Flying Home

by Mary Anne Wilson

  She did just that, and then watched and waited as the screen loaded. The last icon on the screen was for the signal strength, and it had a red circle with a slash through it. As if that wasn’t obvious enough, a message flashed just under it. “No signal.”

  Muttering under her breath, she put it back where she’d found it and huffed. “Nothing,” she told him.

  Gage didn’t say, “I told you so,” which Merry thought was gracious of him. Instead, he said, “I guess we need to talk about what we’re going to do.”

  “Do we have any choice?” she asked. “Don’t we just sit and wait until they find us?”

  “Pretty much, but we need to stay protected and warm until reinforcements come.”

  “That’s covered with the heater working.”

  “That’s another thing we have to discuss,” he said evenly. “Like I said, we can’t keep it running constantly. There’s a limited amount of power for it and it has to be enough to last us for a while. We have to be careful and not get greedy for the heat.”

  “We have to keep the lights on, don’t we, I mean, so they can see us when they search for us.” She could hear the panic in her voice and tried to hide her worry.

  “No, these lights won’t help them. These lights barely could be seen if someone was within five feet of the plane.”

  “Then how can they be looking...?” Her voice trailed off, her heart lurching as a logical truth hit her. “They aren’t looking for us, are they?”

  “They will be, but they have to wait until light, they’ll be able to follow our signal better. No point in trying while it’s dark out.”

  That was totally rational, but it didn’t help her at all. “Even when it’s light, what if we’re buried by that time? You know, snow all over the plane. No one will see us.”

  “We have a good supply of flares, and we have some fuel to make a rescue fire. At dawn, we can make that all happen. The smoke can be seen easily, if the wind stops.” He sat a bit straighter, and despite the touch of warmth in the cabin, he shivered again. “First things first, we should focus on getting through the night.”

  “What about the radio?”

  “No, it’s gone. But the rest of the system for retrieval is in place, and the signal is going out. That’s what they’ll be searching for, and when we know they’re close, we’ll we have the fire and flares ready to go.”

  She looked down at his long legs stretching out along the prone back of the pilot’s seat. His jeans were discolored from the cuffs to his knees. Reaching out, she touched the denim again. “Your pants, you need to...” She bit her lip.

  “Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “Can you...get them off? What about your ribs?”

  “I think I can handle it,” he said.

  “Okay, where do you want me to go?”

  He glanced exaggeratedly around the cabin. “Oh, I don’t know. How about the first class area?”

  “What?”

  He pointed forward. “Just scoot farther up, and I’ll take your word for it that you won’t peek. Just give me the thermal pants and the jeans.”

  She felt the heat rush to her face as a vivid memory of his strong chest and flat stomach, which she’d glimpsed when she’d cut off his shirt, came to her. Shoving the thought aside, she quickly picked up his jeans.

  “The bottom thermals, too,” he said.

  She passed him both things. “What about the second set of thermals?”

  “They’re yours, probably too big, but they’ll help a lot,” he said as he took his clothes.

  She turned away from him, and faced forward. Thermals for her? That meant she had to put them on. Well, duh, she thought. Of course she had to put them on and she would.

  “You can change in first class,” Gage said as if he’d read her mind.

  “Great,” she muttered, but didn’t turn back to him. She could hear him shifting, his breathing getting a bit strained, and she closed her eyes.

  She could imagine what he was doing, stripping off the wet jeans, putting on the thermals, then the dry jeans. After what seemed forever, she heard him almost fall back against the seat. Then a long, loud exhale of air. “Done,” he finally said. “Your turn.”

  She twisted to look back at him. “Oh, shoot,” she said when she realized that Gage was just zipping up his jeans. Looking away, she apologized fast. “Sorry.”

  “You can peek now,” he said with just a touch of humor in the words.

  Slowly, she turned again, relieved that he was really finished this time. The pain lines in his face seemed to have eased considerably, despite the exertion of changing his clothes. His wet jeans were in a ball on the floor by the seat back. She reached for them and added them to the pile on the floor—his jacket and the bloody, shredded shirt.

  She adjusted the lever to lower the back on her seat and sat cross legged on the soft leather. She looked over at Gage. The bandage was horrible and she leaned to her right and made a grab for the first-aid kit where she’d left it. “You need to change the bandage. It’s totally ruined.”

  He gingerly tested the soaked bandage. He flinched at the contact. “I can do it,” he murmured.

  “No, let me,” she said, taking out some cotton swabs, antibiotic wipes and three butterfly bandages. If the blood had stopped, she could pull the wound together in hopes that the scar wouldn’t be too ugly when it finally healed.

  He didn’t argue, and didn’t even flinch when she moved back on the lowered front seat. She gently tugged the tape off his skin and slowly got the saturated cotton pad free from the wound. Thankfully the blood flow didn’t start again. Carefully she cleaned the wound, before putting the three bandages along the cut strategically to make sure the gash was closed.

  “Were you a medical doctor before you went into psychiatry?” Gage murmured, his eyes still closed.

  “Psychology, and no, just the basics I had to take, but I’ve—”

  “I know, bandaged kids up before.”

  She would never admit that she hadn’t bandaged a man’s wounds before, let him think that she’d done this any number of times in the past; that it was nothing special. When in fact, it was kind of special. She shivered as he slowly opened his eyes and met her gaze. Not only had she never bandaged a man’s wounds before, she’d never bandaged a man who could make her breath catch in her chest merely by looking at her.

  * * *

  GAGE MET MERRY’S green gaze, an intensity there for a fleeting moment, and then instantly it was gone. She really was lovely. And he wasn’t confused, certainly not by the pain or the medication.

  Though he regretted taking on the responsibility for Merry, and then failing so miserably, a part of him was just plain thankful that she was here with him. He recognized the selfishness in that thought, but that didn’t alter the truth of it.

  “Thanks,” he said and meant it. “I feel a lot better.”

  Merry shrugged as she moved back on the lowered front seat, but she seemed very serious, and offered no answering smile. So he finally asked, “What is it? The cut? It’s worse or something?”

  “Oh, no, it looks okay, or at least as okay as it can.” She bit her bottom lip. “I was just thinking, you mentioned about the heater. So, do we make a schedule or just use it when we need to or what?”

  “Yes, we use it as little as possible to preserve the power. The lights should go on forever, they’re very low voltage.”

  “No radio at all?”

  “No.” He wanted to move past that quickly. “The heater and the flares and fire are our main means of survival. To keep the cold from getting too intense.”

  Her fine eyebrows lifted. “Too intense?”

  “We don’t want frostbite or worse.”

  She looked as if she’d never even thought ab
out that possibility. “Of course not,” she murmured. “Can we leave it on a bit longer?”

  “Sure, for a bit,” he said, before segueing to a new subject. “You really recognized me at the airport?” That still surprised him.

  “Well, not at first, but then I heard that man who found you asking if you were Gage Carson. That’s when I really knew who you were.”

  “I thought I’d changed a lot since I was a kid.” He’d been a skinny child with unruly dark hair, tanned to the color of coffee, and always sporting a bandage after some mishap with his brothers and friends. “A lot.”

  That teased a smile from her. “Oh, you’ve changed, a lot, but there’s something so familiar.” She shrugged, her smile fading just a bit. “You look like how I imagined you would look when you were grown.” She gestured with her hands. “I’d heard that you were a huge success with your own construction company, and then there you were getting on your plane to head to Wolf Lake. It seemed to be a...” She hesitated on the word, then flushed slightly when she said, “A miracle.”

  Some miracle. He cringed a bit at her words, especially since they were stranded in a storm in a plane he’d crashed. He hadn’t even been capable of taking off his own boots. “Logistics.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  He realized he’d switched subjects again, and that it had surprised her. “Logistics. I couldn’t even get my boots off and it’s only simple logistics.” He made a noise that sounded suspiciously to him like a snort, but then he realized it was about the only way he could actually do anything close to laughing. “I run a huge construction and design business, and yet even with all my engineering skills you had to pull my boots off.”

  She chuckled at that and he liked the sound of it. “Ah, yes, thank goodness for all my higher education,” she kidded.

  “I didn’t get that far. My education is from living my life, the good, the bad and the ugly.” He watched her as his eyes began to feel heavy.

  Sobering slowly from his words, she shrugged, but didn’t speak. Those beautiful green eyes looked down at her hands pressed to her knees, and he knew what he’d said had bothered her, but he didn’t know her well enough to understand why. He was with a woman who had been a relative stranger to him just hours ago, and now their fates were intertwined in a way that he’d never thought possible. “Life is a great teacher,” he said, noticing how low and slightly slurred his words were.

  “Yes, it is,” she said, sitting a bit straighter. “And it’s free. There’s no student loans for living your life.”

  “Said like someone who has student loans?”

  “Whew, yes, some,” she admitted. “But I did receive a few very good scholarships to help out along the way.”

  “I take it you were good in school?”

  “Good enough. How about you?”

  He grimaced and felt the bandages on his wound tug at the skin around them. “I hated it. I graduated high school just because my mother wouldn’t let me drop out.”

  “But you’ve got the company and from what I heard from Moses, you’re incredibly gifted when it comes to construction and design.”

  He settled his head against the back of the seat and let his eyes close. “Moses is a talker. No, I don’t have a gift, just a knack for picking things up and doing them.” He sighed heavily. “You did it the right way by getting a degree.”

  “I’m actually thinking of going back to school to work on some sub specialties.”

  “For what?”

  “Simply put, to get a broader base to work with the needs of emotionally challenged children.”

  He whistled, a low, soft sound in the cabin. “I’m impressed.”

  “I haven’t done it yet. I’m still trying to recover from just getting my degree and being certified.”

  He liked her voice, and wanted her to keep talking while he settled more. “It was a lot of work?”

  “Yes, but it was worth it.”

  “Financially?”

  “I wish. No, the salary’s okay, but the payoffs aren’t money related.”

  “Such as?”

  “I was able to come home to Wolf Lake, where I’ve wanted to be since forever, and I’m actually renting the house I always dreamed of living in when I was little. I’m going to try to buy it, if the owner, Willie G., ever decides to sell.”

  “Willie G.,” he murmured, as an image of the old man with long gray hair and darkly weathered skin came to him. Willie had been a fixture in Wolf Lake for as long as Gage could remember, and long before that. “Willie G. doesn’t sell anything. He’s into keeping all he can for his people on the Rez.”

  “Oh,” she said and in that single word he heard real disappointment.

  “But you never know,” he found himself adding. “He might get to like you, and want you to stick around and let you buy the place. By the way, which piece of land is it? He’s bought up a lot of Wolf Lake.”

  “An old Victorian two story. It’s blue, just like it was when I was a kid.”

  “The one on the side street near the inn that Mallory Sanchez owns and runs?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “I heard he bought it years ago off Momma Dot, a teacher who used to work at the Rez school.”

  “Good to know,” she said. “I used to pass it as a kid and make up all sorts of scenarios about it, like who lived there and me buying it and...” Her voice trailed off. “I guess we’ll see what he’ll do down the road sometime.”

  “Yes,” he said, not adding that he hoped they both had another chance to meet up with Willie. “Where’s my headpiece?” he asked, deftly changing the subject again.

  “Here somewhere,” she said, and he felt her moving, then the seat by him shifting. He opened his eyes, watching her intent on what she was doing. She turned back to him and held out the headpiece, but he waved it off. “You put it somewhere safe. It’s no use to us now.”

  He watched her slip it in a side compartment by the backseat, and he asked as she moved back to the prone seat, “Why is Wolf Lake so special to you?”

  She didn’t speak for a bit, but finally said, “It’s always been home to me, and with my stepfather being in the military, we never put down permanent roots anywhere after we left Wolf Lake. Just places we stayed for a few months, or if we got lucky, a year. But no home.”

  “That must have been difficult,” he said softly.

  “That’s an understatement. I went to eleven schools before I graduated high school. The only time I stayed put was for college, and that was staying in a dorm room with three other students, taking as many credits as I could every semester and working to get extra money.

  “When I was done, I simply didn’t want to move again, not until the offer from Wolf Lake came in. Then, I got to go back home, and I’m being paid for it, at least for two years.”

  “Then what?” He really wanted to know what path she had planned.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’ve never come up with an answer for that even for myself. But I really hope I can stay with the center in some capacity.” She sighed. “And maybe buy Willie G.’s house.”

  The wind and snow shook the plane violently, and he realized how effective the pills were. Any pain from the sharp jerks was lost in a mellow haze. But Merry gasped, and gripped the sides of the prone seat.

  “Tell me we aren’t near any chasms or cliffs,” she demanded with a panic-stricken look on her face.

  “Just trees, lots of trees, especially that big one.” He didn’t know what was beyond the trees and snow, but he didn’t mention that.

  “I know, and it’s six feet away.” She sat back again and said, “Six whole feet.”

  “A miss is as good as a mile,” he said. “In any event, you need to get those thermals on, then we should get ready for the ni
ght.” He watched her tense up again, and he was almost grateful that he suddenly felt incredibly tired. His eyes fought to close as he rested back against the seat. But he kept them open.

  “The thermals,” she repeated and moved to pull them into her lap.

  “Use first class, and I’ll close my eyes.” He almost smiled as she hesitated. “I promise not to peek and I’m a man of my word. I keep my promises.”

  Her face fell, and she bit her lip hard. Wrong thing to say, he realized, when she murmured, “At least one of us does.”

  “Hey,” he said brightly. “You meant that promise. You did everything you could to make it happen. No one can expect more from you than that, even kids.”

  She closed her eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them, looking at him now. “I expected more,” she said on a whisper, then shifted to the front of the seat and levered the back to an upright position. Without saying anything else, she shrugged out of her suede jacket, then grabbed the hem of her top and started to tug it up without saying anything to him.

  That’s when he did keep his promise and closed his eyes. He didn’t open them again, until he heard her say, “All done.”

  When he looked at her, she appeared pretty much the same, except she’d either taken the tie off her ponytail, or her hair had come free in the process of changing clothes. Either way, her thick hair fell a few inches past her shoulders, and even in the dimness, he could catch the coppery streaks in it.

  Her seat back went down again, and she scooted into a comfortable sitting position. She looked at him expectantly. The soft waves of her hair framed her face, and he didn’t even try to rationalize why his only thought right then was that she was stunning. No fancy clothes or makeup, and she looked incredible there on the seat, watching him.

  “Okay, let’s get ready,” he said, and as her expression seemed a bit strained, he was almost thankful for the heaviness in his eyes. He needed to sleep, despite her worries about a concussion. “There’s a side panel back here. Open it and get out the blankets and a thermal wrap, then we’ll turn the heater off for a while.”