Every Happy Family by Dede Crane

that quick descent. We lost our cabin pressure and had to get, right quick, to a breathable altitude. But no worries, everything is under control.”
    There’s a collective sigh like a balloon’s slow hiss, followed by bright but subdued chatter. The flight attendant stands, feels her hair and makes a pleased expression as if she’s just been pranked.
    â€œThat was some weird dream,” Les says, taking off his mask, his speech slurry. “My sister turned into an organ grinder’s monkey.”
    â€œMine wasn’t inflating.” She tugs off the yellow cap.
    â€œIt’s not supposed to inflate,” he says, which sets her off again, a giddy, manic laugh.
    She turns to Jonathan who’s slumped in his chair, his masked face dipped towards his shoulder. Eyes closed, he looks so perfectly relaxed that for a happy second she thinks he’s sleeping. The next second she realizes otherwise and is ripping off the mask and slapping his face. “Jonathan! Les, press the button for help. Help!” She strokes a cheek then pinches a cheek and now pounds his chest over his heart. “Wake up! Jonathan!” She’s crying, fighting off Les as he tries to pull her away and a man says, “I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor,” like in some B movie. She grabs for Jonathan and a piece of him comes away, wedged between her fingers by small threads. A shirt button.
    â€œWith kids of his own,” she calls out to him, desperate to go back in time, pick up where they left off. “My father, he already had his own kids.”
    She is being wrestled backwards towards the rear of the plane. Faye, she wants to tell him, wants him to know, wore perfume, White Shoulders. She left money on the table, to cover her lunch only, and Les made her take it back.
    The same doctor who is supposed to be saving her new friend’s life is now holding aloft a needle. Les has her in a bear hug to keep her arm steady. “It’s all right, Annie,” he whispers. “It’s okay.”
    She looks at her brother’s worried eyes, which are the same rainy grey rimmed in blue as their mother’s, winces at the needle’s sharp jab. And now she hears something else under Faye’s admission, and stops her struggling. “She never told him about us,” she mumbles to Les. “Our father never knew we existed.”
    â€œMaybe,” says Les, as if it doesn’t matter to him, but she knows it does by the way his grip loosens as if in surprise.
    She murdered his existence she means to say, but her tongue has lost traction in her mouth. Which means he might still be out there.

    The plane makes an emergency landing in Chicago and everyone is instructed to remain seated. In her haze, she sees two, or is it three, men stride down the aisle. They’re dressed in white, are barefoot perhaps and take what seems like hours to unseat the nice cheese man she freed from gravity and heft him onto a narrow bed so he can sleep more comfortably.
    Les strokes her hair, just like her father might have done if given half a chance.

Lovers
    â€œThe place is clean and safe,” says Les as he lies in bed, Jill tucked up into his side. Her head is the perfect weight on his chest and her delicious bare leg crosses over his thigh. He’s hoping to make love to her but knows she needs to talk first. “Nancy’s eating three square meals, being looked after day and night. And, most importantly, she has plenty of companions and they aren’t imaginary.”
    He’s relieved to be back in his own bed in his clean-aired suburb, doesn’t believe sleep is even possible in Manhattan without narcotics. It’s clear Jill’s secretly pleased there’s not going to be another parent in the family to worry about. And he’s a bit less eager to unite Pema with her birth mother. A damaged mother, it stands to reason, will pass on that damage to her children. But he