Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  When Grace catches a glimpse of her swept hair in the side mirror, she cries out in mock horror and rolls up the window. They’re within range to catch the FM rock station out of Poughkeepsie playing some tracks off Harvest. With the gaps of an organic four count and the natural album order of the songs, Suzy recognizes that they’re just playing the record straight through. Which starts Grace singing without a thought.

  During a track she’s bored with, she says, “This goes right with the drive.”

  “The right amount of glumness,” Suzy says.

  “I barely even know what they’re saying except that Ontario sounds worse than upstate New York.”

  “I think that’s basically what he’s saying.”

  “I do miss summers,” Grace says. “I miss camp. I miss Dad in summer—ditching work to take us to the lake.”

  “Mom still maintains she prefers winter. She prefers the clothes.”

  “That about sums it up, right?”

  “Labor Days, piled up in the yard, leaning on Dad as he let us just bask in our sadness about the start of school, him sadder than us, just dying that it was the last night, that there were already fewer bugs,” Suzy says. “How he’d call that heat in September, he’d say it had a ‘cold edge’—that just bummed me out. And Mom would be in the house putting up the winter candles in the windows already.”

  “Next track’s a little groovier.”

  “We need something stupid,” Suzy says. “We need ‘The lime in the coconut…’. We’re getting sucked into the Sad Canada vibes.”

  The sun’s still putting out heat as they pass Binghamton, and Grace tells Suzy a story about a boy she went on some dates with but never brought home, a boy a year younger than Suzy is now, twenty-one at the time, who’d already been to Vietnam and was back after six months with a leg broken in all these places that wouldn’t heal fast enough for him to stick around the war. Who seemed pretty all right, hadn’t had any buddies who’d died or anything, but spent his free afternoons calling for the kill sheets out of Saigon.

  “It wasn’t anything crazy,” Grace says. “He’d just do it when he got home like you and I check the mail. And there was nothing for a while, I guess, but one night we were on a date, and that afternoon he’d found out that basically every guy he’d lived with had been killed in some sort of ambush, confirmed deaths for almost everyone, except two, who were missing but almost certainly dead or worse. He just told me the score and then started jabbing into this chicken parm he’d ordered. But he did it that way where you hold the fork like you’re strangling it—like the guy grips the knife in Pyscho. Anyway, he just carved his dinner up into about a hundred pieces and then switched the fork over into his other hand and ate away like it was how he did it every time. And all I could fucking think of was what Mom would do if she was sitting at dinner across from him, her horror at the way he was holding his knife and cutting his meat.”

  “You weren’t thinking about the massacre?”

  “I mean, Suz, I was thinking about seriously dating this guy, and yeah, it was this awful day—but bad manners to boot. Anyway, the reason I thought of it was he was from Binghamton, that restaurant was in Binghamton. Only saw him a couple times after that.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  “Don’t know. But he’s one of the three or four boys I keep expecting to see on a flight. Just, like, the ones where I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if I leaned over with a napkin and pretzels and there he was.”

  “The ones that got away…”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was kidding.”

  “Well, I mean, he was a fox. So were the others. Foxy and lucky, apparently. That night, after he told me, after we’d barely ordered our first drink, I said, ‘Jesus, why didn’t you just cancel, I would’ve understood, I’m not a monster.’ And he said, ‘Ya know, why would I let it affect tonight when it happened ten days ago? That was the night to let it ruin things, the night it happened. They’ve been dead ten days, who am I to cry about it now?’ I wonder if he went back, if he re-upped once his leg healed.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Suzy says, “but for some reason I never run into vets in Sela.”

  “I think they’re there, they’re just maybe content with other things?”

  “It’s true—but I mean, how could that be, that you just never see them?”

  “No uniform,” Grace says. “Shirtless at the beach.”

  “I guess. Just seems like nobody even talks about it. Like, vague allusions to the body count, to Nixon. But there’s hardly ever a brother or a cousin or a best friend.”

  “J.P. had a superhigh draft number,” Grace says.

  “He told me,” Suzy says. “Maybe everyone’s charmed.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it’s the same with Watergate. Maybe, maybe somebody reads a newspaper in the morning, but no one’s exactly losing their mind about it in the streets.”

  “You sound like Mike.”

  “He must feel a little lost,” Suzy says.

  “Oh please, how can you sit around all day moaning about the absence of that sort of thing when that sort of thing is so shitty, when New York is so rotten, when Washington is investigating itself, and everything near our house is nice to look at? He doesn’t have grounds to feel sorry for himself.”

  They cross stone bridges over rivers that flow from gorges.

  “You’ve been on him a little lately.”

  “He’s been on me.”

  “Well, regardless, I feel a little too in it,” Suzy says. “I’m crowding you guys.”

  “Please, again: if you weren’t there, we’d be screaming at each other instead of whispering in our bedroom. It’s nice when you’re around for dinner. It’s chiller.”

  “What’s the issue, though?”

  “He needs a job.”

  “But he’s working every day.”

  “And if the magazine happens, great, but if it doesn’t, what else?”

  “What would he want to do?”

  “There’s a lot he wants to do. What could he do? is more like it. There are things. He could sell insurance. He could write defense grants. Something with some money and some hours. I don’t know how long it’ll be till they make me stop flying. But even if—and it’s a big if—I get away with this for another year, then in a year we will have no money, aside from, you know, the money left behind by his dad. But let’s be real. I’d love nothing more than for Mike to write a nice big moneymaking book or run a nice big moneymaking magazine. But he’s just been acting so attacked, so beaten up over the whole thing. I go out with the girls, or we go to hear music, and it’s the same thing over and over—he tries a little and then starts playing with his drink. Oil and water with all the people we meet in Sela. Even when he drives around during the day, up to Pasadena or out to Riverside, doing whatever he’s doing, looking for stories, I dunno, I just get the sense he’s desperately trying to get away from the beach. Which is something I can’t handle.”

  “You have to acknowledge that you fit in easily anywhere. You have friends who are flying. It’s the place you’re meant to be—even if there are lots of places you might be meant to be.”

  “What’s he been saying to you?”

  “I just mean—he’s trying, he tried at the party on the Fourth.”

  “And then he ate shit and scraped his knees like a five-year-old.”

  “It can be hard to be alone in a new place.”

  “Most places, yes. Not there.”

  “Mike’s a good guy. He’s a better guy than almost all the guys, certainly the ones I’ve known.”

  “You’re right. And he’s good in most of the major ways. I’m just not one to sacrifice the present whatever for the future.”

  “I know,” Suzy says.

  “I’m not one to sweat that sort of thing.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m just…I’ve just been thinking more than ever in the last
couple months.”

  “Thinking what?”

  “Listen, you’re not gonna like this. For a number of reasons. But it’s been something I’ve been meaning to tell you since my trip to visit you in New Haven. It was just always the wrong moment. Even on the beach, just the two of us, it felt wrong. And we’re not alone elsewhere that often. So now seems right, I guess, unless you don’t—”

  “Grace.”

  “In March, I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “And I got an abortion.”

  “What?”

  “In Mexico.”

  “How—how did you not tell me?”

  “It was super early, seven weeks in, is all.…”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, of course, it’s history, all right? But here’s the thing. Mike doesn’t know.”

  “Grace.”

  “I never told him.”

  “Was it his?”

  “Jesus, yes, of course. I just—if he had known, there’s no way. I mean, he doesn’t really buy in anymore, but with the way he was raised, and just wanting children—we’ve talked about it since we first started dating.”

  “But they would’ve made you stop flying.…”

  The radio has found the song Suzy was looking for during the Neil marathon. “You put de lime in de coconut, you drank ’em bot’ up.” Grace laughs—a pistol report, Suzy’s “ha”—before she frowns and her cheeks start reflecting light in streaks.

  “I wasn’t ready. I want to be a mom. I could be a mom now. But I wasn’t ready to stop. This job is the only thing I’ve ever loved doing. I wasn’t like you. I didn’t have racing and reading and college. I loved listening to music, but that was others doing the thing and me admiring it. This is something I do. This is the thing I’m good at. Nobody flies forever. But once it’s over, I’m never going to do anything this me again.”

  “That’s not true at all,” Suzy says, though she’s worried it might be. She’s as uncertain about Grace’s future as she is about her own. Nothing beyond their stints of stewing besides the whole infinite world.…But also the limitations that come with that world. Grace has picked her lane, but it has the capacity to vanish as easily as she found it.

  “It is,” Grace says. “Or whatever, maybe it isn’t, but it’s what I feel. And I just couldn’t bear to give that up yet. So I went with a couple girls down to Tijuana.”

  “I can’t fucking believe that part.”

  “It wasn’t an issue. It was easy. It was clean. Walked over the border—the border’s a turnstile there. It cost a hundred bucks and the guy spoke English and the nurses were nice and we were on the beach in Encinitas by the afternoon.”

  “And then what?”

  “What do you mean? We stayed the night at somebody’s friend’s house and we drove back in the morning and Mike was none the wiser. I told him I was on the rag and that he should switch his brand of rubbers.”

  Grace’s face is drying. She’s sitting upright, glancing out the window with complete composure.

  “You seem remarkably cool about it,” Suzy says.

  “It was something that happened four months ago. That was the time to be upset. Nothing left to deal with now. Just hang on to the job for as long as I can.”

  “You’re allowed to talk about it, you know.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. But please don’t give me that look.”

  “It’s just…Grace, you’re allowed to be upset now, even if it did happen four months ago.”

  “Funny thing, thinking back again, about that dinner and that guy and what happened afterward. I moved to New York, dated some, met Mike. It feels like it happened fast even though it didn’t, like there was almost a straight line from him to Mike.”

  “And that one you brought home to Mom and Dad,” Suzy says.

  “Mike Singer was born to be brought home to Mom and Dad.”

  The turnoff from Route 17 comes fast but familiar, and before Suzy’s tapped the brakes, they’re downtown, on Market, the Victorian-Gothic brick corridor awash in last light, the Eckerd Drug Store and Arbor Theater and Borelli’s Pizza, where both girls worked as waitresses. It’s only another minute before they’ve crossed the bridge over the Chemung and rolled up to the curb at 56 Cherry, but already the shadows have faded, screeded over the green yard and the pink trees and the blue house in such a manner that the onset of a full-force nostalgia flood is muted by the darkness.

  Edith’s into the yard before the trunk is shut, kissing her palms and throwing those palms to her daughters at the curb. Grace is wrapped up first, in a big storm of cooking apron and limbs, while Suzy braces for her turn.

  “Where’s Palmer?” Suzy says. Palmer has been first out the door since she can remember, the hundred-pound streak of white Lab skiing the porch and stairs like a downhill racer out of the gate. Mom moves on to Suzy and double-kisses her, something she’s never done except when showing off to dinner party guests. She tells Suzy she looks remarkably radiant in spite of the drive.

  “Mom, where’s Palmer?”

  Edith juts out her lower lip. “Girls, I’m sorry I’m telling you like this, but we had to put Palmer down.”

  They stand in silence. It hangs there the way a sliced finger does, flapped open in that dead moment before the blood comes, a moment just long enough to believe there might not be any blood at all.

  “What?!” It’s Grace. And then some new, warm tears. “What are you talking about?”

  “He was fourteen,” Edith says. “And he couldn’t get himself outside to go to the bathroom anymore.” She’s hugging Grace again.

  “How long ago?” Suzy says. Edith pats Grace’s head, caught up in the mothering duty, one at a time. Suzy’s getting frustrated. “How long ago did the dog die, Mom?”

  “The week after you left.”

  “That was almost three months ago!”

  “You don’t call us back, you don’t come home enough, so we—”

  “We’ve called since May!”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” Grace says into Edith’s hair.

  “You don’t have a new one, do you?” Suzy says.

  “Of course not, sweetie,” Edith says. “But your father may finally let me get a cat.”

  Wayne’s standing on the porch with the screen door propped wide, drying his hands with a dishtowel. Suzy skips up the lawn, drops her weekender in the entryway, and hugs him hard. They’re the same height—head, shoulders, waist, legs—which made it easy for Wayne to pass along sports equipment to Suzy as she grew.

  “How was the drive?”

  “Oh, fine, easy, average time.”

  “How ’bout the flight? What’s it like to get paid instead of paying?”

  “It’s good, Dad. It’s just like Grace described it—some dickhead passengers but otherwise an adventure, and for money.”

  “Need me to get in anyone’s face for you?”

  “Don’t insult me.”

  Wayne shows a wide, yellow, crooked smile with a gap between 8 and 9 you could drive a station wagon through.

  “I’m gonna run this to my room and then I’ll catch you up.”

  “Mom told you about Palmer?” Wayne says as Suzy takes the stairs.

  “She wouldn’t have if we hadn’t forced her to.”

  “It’s been hard.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “You’ve got your things out there. You’re living your life.”

  “That dog’s been a family member for over half that life!”

  “It was better for you to keep on. It was a long run. As far as those things go, it was okay.”

  “I did get a proper good-bye in May.”

  “See, that’s good.”

  “Fed him the entirety of my leftover moussaka the morning I left.”

  “Mom was wondering where it went.”

  “I needed to make sure I made weight at stew school.”

  “Maybe that’s what k
illed him.”

  “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “You can take it. You didn’t kill him. Fourteen winters killed him.”

  “Mom says there’s gonna be a cat?”

  “Don’t even start.”

  “That’d be disgusting.”

  “You will learn one day that not all things are worth fighting for.”

  “But that should be one of them.”

  “Trust me, there are other things.”

  “We haven’t eaten since the plane.”

  “Good thing we’re almost up.”

  Suzy hears Edith narrating the garden’s new flowers to Grace. Peruvian lilies. Zinnias. Orange and yellow tulips. Suzy carries her bag upstairs to her room, second on the right, above the kitchen—the room she made her own once Grace was long gone. It’s just as she left it—not just in May, but in August four years ago, August ’68, August freshman year. A couple vestigial stuffed animals. The quilt Grandma Whitman overstitched in anticipation of an early teenage winter. The movie poster for Grand Prix, James Garner and Eva Marie Saint. The black-and-white photos of the real-life racers—Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, and the American champ, Dan “The Man” Gurney, son of Port Jefferson, the home-state hero when Formula One rolled through Watkins Glen for the Grand Prix. The fact of their presence—their world-class-ness and cosmopolitanism—just up the road from Suzy’s home always seemed a received privilege. But since she’s been gone, it strikes her as closer to astonishing. That these racing champions (the finest, fastest, most self-sure legends of international motorsports) would come to the Glen each year (after Monaco and Monza and Spa) and sign ticket stubs for Suzy, their royally glamorous English wives cowering in face of the upstate enthusiasm—it made no sense. And yet it had been built into the logic of her life.