by Daniel Riley
“Good Lord. What a maniac. Both of them, sounds like.”
“I read a bunch about hijackings afterward—I mean, more than I had already. Went to the library, read some papers from a couple years back. Guess the guy made some classic mistakes: said he had a gun instead of a bomb, said he was acting alone instead of with partners on the plane, didn’t even make his demands real clear up front.”
“What did he want?”
“He didn’t say at the time, but they got it afterward: wanted to go to Vietnam.”
“Why didn’t he just enlist?”
“I think he had something wrong mentally. Younger guy. Actually from Hawaii. Hadn’t been on an airplane before. Wanted to go and try to help get people out or something. Very unclear, not the best-laid plans.”
“He didn’t want money?”
“Never got that far. But apparently, he’d had plans for a while to start a church-gym combo thing.”
“That makes sense.”
“The captain—this was his third this year. He was fed up. Took it real personally. Looks like he might actually face discipline, though. You’re not supposed to take things into your own hands.”
“The captain really might get in trouble?”
“Hard to say. I have to give a statement. He kinda broke down with me in the back after it happened. Said that they’d be out for him. I don’t know, but the more I read, I’m guessing he won’t catch flak for the first punch. Maybe not even the second. But he gave the guy an elbow to the face as he walked back to the cockpit, after the guy was tied up.”
“You don’t have to mention that one.”
“He winked at me after he did it.”
“Good,” Wayne says.
“Dad, I’m kidding.”
“I woulda been okay with that. What do you know about him? He fly in the war?”
“He said something about Korea. He’s a little younger than you. Mulaney. Jack Mulaney.”
“He an ace?”
“Guessing maybe not, considering he’s flying Grand Pacific.”
“What I woulda given.”
“You wanted to be a fighter pilot and an astronaut. Not a lifer on the Phoenix to Dallas.”
“No, but I’ll take Honolulu to Los Angeles.”
Suzy’s not sure why she’s always made an effort to make her father feel better about it. It’s not like he tried and failed; he didn’t even beat the eye exam. He doesn’t need her, she knows, to reframe the shortcomings of Wayne Whitman, nineteen-year-old.
“Well, thanks for telling me. Upsets the hell out of me that you went through that.”
“Yeah, just a little unsettling.” Suzy has thought about it on and off since it happened—why it hasn’t affected her more. It was contained, but it was cool. No rerouting. No deboarding. All over in fifteen minutes. It made her want to start her flight lessons all the sooner. Plus, the way even Ruth and Marion handled it—not quite business as usual, but devoid of frayed nerves. They just carried on afterward, taking orders and pouring drinks, deaf to the peril. “But it also adds a little gravity to the work, ya know? They’d told us all about it in training, but I’d never really thought it was a real possibility. Makes me respect the girls more. Plus, I’m not opposed to a little buzz.”
“Be that as it may, I don’t like it for you. And I especially don’t like it for your sister. Jesus, I don’t know if I can even tell Mom.”
“I’ll tell her. If Grace hasn’t already by the time we get back. I’ll tell her minus some details.”
Blue has overtaken Red and nips him by a couple lengths as they move across the line. This time they wind down the engines, signaling the end of the ride. They corner into turn one at half speed and settle into a cool-down lap. After Green powers through the homestretch again, he loses his grip in one and jars a wheel loose on the turn’s exit. Suzy and Wayne grimace at each other, and then there’s a vacuum of sound on the track. No danger, but no action, either.
Suzy fixes her eyes on the careless growth of grasses and shrubs at the fringe of the track, the spotty forest that’s been cut down so often it fails to grow properly, like overplucked eyebrows. The circuit rests on top of a hill, perched there around the edges of the crown in the manner of a monk’s haircut. It has always been such a spectacular space for her—the site of such pleasure. But now, as a quilt of fog slips between the sun and the hilltop, the color is drained from the scene and she begins to regard the optics as pretty beat. A shiver seizes her. In the onset of gray, Suzy feels summer ending prematurely, death in the trees, Wayne’s cool edge to the heat. It’s a terrible sensation in July. For thousands of years the mightiest empire in North American history made living here seem easy. And for three generations of Whitmans and Rochelles, it was easy enough, too. But in the instant of a cloud crossing between the sun and Suzy—the instant of the shadow—Suzy knows she’ll never live here again.
On the way home the mood carries over. They make stops at the model-train shop and the liquor store, where Wayne picks up refreshers of Macallan and Beefeater.
“While we’re at it,” he says as they exit the highway, drawing up a conversation that ended an hour ago, “I mean, while we’re talking about things like airplane hijackings and stuff the other might not love to hear, there’s something I’ve been meaning to mention, and I’m starting to feel guilty about spending the day with you and not saying it. Even though I’d rather tell you and your sister at the same—”
“Dad.”
“There’s been some bad news.”
“Worse than Palmer?”
Suzy’s turned her body a full ninety, so that she sees the sad grin split his face. “That’s up to you, but I’d say worse than Palmer.”
“Dad?” Suzy’s voice cracks like a little girl’s. It disgusts her. Her distaste for the sound she makes crowds out the acid she feels beneath her skin in anticipation. She knows already, it seems, and now she’s already trying to defeat it, to play offense against the news that still isn’t spoken.
“Last couple months I’ve had some back pain. No-big-deal soreness. The kind of sore you get from a weekend of yard work. Chopping wood, overhead painting, and what have you. But I hadn’t been doing anything like that. Nothing but glass. Some sailing, like I said. And so I went and got it checked out. Doc thinks it’s a little strange, wants to do some tests. Does a bunch of tests. They take a picture of my back, the whole thing. And turns out I’ve got a tumor wrapped up around my spine. And evidently that tumor is cancerous.”
“What…does that even mean?”
“I have a tumor, on my spine, that is malignant. I have cancer on my spine.”
“I don’t even…what are they going to do about it?”
“Well, listen, hon, the thing is four inches, and it’s gripping my spine the way a fighter pilot puts his hand on the stick.” And here he holds a tightly coiled fist in the space between them. “It’s wrapped around my vertebrae and it’s wrapped around my spinal cord and it’s kinda seeping out and putting pressure on my ribs, that’s really why I hurt. It’s like someone dripped some pig iron down my back and it cooled into a little steel clamp right here,” and he reaches over his shoulder and waves behind his wings, right behind his heart.
Suzy accepts that they are in motion and that they are passing the oak trees and mailboxes and root-veined sidewalks of a block she’s covered thousands of times, on foot and on bike and in car, and yet she feels inexactly displaced, dropped in a current, an unfamiliar soup of colors and lines sweeping around her and through her without moving her along with it, like she’s a rock on a river bottom.
“But what will they do to fix it?” she says.
“There aren’t good options.”
“What are you talking about? What are you saying?”
“They can’t operate. The risk of severing the spine is too high. They can try radiation. The risk of frying my spinal cord could leave me paralyzed from the middle of my back down. Might affect my heart and lungs and other organ
s. Plus, all that stuff is expensive. Too expensive. Too expensive to really even comprehend. Other option is to just let it go. It’s early. It’s apparently a weird kind of cancer that’s not terribly aggressive. They could try radiating it down so that it’s smaller without a ton of pain. But it’s not a real solution. It just sort of prolongs the inevitable. It’s slow, that’s the only good news.”
“But you can survive this.”
“The odds are quite low.”
“Dad.”
“There is a path to surviving this that leaves me without cancer and without grave consequences, but the odds are damned near nothing. I don’t totally know what I want to do yet. Mom and I have been working it out for a few weeks, and I’m seeing the doctor Friday.”
“Oh my God, I’m sorry.” Her voice cracks again.
“I’m sorry, too, sweetie.”
“I just—”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Mom tried calling a few times.…”
Wayne passes their house and takes another loop through the neighborhood.
“I think you should do the thing that keeps you alive.”
“It’s complicated. I hear what you’re saying, but there are many factors.”
“I just don’t understand how it can be any more complicated than trying to live.”
“There’s money, there’s pain, there’s quality of life.”
“But you’re good with pain. You burn your hands at work all the time. You cut off a finger and practically sewed it back on yourself. You broke a leg in a car crash.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, I really do. But I’m just thinking on it still. Really, it’s like this: I’m a B guy. I’ve always been a B-level guy. That’s the life I was given and the life I led. I tried to make two A girls, but I’m a B guy with B luck, B options, and B means, you understand?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We don’t get to have all the things at our disposal.”
“It’s money.”
“Money is a factor that can’t be ignored.”
“What if money wasn’t a factor?” Suzy says.
“It’s never been a thought exercise your mother and I could really indulge.”
“But what if you could do anything here?”
“I suppose I’d try surgery. The best surgeon, the one who might give me better than five percent odds. I’d try radiation. I’d hope that the radiation would eradicate the tumor and that I could still breathe and that my heart could still pump blood and that I’d be back to work on Monday after a weekend of R and R.”
“That’s why Mom was weird when you talked about coming to California for Christmas.…”
Suzy has been distracting herself with the interrogation, forcing the issue in order to win a confession that there is indeed a solution that can be enacted. But when she shifts her attention, even just this much, to recall her parents’ soft commitment to Christmas at the beach—it’s what unzips her. She begins convulsing. She collapses into a pile and bobs with the timing of her sobs. She slams her hands onto the dashboard and then slams her forehead onto her hands. She uh-huh-huh-huhs. Real crying like she hasn’t cried ever really. And then it’s Palmer, and Grace not knowing, and Mom all alone in the house during a blizzard, a split bough kicking out the power for a week with no one around to light the lanterns on the back porch. Most of all, though, there’s the thought of a life that continues on without her father, a life that hasn’t even really gotten going, so far as Suzy’s concerned, a life that’s currently missing hard progress toward the things she’s meant to do. He would miss all that stuff and never even know.
“It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay, really. I’m not going anywhere. Not for a while, you hear me?”
“You’re not allowed to go yet.”
“Nothing’s happened. I’m the same as I was twenty minutes ago. I’m good. Things could get worse, but they might get better. I’m gonna try it.”
“You’re gonna fucking try.”
“C’mon now.”
“That wasn’t a question,” she says, sniffling. “That was me being relieved to hear you say it. Thank you for trying. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you…” And they pull to the curb just a little late for dinner.
The girls planned to leave early, to get to the city around noon, to dip in at Macy’s and log some hours at Grace’s old spots in the Village, before crashing at a friend’s apartment. But Wayne is taking his time making pancakes, says he’s going to be a little late to work today. Even when they’ve had two, three, four each, he keeps pouring batter into the pan. He’s making breakfast so that it doesn’t end. It’s a scene that played out twice a week every week for the duration of their childhood—pancakes in the kitchen, juice and coffee on the table, the slips and collisions and other nonnatural sounds of The Pink Panther Show or The Flintstones skipping from the living room like shimmering foil at the edges of the say-nothing breakfast patter.
Edith gestures toward the stack of papers near the window and mentions a story about the first Stones concert in New York—the first of four in three days—that took place Monday. “‘Jagger and Stones Whip 20,000 Into Frenzy at Garden,’” she says, pointing to the front-page headline with the arch of her eyebrow. “Just…be careful.”
“Mom,” Grace says.
“I came to terms with it years ago,” Edith says. “I’m okay with what I don’t know. It’s just when it’s right in front of me—on the front page. That’s when I get worked up.”
“Seems like everyone survived,” Grace says.
“You I’m not worried about. You’re the survivor. It’s…,” and she thumbs.
“Me?” Suzy says.
“I’m not prejudiced against the Rolling Stones, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Edith says. “I’m an equal-opportunity worrier. Every day of yours at the racetrack—and every night of your sister’s in New York City. It’s really one and the same to me.”
“We raised an adventurous pair,” Wayne says from across the counter in the kitchen. “Who are, it’s important to come to terms with, well past the turn-back point.”
“We really don’t need any more,” Edith says, meaning the pancakes, “unless you’re making them for later.”
“I’m making them for now, and later, and we’ll throw out whatever’s left, but I’m not done yet.”
He places a new batch in the center of the table and then takes a couple steps back to fit all three women in a frame.
“We did a good job,” he says. Grace bites the edge of her glass of orange juice. “It’s all been good when you think about it.”
“Jesus Christ! Dad! Please stop fucking talking in the past tense!”
“Gracie!” Edith says.
“He’s talking like this is the last time we’re ever going to be here together!”
Wayne told Grace last night.
“I’m just taking a good long look at you guys and feeling proud.”
“Okay, but please. Just, like, quit it with the pancakes! We all know what’s going on. Please can we just treat today like we always do? We’re here, great! We’ll be back when we’re back! We’ll see you next time! It’s normal!” She rises to her feet and makes her way toward the living room. “Suzy, we’re going. Just like we always go. At the time that we planned to go. And we’ll see you soon. Same old same old.”
“C’mon, Grace,” Suzy says. “We’ll head out in a minute. Just take a seat.”
“I’m gonna go pack.”
“Gracie, sit down,” Edith says.
Grace stands in the doorframe and presses her arms out to both sides, the posture—the girls have learned in California—of earthquake safety. “I just don’t understand why there isn’t anything we can do.”
“We’re going to do something,” Wayne says. “We’re going to give it our best shot.”
“We’re going to do our best,” Edith says.
“We’re going to figure out the options, fig
ure out the money, and you two will be part of every conversation.”
“So long as you pick up our calls…,” Edith says, raising her coffee mug to her lips.
Grace stares at her mother vacantly, energy too low to take the bait. “This just can’t be it,” she says in a whisper. “None of these things can be it. Let’s just please not treat anything like it’s the final time.”
“We’re not doing anything,” Wayne says. “We’re eating breakfast.”
“Okay,” Grace says. “Then let’s get out of here. Thirty minutes tops. We always leave early ’cause you’re always off to work.”
“You’re right, I’ll get ready for work, and then you can follow me into town.”
Suzy strategically returns to the article about the show: “‘Jagger,’” she reads aloud, “‘a strutting, swaggering Nureyev of a singer, tiptoed up to the edge of the stage and back, suddenly flinging himself into wild leaps and graceful spins as he sang.’ Mom, you love Nureyev. Are you sure you don’t want to come?”
“It does not say that,” Edith says.
“Right here,” Suzy says, handing it over. “Paper of record. It’ll be just like Swan Lake.”
Wayne insists, as he always has, on leading them to the highway, a tugboat to his daughters’ rental car. He pulls to the shoulder at his turnoff, smiles, and salutes them as they roll on southeast. The minute that follows is long, nothing but rubber on blacktop and the metronome of highway seams. Shoomp. Shoomp. Shoomp. Shoomp.
“What the fuck?” Grace says softly.
“He’s gonna be okay.”
“But what if this doesn’t work?”
“Then he dies.”