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Now this association seemed to be broken. Both of our families were evidently dead, unless...! Unless, they had managed to get away from Seattle on a plane!
Hurrah, that was it! That's what must have happened! What an idea! What possibilities! Immediately I made myself known to Jennie.
"Have you ever thought that Frank and Melanie might have gotten onto a different plane and escaped the holocaust?" I said to her softly. "They were all waiting for me right at the airport, were they not?" I stepped closer towards her in the brightly-lit galley.
She began to smile at the thought. "Excuse me for crying," she said and looked away. "I was thinking about Frank and the children, I couldn't quite accept that they should be dead. I couldn't feel it. You may be right that they could have gotten away. Do you think it is possible?"
I nodded. "It is reasonable to assume that they found space on one of the aircraft that I saw standing around. Surely, some of the aircraft must have been fueled up and able to get away. After all, they had the same fifteen minutes warning that we had! Ten minutes should have been enough to get safely away, and five minutes to board them!"
Jennie's face lit up. "Maybe it wasn't quite as frantic there as it was in Vancouver."
With that thought her lovely smile came back. I began to dry the tears off her face, with a napkin. Jennie was familiar with SEATAC's satellite terminals that are well spaced out and usually less crowded. With them being cut off from the main complex via the subway link, there might have been less panic with fewer people around. I suggested that it might have been easy for them to get away, certainly in comparison to what we have seen. "They might have simply walked on an aircraft. There were several aircraft docked. Some might have been ready for takeoff!"
As I spoke, tears came into her eyes again. "I should have thought of that myself, Paul. That sounds totally possible. How foolish of me to lose hope so quickly!"
She put her arms around me.
"Go on and cry, Jennie," I said to myself.
I began to cry myself moments later. Those were the first tears that came, tears of joy, and her embrace of me felt wonderful.
Our embrace lasted for a long time, and with it a new feeling emerged that I hadn't felt for her for a long time. We had been alone together on occasions, but never like this. She had become more than a friend to me, suddenly. She was a woman struggling with this chaos as I was. I had always admired her as a woman, even while I had loved her as a friend. Now everything was different. The boundaries became blurred. The woman became to the foreground. Our embrace ended with a kiss. We smiled at each other, but in a different way as before. It seemed that we had become drawn closer to one another by the power on that great joy that now enveloped us, born by a bright hope.
"Just look at yourself," she said gently when our kiss ended. "If you go on crying like this you might ruin your uniform!" She took a paper-napkin from the tray and proceeded to wipe the tears off my face that I hadn't even been aware off.
The flight to Victoria was a short one. When the engines slowed, I excused myself and headed back to the flight deck. Harry looked at me. "It's about time!" he grumbled.
I sat down. In my mind, I was still with Jennie. "I didn't stay away that long!" I said casually.
"That's not what I meant!" Harry came back, short, sharp.
His manner shocked me. "Then what?" I asked, still puzzled by it all. There wasn't an emergency. He was well able to fly the plane by himself. "What's eating you, Harry?"
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