Orson Card - Enchantment

She rushed back to their places, pulled everything out from under the seats, and came back. The whole time, Ivan had to keep saying, "My wife is coming, she's getting our things, please be patient, don't close the door." As long as he kept talking, they remembered that he was leaving. If he left a pause, they forgot everything and he had to start all over.

Only when they were physically off the plane, standing at the entrance, did the flight attendants finally recover their short-term memory. Now they were quite cold to him and Katerina. But despite all the folderol, the baggage compartment hadn't even been closed yet, and it took only a couple of minutes for one of the baggage handlers to return with the two small suitcases they had checked. Bags in hand, Ivan and Katerina hurried back along the ramp and the tunnel just far enough for the flight attendants to stop glaring at them and get back to business. There the two of them waited until the door of the plane closed. Then they quickly made their way back to the gate, where the clerk at the desk demanded an explanation of why they had changed their minds about the flight.

"I'm superstitious," Ivan finally said. "This didn't feel like a lucky plane to me."

"You realize that a report will be filed on this," said the clerk.

"I'm counting on it," said Ivan. "And now, would you be kind enough to book us on the next flight?''

"How will I know if it's lucky?" he said sarcastically.

"I'll tell you before takeoff," said Ivan.

Only then did Katerina get to ask him what it was that made him get off the plane. He tried to describe what happened at the lavatories, and to his relief, she agreed with him immediately. "You were right. It might not have been her, but if it was, that's just how you would feel. Confused."

"The frightening thing is how close I came to not even noticing it."

"You're not supposed to notice it. That's what the Widow's spells are all about."

"So was it Mother's Aware charm that did it?"

Katerina smiled. "Remember telling me about vaccinations? Well, when you don't get the disease, do you know whether it was the vaccination that saved you, or just that you never happened to catch it?"

Ivan grinned. "And to think you never even went to college."

When the tickets were changed to a flight two days later—the next day's flight was full—Ivan was faced with the problem of what to do in New York for two days. Not that he would mind holing up in a hotel with Katerina—in fact, that was his preferred solution—but he didn't have the money for it. So he did what every self-respecting young husband would have done in such a situation. He phoned his parents.

They told him to call back in fifteen minutes to find out where to pick up the money they were wiring. He and Katerina browsed around the shops. That's where they were when they began to notice airline personnel scurrying around quite urgently, and a buzz of conversation, knots of people jabbering about something. It was probably just Aware still working on him, Ivan thought. Until the clerk from the gate pointed out Ivan and Katerina to a couple of security guards, who approached quickly with their hands on their guns, ready to draw. "Ivan Smetski and Katerina Taina?" asked the one.

"Is there a problem here?" asked Ivan.

"We need to talk to the two of you," said the security guard. "Separately."

"Good luck," said Ivan. "My wife doesn't speak English."

"We'll get an interpreter."

"No you won't," said Ivan. "Because she speaks an obscure dialect of Russian, and I guarantee you that the only person in New York City who speaks it, besides her, is me."

It took an hour for them to believe him, and another half hour of intense questioning about why they left the plane. Katerina tried to ask him what was going on, but they were quick to stop any crosstalk between them. "You will only interpret what we ask and what she answers," the interrogator insisted.

Finally they explained why they were so intensely interested in Ivan and Katerina. The airplane that they had left just before takeoff lost radio contact over the ocean. It also disappeared from radar. A massive search was under way, and no debris had yet been found, but they were acting under the assumption that the plane had gone down. And the two people who got off in a rush at the last second were obviously the ones they were most anxious to talk to.

It solved the question of what they would do with their time in New York, at least for the first day. Once Ivan realized what was happening, he called his father, who contacted friends who arranged for a very high-powered attorney to be in attendance for the rest of the questioning. Ivan scarcely had a chance to learn the man's name, because once he was there, the questioning was pretty much over. Ivan and Katerina had both made their statements, Ivan faithfully translating all of Katerina's recollections, even when they differed from his in some detail or other. He figured that it was more plausible if they weren't completely in unison than if they were suspiciously identical. And since their checked bags had been removed from the plane, it was hard to see how they could have caused whatever the problem was.

And that was the clincher, as far as their attorney was concerned. "You don't even know what happened to the airplane, and here you are questioning these two honeymooners as if you had some evidence linking them to a bomb. You not only don't have a link, you don't even have a bomb."

As they were leaving the interview room for the last time, one of the men who had been fairly quiet until now stopped Ivan at the door. "Please," he said. "I know you didn't cause it. But you've got to admit, you're the luckiest person on that airplane. Why did you get off? What triggered it? It could help us to know what happened to the plane."

"Honestly," said Ivan, "it was just a feeling I had. Muddled. Confused. A sense that something was there that shouldn't be. If I had actually seen something, don't you think I would have warned the crew?"

All of which was true. And anything more he might have told the man, he wouldn't have believed anyway, so what was the point of that? There was a ninth-century witch in one of the bathrooms with a spell of unnoticeability on her, but I trumped it with my mother's charm of awareness.

Yeah, right.

Ivan was just glad that they couldn't make him take a lie-detector test, because he was sure he would have failed that miserably.

They got the money from Western Union, which made Ivan feel guilty, because his parents weren't exactly wealthy. Ivan didn't take Katerina into Manhattan. Instead they found a place farther out on Long Island. Not easy to do, since it was the height of the beach season. But if you stay far enough inland, the motels empty out a little.

They didn't stay in their room the whole time, though. Katerina needed the outdoors, and so did Ivan—he'd spent these past weeks cooped up in house or yard, unable to run every day for the first time in years. They felt safe from Baba Yaga, and so they went out, Ivan to run, Katerina to walk and enjoy the good weather. She tried to run alongside him at first, but she didn't see the pleasure in it. For her, fitness came naturally, from work, not from play.

In the park there were more kites, and Ivan remembered that he had wanted to learn how to make a hang glider. He found a couple of books on hang gliding in a store and figured he could read them during the rest of the trip.

At night, Ivan and Katerina speculated on what Baba Yaga had done to the plane. Ivan explained about how terrorists blew up planes sometimes, which made Katerina sick at heart to hear about it. "Like Attila the Hun," she said—for Attila was still the bugbear of tales to frighten children, in those centuries before the Mongols came. "Slaughtering everyone. Laying waste to everything."