Exit Strategies

by Catherine Todd

  “You don’t let him out?”

  “Only in the daytime,” I said. “At night he mixes it up with the skunks and possums, so he’s confined to quarters.”

  Mark bent over and picked him up, supporting his tail and hind legs with his arm like an expert. “Hey, big guy,” he said. He looked at me. “What do you feed him, Mighty Cat? He’s gigantic.”

  “The vet says he’s just muscular,” I insisted.

  He smiled and put the cat down. He looked at his watch. “Ready to go?” he asked.

  “Do you want some coffee to take with us?” I asked.

  He looked alarmed. “I should have told you,” he said. “You don’t want to have a lot to drink.”

  It was still dark when we exited the freeway. When the car slowed for the off-ramp, my palms started sweating.

  I knew where we were going and why we had to get up at the crack of dawn.

  “This is where we’re going,” Mark said. “Can you guess now?” I could hear the delight in his voice, although it was too dark to see his expression clearly.

  I hoped the dim light hid my sudden pallor as well. “Ballooning,” I whispered. About the only neurosis I’d never gotten around to confessing to Mark was that I was terrified of heights, unless there was a wall and a window between me and the possibility of falling. The sensation was both physical and mental—a weird, unpleasant tingling in the stomach and groin, a feeling that the ground was drawing me down to meet it and that I was powerless to resist. It came randomly—not in every circumstance—but often enough to make me wary of bridges and cliffs. A balloon—with nothing between me and mortality but a bag and a basket—was so far beyond the pale that I’d never even considered trying it.

  “Have you ever been before?” Mark asked me.

  I told him no.

  “You’ll love it,” he said confidently.

  I considered backing out of the excursion. I could picture how it would go. He would be kind and understanding. He might gently try to talk me into going anyway, to work through the fear. I would refuse, and he would be nice about it. A good friend. A good psychiatrist even. But he would be disappointed.

  And so, I realized suddenly, would I.

  “I’m a pilot,” he said happily, unaware of my inner struggle. “I’ve been in several cross-country races.”

  I thought, If I keep seeing him socially, I’ll have to do this more than once.

  “But today is just for fun,” he said. “Someone else will be in charge.” He turned to look at me as we pulled into the parking lot. “You’re awfully quiet,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I said, forcing the incipient panic out of my voice. “I’m naturally reticent before sunrise,” I told him in a more normal tone. “Is there someplace I could go to the bathroom?”

  He pointed to a chemical toilet on the edge of a large field. He bent over and handed me something from the glove compartment. “Here,” he said. “Take a flashlight.”

  When I catapulted out onto the field (never take a flashlight into a chemical toilet; ignorance is preferable), there were miniature balloons bobbing around the launch site like eager guests at a birthday party. It was starting to get light. Several men were stretching a garishly colored balloon out on a tarp next to what looked like a burner and an oversized wicker basket. A huge fan that appeared to be an errant part of a jet engine stood nearby. I thought that if I focused intensely on the mechanics of the process, I might be able to ward off imagining the ascent.

  “What is all this stuff?” I asked Mark, who was helping the others.

  He straightened and smiled. “Those are ‘pibals,’ or pilot balloons,” he said, gesturing at the party guests, now departing the scene. “They show you the wind direction and velocities. This is the burner. It’s attached to the gondola—”

  “The gondola?” What I wouldn’t have given for a nice safe ride across some sewage-infested Venetian canal.

  “The basket,” he said. “And then the basket is attached to the balloon.”

  “How does the bag fill up?” I asked him.

  “The bag is called an envelope,” he said. He pointed to the jet plane detritus. “That’s a big fan. We crank it up, inflate the envelope with cold air, and then light the burner to heat the air. As the air heats, the balloon starts to rise until it pulls the basket upright.”

  I could guess what happened after that. “How do you steer it? I don’t see any steering wheel or a rudder or anything like that.”

  “Well, um, you don’t actually steer it,” he said. “There isn’t any way to control lateral movement in a balloon. They go wherever the wind takes them. All you can do is heat or cool the air in the envelope to enter a different layer of air and move in whatever direction the current is going.”

  “You mean it just drifts? How do you get back to the starting point?” I tried not to sound as alarmed as I felt.

  He grinned. “In the chase vehicle, usually. Part of the adventure is not knowing exactly where you’ll end up before you go.”

  “So it’s an envelope with no return address,” I joked feebly.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said.

  “It must take a long time to get all this set up,” I said hopefully.

  He pointed eastward, where the light was starting to illuminate the tops of the hills. “We’ll be up right after the sun,” he said.

  The fan made a terrible noise, clattering and roaring in the morning’s gray stillness. Mark and the rest of the crew held the balloon open with gloved hands as it filled with cold air. When it was partially full, they ignited the burner, which shot a long narrow flame into the envelope.

  “What’s the envelope made out of?” I shouted to Mark over the din. I hoped it was something nonflammable.

  “Ripstop nylon,” he shouted back. The balloon started to stand up.

  I liked the sound of ripstop, except that it necessarily implied the possibility of rips. I didn’t want any holes in something that was going to be holding me aloft.

  One of the crew grabbed the attached rope as the balloon was standing up. It dragged him sliding over the ground. Visions of Passepartout dangling from Phileas Fogg’s balloon as it sailed away made me cry, “Look out!”

  “It’s okay,” Mark said. “He’s just providing weight resistance, so the balloon doesn’t pop up too quickly.” He took my hand. “Ready?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  He introduced me to a guy in dark pants and a black T-shirt and jacket who looked scarcely old enough to have a driver’s license. “This is Perry,” he said. “He’s our pilot today.”

  “Hi,” Perry said. He was chewing gum.

  “How do you get to be a balloon pilot?” I asked him, trying to sound casual. I hoped it wasn’t something you could learn in summer school.

  They both laughed. “A balloon is an aircraft regulated under the same FAA regulations as all the other categories,” Mark said. “Pilots have to get a commercial license.”

  “With a minimum of seven hundred hours of flight operations,” Perry added.

  I thought he looked as if seven hundred hours would have put him back on the Little League field, but I didn’t say anything more.

  Perry had his own section of the cabin, right under the burner, and separate from the passenger portion of the basket, so I didn’t get to see exactly what he did to make the balloon go up. I anticipated a sensation like riding the elevators in New York’s World Trade Center or the throttle-to-the-firewall thrust of an airplane takeoff. I closed my eyes, expecting to see the world from ten thousand feet up when I opened them. Instead we were only about thirty feet off the ground, and Mark was shouting something at the ground crew, who were shouting back.

  Sort of an anticlimax, after all that anxiety.

  The fear subsided to a kind of fizziness in my stomach, like champagne.

  “How fast does it go?” I asked Mark.

  He turned to me and smiled. “As fast as the breeze,�
�� he said. “Maybe about twice as fast as a walking speed on the ground.”

  “This is the perfect antidote for control freaks,” I told him. “You can’t direct where you’re going, where you’re going to end up, or how fast you’ll get there.”

  He laughed. “You’re cured or you’re driven nuts,” he said.

  “Do you think this is a metaphor for something?” I asked.

  “Probably,” he said.

  “It’s so quiet.”

  It was. There was a lot of frenetic activity on the ground—the distant freeway, crows flying beneath and around us, a few people moving on the hillsides and beaches. But the balloon hung motionless in its air mass, and there was no sound other than the occasional whoosh of the burner as we rose in gentle stages, like climbing stairs. There was absolutely no sense of motion or sway as we drifted. It was as if we were part of a celestial Christmas ornament pinned to the sky, while the earth moved on beneath us.

  The sun rose high enough to light the ocean, turning it a light turquoise.

  My heart swelled, like the balloon, with a sense of peace and happiness I hadn’t felt in a long time, filling up empty spaces I hadn’t even known were there. My eyes blurred with tears.

  “I can’t believe this,” I told Mark. “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  He took my hand. “I’m glad you like it,” he said. “Most of my colleagues think I’ve taken leave of my senses.”

  I took a deep breath and smiled. “If this is taking leave of your senses, I’ll be the first one at the railing waving good-bye.” I looked out at the horizon, giddy with the twin sensations of unexpected pleasure and fear overcome. “It’s so beautiful,” I said. “I’m trying to put a name to this feeling. Everything is so…harmonious. What do you think it is?”

  “Perspective,” he said seriously, watching the world spin past.

  The words popped out of my mouth before I knew I was going to utter them. “I’m quitting my job,” I told him. “I’ll probably get let go anyway, but I’m quitting first. As soon as possible.”

  He turned to me and smiled. “Why?” he asked.

  I spread my hands. “Because it’s no way to live,” I said. “At least not for me.” It was true. I just skipped the part about being made a possible scapegoat if I chose to stick around.

  He didn’t say anything. The balloon went lower, drifting westward.

  “You’re not surprised, are you?” I asked, watching him.

  He looked at me. “No,” he said. “Should I be?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been sidling up to this for quite a while. I just didn’t know I was ready to announce it till today.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, gripping the sides of the basket. “I’ll think of something. I’ve got a sort of an offer from an Internet start-up, but I’m not sure that’s what I want.” I looked out at the distant ocean. There were a few early surfers bobbing on the waves. “I’ve spent too much time being scared about things at RTA. Scared I’ll mess up, scared I won’t have enough money, scared I’m not doing enough for the firm, scared I’m not doing enough for my family. Bobbie even has me scared of getting old. The list goes on, but I just don’t want to be scared anymore.” I raised an imaginary carrot into the sky. “As God is my witness…”

  He laughed. “You’ve got a bad case of ascension euphoria, Scarlett.”

  “Is that a real psych term?” I asked him.

  “Sure. It’s the geographical opposite of rapture of the deep.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  I looked him squarely in the eye. “I am feeling sort of…rapturous,” I said.

  He smiled and kissed me, the way he was supposed to do.

  “I might be taking advantage,” he said, pulling back a little.

  “Good,” I told him.

  “Tell me about your job offer,” he said a few minutes later.

  Despite the fact that I had just announced my intention to shuck my legal career, I was less interested in talking job prospects at that moment than I otherwise might have been. I had to force myself to concentrate. “What?” I asked dreamily.

  “From the Internet start-up.”

  “Oh.” I told him about Jason Krill and Melissa. “But that kind of job might be better for somebody in a different period in life. I’m not sure it’s for me.” As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure it wasn’t. I thought of Melissa and her father and how her whole life in some way was trying to measure up to the impossible standard she thought he held for her. I realized that my entire legal career had been a kind of ongoing dialogue with my ex-husband. A dead man. I’d needed to prove I was a professional—with a capital P—the way he’d been. Well, I’d proved it, at least to my own satisfaction, and I didn’t need to make partner or a zillion dollars at the expense of everything else in my life just to keep the conversation going.

  “Why do you ask?” I asked him.

  “I was wondering if you could use some help finding something else.”

  I shook my head vehemently. “No, thanks. This is something I have to do by myself.” My career choices were complicated by my involvement with Bobbie Crystol and Taylor and whatever happened down the line. It didn’t seem fair to entangle anyone else in that, at least not yet.

  He looked away with a pained expression.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, touching his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to be so abrupt. It’s complicated. Right now I just feel…overwhelmed by all this.” I gestured vaguely, encompassing the sky, the view, the balloon, life in general, and him in particular. “And besides, you’ve done so much for me already.”

  “Don’t make me out to be some kind of noble philanthropist, Becky,” he said. “I don’t want your gratitude. If I’ve helped you, I did it for my own sake as much as yours.”

  Whatever he might say, I thought of the difference that kind of generosity had made in my life at a time when I had nowhere else to turn.

  And suddenly, just like that, I knew what I wanted to do.

  “I have an idea,” I said. I was having lots of them, spilling all over themselves demanding attention. “I think I know what kind of a job I’d like.”

  He smiled. “Balloon pilot?”

  I laughed. “Not in this lifetime.” I looked at him. “I have a long-standing relationship with a charitable foundation. They helped me pay my way through law school, and I know they’ve helped others too. I was thinking of approaching them to see if they need someone to do their legal work or raise money or something. If they don’t have anything, they might recommend me to some other foundation.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What’s wrong? Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s great.”

  “Then why aren’t you more enthusiastic?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.

  “It’s not that. You don’t understand,” he said.

  “I guess not,” I told him.

  He took my hand and held it against his chest. I thought it was the most romantic gesture I had seen in years, but I was hardly objective. “I’m not saying this right,” he said.

  “You’re doing fine,” I said encouragingly.

  “I haven’t been honest with you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I know what you’re going to say.”

  His eyebrows went up. “You do?”

  “Sure. There’s something you don’t want to come out.”

  He looked almost amused. “What led you to that conclusion?”

  “You told me, remember? You said you’d lied to someone you cared about.” I looked at him. “You don’t have to tell me what it is if you don’t want to. I said I didn’t know anything about you, but that’s really not true. I know all the important things.” I told him with my eyes how I felt. Even someone far less clued in than a psychiatrist couldn’t have missed the message.

  He got a wild look o
n his face, as if he might burst into hysterical laughter or tear his hair. I wondered if his big secret might be worse than I thought. “Becky, I—” He stopped and looked down at the ground, or at where the ground should have been. “Christ,” he said, looking around. “We’re heading toward the ocean.”

  “We’re not supposed to be?” I asked.

  Just then Perry came out of his compartment of the gondola, holding three life jackets.

  I guess not.

  “What happened?” Mark asked him.

  Perry looked at him. “It’s just a precaution. I can’t find a current that’s blowing any direction but out to sea.”

  Now that there might be something to worry about, I felt a strange kind of exhilaration but not the apprehension that would have been a sensible reaction under the circumstances. I was also discovering that Eros and Thanatos can coexist quite comfortably in the same experience. I would have to get Mark to explain it to me. “I take it we can’t just turn around,” I said. I laughed. “Oh, right. No return address. I remember.”

  Mark and Perry looked at me oddly.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  Perry turned to Mark. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Try going up,” Mark said.

  Perry shrugged and opened the burner. The balloon rose gently. Very slowly, after an eternity, it started to turn east.

  I was almost disappointed.

  Mark put his arm around me. I couldn’t feel it because of the life jacket, but I moved close to him anyway.

  “You were saying?” I said to him, when it was clear we wouldn’t end up heading for China in a bag of hot air after all.

  He tightened his arm around my shoulders. “It can wait. I think we’ve had enough excitement for one day.”

  “Chicken,” I said.

  He didn’t laugh. “Are you ready to descend?” he asked.

  “Let her rip,” I told him.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  My mother had a visitor.

  Lauren was sitting next to the bed in her wheelchair, resting her head on her hand. My mother was telling her in some detail about her triumph over the forces of evil at Dunewood. “And they made me walk,” she said, “when I had this fracture. Can you imagine?”