Oceans Apart (12 page)

“Actually, you have one, Mr. Evans. A seven-year-old boy named Max Riley.”

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– Karen Kingsbury –

Connor’s eyes flew open. What? A boy named Max Riley? He stared out at a handful of aircraft parked at various angles across the airport’s apron. A seven-year-old boy? How would a child involve him and Kiahna? She had no children that he’d known about.

Unless the boy wasn’t only Kiahna’s, but . . .

His brain swirled and in less time than it took his heart rate to double, everything around him stood still. He considered snapping the phone shut. Walking away and pretending he’d never heard the man’s last words.

But he’d heard them. He’d heard them and with everything in him he knew he was neither dreaming nor the victim of some sort of prank.

A seven-year-old boy?

The floor dropped away, and Connor felt himself begin to freefall. Faster and faster into an abyss that couldn’t possibly have a bottom. The math was not difficult. Seven years old? He’d been with Kiahna the summer of 1996.

There could be only one reason attorney Marv Ogle was calling him now.

“Mr. Evans, are you there?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and shielded them with his hand. “Yes

. . . I’m sorry. How . . . how does this involve me, Mr. Ogle?” Another pause. “The boy is your son.”

So there it was. With five short words, the man threw a spear at Connor that caught him in the chest and tore open his heart. A spear that burst his nicely fashioned reality and ripped a hole in all the justifications he’d ever made about that long-ago night. He had a son? A son he’d never known about nor heard of until this moment?

“Mr. Evans,” the attorney went on, “Kiahna left very specific instructions for the boy, and part of those included contacting you.” 91

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The attorney paused again. “The child has no one. Kiahna wanted you to consider taking him for two weeks, getting to know him before he was made a ward of the court.” His head pounded harder with every word. He had a son? A seven-year-old boy named Max Riley? If he was the child’s father, why hadn’t Kiahna told him sooner, as soon as she’d found out she was pregnant? And now . . . now she wanted the boy to stay with him for two weeks? What about Michele and Elizabeth and Susan?

What about the way their lives were going so well, exactly as he’d planned for them to go?

But with every question fighting for position in his mind, only one demanded his immediate attention.

He had a son?

After all these years, there was a boy in Honolulu who was his very own?

The truth twisted his heart and made a logjam of his words. He knit his brow together, concentrating until the clog broke apart and his words began to come again. “How . . . how do you know, Mr. Ogle? She never told me.”

“I’ve known Kiahna since she was in high school, Mr. Evans.” The attorney sighed in a way that rattled Connor’s nerves even further. “She was a good girl; she didn’t sleep around. After . . . after she found out she was pregnant, she told my wife and me what happened. The whole story.”

Nausea welled up in Connor. With every sentence the weight of the millstone around his neck grew.

“We told her to contact you, but she wouldn’t. Never told a single person your name or how she’d met you. Just that you’d been together.”

“How . . .” Connor didn’t recognize his voice. He had five minutes to report to the gate, and he was barely able to think, let alone move. “How did you find me?”

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“When Max was born, she brought me an envelope. Inside were two documents—a will, and a letter for Max. She replaced the letter every year on Max’s birthday. But the will stayed the same. In it she named you and the airline you work for. She asked that we do everything we could to find you . . . before her son be given over to the state.”

“Is he mine? Legally?”

“No. Your name isn’t on his birth certificate.”

“Oh.” Connor was buying time, trying to fit this new information into his framework of reality. “She wanted me to adopt the boy?”

“Not that either. At least not at first.” The man’s tone was kind, not accusing. “She wants him to visit you for two weeks. During that time he would be told only that you were a friend of his mother’s. When the trial period is over, you would have a choice.”

“A choice?” Connor’s hands shook. Sweat drops rolled down either side of his face.

“Yes. You could send him back and never contact him again. Or tell him the truth and keep him forever.” The nausea grew worse. All his life he’d prided himself for his quick reactions, his ability to confidently tackle any problem he’d ever faced. He had run bombing missions in the Gulf War and pulled himself out of a death spin when his tail was hit by enemy fire. Twice he’d made emergency landings that had caused the airline to rewrite that part of the handbook. Connor could count his mistakes on one hand.

But this?

This was so far out of his league he couldn’t remember how to breathe, let alone think up a way to unravel the ball of knots he’d just been tossed. For the first time in his life, he had no idea what to do next, no clue what to say. The news was still detonating in his soul, taking no prisoners as it worked its way through his consciousness and into the reality of his world.

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“Mr. Evans . . . I realize this is probably somewhat of a shock.

Do you have any thoughts on Kiahna’s request?” Thoughts? Yes . . . he had thoughts, but what were they? Across the concourse he heard the first boarding announcement for his flight. He opened his eyes and let them dart around the empty gate area that surrounded him. As though maybe the answer lay somewhere out in the open.

“I . . .”—he chewed on the inside of his lip—“can I have a week to . . . to talk to my wife?”

“Of course.” The man’s voice was sympathetic. “But I’ll need to know, Mr. Evans.” He made another loud exhale. “Max is staying with his baby-sitter, but she’s not well. If he’s going to be put up for adoption, we should set the procedure in motion as soon as possible.

Homes for seven-year-old boys are not easily found.” At mention of the child, anxiety tightened the knots even more.

He still seemed to be falling, still couldn’t stop the spinning in his head, but even so he couldn’t hang up without asking one last question. “What’s the boy like?”

“He’s . . .” The attorney’s voice cracked.

In that instant Connor knew. Everything the man had said was true. He’d known Kiahna all her life, and he knew the boy, as well.

This phone call was probably as difficult for him as it had been for Connor.

“I’m sorry.” The man coughed. “He’s . . . he’s a very special boy, Mr. Evans. He’s striking looking, tall and well built for his age. He loves baseball and football. He has his mother’s tanned skin and green eyes, and a face that must come from someone in your family. He laughs and loves easily. He and Kiahna seemed to . . . well, they seemed to share one heart, really.” Connor closed his eyes. He could almost see the boy, the way he must’ve looked throwing a ball or walking alongside Kiahna.

Because after all these years, he still had not forgotten what she 94

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looked like. If he had his mother’s eyes, the boy would stand out in a crowd of a thousand seven-year-olds.

The second announcement came over the PA system.

“Look . . .” Connor glanced at his watch. He needed to switch gears, become the professional pilot once more. Not the broken man he’d been that awful summer. “Give me a week. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”

They ended the call, and Connor blocked everything he’d just learned from his mind. As he jogged to the gate, not one detail was allowed time in the foreground of his mind. Not one.

He checked in, took his place in the cockpit, and went through the motions of preparing for the flight. Concentration was a must in any piloting situation, and this one would be no different. Connor gave the matter at hand his full attention, making appropriate conversation with his copilot, and taking the plane full of passengers through a textbook takeoff.

Not until he was up at thirty-three thousand feet, disconnected from everything that awaited him on the ground below, did he let down his guard and then, like the rush of airspace that surrounded his plane, the memories came. Vivid and in full color, they came, and in light of the news the attorney had shared with him that morning, he could do nothing but let them.

95

TEN

There’d been reasons for his fall.

But they had little to do with the bizarre circumstances of that stormy August night when all Hawaiian air traffic was grounded for three full days. Rather, they involved the five months prior, at least that’s how Connor saw it.

He pressed back into the seat of his cockpit and stared at the vast stretch of blue before him. No, if he was honest, the problems started a year before that, in the days after Michele’s mother woke up one morning vomiting, and wound up dead two hours later of a brain aneurysm.

Connor had been flying a little more than three years by then, and competition for schedules and hours was tight. But after her mother died, Michele—who was five months pregnant with Susan—slipped into a depression that frightened him. She spent entire days in bed, doing nothing more than feeding and clothing Elizabeth, who was almost two at the time.

One afternoon when he came home from work, he found Michele asleep on the sofa, their daughter toddling around the kitchen alone. He knelt near his wife, frightened that somehow she, too, had died.

“Michele!” He shook her, and when she stirred, relief flooded his heart. “Michele . . . how long have you been sleeping?” The scene happened again three times in the next two weeks, until finally Connor was forced to make a decision. His wife wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been. She was no longer capable of taking care of herself, let alone little Elizabeth. He contacted the 96

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airline the next morning and requested two weeks off, with a short-ened schedule after that.

Michele’s improvements were immediate.

They found a baby-sitter who could come in while they attended counseling together. And after a two-month dose of antidepres-sants, and the prayers of their friends at church, Michele was herself again.

But by then the damage at work was done. Connor had fallen to the bottom of the seniority chart, and after Susan was born in November, he was assigned a temporary move to Los Angeles.

The memory broke apart and he tightened his grip on the controls. He’d thought about that assignment a thousand times since the night with Kiahna. If only it hadn’t been temporary. If the airline had been willing to move his entire family to Los Angeles, then at least he would’ve had more time with Michele.

The transfer was effective in March, but from the beginning they both knew it could last months. Which meant Michele and the girls would stay in Florida, while he set up a company-funded, furnished apartment in Los Angeles.

“I’ll be home at least once every week,” he told Michele.

And he was at first. But after a while, the commute was hardly practical. Twice-a-week flights from Los Angeles to Hawaii with a layover in Honolulu left him exhausted, struggling to find the energy to go on.

Michele became friends with Renee Wagner, and since both of them were often home alone, they helped each other. Knowing that Michele had a friend made it easier to sometimes let as many as three weeks go by without a visit home.

Then in May, the unthinkable happened.

Connor was bringing a 737 into Los Angeles International Airport when the tower gave him orders to land on one of the west-ern runways. The request was unusual—every other time he’d been 97

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instructed to land from the east. But something else made it strange. As far as Connor could tell, another jet a few miles south of him was headed for the same runway.

Even now, Connor remembered the fear. LAX was one of the busiest airports in the world. Every pilot knew how possible it was for an air traffic controller to make a mistake.

He made the request without giving it further thought. “Flight Four Zero Three requesting change of runways, over.” Silence filled the airways, and Connor glanced out the right side of his cockpit. The neighboring aircraft was closer now, narrowing the distance that separated them. Normally, he would’ve made a second attempt at the request, but time had run out. If he was going to avoid a possible collision, he needed to make a northern angle and land on one of the adjacent runways.

“Hey.” It was his copilot. The man sat straighter in his seat, his voice tense. “What’re you doing?”

Connor felt sweat on his brow. He snapped at the man, “We’ve got company.” He nodded his head toward the first runway.

“Another aircraft coming in.” His eyes narrowed. “I had to make the change.”

“But you didn’t get—”

“I did what I had to.” He glared at the man. “I know what I’m doing.”

He was partway through making the move when he tried again.

“Flight Four Zero Three, requesting change of runways, over.”