Touching Down

by Nicole Williams

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked after a minute.

  “Despite whatever’s come between us, you have always been and will always remain the closest thing to family I’ve ever had.” He leaned in the slightest bit closer, making my lungs catch when I felt the warmth of his breath on my mouth. “You’re the reason I have Charlie.”

  “Well, I can’t take all of the credit. You were there too.” As something that almost resembled a smirk pulled at his expression, my eyebrow lifted.

  “You’re not dying, Ryan Hale.” His eyes burned with the ardency of his words.

  “You might be hot shit, but not even all of your power and influence can change what’s going to happen.”

  His head cocked like he was challenging me on that. “I survived eighteen years with an abusive dad. I graduated high school and college with half a brain. I made it seven years without going back to the booze. I think I’m more than capable of kicking death’s ass.”

  “I DON’T KNOW why everyone complains about airplanes being so uncomfortable. I could sleep in this seat every single night,” Charlie announced, reclining in her seat beside me for the hundredth time. We were almost to New York, and the novelty of her first flight still hadn’t worn off.

  “Well, not everyone gets to sit in seats as nice as the ones Grant got us.”

  As the flight attendant came by again with a snack basket, I shook my head. Charlie went with the opposite response.

  “What do you want this time?” I fought my smile, guessing she was making her fourth or fifth snack basket selection. Usually, I was more conscientious about what I let her eat, but this was her first flight and I was indulging her accordingly. Plus, it was strange the way death made a person reevaluate the way they lived. Did that extra junk food really matter in the end?

  The answer was no. It didn’t.

  “Pretzels, please,” Charlie decided after a moment’s deliberation.

  “Again?” I thanked the flight attendant as he handed the bag of pretzels and a napkin to me before moving to the next aisle. “A dozen snacks to choose from and you pick your third bag of pretzels?”

  “Yeah, but these are airplane pretzels. They taste better.” Charlie shrugged, taking the bag from me and ripping it open. Trying to prove her point, she held one out for me to try.

  My appetite had been poor lately and was totally gone whenever I flew, but I still let her pop the pretzel twist into my mouth. “You are so very right, Charlie-Bird. Airplane pretzels are the bee’s knees.”

  She gave a little giggle. “You’re so weird, Mom.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  As Charlie worked on her fresh bag of pretzels, I let my mind wander. It was so rare that I had a few minutes to just “be” that it felt like a luxury whenever I had the chance, even if it was just a few stolen seconds. I was usually too preoccupied planning for the future to let myself settle into the present, especially now, but ever since Grant had agreed to take care of Charlie when I no longer could, the future wasn’t so pressing.

  Now that she was taken care of, the future only held the promise of the long and painful process of losing myself, one independence at a time. The future was already written for me and there was nothing I could do to escape it, so I devoted myself to escaping worrying about the future instead.

  After Grant had left the next morning to head back to New York, he’d immediately taken care of everything that had to do with getting Charlie and me moved. From having a cab pick us up two days later for our early morning flight, to having a moving company take care of my belongings we couldn’t bring on the plane, to getting our first class tickets and arranging for transportation once we landed in New York. The only thing I’d had to do was pack our suitcases and show up.

  “Hey, Mom?”

  “Hey, yeah?” I turned my head toward her, smiling when I found her clutching the football Grant had given her like she did her old, ratty teddy bear.

  “What do you think I should call Grant?”

  Her question required some thought before I could answer. “What do you think you should call him?”

  She crunched that question out with a pretzel. “I think I should call him Grant, because I just met him, and he is Grant Turner, arguably the best player in professional football today.”

  The corners of my mouth twitched. “Arguably.”

  “But he’s also my dad, so I think I could also call him Dad and be in the clear too. It’s a hard call.” She leaned into the window, staring out of it like she was waiting for an answer to appear in the clouds.

  “Well? What do you want to call him?”

  Charlie breathed against the window, fogging it up. “Dad.” She shrugged. “I want to call him Dad. I don’t want to be one of those kids who calls their parents by their first names. That’s just weird.”

  When she glanced over for support, I raised my hands. “Heaven forbid.”

  Her nose scrunched up a little. “Do you think he’d mind?”

  My hand found hers and wound around it. “I know he wouldn’t.”

  I didn’t feel the tremor hit me until it was rocking my body. It came out of nowhere, hard and violent. Most of my bouts of chorea had been more isolated—manifesting in my hands or feet—but this one spasmed through my whole body. Charlie’s hand slipped through mine in the process. Even though the shaking passed quickly, it wasn’t quick enough.

  She looked over at me, blinking with worried eyes as she looked ready to leap onto her chair and start screaming for a doctor. “Mom?”

  “I’m okay.” I forced a smile, exhaled a slow breath. “I’m just cold.”

  Charlie’s eyebrows pinched together as she ran her palm up and down my bare arm. “No, you’re not. You’re warm.”

  She had a point . . .

  “Sometimes I just get a little nervous flying. I’m okay. Don’t worry.” I leaned over to kiss her forehead, pasting on the unconcerned look every parent had mastered. The one we learned so we didn’t scare our kids when we ourselves were shitting our pants.

  “You told me flying doesn’t make you nervous,” she argued, still looking at me like she was worried.

  “Well, I changed my mind. Especially when I’m fairly confident you just consumed the last bag of pretzels on this plane when there’s still thirty minutes left of flight time. The other passengers might mutiny. Make us walk the plank right out into the clouds.”

  By the time I was done, all concern had been drained from Charlie’s face. Instead of her frown of doubt, she was grinning. “Mom? You’re weird.”

  I wound my arm behind her neck and pulled her to me. “You’re welcome.”

  LA GUARDIA AIRPORT WAS far less harrowing than I’d envisioned. I’d only flown once before—into the Portland airport—and when people talked about flying into New York, they described elbow-to-elbow terminals and mile-wide luggage carousels.

  It was far more manageable than I’d guessed. If only every challenge in life could follow the same example. I’d just managed to snag our last piece of luggage from the carousel and was scanning the overhead signs in hopes of finding one that would indicate what direction the taxis were in. I had the address of the place Grant had arranged for us to stay at, and I was looking forward to getting there and kicking my feet up after a long day of travel.

  “Okay, Charlie, I want you to hang onto my sleeve and not let go. I don’t care if you rip it off, just don’t let go, okay? We need to find where the taxis are.” I glanced down at Charlie, who had a totally unaffected look on her face, like she was a jet-setter already at the ripe old age of seven.

  When I looked back up, I noticed a half circle of people holding signs with names on them. One of them had R. Hale listed on it. I knew there had to have been hundreds of R. Hales in the States and any number of them dashing around one of the biggest airports in the country today, but the man was looking at me with expectation on his face.

  “Miss Hale?” he said when I took a couple of steps closer.

&n
bsp; I shrugged like I wasn’t sure if that was or wasn’t my name.

  “And the other Miss Hale?” The man smiled down at Charlie.

  “Actually, it’s Miss Hale—”

  I cut Charlie off before she could say anything more. I’d given her both mine and Grant’s last names when she’d been born. To the hospital staff on the other side of the country, the last name Turner didn’t mean a thing, but here in New York, the name Turner could come with a degree of recognition. I guessed this man somehow knew Grant was involved in having us picked up from the airport, so I didn’t exactly want my daughter announcing her last name as Hale-Turner. We didn’t need the media finding out about Grant Turner’s love child.

  We had enough to deal with at the present moment.

  “Let me get those for you.” The man folded up the sign and tucked it into his pocket before reaching for the suitcases.

  “I’m sorry, but who arranged for this?” I asked as politely as I could.

  “Mr. Turner did,” he answered as if it should have been obvious. “If you’ll just follow me, we don’t have far to go.”

  When he started weaving through the crowd shuffling through the airport, I followed him, holding onto Charlie’s hand as though someone was going to come along any second and try to rip her away.

  “Are you a driver?” I asked.

  His head shook. “No, I’m the manager at the local Mercedes dealership.”

  My forehead creased. I guessed that explained why he had on a Mercedes-Benz polo shirt.

  “Can I ask why Gra—”—I caught myself and cleared my throat—“Mr. Turner would have you meet us at the airport?”

  When he glanced back at me, it felt like he was trying to gauge if I was messing with him. When he saw I was serious, he pulled something out of his pocket right before he came to a stop outside at a loading area.

  “Because Mr. Turner wanted me to drop off your car for you.” He propped the suitcases up before motioning at the glossy white car in front of us.

  It was nice. Like, the kind of nice you see speeding down the road and take a second look at, but never the kind of nice you imagine you’ll ever get close to—let alone close enough to drive.

  “I don’t understand,” was all I could say as the man held out the keys for me.

  When I didn’t move to take them, Charlie sighed and took them instead.

  “Mr. Turner purchased this car last night. Everything’s been taken care of. There’s an extra key inside, the owner’s manual, and your title and registration will arrive in a few weeks.”

  I shifted, staring at the car with confused eyes. “Grant Turner purchased this?”

  The man was trying so hard not to give me a funny look, but I guessed I deserved one. What he was saying was fairly obvious, but I was having a difficult time wrapping my head around it.

  Growing up, Grant hadn’t been able to afford a new pair of shoes. And now he was spending god only knew how many thousands of dollars on a Mercedes-Benz?

  “That’s correct. Grant Turner purchased this for a Miss Ryan Hale, with instructions to meet you here today to drop it off.”

  Another person with the same Mercedes emblem on his polo shirt was sitting in the driver’s seat. Mercedes. I equated that brand with doctors and movie stars, certainly not the Ryan Hales of the world. My current car was twenty years old and had just passed the two-hundred-thousand-mile mark. The seats were fabric and threadbare, more of the paint chipping off than still on.

  “He bought this for me?”

  Charlie shook her head at my question, but the kind man remained patient. It was just a strange thing to find out someone had bought me a car out of the blue. A nice car.

  “He did, and might I add that he made a very fine choice.” The man shouldered up beside me like he was telling me a secret. “An S-series sedan. The nicest vehicle we had on the lot.”

  Charlie crept closer to the car, her eyes going big when she saw the backseat. She had enough space back there to do cartwheels.

  “Safe too?” I asked, the mom in me surfacing.

  “You’d be hard-pressed to find something safer.” The man moved to open the back door. “Mr. Turner wasn’t sure if your daughter would still be in any kind of car or booster seat, so he picked up both just to be safe. They’re in the trunk, but I’m going to go off of my grandparent knowledge and guess she’s a booster?” The man lifted his brow at me, waiting for my confirmation.

  “A booster,” I breathed, feeling so many emotions all at once that I couldn’t sort through them to decide which was the most dominant.

  Overwhelmed, grateful, surprised . . . even sadness, though in a lesser degree. Sadness because, as grand as this gift was and as good and as decent of a spot as I knew it had come from, it was one I wouldn’t get much, if any, use from.

  “Mr. Turner guessed you wouldn’t want to navigate through New York City traffic on your first day here, so we arranged to have Jeremy here drive you and your daughter to your destination. If that is acceptable to you?”

  While he went around to the trunk to pull out the booster seat, Charlie leapt into the backseat like she was diving into a ball pit. “This is awesome!”

  After I’d wheeled the suitcases back toward the trunk, the man exchanged the booster seat for the luggage. “Jeremy will drive you to the address Mr. Turner gave us, and I will meet you all there to pick him up. Is there anything else I can do for you right now, Miss Hale?”

  The booster seat in my hand, the brand-new, fancy car purring in front of me, my daughter’s future secured and settled on—I couldn’t imagine anything else in the world I needed right then.

  “Thank you for everything.” I smiled before ducking into the back with Charlie and getting her booster situated.

  She was playing with buttons and mirrors and lights—there felt like there were a hundred of them—and squealing over every last one.

  “First Mercedes?” The driver, Jeremy, glanced back at us in the rearview mirror before pulling away from the car.

  Charlie and I exchanged a look. She didn’t know what a Mercedes was and I hoped she never grew up to care about those types of things, but she did know this was different from the old car we’d been puttering around in, sometimes chanting positive words when it took a few tries to start.

  “Yes,” I answered finally. “My first.”

  “You sure are lucky, ma’am.”

  Relaxing into the backseat, I looked at Charlie. She was swinging her legs, clutching her football, and staring out the window at the big wide world of New York City, her new home. She already looked like she belonged here.

  “Yeah, I really am.”

  “IS THIS A mansion?” Charlie reached across the seat and gave me a little shake when the car rolled to a stop. The traffic would take some time getting used to. It had taken us close to an hour to go fifteen miles.

  “What do you mean?” I asked absently, scrolling through the email my doctor in Portland had sent me with a list of neurologists in New York City who specialized in Huntington’s. There were a lot, which was awesome, except I knew none of them could change my prognosis.

  “Man. Sion.” Charlie turned my head, so I was looking out the window she was gaping out of.

  I gaped with her. I thought we’d stopped at another endless traffic light, but we hadn’t. We’d stopped in front of a house.

  Or as Charlie liked to call it—a Man. Sion.

  “Well, is it?” Charlie rolled her window down and stuck her head out as far as it would go, inspecting the structure before us.

  “Yes, this is a mansion,” I answered, leaning toward the driver. “Did we make a wrong turn?”

  Jeremy gave me a funny look. “Nope. We’re here.”

  “We’re here?” I repeated. “Where’s here?”

  Tapping the navigation screen with the address on it, he read, “Fifteen-twelve Legacy Lane.” Then he opened the door and stepped out.

  “Oh my gosh. This is it? This is where we get to live
?” Charlie had her seat belt undone and was shoving out of the door before I’d regained muscle memory.

  I double-checked that the address Grant had texted me a couple of days ago was the same one listed on the car’s navigation, was the same one hanging above the wide double doors at the front of the house. It was.

  “Is this . . .?” I managed as I slid out the same door Charlie had.

  She was busy sprinting around, checking out the different flower beds dotted around the property.

  “Grant Turner’s estate? Yeah, it sure is.” Jeremy was lifting our luggage out of the trunk but paused a moment to inspect the place. “Not too bad for playing football, right?”

  I smiled but didn’t answer—I was still trying to recover from the car, the mansion, and that Grant had brought us here instead of to a house he’d rented for us. Hell, I was still trying to catch up on the last couple of weeks and all that had happened. Moving from Oregon to Texas to New York. Telling Grant that he had a child, introducing them, admitting the reason why, agreeing to move up here with him. Life was going too fast, and it made me panic. I didn’t have my eighties to look forward to the way most of my peers had—I had years left in my hourglass. Months of actual enjoyable life where I was still mostly in control of my body and mind.

  If life kept moving at this rate . . .

  I wouldn’t think about it. Dreading what was coming didn’t change the inevitability of it. It didn’t change the future, but it could lessen the happiness I had in my present.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss Hale?” Jeremy asked after he’d wheeled our suitcases up to the front door and handed me the second key to the car.

  Besides Grant Turner in front of me right this moment so I could ask him what the hell he was thinking?

  “No, thank you so much.”

  I smiled as he walked down the driveway toward the manager’s car, waving good-bye to Charlie. She was still frolicking through the front yard, beelining toward the massive fountain she’d just caught sight of. Unbelievable. A fountain practically the size of a tennis court. I didn’t know why that was what hit me the most when everything else staggered around the estate was just as impressive, but it did. Grant and I had been almost hauled away by the cops one night when we jumped into a public fountain outside of The Clink, and now, he owned one twice the size of that one.