Aloft (42 page)

"He even mentioned Mom the other day."

"Daisy?"

Theresa nods, taking off her sunglasses, as the sun has now dipped behind a high bank of clouds, many miles in the distance. "Actually, he was talking about the day she drowned."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," she says, squarely looking at me, and not in the least somberly. "It's amazing. It turns out he was around when it happened."

"What are you talking about?" I say. "You were both at your day camps. When I got home there wasn't anybody but Daisy."

"I guess that's true," she says, "but Jack was there before."

"He was at lacrosse camp. You were at music camp "

"Drama camp," she corrects. "I was at mine, but Jack told me he turned his ankle and got an early ride home. Do you remember that he was limping?"

"No."

"It's funny, but I don't either," she says. "I really don't remember anything, which I'm happy about. But Jack says he was there. He has no reason to lie."

"Why didn't he say something then?"

"I guess he was upset, and scared. Besides being a little boy."

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"So what else did he say?"

"Just as he got dropped off, someone was coming out of the house. A delivery man or something. Except this guy was drinking from a bottle of beer, and Jack remembers feeling angry toward him, though it was nobody he knew."

I don't answer her, because I don't know how much Theresa recalls of that part of Daisy's life and I'm certainly not interested in educating her here and now, but she says, "I assume he was there to see Mom. That's right, isn't it?"

"Probably so," I say. I suddenly remember all the empties in the house that afternoon, almost a whole case in all. Of course it wasn't the first time I'd come home to find that she'd been drinking heavily, though she mostly drank her sweet plum wine when she drank and the party-Iike litter of beer bottles had seemed unusual. I'd figured she'd been entertaining, a fact that wasn't so terribly hurtful to me at that point, the literal mess of the house more pissing me off, which really says it all, and after finding her suspended near the bottom of the pool the likely fact of some random guy having been there simply dissolved away among the thousand other details and duties that follow any death, and it never seemed important to mention to the cops who came around later that day that Daisy hadn't been drinking alone. But still the flashes of that day quicken my breath, and all at once I feel as though I'm flying at 50,000 feet, or maybe 150,000; it's like the air is thinning so rapidly we're in danger of floating up into the exosphere, right out into the black.

"Anyway," Theresa goes on, "Jack went inside and saw a lot of beer bottles in the kitchen, but not Mom. She wasn't in your bedroom, either, but while he was there he saw the bed all messed up and her underclothes on the floor. And more empty
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bottles. That's when he saw her out in the back. Sack was going to step out the sliding door of your bedroom and say he was there but I guess he didn't. He just watched her for a while. She was standing naked on the edge of the diving board, drinking a beer. He told me she looked very beautiful. Like a Roman statue, before any ruin."

"Jack said that?"

"I'm quoting verbatim," she says, unwistfully. "But he said he was scared, too. And I guess still angry, though he didn't really understand why. You can imagine what a bizarre and sexual sight it was for him. So he's just standing there watching her, and he realizes all the pool floats have been taken out of the water. The tubes and the swan raft and then that big pink doughnut she always used."

This was true, and something I didn't really think about when I got home. I'd assumed the pool had been cleared out by the cops or ambulance people, though it was an odd sight to see all the floats neatly lined up on the concrete deck, like the audi-ence for a swim meet.

"So what did he do?" I ask.

"He said he ran," Theresa answers. "He just ran out of the house, as fast as he could. He went to the playground, he was so scared, and went on the swings, for like an hour."

"Oh, Jesus, Jack."

"So when he finally comes home it's all over. He knows exactly what's happened. The driveway's full of police cars and fire trucks and the ambulance, with its lights going. That's what I remember."

"Why didn't he say something?"

"I'm sure he thought he was responsible."

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"I guess so," I say, remembering now how he kept asking if little kids were ever sent to jail.

"But of course nothing happened to him. And then you were so efficient afterward."

"What? Because I had her cremated? That's what Daisy wanted, you know."

"I didn't know, no," she says, finally a little bitterly. "And I'm not talking about cremation. I'm talking about how you managed everything so quickly after that. I mean, come on, Jerry.

It was a world speed record for goodbyes. I didn't think it then but it was like a freak snowstorm and you shoveled the driveway and front walk all night and the next day the sun comes out and it's all clear, all gone. And then the fact of our not even being allowed inside the funeral parlor."

"You were there, but Nonna kept you two in another room."

"Yeah, Jerry, I know. We sat in the back of an open-casket wake."

"Jesus. I didn't know that."

"I'm sure you ordered her to keep us away."

"I didn't say to go to somebody else's funeral! Anyway, don't you think that was the best way? You were little kids, for chrissake. I don't care what anyone says. Kids don't have to mourn.

And now that I know what Jack saw and had to deal with, all the better."

Theresa turns to her window. "You're probably right," she says, after a while, and tries to smile. Genuinely. I try to smile back. But none of it's any real solace to me. For I could say that I'm still reeling, that I've not yet begun to process all this new information, but that would pretty much be an outright lie.

Wouldn't it? Not because I had any knowledge that Daisy's
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death wasn't wholly an accident, because I didn't, but you'd have to be a complete innocent (or maybe a kid) to imagine such a thing
not
happening, that her drowning in the pool wasn't somehow foreseeable, given the way she was raging and downfalling and the way I was mostly suspended, up here before I was ever up here. And if any part of what I'm saying is confessional, it's not
re:
Daisy but rather the kids, who I knew years earlier would almost certainly end up witnessing some excruciatingly awful moment.

Outside the air is getting a bit choppy, the
d-dump d-dump
as if we're cruising in a speedboat on a rippled-surface lake, the meter even and steady. I can see the weather coming together maybe 50 miles directly ahead of us, not thunderstorms, thank goodness, but odd high-hung batons of cottony haze, odd because you'd normally encounter such a thing in the early morning before the sun rose and burned it off but rarely if ever now, in midafternoon in late summer. Because of the change in weather I've called MacArthur for an instrument approach, the new routing duly given, and taken us down to 5000 feet, and we've just flown over Westerly, Rd., passing over the mouth of the Pawcatuck River, and are now approaching Mystic and Noank and will fly along the northern shore of Fishers Island right down the line to Plum Island and then Orient Point, tracking in along old Route 25, hitting Southold and Cutchogue and Mattituck before buzzing the big outlet mall at Riverhead, where I'll pick up the Expressway and take it on in before banking south for my home field, the route so ingrained in my head and hands that I could probably fly it at night with shot gauges, just the long ropes of the car lights to serve as my guide.

But now the turbulence ramps up, the invisible pockets hitting us hard and fast (like speed bumps in midair), the up and A L O F T

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down severe enough that I tell Theresa to tighten her seat belt and brace herself, just not on her control wheel. It's raining on us now, or better we're in it, and I hope like heck that we're not heading into a so-called embedded thunderstorm, surprise shit that no pilot wants ever to see. I glance over and Theresa's curled up a bit, and I can see she's already a little green about the gills, that sloe-eyed open-mouthed pant. I reach back behind her seat to where I keep the coffee bags for getting sick in and hand one to her. To my surprise she immediately retches into it, not a lot, because she didn't eat any lunch, but enough to make me worry that it's not solely airsickness. She folds it up and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," she answers, leaning her head against the window.

"I'll be fine."

"We don't have long to go," I say, "but it might get rougher."

She half-smiles and gives me a thumbs-up full of irony and goofiness and cool, and for a mostly happy instant I think I can see almost every one of us in her, Battles and Daisy both. But suddenly I feel she's very young and I'm very old and I can't believe I've ever allowed her to come up here. For a while I considered keeping a parachute in the back for Rita but she hated the idea and now I'm wishing like crazy I had, so I could strap it on Theresa just in case one of the wing struts now fails, before she's trapped with me in the metal-heavy groundrush. And no sooner than I finish the thought does
Donnie
get a deep frontal wallop,
Whompi,
and then another,
Whompt,
the force of each rocking us in our hard cockpit seats, violently enough that my sunglasses fall off and land somewhere down near the pedals.

The rain is fearsome. Theresa's headset has rotated forward on her head such that the band is in front of her eyes, and I reach
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over and pull it back into place. She's wincing, and suddenly there's a blot of blood glossing her lower lip.

"Theresa!"

She touches her mouth and inspects the smear. "It's okay, I just bit my ..."

Whornp-Whomp!

Donnie
bucks, then feels like she's yawing straight sideways, and for a long, long second I lose hold of the wheel and accidently push the rudder pedal, and we dip hard to starboard like we're on a bombing run, diving to 4 o'clock, the airspeed indicator boinging inside the crystal like a fat man stepped on the scale;
Donnie's
motor screams, the wings shuddering right down to the rivets, the airframe racked to its outer tolerances from pulling a G or two more than it was designed to pull, and you finally understand in that continuous pregnant second what people are talking about when they hold there's a nano-fine and mostly philosophical distinction between falling and flying. Or fearing and fighting, which perhaps explains how despite my overwhelming impulse to curl into a single cell I not-too-consciously manage to right her, get her level and steady, only to see we've lost 1000 feet, an entire skyscraper, which is absolutely fine as long as there's no more funny business.

"Are you okay?" I ask Theresa, who is canted forward a bit awkwardly. "Hey, talk to me."

"Yeah," she says weakly. "I've had enough of this, though. I want it to stop. Okay, Jerry? Make it stop."

"Okay, honey. We just . . ."

Whomp!

. . .
we just have to get out of this damn pocket!"

Whomp-Whomp!

"Shit!"

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Whomp-Whomp-WHOMP!

This set is nearly concussive, and produces in me what must be the dream of a boxer as his clock is being supremely cleaned, the wash of giddy relief that this is not yours truly but some other chump caught in the klieg lights of ignominy. As the beautiful dream dissipates, though, I can feel that my neck is already stiffening, the little bones fusing, with everything else that's jointed, hips and above, feeling distinctly unhinged.

"Theresa, honey," I hear myself say, my eyes probably open but not really working, unwilling to witness what will no doubt be the
coup de grace,
"hold on, honey, hold onl"

But the final wallop doesn't come. The
whomp
just doesn't
whomp.
The rain has stopped. And all we have is the alto hum of
Donnie's
prop, the rpms in the key of A, a drone that's as sweet as any Verdi tenor crooning of a singularly misguided love.

"Theresa, baby, we're clear, we're clear."

She nods to me and even smiles but there's a look she's manifesting that I have seen plenty in the mirror, and on Jack, and Paul, and even Pop of late, but never on Theresa Battle—

namely, this face of deferral—and I say, "What the hell is wrong?"

She glances down to her lap. And there, between her tanned legs in black Bermuda shorts, on the red vinyl seat, is a shiny pool of wet. She lifts a knee and the clear liquid dribbles over the white-piped edge.

"Please tell me you peed."

She shakes her head.

"Oh shit."

"It's too early," she says. "The baby's much too young to be born. We're only at twenty-five weeks."

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"Do you know how much time you have, before it gets dangerous?"

"No." And then, with the alarm of a hard fact, "I have to get to the hospital. Now."

"It's going to be twenty minutes to the field, maybe more."

"To what field?"

"The field we came from! The only one."

"You have to fly me to New Haven, Jerry," she says. "That's where my doctor is, at Yale—New Haven. I can't go anywhere else. Not now. Please!"

"I don't know. I've never flown there."

"Does it really matter?"

"It shouldn't. But this doesn't seem the time to experiment."

"Can't you use your chart?"

She reaches back and hands it to me, and I don't want to waste any time looking, but now that I'm really flying again I can see we've strayed from our flight path in just the direction she wants. This fact isn't material; even though I can't see much for the thickening haze, I know we're in fact much closer to New Haven than we are to Islip, which is probably twice the distance from here and definitely shrouded with the same weather. So I flip through the charts as quickly as I can while we remain on our due-east heading. And I see that there in fact is a field, which of course I knew some time before in a normal frame of mind, called Tweed, in East Haven, just a few miles from her hospital.