Will Travel with Consequences

By Andrea M. Gilson

A solo trip to South Africa leads Ann, an intrepid dreamer, to tragedy when she puts her trust in a stranger. Ignoring her father's advice, she makes one self-defeating decision after another. She loses her career, her home, her money, a child, and her dignity. As often is the case in life, Ann is led out of despair toward hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrea M. Gilson
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466116870

Andrea M. Gilson

Andrea lives in Buffalo and writes from home when not out stuck in a snow drift.

Book preview

Will Travel with Consequences

By Andrea M. Gilson

Copyright 2011 Andrea M. Gilson

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Chapter One-Trip

Chapter Two-Agenda 180

Chapter Three-Fraud

Chapter Four-Forward

Prologue

This chronicle is a tragic adventure. The events you will encounter in these pages are real. Names have been changed to protect the characters. Ann, a lover of travel and the sea takes a vacation to South Africa after suffering a stroke. She proceeds against the advice of her father. While there she makes a series of self-defeating decisions which results in the events you will read about here. The moral is to be careful what you wish; the consequences may change your life completely. Temporary insanity is the only explanation for the bad judgment Ann suffered leading to the loss of a travel career, a great apartment, thousands of dollars and a child. It is also a story of regaining legitimacy through sobriety and faith.

Chapter One-Trip

Go Carts? I have a trip this afternoon.

Come on, I know you love it, come with us. Ann’s friend teased her and tried to prompt her to scrap the front end of her schedule and go for a day at the racing track.

If I don’t start the trip today, I will have to get up at the crack of dawn in the morning. Ann said.

It won’t kill you. Your four-day will be a three-day.

The Texas sun was sweltering. Carol had called and asked Ann to join her and others at the pool. It was right outside of her building in the apartment complex where they and many of their fellow flight crewmembers lived close to the airport. It was early and she could afford a few hours in the sun before her sign-in time.

She had always been self-conscious about her body and the older she became, of course, the worse it got. She faltered at the invitation but eventually accepted. It was one thing wearing her bikini in front of her former roommate but some guys would be there too. She got into the purple suit with the padded bust and placed a wrap over her bottoms to cover her butt. This should have made her feel more confident but unlike normal women with cellulite, hers was on her legs right above her knees. There was no way she could cover it up without wearing long shorts or a skirt. This had often kept her from pool parties, but today she went. She wrapped a towel around herself and walked down the three flights. She saw a bunch of her friends already swimming and having some beer. They had no trip and were starting the drinks early. She sat down on the edge of the pool and only then wriggled out of her over-clothes. As long as she remained in a seated position her cellulite did not show.

Someone offered her a beer but she wisely declined. They had a great time for about two hours when the men started talking about the go-carting idea. Ann was jealous; it was one of her favorite things to do. She tried to decline and whined about her trip for a while but her friends were persistent. It was rare that she ever called in sick and they all wanted to play devil’s advocate this afternoon. They talked her into letting a reserve flight attendant take her first day and she called the scheduler to say she would pick up with her crew the following morning.

It was a good thing about having this type of a job. There was always another crew member ready and willing to pick up dropped trips. On the same token she could pick up extra work at any time to make up for the loss. She decided that she deserved a good time and cracked a beer right after the call. There were about ten people and they would car pool and storm the racing playground together. Once they got there, Ann smoked her friends in the go-cart course laughing so hard she was crying. It was always the same here, she laughed her ass off. Her friend gave her a good pop from behind which gave her always present headache a brutal aggravation. She reached into her purse for the pain-killing tablets she carried at all times.

They bought multi-entertainment packages and did it all. The regular cars, the grand prix course, and the drag strip were included not to mention the games inside. She drove the drag cars over and over. She could not get enough. The thrill lasted only a few seconds. They completed their sunburns then went inside for a bite to eat at the café. This place had it all, Ann was glad she had decided to play hooky. They went to a pub for beers afterwards. It was a long fun day.

The next day, Ann had to get up extra early to meet the crew she had abandoned the day before. She drove her Mustang to the airport as if the highway were a racetrack still exhilarated from the day before. Most of the trip was uneventful but Ann’s headaches were getting worse. Nothing she took seemed to help and she was taking doses way too often. This would be her final working flight schedule for a while.

***

Maybe you shouldn’t go, Ann heard her father’s words in her mind as she thought things over on the flight to London. She had been daddy’s little girl her whole life. They loved each other but Ann rarely took good advice from anyone when it was contrary to her own agenda. She was destined to learn everything through hard experience.

Her brown hair hung in her face as she watched the other transatlantic passengers boarding the jet. The flight was full and she was relieved that she had a seat in the rear which had allowed her to board early. Space in the bins always filled quickly and she did not want to be one of those poor people that had to have their things removed and entered into checked baggage. She traveled stand-by and she knew that the chance of a checked bag staying with her in the same plane she was on was slim, especially with so many legs to South Africa. She doubted that she would make it onto her scheduled flights let alone her baggage. She had to surround her huge backpack with a strap to hold the belt and chest straps close to the body of the bag just to prove to the gate agents that it would fit into the bin. She had a purse with her headache medicine and a book in to hold her over during the flight without having to rummage through her mangled pack during the flight.

She pushed her bangs out of her face and watched a family of four struggling to get situated with two car seats. Why did people do that to themselves? Ann could not imagine having to lug children and all of the extras that came with them to the market let alone on an eight hour flight. She would be a bad parent. She imagined herself filling their bottles with milk and Kahlua to keep them asleep the whole time if she could. It was a funny thought; Ann knew she would not have any children. It was not in her makeup. She thought parenthood was just a novelty that most people regretted immediately afterwards. No more life, no more time to expand your own mind; just cartoons, poop and crying.

A couple sat in the seats diagonally in front of her and she could smell the booze on them from across the aisle. They hopefully would be asleep soon also. Some folks that came on board a plane after drinking were real pests. They would demand the flight attendant’s attention way too often as if they were in a bar and not on a plane filled with other people. Ann always cringed when she saw these people because it could go either way. They either silently fell asleep and bothered no one or were loud and obnoxious ruining the flight for everyone else. She planned on getting some drinks herself later but she could not afford to get drunk at the five dollars a drink that this airline charged. She stared into space and through the rest of the bodies getting into their seats and thought about the preceding weeks.

She had been sick and had spent two weeks in the hospital after suffering a stroke while working on a flight from Oklahoma City (was it?). The whole thing seemed like a dream and she would be paying the medical bills for a long time. Her insurance covered most of the 139,000 dollar medical costs; but seven thousand of it had to come out of her pocket. She resented the doctors a little even though she knew they had her best interest in mind, not to mention their desire to avoid a law suit if Ann was one of those types. She wasn’t but the doctors had to cover their interests. She underwent so many tests and in the end they all had the same results. Enough already, Ann thought, I am paying for this. She had always been pretty healthy and the episode was a surprise since she was too young for this type of thing or so she thought.

Other than the headache that settled into her lobe and irritated her constantly, she felt okay and performed her job like any other day when it happened. She had always made it to work no matter how she felt and whatever caused her pain would fix itself; which after the saga was over seemed to indeed be the case. So much money wasted. She thought back to that afternoon on June 9.

***

She served beverages in the aisle when a man grabbed her arm and forced her to be seated. He was a doctor and had recognized that she had stroke symptoms. It was a regional airplane and Ann was working alone in the cabin of the too thin and too crowded jet. The doctor made a call himself to the cockpit explaining the problem to the Captain. She lost track of the crew that flew with her that day but would have liked to have gotten their reaction to the events. A passenger using the interphone to call the cockpit must have more than alarmed them.

Ann felt no strange sensations but her unconscious must have known something was wrong because she made no protest to the doctor’s orders but just stayed seated. The first officer had to leave the cockpit to secure the cabin for landing. All of the crew members are trained for these instances but in reality, the pilot surely never had to enter the cabin, put the service cart away and make flight attendant announcements with a live airplane full of people. It is funny to ponder what the passengers thought of the scene.

They must have been quite nervous with the irregular procedures. Ann was oblivious to the situation. She did not remember anything about it. She did not see the pilot doing her work, or notice anything going on. Perhaps she had passed out. The doctor that helped her must have been observing her acting strangely. She wished there was a video of it so that she could see what happened then and hopefully laugh at it now.

The crew did the right thing and landed the plane and thus started her misadventure of hospital stays, tests and blood-thinning shots. A gurney waited for Ann in the jet bridge when they landed. All she could remember was asking again and again for an ice pack that was not forthcoming. The events of the afternoon were absent from Ann’s memory until she lay on a hospital table with some of her friends gathered around. Her former roommate Carol had gotten word through the quick moving grapevine of gossip at the airport crew lounge and called their best friend Glenn. The two of them were joined by an unlikely guest. Larry was a friend of Ann but she did not think they were that close for him to sit by her sick bed while the technicians examined her. She was glad for it and found out that he had happened by when the emergency crew was taking her from the gate area and wanted to show support. It was extra nice of a casual friend to come to the hospital like that. Ann had met Larry when the two of them had both been based in New York at the JFK airport. They had flown together for the month of December one year. They had a great time since it was Christmas month. On the day of the holiday, the Captain made the whole crew wear Santa hats. It was ridiculous but the passengers loved the spirit. The thing Ann remembered the most about the month besides the holiday fun was that Larry was really tall. Six-foot-seven tall and he had to duck to enter the airplane and the cockpit. He must have been very uncomfortable in there. It would have been unbearable for him unless he and the other pilot had a good relationship.

Ann listened to the many doctors and nurses coming and going from her room. It did not seem like a real room but a staging area, they must have known from the start that they would transfer her. She was glad her friends got to stay with her, although she remembered little. She did remember begging anyone that would listen to please get her an ice pack. She just wanted an ice pack. She knew that it would take the pain away.

The decision was made by the doctors after the hemorrhage was found to send