Flight (19 page)

Vasant. She lets herself dwell on the memory of his graceful hand running down her leg.
I want to kiss you, I hope that’s okay,
he had said. Margaret had lowered herself onto his couch, straddling him, and taken his face in her hands. She had never done anything like that. Even now, a thrill blooms in her stomach as she thinks of it. How it can ever work out is unclear, but Margaret knows one thing: she can’t give that up. She wants to feel his hands on her again.

A tractor passes her, pulling a flatbed wagon. The farmer lifts his hand at her, and Margaret waves back. She’s relieved that she
doesn’t recognize him. It could have been her uncle George, or worse still, some member of Doug’s family. She hasn’t thought of Doug in years. Now she’ll have to make small talk with him. And yet, after what’s happened to her, the thought isn’t unpleasant. She watches the tractor moving down the road, the orange triangle wobbling with its jerky back.

After six laps—three miles—her hair is sticking to her head. The rain is only mist, but instead of cooling her off, it seems to make her sweat more. She’s burning off nervous energy, but she longs for some organizational task to put her mind to. Something she can concentrate on and solve. She turns her steps toward the door.

Weep! Weep!
The car passes quickly, so that by the time Margaret turns around, she can’t identify it. It’s local habit to honk when driving by the home of friends or family. It could have been George, or Aunt Janice, or Eddie, Janice’s son. It’s hardly likely, she tells the little voice inside her, that it was Doug. Doug has his own life now. Besides, honking is what friends and family do, and it’s been a long time since Doug considered himself either. Still, she watches the car fade away in the distance before turning back to the door.

“I think his wing is hurt.” Carol hovers over the cage, on tiptoes with the effort of supervising Will’s movements. Will, looking half asleep in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, is reaching a hand slowly into the cage to prod at the larger dove. The other dove flaps around, doing a hat dance of anxiety as her mate—Carol has assumed that they are mates, and that the larger is the male and the smaller the female—huddles forlornly in the corner, one wing oddly flattened and sticking out from his body.

“Maybe we should just leave them and check back later.” Leanne is standing, still in her bathrobe, at the doorway to the garage. She has a coffee cup in her hand.

“Don’t poke him!” Carol cries out. “You’ll make it worse, whatever it is.”

“It could be that he’s holding his wing funny,” Will says. “I want to see if he’ll pull it back in.”

“Well, don’t hurt him!”

Will lifts his shoulder and makes a funny twitching motion with his head, shaking her off like an insect. She knows he’s going to do something rash. He turns his finger over and prods gently at the dove’s stiff wing.

“Ouch, damn!” he yells.

“You were hurting him!” Carol says. But she moves to inspect the hand. “Let me see.” The bird’s head moved so fast she couldn’t see how hard he pecked Will.

“It’s just a little peck. He didn’t even break the skin.” She pats the back of his hand absentmindedly.

“I should wring his stupid neck,” Will mutters, pulling his hand away from Carol, refusing her sympathy.

Carol lifts her hands and steps back, in turn refusing blame. “Don’t say things like that,” she tells Will. “It’s your daughter’s wedding.”

In the doorway, Leanne makes an impatient move. “It’s not worth fighting about,” she says. “Maybe he’s just cold. It’s kind of chilly and damp in this garage.” She pulls her robe tighter around her body and holds the coffee cup to her cheek.

“Oh no!” Fear grips Carol’s heart. “Do you think I should have had them in the basement?”

Leanne looks remorseful. “No, no, I didn’t mean that. You’ve been taking great care of them, Mom. I just meant maybe nothing unusual is wrong.” She puts one hand on the doorknob, as if that will move them all toward the door.

“I don’t know enough about birds to say if anything’s wrong or not,” Will pronounces. He looks at his hand again and then wipes it on his pajama pants. “I could call Tammy down at the vet’s, see if she has any ideas.”

“Oh, Will, would you?” Carol is filled with sudden gratitude. “Would you do it right now?”

“Yeah, all right.” Will climbs the stairs and pauses near Leanne,
who smiles at him apologetically. He puts a hand on her head. “All right, then,” he says, before clumping inside.

“You know, I knew something was wrong with these guys since yesterday,” Carol says. “I felt it in that way, you know. I could feel it coming.” Leanne takes a step into the garage and then, unexpectedly, plunks down on the cement step.

“Oh, Leanne, it’s probably filthy there.” Carol paddles her hands as if to shoo her daughter away. “And that’s such a pretty robe, too.”

Leanne makes no sign of moving. “The doormat is clean enough.” She has her elbows on her knees and the coffee cup in both hands.

“Oh, what will we do?” Carol moans quietly, as if to herself.

“What if he dies or won’t fly away when it’s time?”

“It’s not that important,” Leanne says.

“But you wanted it!” Carol looks at her watch. It’s still early on Thursday, two days away from the ceremony. “I could go to the pet store in Kalamazoo and get more, but last time they had to order them, and it took two weeks.”

“I wouldn’t go to that much effort,” Leanne says. She hugs her arms to herself and ducks her head to bite the edge of her coffee cup. Huddled there like that, she looks like the injured bird, her robe pooling around her on the cement step.

“You know, I almost didn’t marry your father,” Carol says. Leanne looks up, interested. It’s not the usual story. The family wedding story has always been Will and Carol’s whirlwind courtship. They met in San Antonio, Texas, where Will was in officer candidacy school. Carol had driven down for graduation with a friend who was engaged to another student. Will was presented to her as a fellow midwesterner; she was from Dayton. When Will told her he was from Michigan, her first thought was
country boy.
Still, when he asked her to dinner at the officers’ club, she agreed. Kelly Air Force Base was known to have a posh O-club. She bought herself an exquisite shift made of peach silk and used a borrowed sewing machine to make a matching jacket. Will and his friend wore
their dress uniforms. He told her that his application to flight school had just been accepted.

For the next week, they saw each other every day. At the end of it, Will presented her with a shiny red suitcase, the kind a serious traveler would carry. “It’s a gift,” he said. When she opened it, she found the ring.

“I’m the kind of man,” he told her, “who knows what he wants and goes after it.”

She always wondered how he managed to get a diamond ring like that out in the middle of nowhere. Years later, he admitted he had bought it with an IOU from a fellow student whose fiancée had returned it after meeting someone else. Carol would have considered that bad luck. But at the time, she was impressed with his ability to manifest the thing he needed. A man like that was surely going places.

“How did you almost not marry Dad?” Leanne asks, leaning forward.

“Well, you know my ex-boyfriend Rick,” Carol tells her. Leanne nods. Rick also looms large in the family mythology. As teenagers, the girls loved hearing about his James Dean haircut, his ’57 Chevy. He and Carol dated all through high school, and everyone assumed they’d get married. But they broke up right after graduation.

“Rick called me the week before the wedding. I hadn’t heard from him in almost a year. He’d heard about the wedding, and he said he was calling to tell me I was making a big mistake. I should never marry a military man, he said.”

“Why would he say that?”

Carol shrugs. “I guess he thought we’d move around a lot, stuff like that. Or maybe he thought I’d be lonely when Will went off on postings.”

Leanne nods. “That was reasonable.”

“But there was more to it, you know?” Carol gazes off into the dimly lit garage, envisioning herself in her father’s study, the phone clutched to her ear. She’d had curlers in her hair, and tissues stuffed between her toes because she had painted them, and she worried
that those things might somehow telegraph themselves through her voice. She didn’t want Rick to envision her like that.

“I think he wanted another chance. But he couldn’t bring himself to say so. He was too cool.”

“And if he had said so?”

Carol shakes her head, dispelling the vision. “Oh, who knows,” she says, suddenly cranky. “You never know what you would have done, do you? You become a different person, and it’s hard to imagine how you made the decisions you did.”

Leanne laughs, a short bark with no mirth in it. Carol is about to ask her if she’s having doubts of her own when Will appears in the door behind her.

“Tammy says let him sit there for a while. She says birds act weird all the time. Just make sure he’s drinking and eating.” He steps around Leanne, who leans against the doorjamb to let him by. “Can you tell from the food and water if he’s had any?”

“Will, how would we know?” Carol says. “The other bird might have eaten it all.” She stares forlornly at the unmoving dove. “Didn’t Tammy say anything else?”

“She said if he bit me, he’s probably not croaking,” Will says. “They go all passive when they’re on the way out.”

“Oh,
that’s
encouraging.”

“Let’s not worry about it,” Leanne says. There’s something strained in her voice. “It’s really not a big deal.”

“What’s going on here?” Margaret, red from exertion, has appeared in the doorway behind Leanne.

“One of the doves is sick,” Carol says. “And we don’t know what to do.”

“Do nothing,” Leanne says. “Let’s just have some more coffee.”

“Kit’s hogging the shower,” Margaret says. “He’s been in there since I left to go run.”

“Margaret …” Carol starts to tell Margaret that someone phoned for her, but then she can’t remember the person’s name. Some impossible Arab-sounding name, what was it? Vitor? Vikram? He had asked for her so formally, in that strange accent, wanting to
know if he had “reached the residence of the parents of Margaret Gruen.” He sounded polite and cultured, but something about him makes Carol hesitate to pass on the message. It’s not that the man sounded foreign, she assures herself, it’s that she has never heard of him before. Who would be calling Margaret at her parents’? When David isn’t with her? Some instinct makes her not trust this man, and Carol always pays attention to her instincts.

“What?” Margaret is looking at her, waiting.

“I need your help bringing some things up from the basement,” Carol tells her. “Let’s do it before you clean up.”

“
WHERE ARE WE GOING AGAIN AND WHY?” KIT ASKS.
He’s dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, and it occurs to Leanne that he might be cold. She should ask him if he’d like to borrow a sweater from her father, but something is stopping her from being too solicitous. She is suspicious of the impulse. It’s obviously some sort of overcompensation.

“We need to go tell the people at the country club exactly how we want things arranged,” Leanne says. “The caterer is meeting us there with some things she wants us to taste. And then we have to stop by the florist and give them their check.”

“It’s only lunch,” Kit says. “Besides, I thought your mother already picked out all the food.”

“She did, but they want us to make some decision about sauces or something, I don’t know.” Leanne runs a hand through her hair. Another thing she was supposed to do was call a salon and make an appointment to have her hair properly put up for the wedding. She hadn’t thought it necessary, but at dinner last night Margaret assured her it was. Most brides, Margaret pointed out, would have had at least one practice session at the salon already.

“What are we driving?” Kit asks.

“Margaret’s car,” Leanne says.

Kit rolls his eyes. “Perfect,” he says dryly. Leanne giggles but immediately feels guilty. Laughing about Margaret’s stupid car and making sly jokes about the caterers and country-club people and florists is all well and good, but it implies that they’re in this together. And Leanne has not let Kit in on all of it.

“I need another cup of coffee first,” he says.

“I’m sorry about my mom’s Maxwell House,” Leanne tells him. “There’s not a Starbucks for miles.”

Kit holds his hands up, stopping her. “I adore Maxwell House,” he says. “You have no idea.”

“I’ll get you a to-go cup,” she says.

They drive in silence. The rain is still coming down lightly but steadily, enough to require the windshield wipers occasionally. Margaret’s car doesn’t have an intermittent setting, and the slowest speed is too fast, so Leanne pushes the wiper lever every twenty seconds or so. Kit looks at her sidelong but doesn’t say anything. The little Rabbit feels thin and metallic, an insufficient barrier between them and the elements. The engine is noisy, the dashboard flat and no-frills. Leanne wonders why Margaret would have agreed to drive it all the way up to Michigan.

You know, Kit, I’m a drunk,
she could say.

“It’s not a very impressive landscape, is it?” Kit says. He’s looking out the window at the flat fields, mushy with rain and dotted with run-down barns and outbuildings. They have just passed the old Vandenburg farm. The house, a flat brown structure with peeling, scraped siding, has an orange couch on the front porch. There’s an old Gremlin and a truck in the driveway, along with two mangy dogs. A blue snowmobile in the corner of the front yard wears a handwritten sign: FOR SALE.

“It gets prettier north of here,” Leanne says. “The U.P. is really gorgeous.”

“But why?” he asks.

“Why is the U.P. gorgeous?”

“No, why did your father come back here? It’s not exactly my old Kentucky home.”

Leanne can’t tell if he’s being facetious or if he truly wants to know.

“Our dad always said that when he was a boy, he used to look up while he was plowing and see airplanes overhead and all he wanted was to be up there, in the sky,” she says. “So he went off and became a pilot. And he found himself flying over Michigan and looking
down and seeing tractors in fields, and all he wanted was to be down there, on a farm.” She pauses. She’s heard the story countless times, but now it seems to explain something, something she’d love Kit to understand.