Flight (43 page)

And yet that’s the worst part: Margaret has taken the whole thing very strangely. She’ll change her mind later, when she comes
to her senses, but for now she’s insisting on dropping the lawyer. Instead, she says she’s leaving for Evanston tomorrow morning, with Trevor, to talk to David.

“How can you do that?” Carol cried. “How can you go back there with him acting this way?” Margaret had not countered that she had thought it through, had not explained point by point how this was clearly the best strategy or declared that Carol just couldn’t understand.

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the point.” She had pulled Trevor onto her lap and smoothed his hair over and over, until the boy got fed up and climbed down. Then, as he headed for the playroom, Margaret sat there, her arms at her sides.

“I think she’s over the worst of it.” Margaret lifts her feet as she returns, checking her shoes for scraps of toilet paper. She runs her hands absently down her dress, a beautiful sheath made of green silk shantung. It looks like something Carol might have made for herself in the sixties. “Am I all in place?” she asks.

“You look absolutely gorgeous,” Carol says. “I only hate to see it spoiled by this miserable rain.”

Margaret comes to the door and surveys the scene, letting her eyes linger on Trevor. “It won’t spoil it entirely,” she says. “It’s just something we didn’t plan for.”

There’s a rustling behind them, and Carol turns, expecting Leanne. But it’s only the doves scrabbling around in their cage.

“You should take them and put them under your seat soon,” Margaret says. “Unless you want to make them part of the procession.”

Carol leans over to peer down at the birds. “The male one is feeling better, I think.” She glances up in time to see Margaret smile and look away. “What?”

Margaret shakes her head. “I think you’re right” is all she says.

The door to the ladies’ room opens, and Leanne appears, pale and wispy.

“I love Kit,” she says, her voice wavering on the verge of tears. “I really do. But this is awful.”

Margaret laughs. “You are so right,” she says. She goes to Leanne. “Here, have another mint.”

Leanne looks like a child who doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and then her face rearranges itself and she’s an adult again, taking a mint from the proffered box.

What’s going to happen with her bed-and-breakfast? Carol isn’t so certain anymore. In the last few days, the idea has come to seem like it was as much about lashing out as it was an attempt to do something. A pretend farm. Its original impulse was meanness. She feels vaguely embarrassed about it.
You want rustic—here it is.

“You girls will always have a home here,” Carol says. “I’m not leaving the farm.” They look at her, Margaret with a small smile, Leanne considering.

Margaret puts a hand on Carol’s arm. “I’m glad,” she says. “I might need a place to get away.”

“And no matter what happens”—Carol speaks quickly to get past the lump in her throat—“no matter what happens, we’ll always be a family.”

And then Leanne is moving forward in her beautiful dress, her arms held out, her face scared but somehow serene. She puts her arms around Carol and hugs her, and Carol can feel the smooth solidity of the satin bodice, which looks so light and airy but is constructed like a suit of armor.

“Thanks, Mom,” Leanne says.

After a moment, Carol draws back and regards her daughter. She wants to say something, to offer some final piece of wisdom and ask some final question:
Are you sure about this? Do you think you’ll be happy? Do you need anything from me?
But none of them seems right.

“You’re perfect,” she says. She looks at Leanne’s face, then sweeps her eyes down the length of the dress. She stops in horror. “Leanne,” she breathes. “You didn’t finish the hem.”

Leanne’s face goes, if possible, a bit paler. She leans forward to see. “Oh damn,” she says. “You’re right.”

The three of them stand there for a moment, frozen in surprise. Then Carol shakes her head. “I’ve got a sewing kit,” she says. “The little one in my purse.” She’ll get her keys from Will, retrieve her purse from the car, and then they can quickly stitch in something, anything. Everyone will have to wait.

“Wait,” Margaret says, stepping forward. “It’s too late for that. It’s too late to sew anything.” She rummages in her own purse.

“What do you mean?” Carol demands. “Leanne’s fast.”

“Not fast enough.” Margaret seems to have a ton of stuff in her bag.

“Well, what do you propose we do, then?”

Margaret stops rummaging and holds up a small item in triumph. “The bride’s best friend,” she says happily. “Scotch tape!”

And then Leanne actually laughs, and Margaret is smiling and squatting down to tape up the hem, and Carol looks out to see that most of the seats have been filled and it’s time for her to go sit down. She goes to the metal cage and wonders, for the fifteenth time, whatever possessed Kit to paint it green. Is it a joke on their last name? That doesn’t seem very nice. Maybe it’s a tribute to Michigan, to the lush greenness around them, which would be funny, since the green is the result of all this rain. She notices Leanne looking at the cage, too, with a small, private smile.

Carol picks it up. “I’m going to go take my place,” she says, and both girls look at her. With their faces at the same angle, they look alike, more so than they did as kids.

“Okay, Mom, thanks,” Leanne says. “See you after.”

Will is walking his daughter down the aisle. There’s no music, just the soft sound of the rain, a small lapping from the lake, the rustle of people adjusting themselves on damp chairs. He hears it all. He can see Leanne in his peripheral vision, her chin held high. Earlier she seemed nervous, distraught even, but now she is calm. Her face
is pale, but there’s a small smile in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes are soft with what must be happiness. Her dress rustles as she walks. Tiny pearls dangle from her ears.

Those are the pearls that were his eyes.

There are familiar faces on both sides of the aisle. It’s traditional for the bride’s people to be on one side and the groom’s on the other. But Leanne has never been weighed down by tradition. She has always wanted to do things her own way. She takes after him in at least that one thing.

The man his daughter will marry is standing next to the justice of the peace, in front of a white trellis. His hair is limp from the rain. In spite of the weather, Will is glad they’re outside. The air is clean and fresh. Carol might have preferred a church, for the tradition of it. Then again, maybe not. Since yesterday, he has the feeling he barely knows Carol. But this ceremony seems right for Leanne: simple, still, with one graceful gesture at the end.

On his arm, Will can feel Leanne struggling to walk on the uneven lawn. She clutches his elbow, and he stops while she pulls her heel out of a boggy clump of grass. She smiles at him, her eyes laughing. Then she straightens up and they start out again. He is walking his daughter down the aisle. This is a day all fathers look forward to living. A lot of them never will. He was one of the lucky ones. The Air Force ordered 833 Thuds for Operation Rolling Thunder. Almost half of them were shot down. Not everyone had his luck on reentry.

Margaret is standing near the trellis, watching her sister. She was five months old the first time Will saw her. She could already sit up. She was a determined baby with piercing eyes, such a deep blue they looked black. She had learned to smile and laugh and roll over and reach out to grab a toy before he ever met her.

Now she’s a grown woman, with a marriage disintegrating around her, and for the first time ever, she seems unsure where life is taking her next. For some reason, he doesn’t feel sad about that. He’s almost happy for her, odd as that seems. She’ll make her own way now.

Will and Leanne stop walking. They have reached the end of the aisle. He kisses his daughter on the cheek. He has tears in his eyes.

He turns and walks awkwardly toward the chair next to Carol, his part in the ceremony over. His part in Leanne’s life is over in some sense, or at least changed forever. That’s something he’s grown used to, the constant back-and-forth of family life. Even now that the girls are grown, things keep changing all the time.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Carol said to him that morning. “But I think it will be good for us both to be apart.” He was knotting his tie at the mirror. When he was a young man, Carol used to do it for him. She said he always got it too loose.

“Do you want the bed-and-breakfast that bad?” he asked, and was surprised at the silence that followed. When he turned, she was shaking her head, her expression almost apologetic.

“No,” she said. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve made you the reason for my unhappiness for too long.” She looked up at him, frowning. “It’s too easy.”

Will looked back in the mirror. He couldn’t tell if his tie looked good or not. He could see Carol over his shoulder in the mirror. She was still, gazing out the window.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’m ready to go.”

The justice of the peace is speaking to Leanne and Kit. The back of Leanne’s head looks like Carol’s. Next to him, he can sense Carol, a new Carol, one he recognizes less than the one he sees in his daughter. A separation. The conversation hovers between them, complete and faceted, like a gem. It’s irreversible, but oddly, it doesn’t change the pure joy he feels, looking at the back of Leanne’s head.

He might be making a mistake. How many mistakes has he made already? Signing on for the Air Force—was that a mistake? Joining TWA instead of Delta or United, moving the family back to the farm. Somehow none of his mistakes has turned out to be fatal. Is that luck, or fate, or something else entirely?

In war there are two main questions. The first is
Why me?
The answer to that is simple:
I was there. I was in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
The second question is
Why not me?
That should be just as easy to answer—
I wasn’t there. I was in the right place instead.
But somehow that’s not satisfactory.

The justice of the peace is smiling. Kit leans over to kiss Leanne. She puts her hands on his shoulders, her arms resting on top of his. Her eyes are closed, and it’s clear that in this moment, she’s happy. They step apart, and Will realizes it’s over. She’s married. She’s leaving the family and yet she’s still here, part of it in a new way. Everything is spinning apart, transforming itself yet again into something rich and strange. His eyes blur and he can’t see. He feels transported, lifted above everything in his life, ethereal. He feels as if he’s floating above the heads of the guests, an airy spirit, looking down on it all.

The bride and groom turn to Carol, who has pulled the birdcage from under her seat. She stands up and struggles with the door. Leanne moves to her mother and unlatches it. She reaches her hands inside and takes a bird. Kit steps forward to take the second one. He seems a little taken aback by how it feels. The two of them look at each other, Leanne calmer than she’s looked all day, Kit raising his eyebrows with wonder. Leanne’s lips move as she silently counts:
One, two three.
Together, they draw the birds toward themselves, then toss them lightly upward. The justice looks up in surprise. Margaret takes a step back, laughing. There’s a shuffling of wings and flapping, and the birds hang there for a moment. Then one of them shoots upward and the other follows. The heads of all the guests turn up, following their flight. Kit and Leanne stand close together, their faces growing shiny in the rain. Will, too, raises his face to the sky and watches them go.

I would like to thank David Hamilton at
The Iowa Review,
where a version of material from
Flight
appeared as “Name of the Game.” Thanks also to Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for help and encouragement. My agent, Nat Sobel, deserves boundless gratitude for having seen what this book could be even before I could. Jenni Lapidus and Anna Bliss at Sobel Weber were astute and generous. And my editor, Sydny Miner, was somehow rigorous and nurturing at the same time. Their unflagging help made this a better book.

Michael Cunningham set me on this path by saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and Romulus Linney kept me moving down it with his wisdom and his friendship. I can never thank either of them enough. I owe my reader friends for their insight and even more for tolerating me: special thanks to Susan Aasen, Maura Hogan, Elise Mac Adam, Paula Morris, James Wallenstein, Amy Weldon, Sarah Zimmerman, and especially Allan Hepburn and Lisa Lerner, my blue-eyed boy and my brown-eyed girl. I also owe much gratitude to the Vietnam veterans whose writings about the war helped me envision some small fraction of it, in particular G. I. Basil, Jack Broughten, Ed Rasimus, and Dick Rutan.

The greatest debt of support is owed to my family: Fred, Sallie, Heidi, Bob, and Miranda, my bunny, my best one.