God and Jetfire (47 page)

“Well,” he continued, “you
were
an accident.” He was stretching his face longways to give more space to his eyes to catch the water that was welling up in them. Distending his jaw a bit, opening his throat, lifting his eyebrows. It made his eyes wider; there were no eyelashes, or shadows, or blinking, to buffer his question.

“Your mother had had a couple of miscarriages before Julie, and we weren't sure she could have a baby. We had your sister and brother, and we thought we had lucked out. When you came along, your mother was older, and we were scared you might be disabled somehow. And then there was the money. I was starting a new business in a new city, and I wasn't sure I could support three children. My business partner had left and taken all our money.” I had only seen him cry at his own father's funeral. “But once you got here and we saw you were okay—”

He paused, shaking his head, trying again. “When I try to think of the world without you…” He gestured with his hands, fingers spread, slowly erasing the horizon, shakily, back and forth, pushing back that wall of water and unbuilding my foundations. Addressing the imperfect circumstances of my birth and my imperfect understanding of them. Our whole lives can be built on the slightest misunderstanding about our origins. But with that tiny gesture, as effortless as a signature, as insignificant as a hundred visits that amount to nothing, until they add up to something, his shaking and imprecise hands made space for me.

“The second thing—” He dried his eyes with the edge of his bedsheet and smiled apologetically because it was no doubt not a time for emotions, but all the things were fallen. All the constructs of our relationship we'd relied on for no reason at all, since I was born.

“Do you know how old you can be and still have children?”

“Dad!” It felt so good to be exasperated with him; I wasn't sure I'd ever get to feel that again. “Charles is moving to California! It's not going to happen with him, and it's not a thing I can really control.”

“Well.” It was so against his nature to give advice. “The way I see it, I think you have lots of good things in your life. But I don't see why you can't have everything you want. A-at least, I think you want kids.” He smiled. “I'd think it would be awfully nice if you were pregnant by, l-let's see, August of next year.”

August 2013, I registered to myself. It had a magical property. It was the most concrete advice he'd ever given me. Don't kill spiders. Get pregnant by August. And dads understood things daughters couldn't. August 2013 was the right time. And maybe it was less a project he was assigning me and more a prediction he was making, from the wise perspective of his paralysis. I felt my anxiety about the whole issue release, enclosed by the safety of his generous, yearlong boundary. Surely I could do it in a year. Find a man; have a kid. I wanted more advice, more challenges on my skateboard, each one specially designed and incrementally harder. I wanted all the advice he had never given me.

“I—I don't mean that you don't already have a child. I know that Jonathan is your child.”

“I know, Dad, yeah, it's okay—” I stammered. I didn't want him to feel guilty for anything.

“I just think you'd like to have a child you get to raise.” The upside-down smile. “Okay, okay, three.”

I could barely take another thing.

“The blue van. It needs oil, needs a new spare. There's some rust that should be patched. Look in the back, there's a rust kit. I'm going to sell you the van, a thousand dollars.”

That time I smiled. He was still afraid of spoiling me. But even as he lay there, legs like solid rocks, I couldn't imagine he wouldn't need that van anymore, that he wouldn't be pulling up in the driveway again with a box turtle in the back.

*   *   *

It was only after speaking to the ICU nurses, later, that I found out the real nature of August 2013's particular significance for my father; they'd given him that long to live, and he wanted to see me on my way to having everything I wanted before he went away.

He was eventually moved out of the ICU into a rehabilitation facility. With his unparalyzed parts, he continued to study and work and learn. He occupied himself with engineering jobs and with questions that filled his clipboards. One afternoon, an architect called demanding drawings, and I impatiently informed him of my dad's condition. I found out later that Dad had called back, apologized for me, and resumed work. He drew on a large clipboard and had his loyal draftsman, Wayne, come by the rehab facility in the afternoons to pick up redlines.

Another day I saw his clipboard, full of calculations of a different nature. They weren't associated with a drawing, just endless math and a couple of angles. I asked him what he'd been working on. He said he was trying to figure out the exact degree of daily change in the sun's location.

“I'd tried to figure it out about fifty years ago,” he whispered. “I spent twenty, thirty hours on it. I figured it out last year, but last night I realized I forgot it again. So I redid the calculations. It's a sine curve, roughly.”

In the afternoon, when he had put in a full day's work, the nurses would sling him up in the Hoyer lift and lower him into a wheelchair, and I'd roll him, cringing at every bump in the floor surface, outside to the front porch. Mom would bring dinner she'd made, and we'd all look out over the valley at the sunset, and then the moonrise. One of those sunsets, he said to her, “Days like this, you just don't want to end—d-do you?”

He would tell me that he loved me, and, forcing one word to follow the other, the day he died, I would say the same to my son. I'd read through letters my father had written to his mother and discover that he had really wanted to be able to buy me a grand piano. Also among those letters Grandma saved, I'd find one written in an unfamiliar hand, thanking her for the photographs and gifts, for trips to the supermarket, and most of all for letting her see her son, Johnny, over the years, and I'd realize that Grandma knew more about open adoption than she'd let on. At my father's funeral, my grandmother's sister would tell me that we'd get my son back, and she wouldn't explain, but I knew it was connected to the other thing she said, that I am one of the lucky ones in the world because I know what it feels like to be loved. I would commit myself to making sure my son felt the same. Little gifts. Visit more. I wasn't sure. All of those were moments I'd contemplate for a long time after.

*   *   *

But that winter, I was just basking in that moment when Jonathan kept me from freezing to death. We all walked home, and on the way he asked me if I remembered when he was five and he sat in my father's glider but was too afraid to fly. Of course I remembered! I couldn't believe
he
remembered! He said that people perceived him as less brave, or overly cautious, because he was nothing like his brother, but he said he was just strategic about the risks he takes. All of it was amazing, that he could see himself, that he understood something about how others saw him, and that he knew his own perception was an inflection of theirs, not the opposite.

“Do you think you'll be ready to fly someday soon?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, with certainty. But at that time I only hoped he would get to see my father again before he died.

 

THIRTY-EIGHT

You slip off the canopy cover and roll the glider out by its wings. Push it out from the hangar, silently, like a horse from its stable. Men sitting under the trees will be talking about the things they wait all week or all month to talk about, standing by patiently for their turn, looking for a reason to get up and help. Some are tow pilots, on call when you have the glider ready. Some of them are kids as young as fourteen, who somehow found this world and got licensed to solo. All of them tuned to the invisible language of the sky, watching the day unfold in wind socks and clouds.

Facilities are nothing fancy here. The runway is a field of grass, bordered on the south by marsh, on the north by Craig's Creek, and on the east and west by the mountains. There are some stables, two small hangars, a few houses, the clubhouse—but no air control tower. Some days the guys sit at the north end of the field under the trees. Some days they sit at the south end, where there's a tiny storage shed with plastic chairs and a radio.

If you don't already know the area, you assess things for miles around beforehand. You look for the flat fields that might make for soft landings, in case you lose altitude too fast and can't get back to the runway. I remember, as a child, walking across the fields scouting out landing sites as my dad explained that every landing in a sailplane is a kind of crash landing. I guess he meant because you don't have all the controls of a motorized plane. But at the time I understood that they had perfected taking off in gliders, but they hadn't yet figured out how to get back down.

This weekend my son will be flying. He says the only thing he's afraid of is water, and not for the same reasons I am. Of the little bit of online television he's allowed to watch, nature shows are his favorite; what he's afraid of are river monsters and sharks. Flying he can handle.

When we get out onto the airfield, we inspect the plane. My father walks around it weakly, his shoulders shrunken. The wing flaps, the various dashboard indicators, the little hook at the nose of the plane that snatches shut to grasp the towrope and opens wide to let go. I pinched my finger in the little hook once, just as my dad was pulling the trigger to test it, and I was surprised at how strong those tiny jaws turned out to be. We walk the wings, holding their edges to make sure they don't touch the ground as the golf cart pulls the plane into position. I've volunteered to be his passenger for this flight. It will be the first time I've flown in several years. My dad checks my seat belt, which has five straps all radiating to a central buckle. He points to a zippered pouch to my right, where he says, in a whisper, there are barf bags, and I realize he is not kidding. He is speaking as a pilot to his passenger, standard protocol. In the same manner, he explains that he won't be talking much during takeoff because he'll be concentrating, but after that we are free to talk. He has never been so forthright about his silence.

He settles in and begins to murmur to himself.
Altimeter adjusted, dive brakes closed and locked, belts tight, canopy locked, tail dolly off, controls free and clear
 … The towplane pulls up ahead, dragging the towrope. The glass bubble of the canopy is a tiny, boiling, intimate space: we open the side windows to let in some air. Standing tall above us beside the plane, my brother holds the last five feet of the towrope taut between his hands, like a magician proving it is just a rope, nothing funny about it. He holds it there for my dad's inspection, and this feels more like ceremony than safety check. Through the glass my dad can't possibly detect flaws. He looks at it like a wine label displayed gratuitously and nods his head. I'm surprised this passes for an inspection. The towrope is everything. But then, everything is everything.

Squatting at the nose with his palm in the air, my brother uses his other hand to loop the towrope into the hook of the plane, which my dad holds open. When he makes a fist, my dad closes it. Now my brother is at the wing, swinging his arm to tell the tow pilot there is still slack in the rope. The towplane rolls slowly forward until my brother stops swinging his arm. My dad asks whether I'm ready, and I say yes. What choice do I have? My dad gives the left hand thumbs-up, and my brother starts to swing his arm in a full circle, telling the tow pilot we're ready to go.

What is most amazing about all of it is the degree to which it is not rocket science. You check out every part of the plane because there aren't that many. You trust in the twenty-five pieces that comprise a plane, and beyond that, you trust the same thing the birds are born trusting. And as for me, I'm not trusting a pilot, an anonymous official with a license in magic; I'm trusting my father, who's decided to let the cancer take over.

My brother runs the wing, keeping it from touching the grass as we are towed across the field, but as our speed picks up, he lets go, and we begin to take flight, imperceptibly, even before the towplane has lifted off. For much longer than any commercial plane, we are traveling at the height of what feels no more than your bedroom window. We are still sheltered by the high mountain horizon as we speed forward, our shadow born and racing like a good dog just below us. We ascend so gradually that I have to decide for myself when my fear of heights can relax into disbelief. There is no clear threshold between human heights and heights we can't fathom. Human heights and heavens. Soon we are flying together, towplane and glider, like a big brother pulling his little sister along by the arm, flapping and flying behind.

My dad reads his dials, reads the landscape, looks for other aircraft. Wind is blowing noisily into our little windows so I can't hear him, loud as he tries to whisper. I try to think about anything except the barf bags in the zippered pouch beside me. The towplane ahead of us is sometimes above, sometimes below us, looking like a remote control plane as it bounces in the sky. We rise and fall like a roller coaster, and sometimes I cling helplessly to the sides of the sailplane, searching the sky for signs of an invisible track to tell me where we're going, signs we're moving out of turbulence into smooth sailing. My dad is looking hard for the opposite; turbulence means heat, which is how we get higher. Without telling me, he releases the towrope and the towplane falls away and off to the side, and we speed up over him. My dad gives a wave to thank him for the lift.

And now my dad is doing what he loves most. Now we are a bird. This is what it is all about. All the planning trips up to New Castle, making free weekends, driving here, packing food, the hours preparing the plane, sleeping in the modest quarters of the clubhouse. Flight is a long descent, postponed by invisible lift. We are here to find thermals, and the proof of our detective skills will be our altitude and how long we can float.