It’s not that she had a fear of flying. It was more a fear of the hypothetical, the What-Ifs that swarmed the cabin and stuffed themselves resolutely into the twin turbine engines under the wings. They had an annoying habit of lying dormant, those What-Ifs, at least until the very moment she settled in her seat—always, always by the window—and buckled her seatbelt. Then, suddenly, as if the metal catch were a trigger, the What-Ifs were there, springing out from behind her tray table like jack-in-the-boxes, rubbing their grubby little hands together with the conniving hedonism of fruit flies. It was easy to sink into those What-Ifs. Fortunately for Janice, in business class, it was also easy to order a scotch and soda.

But en route to New York from Rio, Janice Polevsky was not in business class. She was in economy class, a pressurized purgatory where the seats were too close and too numerous and only reclined fourteen-and-a-half degrees backwards. And, if memory served her correctly, the FDA-“approved” inflight meals were typically the consistency of pig slop and of indeterminable origin. No, economy class was not for Janice, and if not for weather concerns that had kept her original flight to JFK grounded, she would already be in Minneapolis, or at least on the last leg of her connecting flight, a highball in hand.

No rest for the weary, she mused, nestling herself against the window.

Looking out over the runway, Janice thought of her daughter, Nathalie. Nathalie had been pregnant with her boyfriend’s child—a fact Janice avoided acknowledging as often as possible—and had gone into labor the previous day, several weeks ahead of schedule. Jeff, the father of Nathalie’s child, had not bothered to call Janice and tell her that his girlfriend’s water had broken. Instead he had sent Janice and other undisclosed recipients a mass text in the middle of the night from St. Mary’s in Minneapolis, where Nathalie was supposedly already in labor and had been for an hour.

With the late notice and flight cancellation taken into account, Janice was beginning to accept that she would not touch down in time to cut her first grandchild’s umbilical cord. What she could not accept was the idea of Jeff or his parents—uncultured, blue-collared, backwoodsy kind of folk—doing the honor in her stead. Janice knew none of them were the sharpest tools in the shed; to be frank, she could easily see Jeff’s mother, who was considered legally blind in thirty states and mentally retarded in eight more, somehow missing the cord and jabbing the baby like a stuck pig instead. No, Jeff and his family were not to be trusted with anything more than menial labor, and Janice decided there was no way they could cut the cord. But, on the other hand, she couldn’t stand the notion of Nathalie’s father—Janice’s ex-husband—cutting the cord, either. He and Janice’s divorce had been anything but cordial, and the fact he had remarried too quickly and started a second family—with a free-loving, God-renouncing, hemp-wearing bohemian, no less—still pained Janice to no end. She would have rather died than have him be involved with the birth of her grandchild. Besides, as Janice saw it, it was not his place to be there during the delivery, as he had a whole second batch of sticky-fingered spawn to look after, though his presence over Christmastime or the occasional Little League game seemed plausible. Perhaps not even Janice was completely welcome at the occasion, as she and Nathalie hadn’t spoken much since she’d learned of the pregnancy. But even in her muddled, anxious state of mind, Janice knew that the birth of her grandchild would be the beginning of something far larger than herself, something infinitely deeper and more meaningful than anything she’d ever experienced.

A flash of color from her peripheral vision coaxed Janice’s gaze from the window. A mousy-looking woman in the aisle was grasping the hand of a little girl who looked as though she were dressed in the haphazard disarray of a drunken circus clown. Janice’s eyes followed them disapprovingly. At the very least, I’ll teach my grandchild how to accessorize, she thought.

Behind the spectacle, a sable-skinned man squeezed through the aisle and stowed his briefcase in the carry-on bin above Janice’s seat. Her eyes grazed over his business suit briefly but stopped short at the turban coiled around his head.

“Are you in 13B?” Janice asked the man, hoping that the answer was no.

He smiled politely and nodded, misinterpreting her curiosity for friendliness. He planted himself in the seat directly next to Janice. It was only when he did so that she noticed his size—broad-shouldered, with an ample girth—and she squirmed as to avoid touching her arm to his.

Janice hated this feeling of intimacy with strangers, the kind that forced her to make conversation even if it was the last thing she intended to do. But seat 13C’s vacancy seemed to tantalize her, and something about its sterility, with its prepackaged blanket and dryer-sheet pillowcase, made her think of the delivery room at St. Mary’s. And Janice would have rather kissed the man next to her than think about that.

The turbaned man was fiddling with his laptop. “What brought you to Rio?”

Janice was taken aback by his question, not expecting to be addressed, and she struggled to find her voice. “Well, it was the final destination of a cruise I went on with my girlfriends. And I’d heard it has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, so I came to check it out for myself.”

He looked up. “And? Your verdict?”

Janice shrugged.

The turbaned man directed his eyes back to his laptop. Though she did not really care, nor did she want to know, simple courtesy compelled her to return the favor: “And you? What brings you to Rio?”

“Business.”

“Ah.” Hence the business suit. However, his admission did not keep Janice from finding his wearing one on the plane unbearably pretentious. But she kept this to herself. “And where are you from?”

“Toronto.”

“Rea-lly?”

“I’ve lived there most of my life. But I was born in New Delhi.” He typed a passcode into his computer, eyes trained on the screen all the while.

Pretentious, and rude, too, Janice thought. She considered dropping the whole conversation, but something possessed her to add: “I’m actually on my way home to meet my new grandchild.”

This caught the man’s attention. His face erupted into a smile, a splash of white that matched his turban. “Oh really? Congratulations. You must be thrilled.”

Immediately Janice regretted sharing this personal information. Something about this man, this stranger, sharing in her grandmotherhood sat poorly with her, and she expected him to spend the rest of the flight peppering her with questions she, shamefully, did not know the answer to. Is it a boy or a girl? What’s its name? Are there plans for any more grandchildren in the future? She was prepared to either plead the fifth or fib her way through all of them.

These worries piqued Janice’s desire to leave the plane, but just as she considered unbuckling her seatbelt and making a mad dash for the nearest exit, a voice interceded over the intercom and announced that the doors were closing.

“I guess no one is going to sit here,” her neighbor said, thumbing at the vacant 13C before moving one seat over.

The extra room was of some small relief, but not much, as Janice found that the nearer the plane drew to takeoff and landing, the more vocal the What-Ifs became. Indeed, what if the plane crashed into another on the runway? What if the plane took to the air with some fatal mechanical problem that slowly dissolved the engine throughout the flight? And, most pressing of all: what if the man next to her was a terrorist?

She shuddered and decided it was best to try to sleep for as long as possible before takeoff, perhaps even through takeoff, if she could help it. Yes. Sleep was good; sleep was necessary. Propping the dryer-sheet pillow under her head, Janice dug in her travel purse, pulled out an eye mask, and stretched it over her face. Under her mask, the darkness was merciful. It was almost enough for her to forget that she was in economy class. Almost.

Janice recalled hearing somewhere—presumably from one of those medical daytime talk shows she had time to watch in retirement—that emptying one’s mind of everything but the idea of sleep helped the brain actually fall asleep. And, in seat 13A, she found that if she focused enough on it, sleep sculpted itself into a form. On this occasion, sleep was a heavy thing which curled up between her eyes. It pressed itself down on the centered space between her eyebrows, right where one of those red dots would be on an Indian woman’s forehead. That is, if Janice were Indian, which she was not. Thankfully.

Janice jerked awake from a nightmare in which she was being thrashed about New Delhi on elephant-back. But even as she awoke and regained her bearings, the bumping did not stop. They were taking off, and the plane was skipping like a stone along the runway.

Her companion looked over, perhaps startled by her sudden movement. “It’s hard to sleep through takeoff,” he conceded. Janice, in turn, privately conceded that he had a way of stating the obvious.

She gripped her armrests, knuckles glowing white through her skin, until the plane was high, high in the air, tilting to the side to showcase one last view of Rio de Janeiro in the dying sun. Janice’s eyes traced Guanabara Bay’s rolling hills, as tempestuous as the neighboring sea. It pained her to admit it was beautiful, as it reminded her that she would probably never be able to experience the last leg of the luxurious transatlantic cruise which brought her there. She hadn’t even been able to make the pilgrimage to the foot of the monumental statue of Christ she’d yearned to see since she was but a wee choir girl; seeing it on the skyline had been the only reason she’d really wanted to go to Rio. Janice’s Bible study group had pressed her to visit the venues for the 2016 Olympic Games while she was there, but she did not share their enthusiasm. After watching the overtly pagan ritual that was broadcast as the Vancouver games’ “Opening Ceremony” in 2010, Janice had sworn off the Olympics for good.

She had loved what little she’d seen of Rio, however, with its spade-like mountains and pristine beaches flanked by water almost too blue to be true. This was worth it, wasn’t it? Leaving a tropical Garden of Eden to see a grandchild that she already struggled to accept as her own, trying in vain to reach an umbilical cord that had already been snipped?

The plane bucked. Janice quietly crossed herself, sinking deeper and deeper in her seat.

Janice’s nerves were long shot by the time the flight crew arrived at Row 13, a cart in tow. She attempted to order a cocktail, only to learn from a snooty flight attendant that United’s economy class not only offered only beer or wine, but also made customers pay extra to order them. Janice reluctantly doled out some stray cash in her wallet for a glass of pinot that ended up tasting like watered-down antiseptic. She cringed on its way down. Bad wine. Bad wine had to rank very highly on her list of least favorite things in the universe.

In times of trial, Janice had a way of making lists. It was a form of catharsis; the subject of the lists themselves didn’t matter. They could be lists of anything: Favorite Real Housewives Spinoffs, Things Overweight Women Should Not Wear, Men She Wished Nathalie Had Married (Instead of Jeff), and finally, her most deferred-to list, Unforgivable Sins Not Found in the Holy Bible. Internally, she added bad wine to this list, ranking it somewhere between hip-hop and interracial marriage.

It’s not sacrilegious if it’s true, Janice thought, grimacing as she pushed the wine away. She figured there would be no point in staying awake to dwell on the sour taste in her mouth, so she ripped open the package enclosing her inflight blanket and resolutely wound its contents around herself, straightjacket-style—after all, the less she fidgeted, the easier it would be to fall asleep. She was sure of it. With one free arm, Janice pulled her sleep mask back over her eyes.

This time, once it finally arrived, sleep was a cliff and Janice Christ the Redeemer. She stood above the precipice, arms outstretched as though trying to engulf the entirety of Rio in them. But, instead of embracing the city, she simply let herself tilt forward and let gravity do the rest, hands splayed out at her sides. There was something satisfying about it—falling asleep in every sense.

Janice had finally done it, though she had no way of knowing for sure. She had been asleep for a whopping hour and a half when she felt a gentle shake on her shoulder.

It was the turbaned man in 13C. “The crew is here. Do you want dinner?”

Janice could only shake her head, and if her eyelids had not been too heavy to glare at the man, she would have done so. What business did he have waking her up, and for what? Meatloaf surprise? For a “businessman,” the man from New Delhi certainly did not know his inflight etiquette. All the more reason to be vigilant, Janice thought. She peered at his turban out of the corner of her eye and wondered how many concealed weapons it could fit.

Useless. Janice sighed aloud, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. Now she could not go back to sleep; she could feel her last traces of drowsiness slipping away, like minnows from greedy fingers. Without sleep, Janice was left to grapple with the cruel processes of her brain, which had expanded from petty, hypothetical mind games to thoughts of Nathalie and the baby. It reminded Janice of the day Nathalie had told her she was pregnant with Jeff’s child. It had been the dead of August, marked by a brand of midwestern humidity so stifling that Janice had imagined the water molecules in the air to be thick and bloated with heat themselves. Janice had already been sweating when Nathalie broke the news: that, yes, she was pregnant, and no, she and Jeff were not going to get married in time for the April delivery. In fact, she had told Janice that she and Jeff had no immediate plans to get married at all.

And, as Janice’s world crumbled about her feet that day, indeed, what had she said to her daughter? Nathalie, once the light of her life, the Copernican center of her universe? Whatever she’d said, it had been within her rights as a mother and a Christian, though she could not recall her exact words here, now, in economy class seat 13A. Whatever it was, it had been the right thing to say, she was sure of it. But Nathalie had not called her since.

The plane began to jitter as though it were driving over a gravel road, and Janice recoiled, snapping from her reverie. A voice came over the intercom again. “Pardon us, folks. Just hitting some mild turbulence over the Atlantic. We’ll be keeping the seatbelt sign on until further notice.” Surely enough, just as the intercom clicked off, the seatbelt sign lit up, accompanied by a gentle musical tone.

Mild turbulence. When, in Janice’s experience, had the word “mild” ever truly lived up to its definition? It had earned a place on her working list of Least Favorite Words, which was only two words long; three, really, since the other was “Barack Obama.” “Mildly” spicy curry, a “mild” altercation—she could think of no example where the word wasn’t a euphemism for something far worse, and following this admission from the pilot, she expected Armageddon.

A warm, hearty smell tickled her nose, and she turned to look at the man next to her. Despite the jittering in the cabin, he was blithely eating what smelled and looked like lamb stew, and began pouring dressing on a salad, colorful as a bouquet, in the bowl next to it. Ignoring the prickling in her stomach, Janice looked at his turban, then back at the stew, then back at his turban; surely his eating it broke some religious or moral code of his people. The assumption only fueled her budding visage of him as a wild-eyed infidel in plainclothes.

The plane rattled. The stew steamed. The turbaned man smacked his lips, once, and too loudly. Janice glowered and rolled over on her shoulder, yearning desperately for the world outside the window. She slid the mask over her eyes, and just like that, sleep became the flaws of the man next to her in 13C. Janice counted them, like sheep.

This time, Janice awoke not to the trembling of the plane, nor a hand on her shoulder, but to the dull pain of her forehead hitting the side of the cabin. The plane’s trembling had exacerbated tremendously, and the entire cabin seemed to be thrashing its contents around like helpless beads inside an airborne maraca. People all about her were wide awake and anxious, despite it being the wee hours of the morning in Rio, and a flight attendant beelined past her towards the front of the plane. Janice glanced up at the seatbelt sign. It remained staunchly illuminated.

“What’s going on?” she asked, more to herself than anyone else.

The turbaned man answered. “Not sure. I’ve never had turbulence this bad.” He wheeled around in his seat to check the rows behind him, and Janice did the same. Her heart chilled when she saw the same expression of panic on every passenger’s face, mouths agape with wordless horror. From the back of the plane, another flight attendant dashed by, coattails fluttering in her wake.

Without warning, Janice felt the plane plummet a few yards before catching itself. Oxygen masks promptly burst from the overhead compartment, inciting a chorus of indignant and shocked cries from around the cabin. Even in the chaos, Janice pointedly noticed that the turbaned man remained collected and put on his mask as though he were demonstrating a safety procedure. As Janice’s shaking fingers fumbled to follow suit, a stray What-If took the opportunity to clamber atop a soapbox in her brain. It’s happening, it shrieked. Just like I said. We’re going down, and he knows it.

Janice watched a third flight attendant, proceeding more cautiously as to avoid being lurched into the air, crawl up the aisle. The What-If was right. Something was wrong.

The din on the plane crescendoed to a fever pitch. The varied chorus of voices quickened to match the rate of Janice’s breath, which was becoming shallower and shallower with each amusement-park drop. Just as she was about to demand answers from a fourth flight attendant stumbling past Row 13, the musical tone sounded, then the static of the intercom.

“Cabin: prepare for impact.” There was a click and another cheery two-tone sign-off.

A frenzied cacophony erupted immediately—wails, exclamations, manic shuffling of bags to find stowed-away cell phones, stifled sobs. But Janice, for once, was shocked into silence. So it was really happening, just as the What-Ifs foresaw. The plane was going down. Hadn’t that been what the pilot had said, after all, broadcast with the same nonchalance as a morning weather report?

Janice could understand preparing for impact. But how does one prepare for death? Women like her had their whole lives to figure that out. Janice only had a matter of seconds. Then, amidst the flurried storm inside her mind, a fleeting thought suddenly occurred to her with unearthly clarity: I’m going to die in economy class.

And, just like that, as her death materialized before her, as any fleeting chance of escape slipped out of Janice’s brain and out the cracks of the Boeing 747, Janice weaved her fingers together, ducked her head, and fervently began to pray.

Dearest Lord Jesus Christ the Son Almighty, as a follower of You and Your Word, we both know that I have been the most loyal of servants in my brief time on your planet. As my humble soul joins with Yours this day, I have but a few meager requests:

1. Keep the property from going to someone who won’t take care of it. Though Your House in Heaven is the only home I desire, I couldn’t be at peace if the house was sold to people like Phyllis and Lillian, who’d just put awful cat decorations everywhere. And I won’t even get into the idea of two women sleeping in the same bed, as I know it’s not polite prayer conversation. Please, Lord Jesus of Nazareth: not in my home.

2. I know I have sinned, but to be fair, I also know when I have been sinned against. I humbly implore You, Dearly Beloved Savior, to make sure my ex-husband doesn’t come to my funeral. He doesn’t deserve the satisfaction, and my soul—You bless it—doesn’t need the torment.

3. If the plane breaks up on impact, You-Who-is-Light-to-the-World, please let my body be ejected far, far from the cabin. If the man in 13C ends up having something to do with us going down, I don’t want my body to be associated with his in any way. Surely you understand this, Merciful Lord.

Finally, 4. As one last simple request, O God-in-The-Flesh: don’t let Nathalie cry too much when she hears the news. She needs to be strong for Jeff—as much as You know he tries my patience, Lord—and her little one. But maybe, if You can, let her name the baby after me in my memory. It would be the least she could do.

The nose of the plane jerked suddenly, sharply upwards. Janice squinted her eyes shut, finishing her prayer with the urgency and ardency of a trapped animal.

In Your Holy and Revered and Benevolent Name Jesus Christ O Lord My God In Heaven—Amen.

And that was that. Janice expected to feel a colossal sense of relief, of closure as she concluded her prayer. But instead, she felt precisely what she had been dreading the whole time, dreading even more than the thought of the plane careening to the ground:

She felt nothing.

Then, just as suddenly, Janice felt everything all at once; there was a colossal whistling noise, like the sound of air being let out of the world’s largest balloon, and the most massive tremor yet shook the plane to its core. Janice’s world began to spin, and the voices around her took up their siren cry, and then, and then—all was still.

The rest was a blur. The flight attendants emerged, wildly gesticulating, as light flooded the darkness of cabin. Janice was vaguely aware of a pair of hands from the seat next to hers jimmying her seatbelt loose and hoisting her to her feet, pulling her, trembling, down the aisle and towards the blinding light.

It’s time, Janice thought.

The rocking of the raft was gentle—soothing, like a cradle. Though all relatively intact, the passengers of the United flight bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport had been reduced to dark, huddled masses aboard the 747’s small fleet of emergency slides. No passenger felt this reduction more than Janice, curled on the edge of a raft, shivering in spite of the inflight blanket spread over her shoulders by a thoughtful stranger. She was facing a seaside cityscape twinkling no more than a mile from the wreckage—some passengers in Janice’s raft claimed it was Miami, others Tampa Bay. In the next boat over, a man in piloting garb was lit only by the dim light from the shoreline, his arm wrapped protectively around the horrendously dressed girl from earlier. Despite tearfully clutching a leg, she otherwise seemed to be in one piece. The Armageddon had passed.

As her heartbeat began to tentatively slow, Janice steeled herself enough to turn back and look at the wreckage. The ditched Boeing was massive as ever, yet, something about it lying placidly in the Atlantic gave it an air of harmlessness, like an oversized tin can. It was no more than a plaything, bobbing there. But then again: whom among them, huddled fearful and damp in the evacuation slides of the aircraft, was not?

These thoughts, however, never did occur to Janice. Instead, Janice was thinking of the umbilical cord, and somewhere, deep within the cobwebbed recesses of her maternal instinct, she felt the cord snap without her, the gap-toothed grins of Jeff’s family flashing in the 8mm reel of her imagination. She knew that the baby’s delivery-room wail would play in the back of her mind on infinite loop for years to come—a soundtrack to her failure.

The propellor of a helicopter throbbed from somewhere behind the cityscape, followed by a second, then a third. As the passengers and crew drifted towards the dancing candlelights in the horizon, the turbaned man, feeling Janice quiver beside him, rested a comforting hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“It’s okay,” he assured her, as one would a child. “We’re all going to be okay, I promise; we’re all going to be okay.”

No, it’s not that Janice Polevsky had a fear of flying. But she didn’t have to like it—just like the feeling of the turbaned man’s hand on her shoulder.