Flight (7 page)

If they move to Hong Kong, perhaps she won’t need one.

They’ll get a knockout apartment overlooking the harbor and entertain other expats. There’s a tennis club; they get good shows. He’s even heard there are fancy eating clubs, like private restaurants. It would be the kind of life she’s always wanted.

He approaches her from behind. Casually, he swings his arm back, intending to slap her ass, but something stops him, and he puts a hand on her shoulder instead. She jumps, glancing not at him but at the hand.

“Will!” She slaps the magazine shut. “I found some really fabulous shrimp for the party!”

As soon as they step off the plane, it’s as if the whole scary experience in the air never happened. Leanne takes Kit’s hand as they walk down the jetway. It feels a bit damp, but she’s glad to have it to hold on to. That small, soft lump of warm flesh steadies her, makes her feel more in control. Because just looking out the jetway window at the flat, tree-lined fields edging the airport gives her a sense of being enveloped by home. She can feel the family momentum tugging on her, pulling her into its trajectory.

Kit met her parents already, when the two of them came out to look at the country club. It’s strange for him to be getting married in a place where he knows almost no one, but he insisted it made as
much sense here as anywhere. His oldest friend lives in Cleveland and can drive up for the wedding. His mother lives in Atlanta, but he has no one else there, so she would have to travel no matter what. And he and Leanne each have a few good friends in Cold Spring and New York, but not enough that it made sense to have the wedding there and make Leanne’s family travel east. That would have been a real ordeal. For their Cold Spring friends, they can have a separate party, a barbecue or something, when they get back home.

Rain beats on the jetway roof. “You’re lucky we came to Grand Rapids,” Leanne tells Kit. “Kalamazoo doesn’t have a jetway. You climb down the stairs and make a run for it across the tarmac.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting wet right now,” Kit says. He’s still a little pale, a thin gleam of sweat delineating his hairline.

“Poor thing,” Leanne says. “We should get you something to settle your stomach. Some crackers, maybe.”

“Or some Scotch,” Kit says, and Leanne glances at him quickly. Is he trying to tell her something? His face is blank, communicating only an effort not to look sick.

“Leanne!” Her mother and father are standing at the gate, the only people there to greet the flight. Will is grinning like a kid who expects to be punished. Carol has her arms thrown wide.

Leanne goes to her mother first. Carol pulls her tight for a real hug, and briefly, the world winds down around Leanne, the way it did when she was a child and would hide in her mother’s arms. Her mother has a slightly lemony smell in addition to the familiar celery-like scent of the perfume she has worn forever.

“How did you get through security?” Leanne is jolted from childhood by Kit’s voice beside her.

Carol releases Leanne and laughs. “One of the perks of being airline people.” She beams at Kit, then impulsively throws her arms around him as well. “Soon you’ll be my son-in-law!” she cries.

Leanne gives her father an awkward kiss on the cheek. He puts a hand on the back of her shoulder and reaches another toward Carol, steering them in the direction of baggage claim.

“Everything is all ready,” Carol tells Leanne as they start walking, her eyes bright with pleasure. “It’s going to be so lovely, Leanne. I’ve done everything just as we planned. I got the doves—” She stops short, as if momentarily confused. Leanne shifts her bag to the other shoulder, letting herself be propelled by her father, even as she’s eddied about in the rapids of her mother’s enthusiasm. A familiar feeling of passivity washes over her. Others will pilot the wedding from here. She glances back at Kit. He’s following a few steps behind, carrying the box with her wedding dress, and watching them intently, like an anthropologist arriving in some remote village. Her documentary genius.
Kit Burns,
she started calling him after he won the grant. He’ll look at Mexico with that intense, searching gaze.

“Yes,” Carol is saying, “I got the doves. They’re in the garage in a nice little cage. And I just went to Meijer here for the things we can’t get in Ryville, you know, and I found the most fabulous shrimp. Oh, they’re going to look so wonderful!”

“That’s great, Mom.”

“I was thinking we could use that big crystal punch bowl, only fill it with a mound of ice and perch the boiled shrimp all around the edge. With the cocktail sauce right there in the middle. It will be very impressive, right at the center of the table!”

“That sounds perfect.”

“A veritable shrimp Matterhorn,” Kit puts in. He wants to be accepted by the natives. That’s what anthropologists do.

“Come on,” her father says, exerting just enough force on Leanne’s elbow to speed up her steps. “If we hurry, we can beat the rush to the escalator.”

BY THE TIME THEY REACH THE BAGGAGE CLAIM, THE belt has already cranked into action. Will sees it with relief: there’s something he can do. So far, he and Kit have been extraneous, holding themselves apart from the women’s barrage of chatter by maintaining an awkward silence. Now they can make themselves useful. Will steps over and begins scanning the bags trundling by before remembering that he has no idea what Kit and Leanne’s luggage looks like.

“Leanne’s suitcase is gray. It matches her shoulder bag,” Kit says, as if having read his mind.

“Look at that, the luggage is already here!” Carol cries, a fountain of cheer now that Leanne has arrived.

“Yeah, maybe they hired a second guy to help unload the bag-gage,” Leanne says, and she and Kit grin at each other. Will sees it and looks away. Let them make fun of his Michigan backwater. They don’t know about Hong Kong.

Kit steps forward and pulls a black bag off the belt, quickly turning it upright and pulling the handle out in one smooth motion. He sets it next to Leanne. As he turns back, Will notes that he looks a little pale and sweaty in the face.

“Rough landing?” he asks.

“How’d you guess?” Kit asks, and a small, mean feeling of triumph flickers in Will’s chest.
You’re a bit green around the gills,
he almost says, but Leanne’s grown-up, serious self standing there stops him. He looks out the doors to the parking lot and shrugs instead. “I figured, with that weather,” he says.

“There’s mine,” Leanne says, pointing.

Will is stepping forward when Kit steps in front of him.

“I’ve got it,” the young man says. He sets down the first bag and reaches over to pluck Leanne’s suitcase off the belt. Will steps back, trying not to feel annoyed all over again.

It’s young men. Only lately, Will has been noticing how quickly they get on his nerves. The first time he remembers it happening was when he was doing his initial training on the 767. He was paired with a newbie, a young copilot named Warren Gliss. It was a few years back when things were getting strained at the airline: TWA had been through two financial reorganizations. They were employee-owned and bankrupt, and it wasn’t clear if they were going to make it. Everyone was tense, but it wasn’t just that: Warren Gliss was annoying in his own right.

“Can you carry this one, Dad?” Leanne asks, pushing the handle of the black bag toward Will. He nods and goes to pick it up.

“It has wheels,” Kit says. “That button releases the handle.”

“Got it,” Will says. He heads toward the door, dragging the bag behind him like a recalcitrant dog.

“Oh, Leanne, is that your
dress?
” he hears Carol squeal. He quickens his pace, yanking the bag over the edge of the curb and humping along, separate from the others.

Warren Gliss started bugging him on their first day in the simulator, when Will got taken through his dead-stick landing. The instructor had been putting him through the wringer: hydraulic failure, loss of cabin pressure, two go-arounds, and an electrical fire that killed his right engine. He was thinking the instructor might let him land when the left went, too. He was calm. After twenty minutes without the right, this would be easier: the plane would no longer strain to the right like a stubborn horse angling for the barn. The first thing he did was drop the landing gear. He remembers Gliss making a noise to his right as he did, a little
pop!
of surprise. He thought Will had dropped the gear by mistake. Will checked the speed, did the calculation. Altitude times nine. He was under thirty miles from the simulator’s virtual Dulles—he’d make it just fine. He didn’t say a word to Gliss. He had no idea why they had paired him with a kid twenty-five years his junior. Will had thought of him as Kid Flyboy since the first day of training.

Fifteen minutes later, after he’d brought the simulated 767 down for a perfect landing, he felt better than he had the whole first week. That was flying, he thought. Not the poking-your-fingers-at-a-computer crap aviation had become. Kid Flyboy loved that part, zipping through computer screens like he was fragging video space aliens at the local arcade. Will liked it best when the computers failed, when the autopilot was off, when he could put his hand on the stick and fly.

“Nice” was all the instructor said as he cleared the control panel.

Some Delta guys were waiting, standing in a small cluster by the door as Will and the other two clumped down the metal steps. Desperate for cash, TWA was renting simulator time to other airlines. Delta pilots were said to make double the TWA salary. They nodded, giving off a little buzz of confidence as Will’s crew walked by.
I chose TWA,
he always told people,
when Delta was still dusting crops along the bayou.

Then Kid Flyboy started his whining. “Hey,” he said, jogging a bit to catch up with the instructor. “When am I gonna get my engine failure?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be the same, would it?” the instructor said. Will couldn’t help laughing. He knew how to fly a plane. He knew the feel of it, the tug of a headwind over steel shoulders, the effortless glide of a machine in perfect trim. He didn’t need a computer second-guessing him, but if they wanted to install one, fine. In the end, he knew what he was doing. That was more than he could say for the Kid.

“What are you doing?” Carol demands. “Trying to run between the drops?” Will looks up from the back of the van, where he has been rearranging Carol’s grocery bags to make room for the luggage. He charged across the parking lot so quickly that the others had to trot in a vain attempt to keep up.

“What?” Seeing them all hunching under their umbrellas, Will remembers the rain. Funny, he hadn’t noticed it on the way to the car. It’s still coming down, dull and steady.

“Just chuck that in here,” he tells Kit as the young man arrives at his side with the other large bag. Leanne steps forward with her box.

“Oh yes, get that inside before it gets wet,” Carol says. Will tosses it lightly on top of one of the suitcases and she raises her eyebrows. He sees her make up her mind not to speak.

“Okay, everybody in,” he says, trying to sound hearty and unconcerned. For a moment, as Kit and Leanne move to opposite sides of the van, it’s true. He
is
unconcerned, and hardy enough to stand out in the rain for the rest of the day, if that’s what’s required to move things forward. He pauses, an impulse of defiance making him reluctant to climb into the van, as if doing so will indicate weakness, a triumph of the weather over him.

“What now?” Carol says. He can see her leaning forward to look back at him around the driver’s seat.

He reaches into his pocket for the keys. “It’s just a little water,” he says, climbing into his place at the wheel. “It’s not like you’ll melt.”

Kid Flyboy kept after the instructor: “When am I going to get my engine failure?” He couldn’t stand that Will had shown him up with a beautiful dead-stick landing. But the next day was their last day of ground school. The morning was all lectures. Will squinted at the screen for a while, finally giving in and getting out his glasses. He thought he saw Kid Flyboy smirking into his notebook.
Let him smirk,
Will thought. He needed to see the instructor’s PowerPoint slides. They were going over the electrical system, an area where Will had learned to be slow and deliberate. All those circuit breakers to memorize.

Learning the new autopilot interface was even worse. After lunch, they were seated at computers for the electronic tutorial. Will could feel the sweat breaking out on his forehead. His neck itched, his chest itched underneath his shirt; he shifted forward and back in his seat like a restless high-schooler. He hated this part. In
the old days, there was an actual physical connection between the pilot’s controls and the rudders. Now it was fly-by-wire, electronics and software sending your signals for you, computers butting in on the instincts you’d honed over a lifetime.

At the end of it, he felt exhausted, though he’d been sitting all day. His eyes were wrecked from staring at the blue screen, and his head was beginning to ache. He drove his rental car from the training facility to the hotel and pulled into a parking place. For a moment he sat there immobile, hands on the wheel, thinking about dinner. The idea of driving to a depressing chain restaurant and sitting at a table alone was unbearable. He got some chips from the vending machine and went to his room. He undressed and turned on the TV, but the endless election coverage made his jaw tense up and his heart pound. He switched around until he found sitcom reruns:
Seinfeld
or
Frasier.
He didn’t really pay attention, but he found the familiar cadences, the building crescendos of dialogue followed by canned laughter, comforting. He turned the sound down low as he started drifting off to sleep.

When the telephone rang, he jumped. People rarely called him when he was in training, even though he gave everyone his number. To his surprise, it was Margaret. She sounded like she’d been crying, though she tried to hide it. She explained that she and David were having a fight. She just needed someone to talk to.