Free Loose Diamonds by Amy Ephron Page B

stewardess (who I still think is the calmest person I’ve ever met) and whispered, “The man who got on before me just made a threat to the plane, and I’m not sure what to do.”
    She took my coat and said, “I understand.” She nodded so that I knew she understood. “Please take your seat. What seat is he in?”
    I looked behind me briefly as he was sitting down. “5D,” I said.
    “Please,” she repeated. “Take your seat. I’ll deal with this.”
    I did as she asked, being careful not to look at him as I passed his seat. The plane was full, and the thing I knew that no one else did was the one o’clock to Los Angeles was no longer taking off on time. It was effectively grounded. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone on the plane what had happened, and I sat in my seat for what seemed like the longest time . . . in fact, it was almost half an hour.
    At one point, I closed myself in the bathroom and called my ex-husband, who, among other things, had been front-line intelligence in the Israeli army, to see what he thought of what had just happened.
    Sasha was very calm about it. “He sounds like a crazy person,” he said. “It happens.”
    I remember saying to him, “Sasha, I understand why you say that, but it didn’t seem like that to me. It seemed to me he had a secret that he couldn’t keep to himself. And there was a way he said it, ‘Going to explode, you’ll see,’ that made me think he wasn’t talking about this plane—he was talking about something that was going to happen in the future.”
    My ex-husband still thinks it’s his job to calm me down if I’m hysterical but oddly I was very calm. But Sasha repeated his opinion that the man was a crazy person and said with some confidence, “Don’t worry, the airlines are very good at handling things like this. They’re very well trained.”
    I went back to my seat and watched as the pilot and copilot took the man off the plane. A few moments later, the pilot reentered the plane and the stewardess came back to my seat and knelt next to me. “The pilot would like to see you, is that okay?”
    “Of course,” I answered. I followed her very discreetly as she led me into the cockpit and closed the door behind us. Let me explain, this was before 9/11, so it didn’t seem strange that he wanted to see me in the privacy of the cockpit.
    I told him my story. He listened to everything I had to say. But I wasn’t prepared for what he said to me. “I need you to confront him,” he said. “Would that be okay?”
    I remember being a little flip. “Gee, that wouldn’t be my favorite thing to do,” I said. “Are you sure that’s necessary?”
    “Yes, I feel it is,” the pilot said.
    Let me say this about pilots—it’s not the uniform, or the fact that they know how to fly the plane, but that they feel confident flying a plane with passengers whose lives are in their hands and if they ask you to do something, you just have to figure, they’re the Captain of the Ship and you’re supposed to follow their instructions. He was emphatic when he repeated, “I need you to confront him.”
    “Okay,” I said a little reluctantly. The pilot led me out of the cockpit and back into the walkway where I’d had the initial encounter. His copilot and one steward were standing with the gentleman I’d boarded with in the walkway at the entrance to the plane.
    Almost before I stepped out of the plane, the man began to shout, “I have never seen this woman before. She is crazy.”
    I thought that was sort of strange since I hadn’t said anything yet. I interrupted him. I was speaking softly but firmly and calmly because I was frightened that this would escalate and the other passengers would hear. “What do you mean? We talked to each other right here, while we were boarding the plane.”
    “She is a crazy person.” We were talking on top of each other. “I have never seen her before—”
    “But when I boarded the plane, you spoke to me, you—” I was