Angel Flight

by R. D. Kardon

  A cat-of-the-month calendar hung from a pushpin on the wall. In addition to the family parties, his flying days, and other miscellaneous appointments, it now had baby stickers on a series of days during the month when Em was most likely to conceive. Their fertility calendar.

  Having a baby was never something Danny expected he’d have to work at. But now, having sex with his wife had become a mandatory part of the schedule. Em was in her early thirties, and her doctor said there was no reason to think she couldn’t conceive. She’d gone off the pill only three months ago.

  But Heather was younger than her sister, and her pregnancy had pushed Em into baby overdrive. He looked at the calendar again. This month, the days she was most likely to get pregnant conflicted with his flying schedule. Just then, Em pushed past him to grab something from the fridge.

  “I know. Not this month, I guess.” Her disappointment was palpable.

  Danny didn’t necessarily agree. So many of his friends had “oops” babies. Surely, he and Em didn’t have to consult a calendar to become parents.

  “Oh, I don’t see why not.” He smiled and moved up behind his wife, put his arms around her and rocked her back and forth. Like a scene from a movie, she turned slightly, and he pictured her dragging him to the bedroom.

  Instead, she pointed a sauce-filled spoon toward his lips.

  “It’s hot. Be careful.”

  Danny slurped the steaming concoction, then grabbed for the glass of water Em had sitting by the stove. He put out the small fire the piping hot sauce had started on his tongue. “It’s delicious.”

  “Thanks baby.” Em stirred the sauce thoughtfully, and Danny wandered back to the couch. He noticed a pile of clean clothes in a basket that needed folding. He ignored it and turned up the sound of the game.

  “So, anyway,” Em said, “about Mike. I guess Bruce was able to give him a line on a new job where he works.”

  Danny was focused on the UConn game. “Who?”

  “Bruce. Bruce told Mike about a job at the place he works.”

  “Great. Good.”

  “Yeah, it would be awesome if they worked together.”

  “Sure. Okay.” Danny only half heard and wasn’t particularly interested.

  The oven door swung open. A wave of heat and the smell of fresh garlic bread floated into the living room. Em pulled out the fragrant tray with the His and Hers potholders they had gotten as a wedding present.

  “I wonder how much she knows,” Em continued.

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Tris.”

  Danny couldn’t hide his annoyance. “Knows about what?”

  “Mike’s ex-wife.”

  “What’s there to know?” His interest was piqued.

  “Did you set the table yet, hon? It’s time for dinner.”

  “On my way.”

  Nineteen

  Diana’s flight from Newark was late. Snowstorms had raged up and down the east coast all week causing havoc in the congested Northeast airspace. Tris sat in her now-cold car, the engine off, and willed her mobile phone to ring.

  Thank goodness she had a few days off before the Saginaw trip. The last person Tris wanted to see right now was Bruce, although she’d have to face him eventually.

  Tris squirmed against her shoulder harness and glanced out the window.

  Mike had asked her out again, and she’d enthusiastically said yes. All she wanted was to hang out with Mike and talk about him to Diana.

  Her mobile phone chirped.

  “Di?”

  “Hey. I’m here at arrivals. Can you get me?”

  “I’m already in the Hampton Inn parking lot. Can you grab the van?”

  “No problem. On my way.” Exeter was crowded, so pilots made ample use of local hotel parking lots. They would grab the free van at the terminal and tip the drivers handsomely.

  Ten minutes later, when Diana got out of the van and grabbed her bags, she stopped to light a cigarette. Tris could tell right away that something wasn’t right.

  Even from a distance, Diana looked stooped and tired. Tris drove closer to the hotel entrance to pick her up, and almost stomped on the brakes when she saw Diana’s face.

  Her skin sagged noticeably. Although she’d always tended toward plump, Diana’s clothes hung on her. She looked more like a scarecrow in a pilot costume than the former Air Force captain she was.

  “Hey girl!” Tris said brightly through the open passenger door window, overcompensating to hide her shock. Tris was stunned to see Diana without makeup. Usually, she put a full face on, from moisturizer to powder.

  “Hi Tris. Trunk open?”

  Tris nodded and lifted the release handle again to make sure. Diana dropped her bag in and slammed the trunk shut. She opened the passenger door, plopped down and shot a side-eyed smile at Tris. She didn’t reach over for a hug. Maybe she was just tired.

  Tris couldn’t wait. “Hey, Di,” she said as she pulled away from the hotel, “So great to see you. I have so much news. I met a guy.”

  Diana’s expression was deadpan. “Can I smoke?”

  “Sure, with the window open. But, come on. What’s wrong?”

  “You still smoke occasionally don’t you, Tris?”

  For as long as it took to finish the cigarette, Diana looked out the window. All Tris heard was inhaling and exhaling.

  When they got to her apartment, Tris finally got a good look at her friend. Her appearance was worse than it initially seemed.

  Diana was wan. Deep dark smudges rimmed her eyes, and her skin was blotchy. It looked like she hadn’t even washed her face.

  “Di, you look terrible. What happened?” They never pulled any punches. After all, Diana had taught Tris how to fly, and a pilot can’t dance around critical issues in the cockpit, or in life. Honesty and safety came first—before friendship, before loyalty, before love.

  Diana looked around the room, as if she’d find the perfect response scratched on the walls. “I don’t know where to start, Tris. I’m being ‘reviewed.’ Reconsidered as a captain.”

  Tris didn’t understand. “Reviewed? Reviewed as in decide whether to keep you in the left seat?”

  “Yes.”

  “What? That’s crazy. Why?”

  Diana moved the index and middle fingers of her right hand to her lips, as if she were still smoking. Then she started to cry. “I lost my concentration in actual instrument conditions—started a right turn that should have been a left. I caught it, but still. And then, after landing,” she took a deep breath, “I turned the wrong way onto the ramp, off of a runway I’d landed on a thousand times.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand and sniffed deeply, then blew her nose with a Kleenex Tris handed her.

  “I was flying with a guy I’ve known for years. I helped train him when he first started at the company. And you know the first thing he did when we pulled onto the ramp? Told our boss. Now I’m on review. After five years and a spotless record.”

  Tris sat expressionless on the couch next to Diana, frightened by her mentor’s loss of composure. She forced her brain into problem-solving mode, grasping for what logically came next. But all she could think about was Bruce.

  “What was their justification for putting you on review? You can’t be the first pilot that ever made a wrong turn. I’ve done it. Everyone’s done it.” Her heart beat like it would come out of her chest. Tris fought to sound neutral.

  “I didn’t want to question them about it. You know how it is. I can’t push back. They control my pilot records. The last thing I want on my record is ‘unsafe.’” She paused. “That’s what my first officer said. That I was unsafe.” She buried her face in her hands and then looked up, tears pooled in her eyes. “What would make this guy do that to me? What does he gain?” She turned away, sobbing.

  Tris was afraid to speak, even to breathe. Wasn’t this exactly what she was about to do to Bruce? Did he deserve it?

  Diana composed herself and dabbed at her eyes. “So,” she sniffed, “the p
lan is for me to be on leave for a while. With pay, thankfully. At least they did that. They want me to see their in-house medical guy, who’s here in Exeter. And then I’m headed home—well, to my mother’s house. My home is in Brussels. In base.”

  Diana got up and walked back and forth, first wringing her hands, then shaking them. Tris desperately wanted to calm her friend. But she had nothing.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Diana shook her head. She held up two fingers in a V and motioned to the patio. Tris got up and unlocked the door.

  “I’m gonna have a smoke,” Diana said, and stepped out into the freezing night.

  Twenty

  Tris sat in Dr. C’s waiting room organizing her thoughts. This was her first appointment in a while—since before Jackson Hole, Diana, Mike.

  And Bruce.

  Bruce. The Saginaw trip they flew the day before should have been a breeze but ended up a cluster-fuck. The passengers were late. Then one of their kids, a four-year-old girl, had a meltdown on the ramp. The mom used one hand to try to calm the child, and rhythmically flipped her own bottle-blond hair with the other. The father boarded their two older children, and then stood on the ramp checking his watch every two seconds between hard looks at his daughter, as if she could be stared into submission.

  Finally, Tris got them all tucked in. Then, on takeoff, Bruce was two hundred feet low on departure. Tris alerted him, twice. They were in visual conditions and fortunately air traffic control wasn’t too pissed off; they weren’t asked to “call the tower” on landing, a sure sign that a pilot is going to be reported to the FAA for busting a required altitude. And at least this time there weren’t mountains in front of them.

  Tension in the cockpit was high the whole way home. Neither pilot said much, other than to call for or respond to checklists. Tris couldn’t get her visit with Diana out of her mind, and Bruce was barely responsive to her attempts to converse.

  The two pilots pasted smiles on their faces to get their customers unloaded and on their way after landing. Bruce quickly finished his post-flight duties and rushed out of the hangar without saying goodbye. He knew something bad was coming.

  Here, in her therapist’s office, she recalled how he couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “How are you, Tris? What’s been going on?” Dr. C’s usual opening lines.

  Tris tried to organize her thoughts enough to answer, but her words galloped out. “So much. So much has happened. I’m so confused. And disappointed. But excited. Just, so much . . .”

  “Where do you want to start?”

  Tris didn’t want to talk about Lemaster. But it was where the current string of events began.

  “So, first. Remember the guy Woody called to fly the plane home after the fire at Lemaster? Mike? Well, we went out on a date.”

  Dr. C had been tapping her pen against her thigh. Her eyes widened uncharacteristically. “Really? And how did that go?”

  Surging adrenaline caused her words to sound jumbled, disorganized. “Fine, but that came later. It’s Bruce. I really screwed up. I could have killed him. And me.” Tris popped up from the chair and paced the room, arms loose at her sides.

  Dr. C nodded slightly, put down her pad and pen, and stood. She reached out and gently placed her hand on Tris’s shoulder.

  “Tris. Calm down. Why don’t you sit and tell me how you could possibly have done something like that?”

  Tris sat, gulped a few breaths, and closed her eyes, shaking her head back and forth. She leaned forward, arms on her thighs, hands clasped together, and whispered, “I made a series of bad decisions. You know, the error chain?”

  The flying public always looked for pilot error—the one thing a pilot did wrong—after an in-flight disaster. But those tragedies were generally the result of multiple faulty judgments, tiny cracks in a flight’s foundation which, on their own, caused no damage; yet, when sequenced one after the other, resulted in catastrophe. Like JFK Junior’s crash—so many bad choices. Like Diana. Someone who has ten times the experience I have.

  “So, tell me about your decisions. And how they created a disaster.”

  Dr. C still didn’t get it.

  “No. I mean, one more. If I’d made one more bad decision. If there had been . . .” Tris rubbed her hands together. Their calloused skin scratched like sandpaper. She looked around the room for some hand cream.

  “I let Bruce sit in the left seat—the pilot-in-command’s seat—on a takeoff out of an airport surrounded by mountains. And he almost flew us into one.” Her body spasmed as if shaking off a chill. “Directly into a mountain. A mountain he could see. Right in front of us.”

  Dr. C gasped. “That’s horrible. What about your passengers?”

  Tris closed her eyes and leaned back. “They didn’t notice. Thank goodness.”

  “Tris, I understand why you’re upset about this, but he was flying poorly, not you. Sounds like no one was hurt. Isn’t that correct?”

  How could Dr. C not understand? “I put him in the situation. I trusted him to be better than he was. I should have known that he couldn’t do it—it was too much for him. I’m supposed to have the judgment of a Chief Pilot—how could I miss that he wasn’t ready?”

  “You mis-calculated. You know better now.”

  Tris could only muster a slight nod.

  “Why are you being so hard on yourself? Everything’s fine now, isn’t it?”

  Tris forced a contrite smile. “We’re all alive, if that’s what you mean. I decided in the exercise of my best judgment that Bruce could handle the departure out of Jackson Hole. Except he couldn’t. When I was at the party . . .” Memories of her own watershed moments—her busted check rides, her struggles to complete initial training at Clear Sky, how Danny had rescued her—swirled through her mind.

  So long ago. Danny had stood by her, made sure she got another chance—and then another—until things finally clicked. Didn’t she owe that to Bruce? But her problem was mechanical. She didn’t know what to do. Physical skills could be taught, honed, improved. And she had learned them.

  No. It’s not the same.

  Bruce had failed in an airplane in flight—not a simulator—where living, breathing people could have died. His errors were of judgment, and, in trusting him, so were hers. There was no way around it—she’d have to do the same thing to Bruce that Diana’s co-pilot had done to her.

  It made her sick.

  Dr. C bent toward her. “What were you saying about a party? Did something happen at a party?”

  “Well, Bruce kind of confided in me that he was . . . well, not feeling a hundred percent. That he was nervous. And then on the trip itself—I should have seen it. Why the hell did I let him fly?” She nearly shouted the last words.

  “Tris, please. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

  Tris spat out a laugh. “How am I feeling? Horrible. Like I’m turning on Bruce. And now I have to tell Woody that I was wrong, Bruce isn’t ready like I said he was. Like I argued he was, to convince Woody to upgrade him.”

  “So? Surely Woody’s misjudged a pilot’s skills before himself, don’t you think?”

  Tris nodded. “Probably. But that’s not the worst of it.”

  Dr. C’s brows cinched. “No? Why not?”

  Tris covered her face with her dry, scratchy hands. Pulling Bruce’s upgrade could affect the angel flight, Woody’s expansion plans, her own advancement. Yet there was a worse consequence, by far. Something that would destroy their trust.

  “I’m the one who has to tell Bruce.”

  IQALUIT, NUNAVUT

  CANADA

  April 11, 2000

  CHRISTINE

  Sorry, baby. I had to run to the bathroom. That’s happening more and more now, and sometimes I almost don’t make it. I’m losing . . . function. Oh God.

  You can’t understand what it’s like to lose control of your body. You can’t feel that, or see the changes in the mirror like I can, when I dare to look. My failing body with
my tired, scared face on top of it.

  I may look the same to you, but my body itself is a lie. And let’s not have lies between us, Erik, no unexpressed resentments, no fake happiness. That was my only rule for this marriage.

  My body is creeping toward destruction. No other way to say it. Sometimes at night I actually think I hear it. Like the crunch crunch crunch of the termites gnawing through the wood frame of our house in Exeter. Remember? A little bit more every day.

  And that’s the truth.

  But here’s another truth, Erik. This sad, sick body will soon be gone, but I will always be with you.

  Please keep listening, don’t stop this tape because you don’t want to hear it. I know you don’t want to, that you just want to throw this thing against the wall, but Erik, please don’t stop listening.

  I became a grief counselor because when my dad died, nothing made sense anymore. People who always acted normally were compelled to plant syrupy sweet platitudes in my ear. My patients tell me that’s the worst thing about losing a loved one—that people have no idea what to say, but think they have to say something, anything.

  When my father killed himself, everyone thought they had the answer. “He’s in a better place.” “His pain is gone.” “You’ll move on.” What a bunch of crap. If anyone says those things to you after I’m gone, walk away.

  You’ve heard me say it so many times in speeches, interviews. And now I’ll say it to you.

  Death is a project to be managed. It sounds cold, right? But it’s true. And project management, well, that’s what you do, baby. Erik, if I didn’t think you could handle this—after what we went through with Warren, the move here, my diagnosis—I wouldn’t even consider it. But you can. And it’s what I want.

  You know, it’s not the first time. I thought about this once before. Right after I first met you, right when Warren and I split. I was always afraid. Afraid that every door I’d open, he’d be there. Every time I’d turn around, he’d be there. And I remember thinking on one particularly dark day, “What the hell. If this is my life, it’s no life at all.”