5 pm. Flight canceled, a fourteen-hour layover. Ernest sits in a vinyl seat, a little girl wriggling on the seat behind him, and calls his sister.
Lydia answers on the third ring, voice bleary over the speaker. “Hi. You at the airport?”
“Yes, but my flight got canceled. Storm over the Atlantic.” In the black spiral- bound notebook in Ernest’s messenger bag, beneath the flight information and his assigned seat (18D), he has written in red pen and underlined twice that one in one hundred flights on this airline get canceled. He has also written that 71% of flight cancellations are due to adverse weather. “We’re flying out at seven tomorrow.”
A pause. A rustling sound comes through the phone, as if Lydia is sitting up, or turning over. “I can’t pick you up, then. I’ll be at brunch with Kyoko and Jiro. You’ll have to take the train on your own.”
Ernest props the phone between his ear and shoulder to pull out the notebook, and retrieve a black pen from his shirt pocket. In the notebook, on the same page as the flight information, he writes the new flight number, and the new arrival time: 10 am.
“Ernest?” Lydia repeats. “You’ll have to take the train to Nagoya by yourself.”
“I won’t be able to read any of the signs.” Below the arrival time, he writes that Shinjuku Station is the busiest train station in the world, and therefore the easiest to get lost in, without a guide.
Lydia sighs over the phone. “Don’t you have the Japanese dictionary I sent you last March?”
He has it in his bag, in front of the laptop and next to the exclusive hundredth anniversary edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles. “Yes, but there are forty-three letters in Hiragana, and over one-thousand common symbols in Kanji. I can’t just stand in front of every sign looking up all the words.”
“Most of the signs will be written in English too.”
“What if I get lost?”
“Ask someone for help.”
Ernest presses his lips together. “Lydia. I can’t just go up to someone I don’t know and ask them for help.”
Another sigh. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Look, Ernest, it’s seven in the morning over here.”
“That’s a normal time to be up,” says Ernest.
“It’s a normal time for you to be up,” says Lydia. “I was at a nightclub with Sumi and Arisa until two, and I’d rather be asleep. Text me when your flight lands.”
“I will,” says Ernest, but Lydia has hung up before he finishes.
6 pm. Ernest eats minestrone soup and caramelized mushroom ravioli, and reads The Hound of the Baskervilles for the thirteenth time. In an earlier page of his notebook, he has written that there is no statistical evidence to prove that the number thirteen is actually unlucky. As soon as he finishes this reread, he will flip back to the beginning and start over.
“Can I get you anything else?” asks the waitress, which means that either he’ll need to order something else, or get out of there so another customer can sit down. But this padded chair is more comfortable than the airport seats, so he orders an American mule and reads chapter eleven.
In front of him on the table are six felt-tip pens, and a set of sticky tabs with colors corresponding to the pens: cherry for well-written prose, rust for quotes he appreciates, dandelion for foreshadowing, and so on. He takes a sip of the mule and uncaps a pen (green, for thought-provoking passages), writes a notes, with the date beneath it. He adds a tab above it, perfectly aligned with the printed text.
“Ernest Carter?”
The voice above him is sharp, not quite nasal, and Ernest looks up, then squints in slight disbelief.
The woman who stands in front of him has artificially red hair, and although he hasn’t seen her in what feels like forever, he still recognizes the thin lips and perpetually cocked eyebrows. “Tessa Rowe?”
She wrinkles her nose a little. “It’s Tessa Gellway now,” she tells him, “but yeah.”
Tessa had been Lydia’s best friend for all of middle school and most of high school. They’d been inseparable, almost sisters, and Tessa had spent more time at their house than she had her own, although she never talked about her family. She has always regarded Ernest with a kind of removed disdain, as if it was a coincidence he lived in the same house as Lydia, as if she were more a member of Ernest’s family than he was.
“Funny,” says Ernest, “I’d never have thought I’d run into anyone here.”
He’d moved away for college when Lydia was thirteen, and hadn’t witnessed the falling out, but he remembers vividly the phone call from Lydia at one in the morning in her junior year of high school. She’d been crying already, voice hoarse and broken over the phone. Tessa had turned all her friends against her somehow, and now no one would speak to her. At the time Lydia had a boyfriend whom Tessa had taken for herself, but she wasn’t upset about the guy. She was upset about Tessa.
“I didn’t realize you lived in Chicago,” says Tessa.
“I don’t,” says Ernest. In his notebook, he would like to calculate the probability of running into someone you know at the airport, which probably decreases as the length of time since you’ve seen them increases, and your lives gradually diverge overtime. “I’m on a layover.”
Lydia hadn’t really made any more close friends until she’d moved to Japan halfway through her undergrad. By that time Ernest had finished college and moved back to Indiana, close enough to see their parents a few times a month, but not more than that. He and Lydia had been best friends the summer before she moved, haunting museums and board game cafes. She brought her easel and paints to his apartment and worked on her landscapes while he watches architecture documentaries on weekends. He’d helped her pack stuff into suitcases to bring overseas.
Tessa glances at her phone and takes a step back, but lingers, looking just to the side of him. He runs a fingertip around the rim of his glass. “How’s Lydia?”
He’d been surprised when, on one of their scheduled phone calls, Lydia had told him she’d met someone. Ichiro was sweet, and when he’d come home with Lydia that Christmas he’d shown Ernest photos of his indoor seedling experiments, and watched Agatha Christie film adaptations with him and analyzed all the evidence. Lydia had been thrilled they got along so well, but the odds hadn’t been against her. There weren’t many people Ernest didn’t get along with.
“Good,” says Ernest, surprising himself with the smile that creeps over his face. “Really good. She lives in Japan.”
Tessa frowns, but doesn’t say anything else.
Ernest runs a hand on the edge of the table. He would like to call Lydia now, just to hear her voice again, but she would groan at him for calling while she’s at work, and anyway, he doesn’t know what he would say. Instead, he gives Tessa a placid smile, and opens up his notebook, clicking open his pen. “Well. I’m sure you have a flight to get to. It was nice seeing you.”
7 pm. Back in the vinyl airport seats.
“Have I seen you before?” asks a woman in a green dress with honey hair twisted back from her face. Her narrow nose and wide-set eyes are unfamiliar.
“I don’t think so,” says Ernest.
In his notebook, he writes that the odds of running into someone you know at the airport is approximately one in fifty-thousand.
9 pm. He’s migrated to a high table and stool where he can charge his laptop as he works. He hasn’t quite gotten to the point where exhaustion trumps the discomfort of the seating, so he might as well be productive, earbuds playing a quiet combination of rain and white noise he combined himself for optimal calm and focus. As a bonus, it drowns out the baby across the gate whimpering into its mother’s shoulder.
He is running two fingers up and down the cord of the earbuds, when a voice somewhere above him says, “Ern!”
Ernest has not been called Ern for at least twelve years, but automatically, he looks up.
“Henry?”
Henry Bryant looks much the same as he did in his undergrad years, except for a premature graying around the temples, and a deepening of the crow’s feet around his eyes. He has an army green backpack slung over one shoulder, which he slides to the floor as he pulls out the chair across from Ernest and sits. “God, it’s been years. What are you doing in Chicago?”
“I’ve got a layover,” says Ernest, “but I’m going to Japan for my sister’s wedding.”
Henry was his first roommate, and they’d stayed friends all through college, although they were so different, none of their other friends had understood why. Somehow it had worked. Henry could talk all he wanted and Ernest could listen and not say anything without feeling awkward. He’d gone on Henry’s hikes and weekend camping trips whenever Henry urged him to get outside more, and Henry had accompanied him to libraries and jazz bars where Ernest could take in information and organize it in his mind all he wanted.
“Great. That’s great. Tell Lydia I said hi.”
“I will. Funny, you’re the second person I’ve run into today.”
It was Henry who’d first started calling him Ern, and soon everyone, even their professors, were doing it. Ernest just sounded so damn pretentious, Henry had said, and maybe that was true, but Ernest had thought that ‘Ern’, if anything, sounded a little morbid. He hadn’t really cared what people called him, though. He’d been happy to have friends who liked him enough to give him nicknames.
“Have you seen Jess, or Tony? Or Martin?”
“No,” says Ernest. “No, I haven’t seen anyone in years.” He digs his fingertips into his knees under the table, feeling the corduroy over the jut of bone. He thinks about the probability of running into someone you know, written neatly in his notebook, in sharp black pen.
“Aw, that’s too bad.” Henry’s face crinkles in a half-smile, all eyes and no mouth. “We should do some kind of a reunion, get the gang back together again.”
“Yes,” says Ernest. “That would be enlightening.” He runs a thumb over the bend of his knee, and corrects himself. “That would be great.”
They hadn’t talked much, after Henry had moved to Seattle to work a fancy office job and cross hiking trails off the bucket list. Ernest had considered moving overseas to study in England, but ended up floating from one job to another, data analyst, library assistant, and finally risk management, which at least paid the bills. Years ago he had talked about flying over to Seattle to give Henry a visit, but hadn’t been able to get the time off. They were friends on Facebook—but Ernest spent very little time on social media.
“Great,” Henry echoes. He slings his backpack back over his shoulder and stands up just a little, hands braced against the edge of the table. “Well, listen, I gotta go, but it was great to see you. Tell Lydia I said hi.”
“I will,” says Ernest.
Once Henry is gone, he pulls out his spiral bound notebook, and clicks open his pen.
11 pm. Ernest sits on the floor, leaning against the wall, with his legs stretched in front of him and jacket draped over himself like a blanket. He snores softly.
1 am. Still on the floor, he eats the salted peanuts he bought earlier. He can’t sleep anymore, so he opens his notebook. He writes a list of the next ten books he would like to read, and another list of the most common words and phrases in Japanese, which he has memorized from Lydia’s dictionary, and then he calculates the probability running into two people you know at the airport, two people who have never met before and are completely unrelated to each other.
Then, on a whim, he calculates the probability of running into three people you know.
The odds are one in a million.
“Ernest?”
His breath catches.
After all these years, he’d recognize her voice anywhere.
For half a second he doesn’t look up, wondering if he’s just imagining her. He’s been awake for so long that everything feels like a dream. The odds that she’s just in his head are greater than the odds that she’s actually here. When he lifts his head she is standing over him, and she looks the same as she always had, a dark halo of curls around a freckled face, deep eyes, beautiful lips. She looks like an angel, just as he always thought she had.
“Ivy.”
Her lips purse in a small smile and she steps closer, kneels and then sits against the wall, leather bag in her lap, shoulder and hip brushing his. If it were anyone else, he’d bristle, but it’s her, and it means she is real. He can smell her perfume, lavender and something else he can’t identify.
“Ernest,” she says again, and when she says his name it sounds soft and exquisite, “how are you?”
Ernest closes his eyes, feeling the warm shape of her beside him, and exhales. “Lonely,” he says.
Ivy says nothing for a moment, and then she says, “I’m sorry.”
They weren’t exes, not really. They’d never actually dated.
They’d met at a party, one that Henry had dragged him to, all purple lighting and music with too much bass and alcohol perfumed breath. He saw her before she saw him, red shoes and a white silk dress that rippled like the ocean in a storm as she danced. He had watched her, entranced, until drunk hands had shoved him to the side and he got lost in a throat of shoulders and knees, and the only escape was the porch steps and the cold night air.
She joined him only a minute later, as if she’d been watching him the whole time. Out here all by yourself, handsome? she’d asked, and they’d laughed as if they’d known each other their whole lives.
“What are you doing now?” she asks. Her right hand rests on her knee, so close it’s nearly touching his, but not.
“Risk management.”
Ivy laughs, and though it’s quiet it sounds just the same as when she used to laugh as loud and strong as the wind. He’s missed it. “That’s just like you,” she says. She doesn’t tell him what she’s doing, or where she’s been. Instead she asks, “Do you remember that weekend in the field?”
He does. They had known each other a year by then, and they had become binary stars, infinitely circling each other. On the first warm night of the year they had driven out to the middle of nowhere and not told anyone where they were, relishing the spontaneity like wild birds. He had read poetry aloud while she watched, openly staring, and she had taught him how to dance and showed him how to find Saturn with her telescope.
He hadn’t brought his notebook. For once, he hadn’t needed it.
“I remember,” he says.
She left before they graduated, and she didn’t tell him why, or where she was going. She hadn’t answered his calls, and none of her friends had known where she was either. He can’t explain her leaving even now, only that it was like having the thread between his heart and his lungs snap. Like having his ribs ripped apart and hands grasp the wreckage inside to tear it out. In all these years the pain has faded to a dull thrum, but still sometimes when he thinks about her his sternum screams like it’s burning from the inside out.
“I still dream of you,” he says, quiet. They are not looking at each other.
“I dream of you too.”
Between them, their hands intertwine.
They are silent for a long time. Then, like breaking crystal, he asks, “When’s your flight?”
Ivy shifts, takes a breath. “Two. I should probably go.”
She stands, leather bag back over her shoulder, and he stands too, still so close, fitting together. They don’t exchange information. He doesn’t ask where she’s going. After all, their lives have diverged so much, what would be the point? Meeting here was just a failing of probability, a tiny chink in the equation.
The moment is almost over.
Ivy holds his face in her hand, soft palm against an angular jaw, and he leans into it. “Ernest,” she says, one last time, and it sounds like a prayer.
She presses a kiss to his temple, dark curls caressing his cheek, a whisper of breath against his jaw.
And then she is gone.
3 am. He does not sleep, and he does not write. He watches the moon disappear over the horizon.
4 am. He’s standing in line waiting to board so he can pretend to sleep for the next fourteen hours. His mouth tastes bitter, and his jacket is creased across the sleeves. There’s a text on his phone, from Lydia. Just had dinner. You boarding soon? He types out a reply, and a second later gets back, See you in 14 hours :)
“Have a good flight,” says the attendant scanning his boarding pass. He’s too exhausted to smile, but he nods.
His seat (18D) is an aisle seat, and when he gets there the rest of the row is full. The person by the window is fast asleep, eyes covered by an orange sleep mask, and the middle seat is a familiar face. It’s the woman with the green dress and narrow nose.
She’s reading The Hound of the Baskervilles.
When he sits down, she looks up, and her face changes. “Hey, I recognize you.”
He smiles, just barely. “I guess you were onto something there.” It’s a statistical improbability, but it’s not impossible.
The woman slides a bookmark into the book, closes it, and holds out her hand. “I’m Meg,” she says.
He takes it. “I’m Ernest.”
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