Flying

by Megan Hart

  Stella pressed Gage’s pillow to her face, but there was no smell of him. Nothing left. Something twisted and broke inside her at this, though it was no surprise. She clutched it and waited to be overtaken again by her tears, but there weren’t any left. She’d worn herself out.

  Stella curled up on Gage’s bed, the pillow beneath her head. She slept almost at once.

  * * *

  She woke in the morning feeling a little as if she’d been hit in the face with a shovel. All over her body, as a matter of fact, all her normal aches and pains somehow exacerbated and emphasized as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to force herself to her feet. Stella scrubbed at her face and pushed herself up with a wince.

  In the pale light of morning, Gage’s room looked so much smaller than she remembered. Stella went to the dresser, running her fingertips along the dust on the surface. His collection of toy cars was still lined up along the back of it, though there were empty places in the lineup. Tristan had taken those cars, and Stella closed her eyes against a fresh spate of tears that threatened to pull her under.

  She’d lost Gage to an accident, but she’d lost Tristan to her own stupidity and selfishness.

  Stella looked around the room, feeling sick to her stomach again. For more than ten years she’d left this room untouched, not as a monument or a memorial, but as a punishment to herself. And even that had grown into self-indulgence.

  Sorrow is as insidious as water; if left to its own methods it will fill in every crack and crevice. Water can break apart rocks and sorrow can break a person. Stella’s sorrow had worked its way into every part of her and had tried to drown her, but it had not yet completely broken her.

  It was too early to be awake, but she didn’t want to sleep anymore. Not in this bed, this room. Stella rubbed her face over and over until she scrubbed the dreams away, but still yawning, she went down the hall to her own room. She sat for a moment on the edge of her bed, contemplating snuggling under her own blankets or getting into a scalding shower. She’d set her alarm the night before, and if she were going back to sleep, it would wake her in an hour. She took her phone off the alarm clock dock to switch the settings, and noticed the text that had come in sometime during the night.

  Of course it would be from Matthew.

  Of course all it would say was HEY.

  Because it would impossible for him to tell her he missed her, right? That he’d been thinking of her late at night, watching his phone for a message from her, disappointed when nothing came? He certainly couldn’t tell her that, could he?

  And it was ludicrous of her to expect it from him, Stella thought as her fingers hovered over the phone’s keyboard, typing out a reply she then swiped to delete. She knew that man inside and out, upside and down, and it only made her the asshole to expect him to change.

  She either loved him the way he was, which was no good for her, or she stopped loving him. But there’s the problem with love—also like water, it works its way into every crack and crevice of a person, and it can break you worse than any sorrow. She couldn’t stop herself from loving him, not just like that with a snap of fingers and an iron will, but she could refuse to let it break her.

  She needed Matthew right now, but reaching for him would only start them both on that same old tumble down the rabbit hole. No Wonderland at the bottom. Only rough and jagged rocks, only dank, dark water. Only frustration. Only grief. Only that sharp and biting love that ate her from the inside out.

  Stella deleted Matthew’s message without answering.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jeff had insisted Tristan attend counseling, which Stella didn’t entirely oppose. Enforcing the visits to the counselor as a requirement for Tristan living in Jeff’s house, however, she found utterly despicable and yet so typical of her ex-husband that all she could do when she found out was shake her head. Because Tristan had been grounded from his car for coming home too late—a punishment she did approve of, even if Jeff’s other ideas were lame—Stella picked up her son after the session to take him to dinner. She found him sullen, nails bitten to the quick, unable to look at her. When she’d asked him how the session went, the truth came out of him in a choked, desperate voice that made her want to weep in sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know he was making you go. I thought you wanted to.”

  “I don’t.”

  She’d pulled into the parking lot of his favorite burger joint, but now stared ahead, thinking hard. Her relationship with her son had faltered and misstepped, and navigating it was like tiptoeing through a mine field. But she was still his mother. He was still her son. That had to mean something, even among all the mess.

  “I’m sorry, Tristan. For all of this. I know I’ve been a really shit mom.” She took a deep breath. Cleared her throat. “I know you think I wasn’t giving you enough attention because of my relationship with Matthew—”

  His laugh stopped her. “No.”

  She looked at him. “No?”

  “I was glad you had a boyfriend.”

  “You were?” Frowning, she twisted in the front seat toward him.

  Tristan hesitated, then nodded. “Well...I mean, it was sort of gross, but yeah. And I know I gave you a hard time about it, but...I didn’t want you to be alone, Mom. Dad has Cynthia. And then, you know, I met Mandy. I didn’t want you to be alone, especially ’cause I’m going off to college in a couple years. I just didn’t like him because he was an asshole.”

  “Oh.” Stella blinked, then burst into startled laughter. “Oh, God. Tristan, he wasn’t. I mean, he was, he could be, but...”

  “He made you go there all the time. And he ignored you.” At her next startled look, Tristan shrugged. “I could tell. He was a jerk to you.”

  “Sometimes. Yes. He could be.”

  “He made you happy sometimes, though. Didn’t he? So I’m sorry you guys broke up. And you’re not a shit mother.” Tristan’s voice cracked. “You’re kind of the best mom. I mean, even though you get on my case about a lot of stuff, you also leave me alone to make my own decisions and things. You let me be my own person.”

  How had this happened? This boy in front of her, how had she and Jeff managed to make this? When the pair of them had done everything wrong, how had Tristan still turned out so right?

  “You don’t have to go back to counseling if you don’t want to. I don’t care what your dad says. I’ll talk to him about it.”

  Tristan hesitated, then nodded, looking out the window. “It’s not so bad. But maybe you and Dad should come in with me too, sometimes. You don’t have to do it together.”

  “If you want me to... If you need me to do that, I will.”

  He gave her a smile, a small one, but it was enough.

  “Hey, what do you say instead of junkie burgers, I take you home and we can have lasagna? I made a pan last week. I can defrost some. We can rent a movie too.” Stella took a brave breath; this was more anxiety-making than asking a new guy out on a date. She braced herself for rejection, but instead Tristan smiled wider.

  “Can we rent The Resurrected? It’s supposed to be bad-ass.”

  “Zombies,” Stella said. “Ugh. But okay.”

  Dinner was consumed—it was hard to believe that she’d forgotten how much he could eat, but she had. The movie turned out to be excellent. It was getting to be time to take him back to Jeff’s, something she was not looking forward to at all and Tristan didn’t seem to be either.

  “Can I just stay here tonight?”

  She kept herself from grinning, not wanting to make this a big deal. “Sure. Of course. Anytime.”

  Following him upstairs a few minutes later, Stella paused in the hallway to stare past Tristan’s open door to the one that was closed. She knocked on his doorframe. “Hey. So, listen... Tomorrow I have som
ething I think we should do together.”

  * * *

  It took them only a few hours to clear away what had been a small boy’s lifetime. The clothes she donated to charity. Tristan took a few of the books, a couple toys, but as Stella sorted through boxes of building blocks and toy cars, she was surprised to learn she had no desire to hold on to any of it.

  Gage had owned these bits and pieces; Gage had loved them. She had loved Gage. There could be no substitute for the loss of her son in the keeping of his things.

  She had to let it all go.

  Tristan put his hand on her shoulder when he saw her weeping. He knelt beside her. “I miss him too. Dad won’t talk about him. You never wanted to talk about him either, but Dad... He makes it like Gage never existed. At all.”

  “People grieve in all different ways, Tristan. I’m sorry for letting my issues get in the way of you being able to talk about your brother.” Stella drew in a hitching breath, wishing the tears in her throat would escape so she could be rid of them.

  Tristan sat with a toy car missing a wheel in his hand. “He liked this one a lot. I always wanted to play with it, but he wouldn’t let me. It’s just junk now.”

  “You can keep it if you want to,” she told him.

  Tristan looked at it, then nodded and tucked it in his pocket. “Remember when we used to play superheroes? He always let me be Batman, even though he was older.”

  “He always held your hand when you crossed the street,” Stella said on another surge of tears. “You hated it, but he always made sure you were safe.”

  Tristan nodded, staring at the carpet for a moment before looking at her with tears in his own eyes. “Once, on the playground, some bigger kids tried to push me down, and Gage punched one in the nose.”

  “I never knew that,” Stella said.

  “He made me promise not to tell, because you’d have yelled at him for fighting.”

  But inside, she’d have been proud of him, Stella thought. For protecting his baby brother. She’d have scolded him for fighting, but she’d have been proud of him too.

  “I miss him, Mom. But sometimes I don’t really remember him. It’s like I’ve been an only child my whole life. I know I wasn’t, but it feels like that.” Tristan hitched out an embarrassed sob and covered his face. “I’m a shitty brother.”

  “No,” she said, pulling him closer. “No, honey. You are not a shitty anything. You were a great brother to Gage, and you are the best son I could ever ask for. You don’t have to remember him every single minute to keep him in your heart. And it’s okay, sometimes, if you don’t think about him at all. Loving someone doesn’t mean you have to make your whole life about remembering him.”

  Then he hugged her, and Stella hugged him back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The phone rang, of course, when Stella was wrung out, exhausted from the day of dealing with Gage’s room. The trunk of her car overflowed with bags and boxes of things she was donating to charity, and she’d thrown a lot of it away. Tristan had put a few things in his room, an act that had given Stella hope he might decide to come home permanently, but which she didn’t dare mention in case it urged him to be more adamant about staying with his dad. He’d gone back to Jeff’s an hour before.

  She wasn’t ready for Matthew’s call, but she answered it anyway.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She wanted to tell him to fuck off, but all she said was hi.

  He talked then. Several minutes of bland chatter that set her teeth on edge and made her head pound. It was nonsense. It was nothing.

  “Enough,” she told him. “You call me up after all this time, you want to talk about the weather? Sorry, I’m busy. What do you really want?”

  He sighed. “I want to come to see you.”

  “No,” she said immediately. “And also, fuck you, Matthew.”

  He was silent but did not disconnect. She could have, but waited for him to be the one to end it. Instead, Matthew sighed again.

  Voice rasping, he said, “Stella, I have to tell you something that’s really hard to say.”

  She waited. He said nothing. She waited some more.

  “I can’t fly,” Matthew said.

  Stella didn’t sit so much as her knees gave out and she folded onto her couch. For an evil moment she thought he’d somehow found out about all the times she’d flown, what the term had always meant, privately, to her. “What?”

  “I can’t fly. I’m not capable of it. I...I was a pilot,” Matthew said. “Something happened.”

  “I’m listening,” Stella said when he fell silent again.

  Matthew began to speak.

  * * *

  “There was nothing different about the day. I got up. Ate breakfast. I kissed my wife and girls goodbye, and caught a cab to the airport. I was going to be gone just for the day, a quick turnaround with an overnight stay. Nothing I hadn’t done a hundred times, a thousand times.

  “I had no reason to suspect anything bad might happen. The weather was good on both ends of the flight. My crew was one I’d worked with so many times we’d become a family. The only difference was that I’d been at my buddy’s birthday party the night before. I’d been drinking, but I wasn’t wasted or anything like that. A little hungover, but nothing serious. A headache. A little tired. And I had a little bit of a cold coming on.

  “We were on the approach to Philly a few hours after sunset. My first officer and I were talking about where we wanted to grab dinner when the first bird strike happened. We both looked at each other like ‘what the hell—’

  “That’s when the rest of the flock hit us.

  “You never think a bird can do so much damage to a plane, even a Canada goose, which is big. A bird, right? Against a plane?

  “Usually a bird strike is one, maybe two. Later, they counted more than ten strikes. The mechanics who worked on the plane said they’d never seen that many strikes at once, but all we knew at the time was that something was hitting us, and we couldn’t see what it was.

  “My first officer reacted first. He’s the one who shouted, ‘Geese.’ He’s the one who started the emergency protocols while I sat there like an idiot for a minute and a half. You don’t think that’s a long time, a minute and a half, but count it out while you’re in a plane, in the dark, losing one of your engines, and you’ll see it’s both an eternity and a heartbeat.

  “Jim was looking at me like I was a ghost, and I could see him talking, but it was like I couldn’t hear him. I knew he was making sounds, but nothing made sense. He was looking to me to take over, to get it under control, and I sat there without doing a damn thing. He shut off the engine that had been compromised, but we had no idea if the other engine was okay. We could smell smoke, but there was no sign of fire. All we knew was that we’d been struck repeatedly, that we’d lost an engine, that we had to get safely to the ground.

  “Because we were on approach and the birds hit all at once, the rocking of the plane got passed off as the landing gear coming down too hard and some turbulence. I could’ve done so much more in that minute and a half. I know it. I should’ve. But I froze. All those simulations, the training, everything I’d prepared to handle...and I couldn’t make myself move. All I thought about was how this was it. Everyone on this plane, everyone who’d entrusted themselves to me, all of us were going to die, and it would be my fault because I hadn’t been able to get my shit together in time. I’d left it up to someone else, when it was my responsibility, and now we were all going to die.

  “When I finally managed to get my shit together, we went through the rest of the emergency protocols without any problems. My first officer radioed ahead to be met by the fire department. We alerted the passengers of a possible issue. And then we white-knuckled that plane to the ground.

  “Only two people were hu
rt, and that was from improperly stowed carry-on baggage. That can happen even on a regular bumpy descent. But still, they got hurt because of me.

  “It took a year for that plane to be put back on the line. That’s how much damage it took. If it had taken us only a few minutes longer to react, if we hadn’t been on the approach, if we’d been in a regional jet, if my first officer hadn’t been so on the ball... If, if, if. If any one of those things had been different, we’d have crashed.

  “Nobody thinks about how little keeps a plane in the air until you see how little it would take to knock it out. I’d always known, of course. You don’t get your commercial pilot’s license without knowing it. But knowing and experiencing it are two different things, and all I could think of after that night was everything that could’ve gone wrong and about how long it had taken me to take charge and do my job. All I could think of was how it felt to know there was something wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. And what would happen the next time I had to react? What if the next time I didn’t make it at all, or I was with someone who didn’t pick up my slack?

  “What if the next time, I killed myself and everyone on board that plane?

  “I took a medical leave two years ago. I went on extended disability a year ago. That’s when I started teaching adult ed.

  “I haven’t flown since.

  “I can’t.”

  * * *

  “Is that why you asked me if my ex had been a pilot?” Stella asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Stella’s head pounded. She wanted to get off the couch and pace but couldn’t make herself. Shudders twitched her until she pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped herself in it. Her teeth chattered.

  “Everything turned out all right,” she said after half a minute. “You saved them. You didn’t choke. You landed the plane.”