On Friday, April 24, 2009, my 15-year-old daughter ran away from home. The next day she was discovered in Chicago, approximately 650 miles from our home.
While I could have driven to Chicago to pick her up, I knew that the 12-hour drive would be too much after the three hours of restless sleep I’d allowed myself in the previous 24 hours. So at six in the morning, I grabbed my credit card and called the only airline servicing Chicago from our area.
I was to fly round-trip, but wanted to split a round-trip fare between the children. Tommy, my 14-year-old son, would fly to Chicago with me and return with his grandmother by car. I needed time to talk to Allison alone.
“Is this flight connected to a death?” asked the ticketing agent.
“No, I’m picking up my runaway child, and bringing her back home.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if it was because my daughter ran away or because she was charging extra for two one-way tickets.
Between the time my daughter was located in Chicago at 5:45 a.m. and 10 a.m., I had talked to my sister on the phone, had a lengthy visit from a local police officer, and received a call about the whereabouts of my ex-husband Frank.
When we landed in Minneapolis to change planes, I had a voice-mailbox full of more questions I couldn’t answer. Slumping into a chair near the gate, I almost couldn’t respond to Tommy’s frantic description of the scene in the terminal.
People dressed in business clothes were busy talking on their cell phones or working on their laptops. People in military uniforms traveled between stations of duty. Harried parents tried to keep their young children quietly entertained. Employees manned the concession stands or cleaned the bathrooms that the travelers crowd with luggage.
When my cellphone rang in the line for airport fast-food, the man at the register had know idea it was an actual “emergency call.” When the airplane personnel politely wished us a good day, they couldn’t know how difficult a greeting it was to return. Suddenly it occurred to me that, like myself in that moment, not everyone at an airport is happy to be there.
When Tommy and I arrived in Chicago, we looked for my ex-husband. “I don’t think I’m going to recognize him,” Tommy admitted. I knew how Tommy felt. None of us had seen Frank in about three years. The last time I had waited for Frank in an airport was 1986, in West Germany, jet-lagged and feeling abandoned because he was an hour late--but that was a lifetime ago. He was only meeting me today because he lives in Chicago; I had tracked him down to tell him about our daughter running away, and was offering him one more chance to act like a father.
It didn't take long for me to realize how little Frank had changed. Although his hair had turned gray while receding several inches back from his forehead, his face looked more wrinkled than I would have expected at age 45, and although his body had ballooned, his solipsistic attitude remained. During the drive from the airport to the hospital where Allison was being held, Frank chose to ramble on and on about himself, rather than get to know the 13-year-old son sitting next to him. Thanks to a runaway daughter and a plane trip covering 650 miles, I discovered I was no longer afraid of Frank.
I tuned Frank out. I wanted my daughter; I wanted an aspirin; I wanted to get back on the airplane; I wanted to go home.
Jeanette Lukowski was born in Chicago, but followed her muse to Minnesota in the early 1990s. She currently teaches a variety of college English courses, writes for both pleasure and publication, drives around the continent she calls home, and spends time with the two young adults she raised single-handedly.