Between Friends (3 page)

“Here,” he murmured, reaching around her waist, pulling her up so her head almost brushed the roof. She had no idea what he was doing. But then he pulled her hip across him, and she got it, and pivoted, swinging her leg up over his lap and settling down on top of him, so they were face to face, her rear against the steering wheel.

It wasn’t like anything could really happen. She wasn’t wearing a skirt, she was wearing jeans, and so was he, but when he pulled her up close to him, oh.

Oh . . . wow.

The wind was from the west, less than six miles an hour, in Puerto Aysen, Chile. It was a good night to fly, and I was ready to go. Drew and Dr. Cho waited for me in Seattle, but the final destination on my ticket was Ft. Myers, Florida. By the time I arrived in Naples, Drew would just be arriving at work, hours before he would have to leave to pick me up from the airport. My itinerary change wouldn’t be of any practical inconvenience for him.

The emotional inconvenience would be more difficult to overcome, and though I dreaded the inevitable confrontation, it didn’t make me consider changing my mind. The wind shifted direction slightly, and I breathed deeply, careful to not move as it lifted the edge of my skirt, toyed with the ends of my hair. I considered turning slowly, allowing the wind to slip across my shoulders, tease my ankles, but I knew there were students watching from behind the tall windows of the center.

I knew that they made fun of me—my long hippie hair, the music of multiple bracelets, the gauzy skirts that lifted and floated around me with each breeze.

They called me Dr. Stevie Nicks.

I shouldn’t have known about the nickname, but I did. And maybe I shouldn’t have been amused by it or liked it, but I was, and I did.

They didn’t understand that these bits, these extensions of me, my air-buoyed clothing, the hair I rarely trimmed so the ends would get wispy and thin, were scientific instruments. I felt the changes in the air through each hair lifted—how much, how long, how high—through each sleeve tugged, each hemline that tickled my calves.

I had stopped being self-conscious about my perceived eccentricities years ago. I vacillated between believing them myself, inhabiting them joyfully and consciously, considering ways to expand them, and being irritated by others’ concentration on them when they’d developed, sometimes to my horror, without prior thought.

Breaking into Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move” during a lecture at Cal State had been spontaneous, while ripping my shirt down the front in the wind tunnel in New Mexico had been planned days ahead of time as a joke.

The first went over incredibly well, and I often got requests to reprise the performance. The second . . . well, that wasn’t considered eccentric or amusing so much as extraordinarily unprofessional, and I’d spent months rebuilding my credibility.

Singing and funny clothing? Apparently acceptable. Brief nudity in a wind tunnel? Not the way to advance a career. I’ve learned lessons. There were always more to come.

So I was a joke, to some. To others I was nearly mystical. Those were the ones I avoided. Because while I could live up to and eventually overcome a joke, I couldn’t ever live up to that mythical being the others want me to be: goddess of air, of wind, a pure element, a sacrament. They were looking for something to believe in and thought I was available for duty.

The breeze picked up, and then I did turn, slowly, a solo waltz on the balcony, and as I did I saw Suyai, a student, one of those who lay in wait for me, like a child spying on fairies.

I didn’t acknowledge her presence, and she pressed against the glass, her eyes intent, the scarf she had wound about her neck flashing with silver thread. I had little strength for a proper twirl, and ended with my hands clasping the railing again, the breeze a memory slipping past me.

Suyai owed me nothing. And I’d asked nothing of her but a ride to the airport. There were others who owed me. But what currency were my notes written in? Some owed me money, some owed me appreciation, some owed me, at the very least, time, maybe a Christmas card. But nobody owed me what I most needed.

Except, perhaps, Ali. Because Ali owed me everything. Or she always said she did. And she was the one person I couldn’t ask. So why Naples? Hurricane season didn’t start for months. And maybe, for me, hurricane season was a thing of the past.

I needed to see Ali, certainly, always, but the person my thoughts kept coming back to was Letty. Was I not there when she was conceived, there when she was born?

I was. I was there; I saw her wailing and infuriated, hauled from her mother who lay pale and exhausted on the table but clutching my hand with the inherent strength of motherhood already.

And no matter where the wind took me, I went back to southwest Florida. I didn’t just keep the house for a base during hurricane season, a place to house the other researchers, my students. I’d kept it for Letty; for my friend, Ali; for the only connections that were family to me.

So I’d seen Letty plenty, not every year, but sometimes more than once in a year. And, as if that angry birth had been brought about by my presence, I most often saw her mad. I saw her wailing and infuriated on her second birthday, flinging cake at the dog. Wailing and infuriated at six when her mother wouldn’t allow her out on the catamaran with me. Indeed, most of what I knew of Letty was her fury.

Ali was never furious.

I’d like to think she got all that anger from Benny, but that would just be convenient. Benny wasn’t an angry man, just a solid, slightly boring one. He wasn’t boring to Ali, though; I knew that. No matter how the idea of marriage and settling down bored me, the two of them were as strong an example of a conventional life as I’d ever seen. They were, always had been, kind to each other. They could have been poster children for an enduring marriage.

So that left me as progenitor of that rage. How much more did Letty get from me? What had she inherited besides a weakness for anger? That was what really drove me to Naples.

In my three-in-the-morning-can’t-sleep moments, my most selfish, greedy-of-life moments, I thought of what Ali owed me. She got what she needed.

A child.

But when those selfish moments are over, I know I won’t ask anything of her.

I can’t.

Because what I’ve given her is quite likely broken.

And the winds that took me away, that drew me to the ends of the earth, were the same winds I was relying on to take me home to meet my daughter. It was wind again that would force me where I need to be. Wind: resistance to bear and hold me aloft, and tail to shove me home.

The flight had been smooth so far, though the pilot warned we might run into turbulence ahead and kept the seat belt light on. Chances were good that I was the only passenger on the flight hoping for turbulence. I wanted to analyze it, to decipher what was going on in the atmosphere, what we were plowing into, what was plowing into us. But I also wanted to fantasize about what I would do were I in the cockpit, how my knowledge would alter my decisions, and what might happen if I were wrong.

I never got my commercial jet license. I had no interest in being a pilot as a career anymore. I was doing exactly what I wanted with my life.

I’d simply wanted the feel of air beneath my hands, wanted to know if it was controllable. I’d stuck my arm out the windows of cars, I’d learned how to sail, I’d studied birds, but it wasn’t until I flew that I understood.

Once you learn the rhythm of current, you recognize it when you see it . . . and then you see it everywhere. You feel it in the beat of your heart, the pulse of blood in your wrists, the throbbing ache of an injury.

The tides, the air, our breath, our blood. We were all connected by these things. The dust storms off Africa become the hurricanes of the southern states, which become the nor’easters of the northern climes, which go on to become the other winds of the world. Not that Africa is the generator, Patient Zero, of the world’s wind. All the winds are recycled from other places, and there is no one birthplace, though I was going to miss searching for it, nonetheless.

After this trip home, it was quite likely that my travel window would be firmly shut, locked tight, and storm shuttered. No wind getting in.

“What can I get you to drink?” the steward asked, opening a tiny bottle of scotch and glugging it into a plastic glass for the man next to me. I stared at the burnished gold, smelled the sharpness of the alcohol as it passed inches from my face.

“Water, please,” I said.

Contrary to popular belief, people with kidney disease can drink without immediately keeling over. I knew several who did. But I’m not stupid. Even if Dr. Cho hadn’t had the big talk with me before leaving Seattle, I knew I was on the dialysis countdown. After the first six months of my diagnosis, when I went through some standard denial, I realized things were progressing much faster for me than for the other people in my support group.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

We all went through a careful inventory by the members already present when we arrived at the meeting. After it was clear that I was deteriorating more rapidly than everyone else, I tried to be the first one there so at least I could be seated. But I couldn’t hide my bloated, tired face from their shrewd gaze, their narrowed eyes. And I saw the relief there, the relief that at least they looked better than me.

So I changed everything overnight. I can do that; I’ve always been able to. Stop drinking? Bam, no problem. Low-protein diet? Zing, done. You make the decision and you do it, it’s that simple.

And I stopped going to the meetings.

The steward set the water on my tray and held out a bag of pretzels. I shook my head. Too much sodium. He moved on to the people behind me and we hit a pocket, dropping the plane momentarily. It wasn’t much as far as turbulence went, but the man next to me inhaled quickly through his teeth. It wasn’t quite a gasp, but it was sharper than it should have been, and he brushed my arm with his elbow as he tossed his scotch down.

The man next to me was afraid to die.

I was, too.

Benny didn’t come to bed until after midnight. I wasn’t quite asleep, but I wasn’t quite awake either, and when he settled in, all I thought was that things were as they should be, even though we’d not spoken about his job or the baby. At least some of the tension in the house had been defused. We both knew what was on the table, even if we didn’t know why.

I had to open the store early for Simon, a music teacher who was bringing in a student and her mother, and in the morning I kissed Benny good-bye tenderly, happy with the feel of his whiskers against my lips. We’d talk that night, about everything.

I had time to take the scenic drive to the store, turning off 41 and down to Crayton, slipping past the massive ficus that had managed to survive hurricanes. I loved these trees, their aerial roots patiently floating like jellyfish tentacles, waiting to meet the ground and secure themselves. They filled me with a great sense of calm, digging themselves in so adamantly.