The plane from Richmond came down into Harrisburg twenty-five minutes early on a Thursday in the middle of October, riding a tailwind the pilot kept apologizing for, as if arriving ahead of schedule were a kind of rudeness. Emery Brennecke sat in 14C with his laptop bag between his feet and a snow globe in a paper sack on his knees, and when the wheels hit and the cabin filled with the small music of a hundred phones waking up, he did what everyone did. He thumbed his screen and watched it fill.
Eleven emails. A reminder for a Monday call with a hospital in Delaware that wanted three walk-in coolers and a blast chiller and didn't want to pay for any of them. A text from his sister Hedy that was a photograph of a raccoon on her porch rail, captioned YOUR NEPHEW NAMED HIM BARTHOLOMEW. And four notifications from an app with a cartoon fox for an icon, the app that ran his daughter's watch.
Linnie's Watch: Missed call. 3:12 PM.
Linnie's Watch: Missed call. 3:14 PM.
Linnie's Watch: New voice message (0:06). 3:16 PM.
Linnie's Watch: New voice message (0:04). 3:41 PM.
He looked at them the way you look at a stack of mail that is mostly catalogs. The watch was purple, with a fox face that winked when you pressed the side button, and it could call exactly four people, and it had been strapped to Linnea's wrist since her seventh birthday in June, and in four months she had called him from it perhaps two hundred times. She called him to tell him a cloud looked like a shark, and she called him by accident, constantly, when she leaned on the button doing cartwheels, so that he would answer in a meeting and hear nothing but grass and breathing and somebody named Jayden yelling about a ball. The voice messages were usually the same. Six seconds of rustle. Four seconds of a fox face pressed against a sleeve.
He swiped them away. He meant to listen in the car.
What he did instead, while the plane was still taxiing past the dark hangars of the Air National Guard, was text his wife. Landed early!! Linnie's watch butt-dialing me again, lol. Home by 5:30, want me to grab anything? And then he watched the three gray dots come and go and come again, which took longer than three gray dots should take, and finally the word arrived, lowercase, without punctuation.
ok