Lost in Flight

by Neeny Boucher

  When she woke the next morning, the sun was shining through their bedroom window. He was sound asleep with an arm around her waist, holding her to his chest. His long hair was in her face tickling her nose and she moved it away. The sheet was just covering him and he’d stuck one of his legs out of the covers. He looked peaceful, so she let him sleep and made her way back to her family home.

  She went the back way to her house and snuck in before anyone else was awake. Climbing back into bed, she fell sound asleep and woke up a few hours later to find Riley lying on the bed next to her. He had his hands behind his head on the pillow and she could tell he was sound asleep.

  He’d taken his shoes off, but apart from that he was fully dressed. She took that opportunity to look at him when he was so relaxed. She loved his face, his body, his hair, his smell, his smile, his laugh – she loved just about everything about him, except the bits that drove her insane.

  In some ways, Christina knew it was unfair. It wasn’t really Riley’s fault. She wanted different things out of life and she wanted him to want them too. She wanted him to support her – be there for her and she fervently hoped he would. If he would get out of this place with her then they had a chance and if he wouldn’t? She didn’t want to think about that. He had to see things from her point of view.

  Watching him she felt an overwhelming sense of love for him that she couldn’t help herself. She woke him up by touching his face and kissing him on the lips. He opened his eyes, smiled and rolled into her kiss putting his hands behind her head, pulling her closer. He kissed her eyelids, cheeks and used his teeth to nuzzle her chin.

  “Dina, I’ve been thinking. If you want to go to college – do it. You know, Seattle would be good. I know the place – we both know it – and there are things I could do there too.”

  Christina went still. “I’m going to Georgetown,” she whispered.

  She felt Riley freeze and he slowly turned his head toward her. “Georgetown?”

  Christina nodded. “I… I want to go to Georgetown.”

  Riley went quiet and then snapped. “So you’ve already decided - without me?”

  “It’s… it’s just… Georgetown is a big deal for me. It was hard to get in and it’s got a good reputation for law,” she said, “and there are things you could do in Washington too, you know?”

  ********************

  Riley

  Riley couldn’t believe it. Law? When did she want to do law? They hated lawyers. They joked about them being parasites and now she wanted to be one? Oh yeah. He did know. She’d already made her choices and left him with two: 1) go with her like a lapdog or 2) let her go.

  He looked at her and his eyes roamed her face. He drank her in: her dark eyes, her black hair, olive skin, her scent, her beautiful mouth that kissed him senseless and released a voice like the angels. He couldn’t do this. He wouldn’t be a part of watching his Dina disappear and become an ordinary drone.

  Riley smiled at her, but his heart was breaking. She returned his smile with hope in her eyes and he couldn’t say what needed to be said. Instead, he whispered. “Baby, I’ll think about it, okay? I’ll think about all of it.”

  ********************

  Christina

  Christina dared not breathe. They were going to do it. Something good would come from this. They could make it with a change of scene. As it turned out, her optimism was over inflated. In retrospect, she thought, perhaps Riley should have gone to law school. He’d placed the caveat of “think about it” clearly in his statement and she’d missed it.

  Riley did think about it and decided he didn’t like either of the choices before him. He chose another one: he broke up with her, left, and went on a road trip. Riley disappeared for nearly three years, leaving them in limbo.

  ********************

  When Christina heard Riley had left town, she went to the farmhouse to check for herself. Sure enough – his truck and bags were gone. She stood in the middle of their kitchen, looking around her. This had been their home and now she felt like she was trespassing. Her connection to this place had gone only god knew where.

  Riley had left the divorce papers in an envelope on the table with a note attached. Well, it was more of a poem with hideous, horrible, scary, macabre artwork of hearts staked through with knives. There were also pictures of birds bleeding from their eyes with their wings broken.

  Staring at the pictures, she felt sick and defiled. She threw the pictures away and wiped her hands down her sides, as if to try to take the taint away. And then there was the poem.

  The poem was personally vilifying, and clearly, addressed to her. She skim read it and words such as “broken hearted”, “parasite”, and “virus” stood out to her. It helped because they were underlined – just so she could get the point.

  Christina’s mouth opened and closed. This was horrible. The poem could be deconstructed into two essential points: 1) I’ve gone and 2) screw you.

  She couldn’t believe it. She opened the envelope to find the papers unsigned and sat at the table in shock. No, no, no, no, no. He couldn’t be doing this to her, but he was.

  Riley’s absence, on top of her mother’s recent death and her family’s grief nearly caused a mental breakdown. She went through life in a fog worrying about Riley constantly. What if anything happened to him? What if he’d done something to himself because of her? What if he wasn’t coming back? He had to come back though? Surely.

  Her fault, her fault, her fault went through her head in a constant loop and she tried every avenue to find him, without luck. He had disappeared off the face of the earth and she counted the days and nights in hours, minutes, and seconds. She’d underestimated Riley and he’d countered with a maneuver she never expected.

  She had never understood the depth of her feelings until he was gone. He was irreplaceable. Breaking up had been an idea, an abstract, something not real. Now, she was living the experience it was cold and lonely.

  Christina just wanted him back with her and to know he was safe. She couldn’t sleep and if she did, her dreams were filled with images of Riley in danger, and she couldn’t get to him. She felt like someone who was punch-drunk and her place of shelter, Riley, was the source of her misery.

  Her grief, however, was about to be replaced with anger, and resentment. There was a consequence to Riley’s absence that neither of them had foreseen. After Riley had been gone 48 hours, his parents filed a missing person’s report.

  The Police found his truck at the airport with no sign of him. He hadn’t booked a plane, train, or bus ticket. Christina began to fear he’d done something to himself because of her. In all lives, there are experiences that are humiliating on first encounter, but with the distance of time can be viewed with humor.

  This was not one of those experiences.

  The police visited Christina and she was asked to accompany them to the station, where she had to go over the gory details of what had transpired between her and Riley. Shame faced, she’d given her account to the two police officers with her father present explaining about the fight, the spanking, the biting, the sex, the twisted poetry, and artwork.

  Her father looked at the floor when the Police Officer asked her to reiterate certain points in the discussion, which went something like this:

  Police officer 1: “You bit your husband while he was spanking you and then you had sexual intercourse?”

  Christina: “Um, no. I bit him and then he spanked me. The sexual intercourse came after.”

  Police officer 2: “So, you assaulted your husband?”

  Christina: “Technically, I think we assaulted each other.”

  Even to her own ears, it sounded so wrong and she’d been there. Her father had insisted on staying with her while she was questioned and he asked the police whether Christina needed a lawyer. Dad had always liked cops and lawyer shows, and he was determined to show the police he knew a thing or two about the law through the experience of watching television. Now both
of them wished he wasn’t there and this conversation never happened.

  They were questioning Christina like she may have had something to do with Riley’s disappearance. Looking her up and down, all dressed in black, she decided the police were not her friends. She got the distinct feeling that Riley’s parents and the police thought she might have killed him.

  Having it inferred by the police that you might potentially be a whack job and have killed your husband in a murderous rage – with your father standing there – is not good for the soul. The police thought, that since Christina’s mother had died recently, she might have had some psychotic episode that affected her mental health and she’d done something to Riley. She wanted to say that Riley affected her mental health, but she didn’t think “humor” would be a good strategy at this stage.

  Christina wanted the ground to open and swallow her whole. She was also formally advised that she was a person of interest and not to leave town. Shanwick’s gossip mill worked over time and the rumors swirling in town deterred Christina from venturing there unless she had to. Unfortunately, she did have to – every day.

  She had been working in her parents’ music store part-time since she’d left school, which kept her and Riley afloat financially. Her main source of income was singing at private functions, but in the face of the rumors about her, the gigs dried up. Those booked, were quickly cancelled.

  Dark circles formed under her eyes and she lost so much weight that her clothes hung on her. She didn’t go out and refused to see anybody, not that visitors were lining up at her door. Bonnie and Mandy tried to help, but neither of them had lost their mother or their husband.

  When people spoke to her, their voices came from a distance and she had difficulty making sense of what they were saying. She developed a rash and when she went to see the doctor, he suggested he prescribe her an anxiety medication, but she refused. All she needed was time and confirmation, one-way or the other, whether Riley was dead or alive.

  The only time Christina left the house was to and from the shop. When her mother became ill, Christina ran the store by herself, trying to secure the family business. The shop had recently been sold, because Dad couldn’t look at the place without being reminded of Mom and he wanted to pursue other ventures. Christina buried herself in stocktaking, balancing the books in readiness for handover to the new owners and to take her mind off ruminating on how shitty her life was.

  Since the rumors started, there had been a lot of traffic through the doors, but she didn’t pay it much attention. She was used to being an object of curiosity, but now the looks she was getting were loaded with malice. Christina did what she normally did in these circumstances: she stuck her chin out and ignored them.

  She looked up when the shop doorbell went to see Bonnie and Mandy. The smile died on her face when she saw the looks on their faces. They walked up to the counter and Bonnie told her that, “she’d been in more fights in the last few days, than she’d ever been in high school.” That was certainly saying something and as Bonnie was now working in the town as a realtor, it wasn’t good for her career.

  From what came from a distance, Mandy informed her that Shanwick was “crazy at the moment” and listened as her friends outlined the rumors in circulation about her. Some of the more elaborate ones were: she was supposed to have killed Riley in a murder-suicide pact that had gone wrong. They belonged to a cult and she was the high priestess who’d performed some ritual, human sacrifice. Her personal favorite: aliens had abducted Riley.

  The X-Files had been really big for people of their generation, and if aliens were involved, she spitefully hoped Riley was being probed vigorously. She wasn’t surprised by the rumors and gossip, just that she’d never realized the amount of creative imagination that existed in Shanwick. All that potential – wasted.

  It didn’t take long for the open hostility to turn into action. About a week after the police interviewed her for the first time, the shop got vandalized. The menacing looks by groups of people in town were accompanied by insults.

  “Bitch”, “whore”, “freak”, “slut”, and “Satan” were the most common. “Psycho-killer”, “Elvira”, and “Darth Martin”, less so, but employed in creative ways. People would come into the shop and faux order Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”, and leave laughing. For the most part, she could handle it, but when the windows on their family home were smashed and Dad’s car covered in graffiti, she’d had enough.

  As time wore on, she got anonymous hate mail and weird, icky, marriage proposals. There were offers to be her next ritual sacrifice and freaky, pornographic pictures. Unbeknownst to Christina, most of the really, really, weird stuff she received came from Mason Glenn.

  Bonnie, Mandy, Dad, and Johnny were her only key supporters in the whole place. Dave, Mandy’s partner, was Riley’s oldest friend and even he avoided Christina like she was contagious. Christina found out years later that Dave never thought she’d killed Riley. He was furious that Riley had gone because of her.

  The climax of the whole experience was when Christina was attacked by three guys in town she used to go to school with. Christina had closed up the shop for the day and was walking home when the abuse started. She tried to ignore them and kept walking, but they followed.

  “Hey slut,” Jason King yelled. “Where’s your husband?”

  “Come on bitch,” Carl Beaumont jeered. “What did you do with him?”

  “I heard you cut his heart out,” Shane Palmer laughed at her. “You always were a weird, stupid, pig-ugly whore – thinking your own shit don’t stink - but you’re nothing – nothing, but a psycho-killer.”

  They cornered Christina not far from Apron Park when things escalated from words to physical actions. The insults – she could ignore, but it only took one, in her case, Jason King, to take it too far. He pushed her and she pushed him back. She blocked Shane Palmer’s punch, but not the one from Carl Beaumont, which hit her in the stomach. It was hard enough to hurt and knock the wind out of her.

  After the initial attack, Jason King hung back, letting his attack dogs do the work and then he grabbed her, throwing her to the ground with force. She landed on her shoulder, jarring her neck and head. Suddenly it was all connecting arms, legs, and elbows. Christina got a few hits in, but took a smack to the mouth and she tasted blood.

  When Jason King started grabbing at her private parts, her blood went cold. Oh my god. She would take a beating, but not that – not that.

  She kicked out with her foot and hit King in the knee, but Beaumont responded by kicking her in the ribs. She saw dots in front of her eyes and thought she was going to pass out. Christina was struggling to keep conscious because god only knew what they would do if she passed out.

  Just as she thought she was history she heard, “GET AWAY FROM THAT GIRL!” Eddie Robinson, Mandy’s 6’4 ex-Marine, Muhammad Ali fanatic, man-mountain of a father, stood there with his fists clenched and eyes bulging. He hit Carl Beaumont in the head, knocking him to the ground where he landed with an audible “Ooof.” Jason King went to pick him up and Eddie kicked him fair in the ass, making him fall forward, skinning his hands.

  Eddie spun and advanced toward Shane Palmer, who put his hands up, pleading with Eddie. “Wait, wait.”

  “Wait?” Eddie growled, “Wait? Only thing you’re waiting for is to meet your maker. You come near this girl again,” Eddie Robinson menaced, clenching his fist and snarling, “I’m coming looking for you and don’t worry about the hospital – cause you’ll be going straight to the morgue. Now get.” The young men ran as fast as they could.

  Eddie picked her up and when she heard him say. “Come on baby girl. I got you,” Christina burst into tears. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she had a parent, or anyone, that took care of her. With her mother’s death, she felt like she’d lost both parents and she was the sole adult in the house. And Riley? His absence and silence spoke volumes.

  Gently, Eddie put her in his car and drove her home, murmur
ing in a soothing tone: “Everything’s going to be all-right, Dina. I’m here. We’re here. We’re going to take care of you.” He followed her into the house and waited for her father.

  Her father had not been in a good way since their mother died and Christina tried to put Eddie off, but he insisted. “JACK,” he bellowed. “JACK! I need to talk to you.”

  Dad appeared looking disheveled and his eyes were unfocussed. Christina was used to it, but Eddie’s mouth opened and he stared at Jack’s appearance in shock. Clearing his throat, Eddie said quietly. “Dina got attacked in town, Jack. She’s hurt and it’s not safe for her here. I want you to get her out of town.”

  Jack’s eyes moved from Eddie to Christina and he blinked, trying to clear the fog. Eddie shook his head. “You need to get yourself together, Jack. Do you know what’s going on here? Your daughter isn’t safe and you don’t have the luxury to spend it wallowing around the house.”

  Her Dad gulped. “I’ll get a gun,” but Eddie interrupted him.

  “Don’t be a damn fool, Jack. You’re just as likely to shoot your own foot off the way you are right now. Gun? Sweet lord, Jack – you can’t even use a gun.”

  Christina looked at her father and he was broken. She said quietly to Eddie. “I can’t leave town. The police won’t let me.”

  Eddie grimaced. “You get her a lawyer, Jack. You hear me? You get her the best one you can and if you haven’t got the money – you come talk to me.”

  He towered over her father and Dad had to look up at him. If it weren’t so tragic, it would have been comical. Jack blinked like a child and the look on Eddie’s face was one of sorrow for his friend. Eddie placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder.

  “Dina’s going to come stay with me and Asha now. Asha can look after the shop for you until the new owners take it over. Dina is not going there alone anymore - okay? I’ll take care of her and if anyone comes at her – until this mess is cleared up – they’ll be sorry. But you need to get it together.”