Flight (27 page)

WILL IS COMING IN LOW, CLOSE TO THE DECK, THERE’S
a staticky wailing in his ears. It’s the radar-seeking Shrike, sensing a SAM site. His wing leader banks left. Will follows suit.

Ahead is a tiny cluster of what look like buildings. He can see them only when he jinks right or left. Now that they’re diving in head-on, he can’t see them at all.

“I’m on target,” the wing leader says. “Hit my smoke.” The Shrike is squealing like a stuck pig. In fact, it sounds exactly like a stuck pig. He looks out his window to the left, and it
is
a pig, attached to his wing in a small harness.

“What the hell?” he cries.

“I’m going in,” the wing leader says, and then Will is diving, too, his plane following of its own accord. He keeps glancing at the pig, hearing its frantic noise, and then he sees the target. A farm. It’s not Vietnam at all; it’s Michigan. He sees the familiar white house, the stubby red barn, the blue Harvestore silo. Cornfield to the east, wheat field to the south, perfect rectangles of green.

“Wait!” he yells. He pulls as hard as he can on the yoke, but his plane keeps on diving. The pig has stopped squealing. Will looks out the window, and it meets his eyes serenely.

It’s okay,
he tells himself.
I’m only hitting them with a pig.

He dives left. The ground tilts on its side and reaches for him. He eases the plane through the barrel roll, the ground slipping over his head, then wrapping around to his right. Slowly, with great effort, he reaches out and launches the pig. It sails away from his plane, gliding quickly on a shiny pair of wings. But as it heads for the ground, it begins to pull up and back in a big arching circle, curving around and heading back toward Will. It comes on fast, its expression no longer serene but malevolent.

He wakes up. He doesn’t yell anymore, he barely even jerks. His eyes fly open and he’s there, in his bed at home, almost sixty years old. The light is coming up outside. From the look of it, the rain may have stopped. It’s Friday, one day before his younger daughter’s wedding. He looks at the clock: 6:06. In twelve hours there will be forty guests drinking champagne in his home. He sighs and rolls over. Maybe he can get another hour of sleep.

It’s funny, he never dreams about flying commercially, though there have been plenty of scares there, too. He’s landed planes with engines that died, or worse, flamed out and slung compressor blades every which way, banging holes in the fuselage. He’s had a rear tire blow out at V1 on takeoff, leaving him the bad option of a go-around or the worse option of aborting and risking a lethal slide off the end of the runway. Once a Cessna appeared out of nowhere on his final approach, and he had to take evasive action to avoid ramming into it. Luckily, he was flying the 707 at the time, one of the most maneuverable jets there was, and one of the fastest, until the airlines got rid of them because with four engines, they were too expensive to fly.

The clock blinks ahead a minute: 6:10. Commercial flying is safer now than when he started. The month after he joined TWA, one of their Convair 880s crashed into trees on a nighttime visual approach in Cincinnati. It was snowing, the glide slope wasn’t working, and they just miscalculated. It was an easy mistake. Will knew one of the guys on the crew, and when he heard about the crash, his heart sank. Losing buddies was something he figured he had left behind in Vietnam. Sixty-five of the seventy-five passengers died in the crash.
Do I really want this responsibility?
he had asked himself. He was flying the 880 himself. What if he screwed up? Later, when the NTSB report came out, Will pored over the blow by blow account, determined not to repeat that mistake. It couldn’t even happen now: visual flight is a thing of the past.

He closes his eyes, trying not to look at the clock. A green afterimage of the red numbers glows on his eyelids: 6:13.

There aren’t as many hijackings now, either, in spite of all the terror fears and heightened airport security. In his first four years,
sixteen planes were hijacked, and that was just TWA. As America’s lead airline, they bore the brunt of it, but others were getting slammed, too. Of course, in those days, even hijacking was more civilized. If the hijackers got nailed, they gave up quickly. If not, they got taken to Cuba or Italy or Beirut, and it ended there. Sometimes they torched the plane to make a statement, but they let the passengers and crew go first. Still, TWA got sick of it. After a few years, they stormed a hijacked plane at JFK, and that put the lid on hijackings for a few years.

Blink: 6:16. It’s no use. Will sits up and rubs both hands on his face. He might as well get up. He slides his feet out of bed and stands up, feeling especially stiff in his pinned leg. It’s the humidity. All this rain in the past few days, and—if his stiffness can be believed—more to come. Sometimes when it rains he gets a dull, distant ache, so deep it’s almost more the idea of an ache than real pain. Collateral damage.

The house is bright as he pads down the stairs. It’s funny, when the girls come home, the house doesn’t feel overtaken, the way it does when there are guests staying over. It just goes back to feeling the way it always did, full of the electricity the family generates as a unit. His stomach yawns and gurgles. Margaret’s gumbo was delicious, but it wasn’t that filling. He could use some breakfast.

As he heads into the kitchen, he’s surprised to see Leanne. She’s standing at the kitchen window, gazing outside. Something about her demeanor looks closed off, as if she has withdrawn into her own skin. She often has that look, that feeling of distance. When she was little and something she’d done caused a response from people around her, she always acted surprised. It was as if she expected to make no impression on the world, but to glide through it silent as a deer.

“Hey you, what’s up?” he says. His voice comes out more jovial than he means it to be.

She lifts her head toward him without turning around. “I remember you building that deck,” she says. It sounds like a line intended to throw him off the scent of her real thoughts.

“Yeah.” He looks at the back of her. She’s taller than Carol, and her hair comes from his side of the family. His mother. “That was when I was laid off.”

She’s silent, and he thinks that might be the end of it. “I always thought it was weird,” she says. “Having the furniture built in like that.”

Surprised, he looks past her out the window to the deck, gray in the morning light. “Why weird?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Just weird to put it all in there, fixed, like that. How do you know that’s where you’re going to want to use it? Or even that it’s the right furniture to have?”

Will shrugs. “What other furniture could you possibly want?”

Leanne turns toward him. “I don’t know,” she says. It’s a statement, clear and final, a declaration. Will is struck by how definitive it sounds.
I don’t know.
That, he thinks, is all the conviction she has.

The sun is shining on the bed when Carol’s eyes pop open. She looks at the clock: 6:30. Today’s the day. They have the run-through this morning. Kit’s mother, Bernice, will be picked up in the afternoon, and the cocktail-party guests arrive at six. Last night at dinner, Carol laid out the plan. After the rehearsal, Will and Kit will go to Grand Rapids to pick up Bernice, while Leanne makes sure the best guest room is ready: towels, toiletries, sheets, flowers. Then Margaret is going to give Leanne a manicure, since she refused to make an appointment at a nail salon in Kalamazoo. Carol will start the cooking in the morning, and the girls will help her in the afternoon. Once Will is back from the airport, he’ll be on call, for any last-minute trips to the store. They will start setting up at four and make sure all the food is laid out by five thirty. That will give them half an hour to set up the bar.

“Will.” Carol rolls over, but he’s not there. She rises and quickly puts on the capri pants and matching T-shirt she laid out the night before. Thank goodness the rain stopped, so she doesn’t have to find something else to wear. She’ll shower and dress for real closer
to the time of the party. She likes to do it that way, so she’s fresh when the guests arrive.

Slipping downstairs, she can hear the coffeemaker’s long, gurgling sigh. That’s one thing she won’t have to do. They won’t have eaten, though, so she’ll cook something quick, oatmeal perhaps, to get them going. But first she wants to check on the doves.

The flapping starts as soon as the door to the garage smacks shut behind her. Carol flicks on the garage light and goes over to their cage, leaning to see inside. They’re both alive. The smaller one is still bright-eyed and active. The larger one seems better than yesterday. He’s not holding his wing strangely, and he has moved from one side of the cage to the other. She hopes that means he’s eaten something.

“One more day,” she whispers to them. “Just one more day, and then you’ll be free to fly off and do whatever you want.” She wonders if the doves will live the same life they had before, or if they’ll be transformed by their experience. Perhaps they’ll resettle in Michigan and make a better life. Maybe they’d been living somewhere awful—Delaware or New Jersey—somewhere with polluted air and huge freeways. Now they can live a nice life amid woods and lakes and fields. Will other birds accept them? She’s heard that if a person touches a baby bird, its mother won’t take it back. But that’s probably not true of grown doves. Besides, they’ll both have the same smell. At least they’ll have each other.

Carol adds a few more seeds to their paper plate and goes back in the house. Now for breakfast. It’s a little warm for oatmeal, but it’s always good to have a nice, solid breakfast when you have a big day ahead.

Leanne and Will are sitting at the kitchen table. Each has a cup of coffee. Leanne is staring out the window.

“We forgot something,” Carol tells Will.

“What?” He looks only half awake. He should have slept longer. He must have been having his insomnia again.

“We forgot to chill the champagne. There are three cases of it
down in the basement. You’ve got to go load it into the basement fridge.”

“Okay, no problem.” He says it easily, without really taking it in or moving from his position in his chair. His bare feet are planted heavily on the kitchen floor.

“Will,
now.
Please.” She hates to nag, but she needs to make sure he does it. If she leaves it, it will never get done. “When you come back up, I’ll have some breakfast ready.”

“All right, all right.” He drains his coffee mug and pushes himself to his feet, slowly, like an old man. He gives her a sarcastic salute as he ambles by her to the sink and plunks his mug down inside it.

On the way out the kitchen door, he passes Margaret. She’s wearing her running clothes and carrying an empty yogurt container.

“I was just about to make breakfast,” Carol tells her.

“Don’t bother for me,” Margaret says, stepping on the garbagecan pedal. “I just had a yogurt. I’m going for a quick run, and then I’ll be back to help you. Trevor’s still sleeping.” She gives her mother a softer look than usual. Last night she told Carol what the lawyer had said. The idea of police coming to take Trevor away is so awful that Carol can’t even let herself think about it. She’s a little surprised Margaret is leaving the house to run. But she looks better this morning, calmer. Maybe knowing things are in the hands of a professional has helped. Surely David will stop acting this way when he hears from the lawyer. He’ll see that he’d better shape up if he wants to see his son at all.

“Let Trevor sleep as long as possible,” Margaret says. “I’ll be back in half an hour.”

“I’ll have more coffee made,” Carol tells her, meaning
I’ll make sure Trevor’s okay.

“Thanks, Mom,” Margaret says. She leans forward and looks as if she’s going to say more, but then turns around and, taking Will’s mug out of the sink, fills it with water and drains it quickly. She rises up onto her toes and bounces a couple of times, taking a deep
breath, then half turns to give a small wave before moving lightly out of the kitchen.

The front door opens and shuts quietly. It occurs to Carol that this would be a good time to start making the crab dip. She has bought canned crab for it, and she knows Margaret would say something about fresh crab being better. Carol didn’t even dare put the crab on Margaret’s shopping list; she had Will get it yesterday in Kalamazoo. She can have the dip made by the time Margaret gets back, and she’ll never know. People love Carol’s crab dip, can or no can.

“So, Mom.”

Carol gives a tiny jump, startled. She’d forgotten Leanne was there, still sitting at the table in her pajamas. “What’s on the agenda for this morning?” She stands up, offering her lanky physical self.

Carol sets the can aside. “I was just getting started on the cooking,” she says, “but I planned to make oatmeal for everyone.”

Leanne looks out the sliding doors at the sun shining on the deck. Her face is a little pale. “Kit is happy with coffee and toast,” she says. “And I don’t think I could eat anything.”

“Aren’t you feeling well?” Carol’s mind races to the shrimp. Maybe Margaret didn’t cook them well enough. Or maybe that chicken she bought from Peterson had worms. Carol has never liked eating chickens fresh from the farm. You never know what diseases they could have.

“No, not sick,” Leanne says. “I just feel a little … tense.”

“Oh, honey.” Carol moves to her daughter. “You’ve got wedding nerves, that’s all. Something to eat will do you good.”

“Whatever.” Leanne sits back down, and the way she flops into the chair suggests a forlorn adolescent rather than a grown, soon-to-be married woman with her own home and a lovely, successful business. A brief flash of anger causes Carol’s jaw to flex, but she squelches it quickly. Here is her baby, nervous on the day before her wedding. She halts behind Leanne’s chair.

“Later, I’ll need your help washing and trimming vegetables,” she says. “That’s always the biggest chore.” A job to do—that will perk Leanne up.

“Okay.” Leanne has her arms wrapped around her own middle, and she speaks so faintly Carol can hardly hear her. Carol hovers, her hands on the back of the chair, unsure what to do. A familiar, tight feeling of annoyance with her younger daughter is rising in her chest.