Flight (39 page)

“Nice toast, Dad,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says. “You, too.”

Will is distracted. He can hardly answer Margaret. He wants nothing so much as for all these people to be gone. And he may get his wish. The toasts, oddly enough, seem to have provided some kind of sign for the party to end. Already, a few people are gathered around Carol, saying their goodbyes. Kit and Leanne have moved to the couch, exhausted, no doubt.

It occurs to Will that he’s starving. He hasn’t eaten a thing since
he finished off the tub of cottage cheese. Maybe there’s something left on the food table. He ambles toward the dining room, stopped several times by people congratulating him and saying goodbye. He shakes hands and kisses cheeks. Finally, he gets to the dining room.

As he expected, it’s empty. He surveys the damage. There’s some kind of dip that’s nearly gone, and a few scattered crumbs of cheese.

Empty bowls dot the table, giving no sign of what they might have contained. There’s still a big pile of vegetables, though, and quite a few small cucumber rounds with some kind of salad on them. He picks one up and bites into it. Fish.

He eats the rest of the cucumber things, and then he starts in on the vegetables. There’s a lot of dip left, something creamy, and when he loads that on, even the summer squash isn’t bad. From the foyer, he can hear the sounds of departing guests. He should be out there, saying goodbye with Carol, but right now food is more important.

“Hi, Dad.” He turns. It’s Leanne, standing in the doorway. She looks a little wobbly on her feet, and slightly pale. She probably hasn’t eaten anything, either.

“Hey,” he says. “Come and have a snack.” Leanne walks toward the table as if intending to do just that. But when she gets there, she leans heavily against it, looking down at her hands. He sees a thin layer of moisture clinging to her upper lip.

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

Will stops chewing a pepper long enough to take a good look at her. Her shoulders are hunched, and her lip is trembling. “What’s wrong?” he asks. One of Carol’s phrases comes to mind: “an attack of nerves.” Or maybe Leanne ate something bad. The possibility that she’s drunk crosses his mind, but he doesn’t want to think it. He never saw her with any champagne, and that’s all they were serving.

Leanne stares at her hands. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says. She looks up at him and laughs, a short, loud exhalation, as if trying to make a joke. The effect is gruesome.

“You proposed to Mom on the third date,” she says. “How did you know you wanted to get married?”

Will looks down at the veggie plate. There aren’t many red peppers left, but there’s lots of broccoli and cauliflower, and a whole pile of scallion lengths.

“Sometimes you arrive in a place and you know it’s the right place,” he says. “Or sometimes you just take the leap of faith. It’s like flying. Sometimes you can see it. You look out the window and there it is, the place you’re going.”

“But not all the time?”

“No, not all the time.”

“How do you know when you’ve gotten where you’re going if you can’t tell you’re there?” Her expression has gone from lighthearted to quizzical, as if she’s having a hard time putting his sentences together in her head. She’s certainly acting drunk.

“It’s called dead reckoning,” he says. “You fly in the right direction at the right speed for a certain length of time, and when that time has passed, you’re there.”

“You don’t know you’re there?”

Will tilts his head. “You
do
know you’re there. You must be there, because you’ve reckoned it that way.”

Leanne looks at the red pepper in his hand. Her face is quizzical, the way it used to be when she was a baby. He’s not sure what they’ve been talking about, but he longs to embrace her. The memory of everyone’s coolness toward him earlier in the day stops him.

He stands, frozen, unsure what to do.

“I need to go to bed,” Leanne says. She starts for the door. He watches the back of her. In the archway, she stops and turns her head. “Good night, Dad,” she says, an afterthought. She doesn’t look at him.

“Good night, Leanne.”

Half an hour later, it’s over. The last guests are gone, and Kit has followed Leanne into the room they’re sharing. Margaret put Trevor to bed and helped clear the dining room table and load glassware into the dishwasher before Carol urged her to go to bed herself. Margaret swayed slightly on her heels, considering, and then for once, did as she was told. Now it’s just the two of them, Will and Carol, in the bright kitchen. Lights are still blazing in the rest of
the house, and Will thinks of the electricity bill, ticking higher every second. He should go turn them all off. But something compels him to stay, to continue drying platters and trays as Carol washes them. He stacks them gently on the other counter, careful not to chip the edges or bang them against one another. Carol will have to put them away. He’s not sure where they belong.

Carol is atypically silent. Normally, she would be going over every event from the party, analyzing comments, quizzing him about what people said to him. Instead, she washes steadily, a small sad frown on her face.

Leanne is getting married tomorrow. And then he’ll join Cathay Pacific. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe his body has tricked him for real this time, not just aging but decaying. He thinks of how quiet the television has seemed lately, how he missed air-traffic control hailing him. Decadence, decline, conclusion. The great trajectory.

Outside, there’s a flash of light. A few seconds later, there’s a long low growl, then a short clap.

“Damn,” Carol says to herself.

Will pauses, dish towel in hand. “I heard it, too,” he says softly.

Carol moves at the sink, but not toward him. She stops, her hands plunged into the water halfway to her elbows, as if looking for something.

“You’ll probably pass the physical,” she says, not looking at him. “But you know I can’t go to Hong Kong.”

“I just thought …” He has no idea what to say. Worse, he has no desire to protest. She’s telling the truth.

“I know you’ll go.” Her voice is oddly gentle. She’s not trying to start an argument or convince him of his mistake. She’s nudging him gently, as she used to nudge the girls, toward understanding some simple, unchangeable thing.

“I will if they let me,” he says dully. The dish towel hangs limp at his side. He can’t say anything else. Something is driving him to go, something inside him that it’s too late to change. “I’ll go,” he says, “but I’ll come back. After a year or two.”

She nods. His words don’t surprise her. When she answers, she sounds tired, more than anything else.

“It will be a trial separation,” she says. “And then we’ll have to see.”

When he was younger and they fought so often, he used to imagine the end of their marriage. He’d imagine getting fed up and walking out, suitcase in hand, or coming home to a house with the locks changed. Sometimes he’d make up speeches and imagine himself delivering them. He envisioned crying, fights, protests, broken dishes. Not this. This is like takeoff, something you know is going to happen but still yanks your stomach out when it does.

The first time he ever flew supersonic was on the T-38 in flight school. It was like nothing he ever knew. It was just a gee-whiz flight, a little go-around to give you the feel of it, and Will hadn’t expected anything special. He’d been on the T-37 for months, and the planes didn’t look all that different. But when they took off and started climbing at ten thousand feet a minute, he felt something drop in him. Instinctively, he grabbed his harness. The base was vanishing behind him so fast it seemed irretrievable, a stone dropped from a bridge. This was movement, he realized, real forward motion, no time to think back or second-guess. As he watched the ground drop away, the future clicked into place, and he felt an overwhelming joy. Now he was doing it. Now he was really going somewhere.

IT’S EITHER LEANNE OR THE RAIN THAT WAKES Margaret, although neither has made a sound. The room is lit with even, gray light, and Leanne is standing inside the door. Margaret squints at her. She’s pale and biting her lip. It’s so silent in the room that Margaret can hear the long, smooth rustles of Trevor breathing from across the hall. Last night she put him to bed and, on impulse, climbed in with him. She lay there, one arm over his warm self, until she was almost asleep. Then she slipped out from under the covers and quickly, arms clutched around her body as if to hold in the calm she had borrowed, slipped across the hall.

“Sorry, Margaret.” Leanne comes forward to kneel by the side of the bed. Her face moves into view right in front of Margaret’s. “I hate to wake you.”

“I’m not sure you did wake me,” Margaret says, putting a fist to her eye. She’s becoming aware of a distinct throbbing in her right temple. Champagne. She hoists herself up on one elbow.

“Margaret, I’m sorry to hear about you … about you and David.” Leanne takes a deep breath after speaking. Looking at her sister’s moist face and red-rimmed eyes, Margaret realizes that whatever hangover pain she feels, it’s only a fraction of Leanne’s.

“Oh, well …” Margaret drops back on the bed, rolling over to stare at the ceiling. “Whatever. What’s done is done.”

“What are you going to do?” They are still whispering. It must be before six.

“I’m going to sue him for divorce and custody.” Margaret closes her eyes. The words sound so sure, so final. They have the quality of fixing whatever happened between her and David, freezing it into one interpretation. That’s a relief. She rolls over onto her side and leans on her elbow once more, this time resting her head on her fist. It’s as if she and Leanne are exchanging confidences at a slumber party: who likes whom, who got kissed at the dance.

“I’m going to do whatever it takes to sort out my life,” Margaret says, again using words to organize the mess of her life into a clearly defined narrative. It’s the pre-set language of divorce she’s using, she realizes, the discourse of the spurned wife. She’ll get a small apartment with a nice room for Trevor, and she’ll become one of those busy divorced mothers, budgeting carefully, rushing to get her dry cleaning on the way home from work, showing up alone for parent/teacher conferences. There are worse things to be.

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?” Leanne is frowning, her eyebrows drawing together as if contemplation is an effort.

“What other way is there?” Margaret says. It’s not an entirely rhetorical question. If there is another clear path, she’s willing to hear about it.

“I guess that’s the only path.” Leanne’s voice is losing force. “But there might be ways of going without a path.”

“Like what?”

Leanne shrugs. “I don’t know. It just seems …” She raises a hand and waves it from one side to the other. “It’s such a road map. Once you put all that machinery in motion, it’s just going to … to go of its own accord.”

Now Margaret frowns. It’s funny, but Leanne has put her finger on the very thing that seems so horrifying about the whole process.

“I know what you mean,” Margaret says. “But the question is, where else can I go?” She puts her hand, the one she’s not leaning on, against the side of her cheek. Her face is cool in the morning air. Her words seem to have galvanized Leanne.

“Actually,” Leanne whispers, “that’s why I came to see you. I wanted to use your car. I need to go.”

“Go where?”

Leanne shakes her head slightly in a vague, involuntary motion. “Just … go,” she says.

Margaret sits up. “You don’t want to get married.”

Leanne clutches one wrist in the fingers of her other hand, hunching her shoulders together. She puffs her cheeks as she breathes out. “He wants me to go to Mexico with him,” she says.

“And you don’t want to?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Yes and no?”

Leanne looks at her with the expression of a teacher who has gone to great pains to explain something and now realizes that it has fallen on completely deaf ears. “How can I know what I want?” she says. “I don’t. That’s the whole point. That’s what getting married is—being sure. Well, I’m not.”

Margaret takes this in. “Does Kit know you’re leaving?”

Now Leanne’s head drops, and Margaret sees tears coming into her eyes.

“No.”

“Leanne.” Margaret touches her sister once, on the shoulder, feeling an unusual desire to reach out and comfort her. They’ve never been close that way. “Leanne, are you sure you want to leave?”

Leanne bites her lip, but she nods, the most vigorously assertive gesture she’s made yet.

“Okay, then.” Margaret swings her feet out of bed. “I’ll get you the keys.”

Leanne shudders slightly, from fear or relief. “I’m so sorry about this.”

Margaret shakes her head firmly. “There’s no reason to be sorry about any of it.” She takes the keys from the dresser, where she has left them on top of a pair of socks, so they won’t scratch the dresser.

“Everyone is all set for the wedding. Mom’s going to be so disappointed. And Dad …” Leanne stops, frowning at the keys as Margaret puts them in her hand.

“It’s your family, Leanne,” Margaret says. “You get a free pass.”

“But not with Kit.” Leanne looks Margaret in the eye, projecting gratefulness but also fear. “I don’t get a free pass with Kit. He’ll never want to see me again.”

Margaret looks out the window. The day couldn’t be more miserable.
Another pathetic fallacy. “No,” she tells Leanne. “Probably not.”

Leanne nods. She closes her fist on the keys. She moves forward, a little impulsive jerk, as if to hug Margaret, but then turns instead and slips out the door. She makes no sound as she leaves.

Margaret stands in the bedroom. It occurs to her, vaguely, that she ought to be annoyed. Her sister has done what she has always done, shirked all responsibility, leaving Margaret to do the dirty work of breaking the news to Kit and trying to console their parents. One of them will have to drive Margaret to Chicago while Leanne, vague and self-centered as ever, will be zipping off in Margaret’s Rabbit, not even sure where she’s going or how she’ll give the car back.