Jacqueline Ellis
FLIGHT PATHS
December 2021:
I give my dad a project: tell me what you remember about making wine with your friend Franco, back when we lived in Peterborough. The task distracts him while he waits for biopsy results. Suspected mesothelioma.
It is two weeks after he called to tell me that a routine chest X-ray had uncovered nodules in his lungs, and we have spoken every day since then: 4:00 p.m. in the United States, 9:00 p.m. in England.
Each time, before I hang up, I say:
“I’ll call tomorrow. Just to check in.”
Each time, my dad hands the phone to my mother.
“Shall we come?” I ask her. “For Christmas and for dad’s 80th?”
“Not yet,” she says. “Not until we know for sure.”
My dad records his memories and sends me a digital file. I touch play on my phone and wait for his voice.
He reads from notes, takes time to enunciate, sometimes falters, clears his throat, loses his breath at the end of a sentence. He tells me how he and Franco built a wine press from steel and wood purloined from the brick factory where they worked. How Franco ordered Sangiovese grapes from Naples. How they pressed the fruit into juice, siphoned the juice into barrels. Waited while it fermented.
I watch the audio waveform, white columns that rise and fall on my screen, visualize my dad’s words. I had told him I needed the stories for something I was writing, but I don’t take notes or think about how I could shape his story, make it more literary. Just listen and rewind, listen and rewind.
September 11th, 2001:
Unusually, my dad calls at 8:45 on a Tuesday morning.
He has recently retired. I have just started my first tenure-track teaching position in Jersey City.
I give perfunctory responses to his innocuous questions:
Am I prepared?
Of course.
Am I nervous?
Not really.
Sirens fill the streets outside.
“That’s a lot of noise,” my dad remarks.
“Yeah, just fire engines.”
I glance at the TV.
We say goodbye and we’ll talk on Sunday and have a good week and say hello to mum and give our love to Dan.
The wails outside fill the room.
March 1993:
On the way to Heathrow, my dad braked too late to avoid hitting the car stopped in the line of traffic ahead of us. The impact was slight, but my body angled forward from the back seat, and I glimpsed his profile—the tightness at the corner of his lips, the curve of his forehead, the tips of grey brow hairs curled over the corner of his eye.
My dad got out of the car to meet the other driver.
“Weren’t you paying attention?” the driver snapped. “Are you stupid?”
My dad nodded. “You’re right,” he said.
I started to ask my mother why dad had been distracted, but her head was tilted up to where the top of the windshield met the roof of the car. She inhaled, the beginning of a sigh. The back of her neck was rigid. I looked down at my hands like a scolded child. As if I wasn’t a young woman whose father was driving her to the airport because she had chosen to live in another country four thousand miles away from home.
In seven hours, my flight from Heathrow will land at Logan Airport in Boston. I will present my visa to an immigration officer. One-by-one, he will press my fingers onto a purple inkpad then place each of them in the center of a square printed on a yellow form. He will not smile or speak or look at me. He will stamp the pages of my British passport in red ink. He will hand back my passport. Then he will look toward a line of people waiting behind a strip of yellow tape stuck to a dirty blue carpet and say, “Next person, step forward.”
In the backseat of my dad’s car, I had distracted myself with calculations. If I flew home once a year for two weeks, time together with my parents would be more meaningful than mundane weekend visits from a few miles away or daily pop-ins if I lived around the corner. I might miss birthdays or Father’s Days or family reunions, but those absences won’t matter if I call more frequently, if we spend whole vacations together.
I didn’t factor in unknown variables: divorce, a second marriage, a daughter.
I didn’t consider how I might weigh the options when my dad got old and sick. Didn’t measure the value of everyday time, the caring, present moments when I wouldn’t be there to help get my dad settled at home after a hospital stay or write his doctors’ appointments onto the calendar. I wouldn’t buy his groceries or make his coffee or chat with him about the Channel Four news. Ask him to identify birds that visit his many feeders. I didn’t anticipate what his final seconds might look like—the jagged green-lines monitoring his heart, the trace of ice water over his dry lips, his still, held hand, the ridges of his thumbnail against my index finger.
November 2019:
I talk to my brother on WhatsApp while I walk my dog in the park near my house. My dad has been in the hospital with chest pains several times this month. I squint against the sun, look up at where the flight path from Newark airport streaks the sky, then down at the jagged salt-lines that ring the sides of my boots.
When I was little, my dad let me sit on his lap while I steered our car back and forth over an unbridged stream. Sometimes, he would drive fast over hilltop roads and pretend our car had taken flight. I would press my face against the window, watch the road disappear below.
“This is how things are going to be now,” my brother says.
He tells me not to come. Not yet.
Jacqueline Ellis writes creative nonfiction, memoir, and personal essays. Based in Montclair, New Jersey, she is originally from Peterborough, England. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hinterland Magazine, Bending Genres, Zone 3, and The Normal School, among others. Find her work at jacquelineelliswriter.com.
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