, I heard distinct, purposeful steps following close behind me. Again I stopped.
“Don’t tell me,” said my dad—turning back with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “You left something.”
“No,” I said, looking around. “I—” There was no one behind me. Passengers coursed around me on every side.
“Jeez, he’s white as a fucking sheet,” said Xandra. To my father, she said: “Is he all right?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine,” said my father as he started down the corridor again. “Once he’s on the plane. It’s been a tough week for everybody.”
“Hell, if I was him, I’d be freaked about getting on a plane too,” said Xandra bluntly. “After what he’s been through.”
My father—tugging his rolling carry-on behind him, a bag my mother had bought him for his birthday several years before—stopped again.
“Poor kid,” he said—surprising me by his look of sympathy. “You’re not scared, are you?”
“No,” I said, far too fast. The last thing I wanted to do was attract anybody’s attention or look like I was even one quarter as wigged-out as I was.
He knit his brows at me, then turned away. “Xandra?” he said to her, lifting his chin. “Why don’t you give him one of those, you know.”
“Got it,” said Xandra smartly, stopping to fish in her purse, producing two large white bullet-shaped pills. One she dropped in my father’s outstretched palm, and the other she gave to me.
“Thanks,” said my dad, slipping it into the pocket of his jacket. “Let’s go get something to wash these down with, shall we? Put that away,” he said to me as I held the pill up between thumb and forefinger to marvel at how big it was.
“He doesn’t need a whole,” Xandra said, grasping my dad’s arm as she leaned sideways to adjust the strap of her platform sandal.
“Right,” said my dad. He took the pill from me, snapped it expertly in half, and dropped the other half in the pocket of his sports coat as they strolled ahead of me, tugging their luggage behind them.
v.
THE PILL WASN’T STRONG enough to knock me out, but it kept me high and happy and somersaulting in and out of air-conditioned dreams. Passengers whispered in the seats around me as a disembodied air hostess announced the results of the in-flight promotional raffle: dinner and drinks for two at Treasure Island. Her hushed promise sent me down into a dream where I swam deep in greenish-black water, some torchlit competition with Japanese children diving for a pillowcase of pink pearls. Throughout it all the plane roared bright and white and constant like the sea, though at some strange point—wrapped deep in my royal-blue blanket, dreaming somewhere high over the desert—the engines seemed to shut off and go silent and I found myself floating chest upward in zero gravity while still buckled into my chair, which had somehow drifted loose from the other seats to float freely around the cabin.
I fell back into my body with a jolt as the plane hit the runway and bounced, screaming to a stop.
“And… welcome to Lost Wages, Nevada,” the pilot was saying over the intercom. “Our local time in Sin City is 11:47 a.m.”
Half-blind in the glare, plate glass and reflecting surfaces, I trailed after Dad and Xandra through the terminal, stunned by the chatter and flash of slot machines and by the music blaring loud and incongruous so early in the day. The airport was like a mall-sized version of Times Square: towering palms, movie screens with fireworks and gondolas and showgirls and singers and acrobats.
It took a long time for my second bag to come off the carousel. Chewing my fingernails, I stared fixedly at a billboard of a grinning Komodo dragon, an ad for some casino attraction: “Over 2,000 reptiles await you.” The baggage-claim crowd was like a group of colorful stragglers in front of some third-rate nightclub: sunburns, disco shirts, tiny bejeweled Asian ladies with giant logo sunglasses. The belt was circling around mostly empty and my dad (itching for a cigarette, I could tell) was starting to stretch and pace and rub his knuckles against his cheek like he did when he wanted a drink when there it came, the last one, khaki canvas with the red label and the multicolored ribbon my mother had tied around the handle.
My dad, in one long step, lunged forward and grabbed it before I could get to it. “About time,” he said jauntily, tossing it onto the baggage cart. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Out we rolled through the automatic doors and into a wall of breathtaking heat. Miles of parked cars stretched around us in all directions, hooded and still. Rigidly I stared straight ahead—chrome knives glinting, horizon shimmering like wavy glass—as if looking back, or hesitating, might invite some uniformed party to step in front of us. Yet no one collared me or shouted at us to stop. No one even looked at us.