Chapter XI

            Ellie Degler’s anxiety about planes was nowhere in sight, where she usually kept it. Mark didn’t even know about it, despite the two having spent a significant amount of time flying around the States. It was something that she had confided only in Alan, as they flew back to Montana from Costa Rica, years ago.

            “Ellie, are you alright?” He had been trying his damnedest to be upbeat about the entire situation since they had escaped Nublar, but it had come off as a grim reminder more than anything else.

            Ellie remembered that she had said she was fine, but the lie was about as obvious as Alan’s faux attitude. Alan pressed her gently for the answers, but it wasn’t until the next night, as they lay in their trailer’s bed, that she finally decided to tell him.

            “Alan?”

            “Yes?”

            “Remember what you asked me yesterday? On the plane?”

            “Yes,” he said, shifting so her head comfortably laid on his chest. He played with her stringy blonde hair, smoothing it out and then running his fingers over her scalp, a technique of massage she had grown to love. “What happened up there? You’ve never acted like that in a plane before. Was it…the incident?”

            There had been an unwritten, unspoken agreement between them that the words Jurassic and park should never be put together again. They referred to it as “the incident” or “the accident.” Ellie had never really known the difference. Euphemisms still hurt.

            “I don’t know,” she had admitted. “But when I was up there I realized that a plane is man-made. It has flaws, it has errors. It has all those things because people that made them have flaws and make mistakes. What if one thing, one nut or bolt, what if it was neglected and it broke and it caused some sort of chain reaction that sent the plane down? All because someone was too lazy or ignorant to check on it or notice it or replace it or something? I’ve never thought about it before, Alan. There’s just so much that can go wrong.”

            Alan had smiled. Genuinely. He was trying to make her feel better but this time he himself believed what he was about to say. “Well, you heard Malcolm. It’s unpredictability. We can’t predict what can happen because of that complex system he keeps talking about. We have to just trust.”

            Ellie didn’t smile back. She just closed her eyes. “I learned a valuable lesson, Alan. I’m never trusting a stranger again.

            “It’s dangerous.”

            Ellie smiled grimly as she thought about those words again. Sometimes it’s more dangerous to trust someone closer to you. Somehow she had always failed to learn that particular lesson and the guilt it caused her was overwhelming.

            It was a fairly long flight to the Billings Logan International Airport, seven hours and some, including the stopover in Denver. Ellie was looking forward to changing planes just so she could be on the ground again, though it would only be for a few minutes. As it turned out, the plane to Billings left only 45 minutes after her Washington plane landed in Denver. She wouldn’t have time for a satisfying bite to eat (plane food had always nauseated her), and already the hunger pains were starting in. She never ate breakfast anymore but she began wishing she’d taken the time to pour a bowl of cereal.

            So she sat staring out the window, trying to ignore the young woman next to her, who was happily slurping a coke and who had failingly attempted to strike up a conversation. Ellie studied the clouds but found no solace.

            She couldn’t read or write in the plane because it made her dizzy. She couldn’t watch the movie because, for some reason, no airline had ever played a decent film while she was flying. She couldn’t knock the girl next to her senseless because it was illegal and she could get in serious trouble.

            And she couldn’t think of Alan because her heart would begin to find a violent way to burst from her chest and her face would get red and she would probably die at this height because of it.

            She wasn’t getting any younger, but just thinking about thinking about Alan had her fluttery like a little girl on her birthday. But was that desire? Was that shame?

            If all went well and the planes didn’t crash, she was only a few hours away from Alan’s arms and lips.

            What? Alan’s lips? You’re married! Happily! Alan’s your past, Mark’s your present and your future. You can’t escape that. You can’t leave that behind for what amounts to a longing for something you can’t have.

            Ellie knew rationality. She had learned every bit of it from Alan himself. She had practiced it and embraced it and worshipped it. Just like Alan Grant had taught her. Feelings got in the way of scientific practicality. They should be discarded.

“Forget your opinions and your feelings, for just one minute, just focus on what you know about something and apply that knowledge to what you’re seeing. Only when you’ve done an objective appraisal do you inject your professional opinion. And only your professional opinion.”

At the time, they had been on their knees in front of some theropod bones, on one of the first expeditions Ellie had ever been with, and she had just said that she believed the skeletal remains belonged to an adult Procompsognathus triassicus. Grant then asked several other people what they believed, and then revealed that the bones were a rare glimpse at a young Deinonychus antirrhopus. He went on to admonish the group for jumping to the conclusion without first looking at the evidence, namely the fact that they could not immediately find a skull (and thusly making identification much easier) and that the bones were much too thick to be the thin, sticklike structure that was the procompsognathus skeleton.

Ellie smothered the memory, hoping at the same time to smother the mixed feelings she had for seeing Alan. But try as she might, the feeling remained, like a scolded cat that walks a few steps away and sits down to stare at you.

If it hadn’t been for her internal anxiety about the plane, the feelings alone would have kept her awake. Now she felt like an office minion, high from ten cups of coffee she’d had that morning. Her leg was buzzing, vibrating against her shorts, occasionally banging on the chair in front of her. She was drumming her fingers against that same leg in one big chaotic tick without rhythm. It was white noise. It was all white noise. Like the plane engine, or the hum of mumbled conversation around her. White noise.

Ellie Degler spent the entire plane ride to Denver like this, giving the girl next to her tight, mirthless smiles whenever she said something, twitching like a madwoman and wondering why it took so long, in this day in age, to get from point A to point B.

After an eternity in the closeness of her mind, Ellie’s plane landed and she debarked with enthusiasm. The girl said goodbye to her and Ellie ignored her, shouldering her bag and squeezing out into the aisle. She walked through the collapsible hallway into the open terminal. Denver International was huge and, like most regional airports, very advanced both in terms of technology and architecture. The high, minimalist beams allowed for a wide view of the surrounding tarmac and sky, but the sunshine that brightly lit the terminal was the furthest thing from Ellie’s mind.

Lady Luck, at least, had some sense of pity: her second plane was only fourteen doors down. At least it wasn’t in another terminal.

She didn’t have to wait in line. The plane was half the size of the previous one and there weren’t many people going to Billings anyway, so she boarded almost immediately, showing her fake smile to each of the airport and airline employees who greeted her. After a few minutes, when the plane began to move into the runway, she realized that the seat next to her was unoccupied and that she had both seats to herself.

But the fact that she didn’t have Beach Bum Barbie incessantly blabbing to her, however, did little to alleviate a new and far more terrifying feeling: the empty cave that suddenly appeared in the region of her stomach as she realized that this plane was smaller than any other plane she’d been on since Jurassic Park.

She had been avoiding smaller planes like the plague. The logical side of her, the Alan Grant side of her, said that the bigger the plane, the more problems it could possibly have. But her unnerved self, the self who lived her dreams on a dangerous island, told her that smaller planes were death traps. They were small enclosures. There was no where to run. Like an island. No where to run.

The gin and tonic she ordered from the stewardess didn’t help, but it didn’t not help either, and for that she was thankful.

She wasn’t much of a drinker, and her tolerance was pretty high, but she kept ordering in the hope that it would put her to sleep. Unfortunately, the limit on this plane was three, and by the third Ellie felt only a heightened sense of things, fear in particular, and she was aware that her paranoia would only grow until the alcohol was flushed from her body.

If the first flight seemed to take a long time, the second never seemed to end, even though it took less than half the time.

Ellie wallowed in a half-drunken stupor, wondering how long it would take for the rumbling engine to fall apart and send them all plummeting to the ground. She felt a little surprised that she wasn’t getting airsick but she knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that her panic was smothering any physical feelings.

When finally Ellie debarked, she did so without fanfare. She picked up her belongings and filed out patiently with the rest of the passengers. When she made it out into the terminal, she calmly asked an employee where she could find the nearest restroom. Then she made her way to the woman’s bathroom in the small Billing, Montana airport, put down her bags outside a stall, and violently threw up in the clean porcelain toilet.