by Ken Douglas
“ No problem.” He looped an arm behind her legs and hefted her off the deck.
“ I didn’t mean you had to carry me.”
“ It’s the best way.” He turned sideways and sidestepped up the aisle toward first class. She pushed the curtain aside as he carried her through.
“ Are you all right?” the prime minister said as they passed his seat.
“ Sprained my ankle.”
“ Ouch,” he said, and she smiled down at him.
“ What happened?” Broxton said, when he looked up and saw her in the arms of the tall man.
“ Sprained my ankle,” she said again, and Broxton scooted over to the window seat as the big man gently put her down in the seat he’d vacated.
“ You can take the seat over there.” She pointed to an empty seat in the second row. He nodded, went forward and took the seat.
She buckled up, then wiggled her ankle.
“ How is it?” Broxton asked.
“ Not sprained, just twisted. It’ll be okay,” she said.
“ That’s good,” he said. He was holding onto both a tight smile and the ring.
“ Squeeze it any tighter and you’ll break it,” she said. Damn, she thought, that came out wrong. She was always putting her foot in her mouth.
He lowered his eyes to the ring, relaxed the tight expression and slipped it back into his pocket. She wondered if it had a case. “You’re right,” he said, looking up and grinning.
“ I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. My mouth is always getting me in trouble.”
“ That what happened to your eye?” he asked.
That got her attention and she bored into his eyes looking for a trace of sarcasm, but found none. She decided to be honest. “Yes,” she said.
“ The cop husband do that?”
“ Yes,” she said. It had been over a week ago and she really thought the makeup covered it.
“ He do it often?”
“ Not so often.” She raised a finger to touch the bruise. She winced and she saw that he noticed.
“ Once is too often,” he said.
“ I’m handling it,” she said.
“ You should leave,” he said. “They never change.”
She broke away from his stare and looked beyond him, out the window. They were flying smoothly now, but the ocean seemed unnaturally close. She saw a sailboat below and wondered what they thought of the big jet flying overhead, so low and so slow.
“ He’ll change,” she said, still looking out the window, but she felt his eyes even as she tried to avoid them.
“ How long have you been waiting?” he asked.
“ Twelve years,” she answered without hesitation. Everyone on the aircraft was worrying about whether or not they were going to live or die this day, including the man sitting next to her, but he was also concerned about her.
“ You could leave,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.
“ And go where?” she said.
“ You’re working. You have a glamorous job. You must have some self esteem left.”
“ I have a lot.” She turned toward him, angry now.
“ Then you could leave,” he repeated.
She bit off her answer by biting into her lower lip. He was right, she had a chance, if only she could be brave enough to take it.
“ What is it?” he asked.
“ I speak Spanish,” she said. “My mother is Mexican.”
“ And?”
“ I have this friend, she works for Iberia, you know, the Spanish Airline. She said I could get on there.”
“ But?”
“ It’d mean moving to Madrid and starting over. No seniority. Less pay.”
“ Do it,” he said.
“ I’m thirty-six, three more years and I’ll have my twenty in. It would be insane. It wouldn’t just mean less money, it’d be a lot less.”
“ How much do you get to keep now?”
That stopped her. How did he know that Earl took all her money, leaving her only a small allowance for food and clothes? It was one of his ways of keeping his fist wrapped around her.
“ Take the Iberia job.”
She looked back into his steady eyes. He didn’t understand. “He’d never let me,” she said. “He’ll come after me.”
“ Maybe, but I doubt it. They get off on the control. If you don’t go back, he’ll most likely look for someone else to dominate.”
“ You make it sound so easy.”
“ It usually is.” His hands were folded in his lap. She noticed that his finger tips were white. He was worried, too, but he did a good job of covering it up.
“ Do you have a picture of your girl?” She wanted to take his mind off his fear and take the conversation away from her problems with Earl.
“ I do,” he said, and she couldn’t help but notice how his blue eyes glowed as he reached toward his back pocket for a wallet. It was a short struggle because the tight fitting Levi’s didn’t want to yield the wallet. He had to shift in the seat in order to get his fingers in the hip pocket and she saw a quick grimace as he pulled it out. From the faded condition of the jeans she’d guessed that he’d had them a long time, and from the way they fit she guessed that he’d been a few pounds lighter when he bought them.
“ My husband never carries anything in his back pocket.” She didn’t know why she said it. She was thinking about the bulge the wallet must have made when he was standing and for some reason she’d pictured Earl standing fully dressed in front of the full length mirror in their bedroom, admiring himself, running his hand over his muscular body, touching his chest, his stomach, his ass.
“ Why not?” Broxton asked.
“ He’s proud of the way he looks. He doesn’t like to break up the lines.”
“ Weightlifter?”
“ How’d you guess?”
“ Weightlifters like to show off.”
“ He doesn’t lift for bulk, he lifts for strength,” she said. For some reason she felt like she had to defend him. “He does all kinds of sports.”
“ Really?”
“ Sure, he hunts.”
“ That figures,” Broxton said.
“ He goes river rafting every chance he gets.”
“ Really? I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
“ He’s on a softball team, they came in second place last year. He bicycles, runs and he swims everyday,” She was rambling and she knew it.
“ All right, he’s into more than body building and killing innocent animals. I still don’t like him.”
“ You don’t know him.” Why was she still defending him.
“ He beats his wife, I don’t need to know anymore.”
“ How about that picture,” she said. Now she really wanted the conversation turned away from her and Earl.
“ Here.” He handed her the open wallet. “It’s my favorite picture of her.”
Maria looked at the picture. It was a black and white photo. The girl staring at her from inside the plastic credit card holder was stunning. She had a model perfect face, not a blemish, a perfect roman nose, perfect wide set eyes, gray in the photo, but she guessed they were blue, perfect blond hair flowing past her shoulders, perfect high cheekbones, perfect chin, perfect woman, perfect girl. “What color are her eyes?” Maria asked.
“ Blue,” Broxton said.
“ Perfect,” Maria said.
“ She sure is,” he said.
“ She looks happy here.”
“ It was taken the day the happiness came back. She went right down to the studio at the mall, no makeup, no fancy hairdo. She wanted her happiness recorded forever, just her happiness, nothing else.”
“ Where’d it go, the happiness?” Maria asked.
“ A drunk driver took it away. She was fifteen and riding in the back seat. That’s why she survived.”
“ Who was in front?”
“ Our mothers. Hers and mine. Their lives were snuffed out in an instant.”
>
“ I’m sorry,” Maria said.
“ It killed something inside of her, her father too. For over a year they went through the motions of living. Then finally Warren, her father, started to come out of it, but Dani was lost to all of us. I suppose I could have helped, she was my best friend, but I was suffering, too. When we started living again, Dani was a recluse. She failed her sophomore year in high school and had to be sent back a grade and we just sort of lost touch.
“ Warren tried everything-counseling, doctors, shrinks-nothing seemed to help. So he threw himself into his business, built it up, sold it and bought property in the booming Southern California market. He made a fortune, but he still lived next door, in a fifty-year-old home on the edge of the barrio.
“ Then it happened. It was Dani’s eighteenth birthday and she was as glum as ever. I hadn’t seen her in a while, but I knew what day it was, so I went to the pet store and bought a collie puppy. I took it next door after dinner. That pup took one look at her, jumped in her lap, shook his little body like he’d just come in from the ocean and promptly pissed.
“ Warren and I watched in dumb amazement. Then Dani smiled, then she laughed and then the light came back into her eyes. It took three years and a collie puppy.
“ After that she threw herself into school. She majored in French, minored in business and studied Spanish and Japanese in her spare time. She managed her father’s successful Senate campaign before going into business and making a fortune in her own right.”
“ Senate campaign, as in the United States Senate?” Maria asked. She wanted to ask more about Dani, because something about her picture was familiar. She knew her from somewhere, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
“ Yeah, the U.S. Senate. He went in 1980, a Democrat that squeaked through the Reagan landslide. One of the promises he made during his campaign was that he wouldn’t be a career politician. One term only, he promised. He turned control of his real estate empire over to Dani and spent six years on the business of the United States. Nobody could buy him, lobbyists were afraid of him, everybody respected him, because he didn’t take a dime. He had no campaign committee to feed, no exploratory committee for higher office to staff, no image to improve. When his six years were up he quit as one of the richest men in America.”
“ How’d he do that?”
“ While he was in office Dani sold all of his real estate and invested in some computer and software companies. Apple, IBM and Microsoft. She made him wealthy, but in his mind he’s still a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks. He’ll never be anything but an aw shucks kind of guy. He couldn’t get used to all the money, so when the Democrats finally regained the White House and the President called, Warren went back into government. Three years later he had a heart attack. The doctors said rest, at least a year. But Warren couldn’t just lay about and do nothing. The president suggested an ambassadorship, somewhere where he could take it easy but still make a difference. Trinidad was the place. Warren gets a year’s rest with an easy job, then he’ll probably go back and help the president again.”
“ Wow, and that’s your girl’s father?”
“ That’s him.”
They were quiet for awhile, and she took the time to study the other passengers, some staring blankly forward, some lost in their own thoughts, some conversing softly, trying to forget that the plane was flying low and slow. She thought of Rick Nelson and wondered what it was like for him just before his plane plowed into that dark Midwestern ground. She imagined his pure sweet voice singing Hello, Mary Lou. She started singing, just above her breath. “Believe me girl, I just had no choice, wild horses couldn’t make me stay away, it’s all I had to see for me to say…”
“ Hey, hey, hey. Hello Mary Lou, goodbye heart,” he softly sang in answer.
“ I’m embarrassed,” she said.
“ I was thinking of Buddy Holly and Peggy Sue,” he said.
The plane lurched downward and she grabbed his hand without thinking. He felt good and kind and strong and she felt that nothing could go wrong just so long as she held on to him.
“ It’s all right,” the captain’s voice said. “We’re coming into Port of Spain. We should be on the ground in about fifteen minutes.”
Maria heard the landing gear coming down. It locked into place with a slam that sounded like another explosion and the plane jerked to the right again. The wing tipped, straining for the ground below. Someone screamed and Maria knew it wasn’t all right. Then the giant aircraft righted itself and she prayed they had it under control.
And for a few seconds they did. They were flying straight up, landing gear down. She let out a long sigh, and started to say that it looked like they were going to make it, when normal sound was erased by the tearing sound of metal. The sound rocketed through the plane, stealing the hopes and draining the dreams of all on board. Now the left wing tipped toward the ground and the nose arched upward for a second, then rocked to the left, following the wing. They were in an earthward bank, making a downward left turn.
She grabbed onto the hand that was still there and looked past the man sitting next to her and out the window, and all she saw was blue. But it wasn’t the blue of the cloud filled tropical sky, it was the blue of the ocean below.
The plane banked steeper into the turn. Maria was afraid that they were going to go into a spin, but they gradually eased out of the bank. She sighed again when the view turned from ocean back into sky and they were flying level once more.
“ Oh no,” she whimpered.
“ What?” Broxton said, and he turned to look too. “Shit,” he added.
She didn’t say anything, there was nothing to say. They were flying over Chaguaramas Bay, barely skimming over the tall masts of the sailing yachts anchored there. She saw the upturned faces on the boats below, saw the rolling waves as the plane blew out of the bay toward Casper Grande Island, level now, but still turning. She saw the Fantasy Island Resort on Casper Grande and she shivered, because she wasn’t looking down. A woman behind her screamed as the plane whisked by the tall trees. Then they were headed back out to sea, away from Trinidad, the ocean only feet below.
For fifteen minutes that seemed like forever, they flew low over the ocean as the plane made a wide turn, back toward Port of Spain. Maria held tightly to Broxton’s hand and stole a quick look around.
The elderly couple in the center seats across from them were locked in an embrace. The woman in the aisle seat behind was frantically writing in a pocket diary. Probably a goodbye to someone she loves, Maria thought, and for a second she thought about writing her mother a quick note. Just to say she loved her. She hadn’t said it in so long.
But she dropped the thought as the blue ocean disappeared and the green tropical jungle of the Caroni Swamp filled the window. They were skimming the trees and Maria knew they weren’t going to make it. She wondered what lived in the vast swamp below.
“ Bend down and grab your socks!” the captain’s voice screamed over the speaker system. “It might be a rough landing.”
“ He’s going for it,” Broxton said.
“ Good for him,” Maria said, but her thoughts were filled with gators and crocks and she wondered if sharks wouldn’t have been quicker.
Then she felt the plane crash into the ground with a shotgun sound. They seemed to be sliding out of control. She wanted to cry out, to scream at the cruel death only instants away. Then she realized they were rolling to a stop. They hadn’t crashed. They were on the runway. They were safe.
Someone started clapping, then someone else on the other side of the cabin clapped an echo back and she felt a blissful peace and uncanny joy take hold of her as she freed her hand from Broxton’s and joined the applause that filled the aircraft.
“ Ladies and gentlemen,” the captain’s voice broke out over the speakers. “Welcome to Port of Spain and thank you for your appreciation.”
The applause picked up and someone cheered. Then they were all cheering.
The door to the cockpit opened and Captain Roger Herra stepped out followed by his copilot and the cheering increased to a deafening crescendo. Then as suddenly as it started, it stopped.
There was no panic. No one screaming, no one pushing, no one fighting to get off. They’d cheated death and they all knew it.
She watched as Broxton flicked open his seatbelt and stood. He stepped over her and bent over and gathered up the contents of the fallen briefcase and filled it. Other passengers were picking up around themselves, standing and stretching, the dangling masks, the only sign that this flight had been any different from any other.
Broxton gave the child a smile and Maria saw the gratitude in the little girl’s eyes. He handed the briefcase to her father and received a smile back for his kindness. Then he pulled his carry-on bag from the overhead locker.
“ I’m staying at the Hilton,” Maria said. “Maybe we could have dinner or something.”
“ I’d like that,” Broxton said. Then he asked her if she needed any help getting off the aircraft. She wiggled her foot. It didn’t really hurt very much anymore, but she nodded anyway. A small kind of fib, but she was still shaken up and she wanted to stay with him just a little longer.
Ten minutes later they were inside the terminal. Broxton had an arm around her waist, even though she didn’t need any help walking. She was dragging her bag on its trolley. He had his bag slung over his right shoulder. Then he froze. She saw him bite into his lower lip, saw the smile slide off his face, felt the spike that must be knifing through his heart.
She turned to see what he was seeing.
He was staring at a rack of newspapers, studying the front page of the Trinidad Guardian, caught by a color picture of a smiling blue-eyed blonde with her arms wrapped around the man from the plane, the prime minister’s body guard, Kevin Underfield. For a second she thought the blonde woman resembled the Barbie doll he’d handed back to the little girl. She was smiling up at the man and he was smiling at the camera, like he was the cat that just swallowed the canary. Then she read the headlines.
ARE THERE WEDDING BELLS IN DANI’S FUTURE?
“ Your girl?” she asked.
“ My girl,” he said.
