Lieutenant

by Lesli Richardson

  George chuckles. “I can see why you need two men to corral you if you’re this spunky when you’re convinced you’re almost dead. You must have put a hurting on Carter the night you swung on him.”

  “I did. I got bitey, too. He had to wear long sleeves to hide the marks.”

  “Lucky man.”

  “Oooh, the governor of Tennessee is making a pass at me. I think.”

  He chuckles. “Lieutenant governor.”

  “Nope. You probably got a promotion.”

  “He might have made it.”

  “Nah. Battlefield promotion.” I manage to raise my hand enough to sort of salute him. “Lucky bastard, sir,” I tease.

  Aaaannnd, once again, I’m thinking about Carter. About his words to me that night back in college, when I asked to be his and he proposed to me.

  My smile fades. “Dying’s easy,” I say. “Surviving’s harder.”

  I don’t think I ever truly appreciated what he meant that night.

  I do now.

  “You’re not going to die, girl. I don’t give you permission to do that.”

  He’s trying so hard. I can’t help it. I’m crying, but it’s mostly dry crying because I’m so dehydrated. “Please tell them,” I whisper. “Tell my guys I love them. Tell Carter I tried. That I tried to stay safe. That was his last order to me, to stay safe. Please tell him I tried.”

  He shifts me again, holding me. “Shhh. It’s okay, sweetie. I’m not leaving you behind. We’ll both make it, I promise.”

  “Tell them I want them to get married,” I whisper. I don’t know why I’m bothering to whisper, but oh, well. “Tell them to please be happy. I want them to be happy together. And tell Daddy I’m sorry I didn’t get to be governor.”

  “I’d vote for you.” He kisses the top of my head and stays there like that, his face in my hair, his breath warm against my scalp. It reminds me of the early days with Carter.

  I hope I’m reminding him of good times with Ellen. I don’t begrudge him this at all.

  Helloooo, dying.

  We might be getting more rain soon, though. The wind has picked up a little today, and it looks stormy off to the southeast.

  Probably not soon enough to help me, but maybe Connie will make it.

  Hopefully George will make it. Those kids deserve to have their dad back.

  I bet he’s going to be a kick-ass governor.

  I’m staring out at the horizon as it turns a deep, beautiful purple, and I know my time is short because I’m seeing little lights bobbing around.

  “I see angels,” I say. “Well, I’m fucked.”

  He snorts. “You’re still alive, honey.”

  I go full-on Monty Python. “No, I’ll be stone-cold in a moment.” I snort. “Stone crabs. I’ll be stone crab in a moment.”

  “Nah. You’ve got to tell me all sorts of raunchy shit to pass on to your guys. You can’t leave me hanging like that. I’m a widower now. I need stories for my tell-all book I’ll write when I’m eighty to embarrass the hell out of my kids. Ellen would want me to do that.”

  I’m still seeing angels. “If I’m so alive, Dom Smart-ass, why am I seeing them?” I manage to point.

  George finally lifts his face from my head and then promptly lets out a scream. He lunges over the side of the raft, dropping me in the process. I fall back, painfully hitting the ground.

  He’s still screaming, sobbing, and seconds later, I hear a phwomp and a painfully bright light arcs up, up, up, streams of light doubling and tripling in my vision.

  Now the others are all screaming, and another phwomp, another light.

  George returns and helps me sit up, keeping one arm around me so I don’t fall over again. He’s sobbing and laughing and sobbing and laughing and sobbing and…

  You get the idea.

  Then he shoots off another flare with his other hand, wordlessly screaming before he kisses my cheek and starts screaming again.

  I squint reeeeallly hard.

  The angel lights change course, from where they were slowly tracking across the horizon, and start heading our way.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Carter

  I know there’s not really anything I can “do” but sit and wait and hope for news.

  Any news.

  Except the bitch of it is that I’m a realist. My military training comes back to me despite me trying to will the knowledge from my brain. Three days without fresh water, max.

  It’s been three fucking weeks.

  I hate being a realist.

  The SAR ops has been scaled back, and is now being considered a recovery mission. The black box was recovered, and Mike’s body was found strapped into a starboard seat on the wing.

  Susa and Connie’s bodies were not in the cabin, nor were they among any of the bodies recovered so far.

  That means nothing, of course.

  Two of the life rafts, and one of the slides, are unaccounted for. The one overturned life raft that was found doesn’t give me much hope. No one knows which life raft it was. The eighteen survivors plucked from the life raft say they lost sight of everyone else in the storm in the immediate aftermath of the ditching.

  It’s not looking promising, no matter how I ask Owen to please breathe and focus on work and to not give up hope.

  Maybe that’s cruel of me to say to him, to not give up hope, but I’d rather be with my boy when I finally acknowledge the inevitable.

  Be there to hold him.

  I know I need to book my return flight to Florida, but I can’t yet make myself acknowledge the finality of that decision.

  Of returning empty-handed.

  Of returning…alone.

  Of facing my boy and having to admit to him—and everyone else—that she’s really gone.

  Hypothermia. Drowning.

  Did she die of exposure? Did she drown adrift in open water? Did sharks attack her before or after she died?

  Did she drown trapped in the aircraft and her body washed free?

  Was she aware of what was happening?

  Was she scared and screaming for us as the plane went down?

  Part of me hopes she died instantly and unaware in the initial engine failure and cabin decompression. That she was dead before the plane even ditched.

  Except the fact that she wasn’t found strapped into a seat would tend to discount that theory. The seatbelts on the two other seats in Mike’s row were intact, unbuckled. They weren’t ripped or torn from their anchors, meaning either the seats were vacant—unlikely—or their occupants unfastened their seatbelts at some point and were not belted in when things went to hell.

  The seat cushions were displaced and no life vests founds. Again, that means nothing. Not really.

  Another option I don’t want to contemplate and will never mention to Owen or anyone else—that maybe they hadn’t been wearing their seatbelts when it happened, and they were both sucked out of the plane during the initial event.

  It is a grim possibility one of the NTSB investigators confirmed when I confronted him about it in private, needing to know if it was possible despite not wanting to know.

  If that happened, their bodies could have ended up anywhere, and likely will never be recovered.

  Likely hit the water like sacks of concrete and disintegrated. The plane was at thirty-two thousand feet when the event happened.

  Like I said, that’s not a possibility I really want to think about, for a lot of reasons.

  Part of me who doesn’t even believe in god prays my pet didn’t suffer, didn’t know, wasn’t in agony.

  Wasn’t afraid.

  Part of me hopes that, if she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, she took a nap, like she’s wont to do on longer flights. That she didn’t have time to don her oxygen mask, and was killed so quickly that she never even knew what happened.

  A very large part of me hopes that.

  #realistssuck

  I will never share these thoughts with Owen, or with anyone else. My boy wants
to hope they’ll find her and Connie both, alive, some sort of movie miracle. That maybe they washed up on an island and they’ll pluck them off it with a pet volleyball and some FedEx packages, or some shit like that.

  I know how hard this is on Owen, being alone and in Florida, and it makes my heart ache even more. I feel like I’ve failed both my pets. I couldn’t protect one, and I’m not there to console the other.

  Me? I compartmentalize. I have to. It’s the only way I can function at this point. It’s a skill I learned after losing Tom and Pete, and my friends. A skill I honed to fine precision during my time in-country, especially after I was wounded and my two best friends were killed, another gravely injured.

  Otherwise, it’d be too damn tempting to find a gorgeous beach somewhere, watch a sunset, and suck-start a pistol.

  Except…I can’t.

  Owen.

  I can’t do that to him. I can’t leave him alone. That’d be cruel beyond measure, and I’ve failed enough already as a husband and Master.

  Everyone here has been kind and bending over backward for us. They ruled out terrorism, since it was a charter flight. Based on the cockpit recordings and black box data, it looks like a stupid, catastrophic mechanical or structural failure with the starboard engine, probably triggered by the severe turbulence they encountered.

  Fricking random bad luck.

  I want to rage and scream but I keep that locked deep inside me. I keep my expression as neutral as possible and nod when talked to, carefully choosing every word I say before I say it. Despite all the US and foreign government wonks here now from various alphabet-soup agencies, somehow I have become the de facto spokesperson for what’s left of the group of family members.

  The stoic husband, the decorated war vet, the chief of staff.

  The widower-apparent.

  Part of me starts to think maybe I should ask Owen if he wants to pull out of the race. No one would blame us if he did. We can quietly return to Tampa at the end of his term, grieve, and eventually get married. Maybe go to Vegas, to the same chapel where I married Susa. Exchange the same vows.

  Try to love as much pain as we can from each other’s souls.

  Part of me knows if I did that, if there was any truth to the theories about ghosts, that Susa would mercilessly haunt us for giving up politics after working so damn hard to achieve as much as we have.

  I know her. I know my sweet, vicious little pet. She’d be screaming at me to capitalize on this, use it, mercilessly leverage it into a slam-dunk victory. Milk every ounce of sympathy we can from it.

  I know she would.

  But…to be honest? Even the bastard extraordinaire has his limits. I don’t have the heart to do that, I don’t think. Not unless Owen tells me that’s what he wants, to honor her like that by staying in and continuing to work for re-election.

  If he does? Then absolutely, that’s what we’ll do.

  Otherwise…

  I don’t know anymore. The plan has…dissolved.

  I feel like a significant part of me has dissolved.

  I’m not sleeping more than an hour or two at a time. My nightmares plague me—both the old ones of Germany, and that day in the desert, as well as new ones.

  Of Susa screaming and reaching for me, her hand slipping out of mine every time before she’s pulled into an abyss where I can hear her screaming and can’t reach her.

  Can’t save her.

  Can’t keep her safe and protect her, the way I promised I would.

  I cannot make myself admit that I’ll never again stare into her blue eyes. Don’t want to admit I’ll never hear her sweet moans as I make her come.

  Refuse to admit that my heart breaks even more knowing the three of us will never become parents.

  That it’s Owen’s most secret dream, and one I can no longer make come true for him, shatters my already shredded heart into a million jagged pieces.

  * * * *

  It’s the middle of the night when my personal phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but I groggily answer anyway because I’m not sure who I gave this number to over the past three weeks. I’ve gotten used to hanging up on reporters.

  “Carter Wilson.”

  At first, I have difficulty understanding the caller and his accent when the man hurriedly introduces himself. It’s more my exhaustion and just-awakened state than his thickly accented English.

  Yet it’s his next words that send a jolt of adrenaline pinballing through my system.

  “I have positive news about your wife, Mr. Wilson. She has been recovered, and is being transported now with others.”

  At first I think the man is fucking with me. As much as I’m desperate to at least recover Susa’s body to bring her home so Owen and I can have her cremated and keep her with us in some small way, I know the chances of them ever finding her or the other fifty-plus passengers who are still unaccounted for is slim to none, at this point. Not this long out. I only hope she died quickly and didn’t suffer.

  I hope she died knowing how much we desperately loved her.

  That there will never be another woman in our lives.

  I close my eyes and struggle to process the caller’s words, what he’s saying not quite piercing through my exploding grief. I don’t know why he thinks his news is worthy of the label “positive,” but whatever. I’m sure his English is way better than my Filipino, or whatever language he grew up speaking here, so I probably have zero room to talk.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t understand you,” I say, finally interrupting his increasingly agitated monologue. I’m still hung up on his first sentence after he introduced himself. “Can you please start over and repeat what the first thing was you said?”

  “Susannah Evans. Your wife. She and others are being transported by boat to Bandar Seri Begawan. They arrive, maybe six hours, maybe seven.”

  I’m too ragged and raw. I close my eyes, the sob escaping me. Closure, at least, can happen now. Owen and I will always grieve her.

  Now how to break the news to my boy?

  “Thank you,” I manage to choke out. “What do we have to do now? To claim her body?”

  I’ve been expecting this, but not really thinking I’d have it, especially three weeks out. I figured we’d be planning a public memorial for her with nothing but pictures to celebrate her life, and—

  “She asked for you.”

  I’m not sure if my heart’s actually stopped or not.

  “What?” I’m thinking this idiot obviously doesn’t know English as well as he thinks he does, and how cruel of him to fuck with me like this.

  “She ask for you,” he insists.

  I finally force myself to sit up, feet on the floor, my body protesting as I do. I rub my forehead against the massive headache I’m almost hoping is an aneurysm so it damn well kills me right fucking now.

  “Look, dude, I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but—”

  “She is alive. They find her and others alive. Your wife, Susannah Evans.”

  “What?” I know I scream it, but I’m wide awake now, adrenaline spiking my pulse in a way it hasn’t since that day in the desert so many years ago before the car bomb forced my life into an unanticipated direction. Or the day at the school, when I had to be a soldier again.

  I’m standing now, with no memory of even getting out of bed. “What do you mean she’s alive?”

  “Alive. She and four others. Please, pack quickly. We send bus to hotel for you and other families within hour. We will fly you there. Please, wait downstairs in meeting room. Mr. Ocampo to arrive shortly to talk details. He is en route.”

  “Okay.” I can’t think. “Okay. Alive? Okay. Wait, alive? Really? Are-are you sure it’s her?”

  I will absolutely fucking track down and rage-murder this fucker with my goddamned bare fucking hands if it fucking turns out he’s fucking wrong about her fucking identity and it’s someone else.

  Fuck.

  “Yes! Susannah Evans. They are on fishing vessel.
Rescued off island. Please, hurry, Mr. Wilson. Mr. Ocampo asks no press yet. No press. Please. He talk to families first.”

  “I…thank you. Thank you, I will. Thank you!”

  The line goes dead and I’m still holding my phone to my ear, trying to…process.

  Alive?

  She’s alive!

  I slump onto the bed and my hands are trembling so badly I can’t manage to get my goddamned phone to open my contacts. I finally have to use voice commands to ask Siri to call Owen’s personal cell phone for me.

  My whole body is shaking. When Owen answers, I’m already crying. Now, hearing the sound of his voice, I completely crumple.

  Sobbing.

  Poor Owen probably assumes the worse when he hears my voice, but before he can ask me anything, I’m babbling. “Where are you? Right now. Where are you?”

  “Sir?” He sounds confused by my question, so I clarify, the bastard extraordinaire making a brief appearance.

  “Where the fuck are you, boy?” I scream.

  “I’m in my offi—”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, S—”

  “Alive.” I choke up saying it. “She’s alive. They found her alive! They just called me and told me to pack, that they’re going to fly us to where they are. They found five people alive, and she’s one of them!”

  I know it’s the stress, but I start giggling when I hear his choked sobs.

  “A-alive? Are you sure?”

  “The guy said he is. Also said not to notify any press yet. I honestly don’t know where the fuck he said they’re taking them, they’re on a fishing boat or something. Rescued off an island. I’ve got to get packed and meet everyone downstairs. Ocampo’s on his way over to talk to us. It’s the middle of the night here, and he woke me up.” I’m babbling again, and I know it.

  Alive!

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Owen

  Thank god I’m in my office with the door closed when I receive Carter’s call. From the way Carter had been crying when I answered, I was absolutely certain this was not the news he was going to drop on me.