Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “But what if he wants to marry me?”

  “I can see you’ve really figured this out,” Suzy says.

  “Me? What about you? You haven’t said a thing! Never a story, never a word about anything!”

  “I’ve been flying a lot.”

  “Who have you been going on dates with, though? Where have you been going out?”

  “No dates to speak of. I just kick around Sela. Really.”

  “How are you this uninterested in meeting men?”

  It’s a question that hits right as they roll into the steepest incline, and the sun seems to have pulled in like a camera for a close-up, right at shoulder height, right in their faces, and she’s searching for some shade or the next flat, and it’s just not coming. The thought of spending evenings with strangers regularly—it had, even in high school, never much interested her, just another thing that had made her feel like less of a normal young woman. Out of the groove with her female friends. And though she hasn’t had to muster up many explanations recently—Grace and Mike stopped asking, maybe because they’d assumed something about Billy—she just shores up her heavy breathing and tells Rachel about the cowboy in Dallas. A brief story and an isolated incident, but it cuts the edge off the appetite nonetheless.

  At the top of the hill, after one last big push up the final sloppy incline, they turn over their shoulders and behold the Southland, certainly not the filthiest day they’ve seen, but not clear, either. The basin’s like a bathtub, edges at the peninsulas of the bay, filled up with old water that won’t drain.

  “There’s you,” Rachel says, pointing toward Sela through the smog.

  “And there’s you,” Suzy says, pointing at an opaque wall farther to the east.

  “How could you even tell?”

  “Blind faith,” Suzy says. And they debate going inside the observatory to look at the stars.

  Rachel smokes a joint she brought along, and they end up watching the show, stretched way back in their seats. Afterward they hike back down to their cars, red and sweaty, and they hug tightly anyway. Rachel holds Suzy’s head close, so that Suzy sees all the freckles rearranging in the patterns of the star show, and Rachel says, “We have to do this again soon,” and Suzy says, “I know, we do.” And she really means it this time, until the car door’s shut and she’s on the Harbor and the world is erasing itself behind her, so that all that truly exists for Suzy is what’s in front of her, on the other side of the traffic.

  Suzy brings the booze to Thanksgiving, whiskey and wine. It’s raining—a miserable, freezing (that’s the word Grace uses now to mean fifty), flooding afternoon. Suzy didn’t know until today, but two storm drains let out near Mike and Grace’s place, Yellowstone geysers that flood all the way back down Nineteenth to the beach, where the water Vs a path through the sand to the ocean like a snowplow. “This is good,” Mike keeps saying throughout the prep, to more thunder and lightning, and the louder rushing of water out the window. There’s been a drought and this should at least pull the crisis back from red to orange.

  “Not if the water’s just dumping straight back into the ocean,” Grace says.

  “It’ll do enough,” Mike says. “It’ll make it just enough not-bad.”

  “I miss summer,” Grace says. “I miss the November that it was last week.”

  “What a couple of fantastic brats you’ve both become,” Mike says.

  “Don’t wrap me up in this,” Suzy says, flipping through the magazines. On top, that issue of New York that has been sitting around for months, the one with the first look at Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine.

  “I’ve seen your face when you’ve gotten back from New York recently,” Mike says.

  “You’re right. When I get off the plane here, I feel loaded,” Suzy says with a put-on smile. “I feel rich—with good fortune.”

  The turkey’s ready just when Mike said it would be. And after a day of prep they’re finished eating in fifteen minutes.

  “Did Dad seem ready?” Suzy says as she clears her plate. Grace just flew back from New York last night.

  “I guess,” Grace says. “I mean, he looks and feels like shit, but I guess he’s more confident than he was.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Still a chance the date gets pushed. But he seems pretty fixated on the surgery.”

  “And ready for the trip out here?”

  Wayne and Edith had decided to come for Christmas after all, pending complications with the procedure.

  “Seems like it,” Grace says. “I mean, it’s hard to feel solid about anything.…”

  “It’s all gonna be good,” Suzy says. “Seriously.”

  Mike starts to pile up the dishes, when Grace waves him back to the table: “C’mon, just sit for two minutes. Leave some dirty dishes in the sink, one day of the year.”

  “You know I’m gonna be gone all week for the story. I just don’t want them to be there when I get back.”

  “I baked a pie!” Grace says, ignoring him.

  Suzy checks the clock.

  “I’ll have a slice, but then I have to split.”

  “It’s still pouring out,” Grace says.

  “I said I’d stop by Billy’s.”

  “Billy Zar’s Thanksgiving,” Grace says.

  “Right,” Suzy says. “He invited me to Thanksgiving, in case I didn’t have anything going on.”

  “Even though he knew you would.”

  “And so I said I’d come for dessert,” Suzy says.

  “Even though I baked a pie.”

  “I’ll go over for dessert, say hello, say thanks for inviting me, and then skate back.”

  “That’s a lot of back and forth.”

  “Well, what the fuck, Grace? Just say I’m not allowed to go if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “You do what you want. You can come over for leftovers tomorrow or something.”

  “Here, take my car,” Mike says, moving for the keys.

  Grace levels a shard of incredulity his way.

  With the car it takes five minutes instead of twenty. Suzy sits in the driver’s seat outside Billy’s house and plays back through the decision she’s made. She told them she’d be back in an hour but regrets having left. There are infinite days of not-Grace in the future—separate lives in separate houses, separate cities maybe—and she knows she should stick around when it means something to her. Suzy knocks on the front door—she’s never been in the big house—and Billy greets her in a collared shirt and a tie, the first she’s ever seen on him. He’s shaved and combed his hair back with some matte goop.

  “You’re here,” he says. The din of a large group can be heard in another room.

  “Hey, look,” she says, “I’m sorry, but I’ve gotta head back. I didn’t think ditching out would be such a big deal, but I was wrong. I wanted to come over in person so you didn’t think I was full of shit. Just wanted to say hello and Happy Thanksgiving and all that.”

  “You’re not coming in?” Billy says, fingering the seam of his shirt.

  “Nah, just wanted to say hey and that I’ll see you tomorrow or this weekend.”

  “Sure you don’t want pie?”

  “Grace made a pie, that’s what this is sort of about, actually.”

  “Say no more, guapa. I get it.”

  “All right, well.”

  Billy checks over his shoulder to make sure no one’s getting too expectant. He knuckles the screen door, a little contact with Suzy’s hand, and then he winks.

  “Did you just wink?” Suzy says.

  “I’m throwing everything I’ve got at you,” he says, and smiles kinda sadly and closes the door.

  She drives back, running it through her head—has he been throwing everything he’s got at her?

  Suzy pulls up to the curb and splashes to the stucco overhang of the front porch. As she reaches for her keys, she hears panicked breathing—the sort of breathing you can identify even if you haven’t heard the voice breathe that way bef
ore. The way you can tell someone from their cough, the voice of the cough, she can tell the voice of this breathing. And then it grows rhythmic and constant, a little louder, and Suzy covers the distance to the car in a fraction of the time it took her going the other way. She slams the door and shuts her eyes and makes earmuffs with her hands, tensing her body all over, trying to expel the sound from her brain, a deliberate exercise that only makes her laugh herself to tears in the steam-shrouded cab of the Karmann Ghia.

  At least, she thinks, they’re doing better.

  At the outset of an hour-long session, with the Zamperini airfield growing postage-stamp-size beneath them, Suzy asks Millikan if he’s ever crossed paths with J.P. J.P. did his lessons with the other instructor, but Suzy is still surprised she hasn’t seen him around even once.

  “Don’t know him,” Millikan says. “But Foley seems to run through an enormous number of students.”

  “What do you mean? He fails them?”

  “Even if you pass the exams, he finds ways to weed people out. He and I tend to stay in our own lanes, but the little I know him, I don’t love the guy. It’s like he does the job in order to keep the skies clear for himself. To make sure there aren’t too many new licenses. Bad luck this guy you know landed with him instead of me.”

  Suzy hadn’t realized it was that easy to cut a student. Her hands grow tense on the yoke.

  “I hardly even know him,” Suzy says. “But I do give him credit for planting the idea in my head. I didn’t realize I could just sign up.”

  “Well, then, I’m appreciative, too.…”

  It’s the sort of thing he’s said each time they’ve been alone since their dinner together. Each lesson—floating the sentiment to gauge the response. But Suzy hasn’t given much, certainly hasn’t opened the window wide for another invitation.

  She enjoyed herself at his house, but after the fact, alone, she drifted back to the nagging concern that she might gum up her certification with a false move, interpersonal-relationship-wise. She crossed the line going to his house, but she knows it might’ve been an even greater risk to refuse. Now she simply keeps the idea alive, nurses it, neither explicitly indulging in his affection nor rejecting it outright.

  She likes this just how they are. Side by side, working together toward greater comprehension, the control column before each of them moving in unison. It’s the sort of charge she hopes to live in for as long as it will last. After today she will be one hour closer. And Suzy knows that’s all that matters.

  Two weeks before Wayne and Edith are due to fly out for Christmas, a United 737, on its most well-worn route, crashes on approach to Chicago. Noses down after an incident-free two hours and seventeen minutes from National to Midway, four hundred feet short of the runway. Kills forty-three of the sixty-one on board and two on the ground.

  Though she’s spending the wet afternoon in Seattle and no one outside Grand Pacific knows where she’s been put up, Suzy receives notice from the front desk that there’s a caller on the line. Before she can get a hello out, he’s off. Wayne says he just spoke to Grace, too. Says he’s not feeling good about flying. Says they might back out of their trip altogether.

  Suzy catches a glimpse of her face in the mirror. A face that’s speaking no words but is twisted, roiling, edging up to disgust. The weakness in her father’s voice is poisoning. Hearing the man who told her, at fourteen, to accelerate into turns at the go-kart track, who told her, at sixteen, to pass the boys on the inside, to pound the gaps, to live in racing’s underexploited odds—it turns her mind into a blender.

  “What are we talking about here? You’re just not gonna come because you’re afraid? You’re gonna stop because of an outside threat of dying? You, of all people, should have less fear—now more than ever. You have next to nothing to fear at this point.” There is silence and Suzy fills it. “Dad, what’s really going on?”

  He takes a few breaths before starting again.

  “I just sit here all day watching the mess. This mess, or whatever mess. Day in and out. The coverage on the television especially, they break in every hour with news of the mission.” He means Apollo 17. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt—the last crew NASA plans to send to the moon. “It’s the end of the biggest thing that’s happened for mankind in your lifetime.”

  Suzy’s face is fixed in disbelief. This is what life without work reduces you to. Lines like that one. A living room humid with schmaltz. She hears a sniffle and imagines his eyes running like the storm drains on Thanksgiving, his face shining dull in the weak Schuyler light. She feels herself growing stuck to the bed, drying like concrete, and so she springs herself to her feet to pierce him with a pin through the phone.

  “Sorry, were you asking for my opinion or just saying that you’d already made up your mind that you’re too afraid to come to California for Christmas?”

  There is a break, which means it’s worked.

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just…,” he says. “We’re still coming.”

  It’s a packed flight from L.A. to Denver, preholiday traffic, and the pilots are worried but not too worried about the snowstorm hammering the Rockies. When she can, Suzy asks to work up front—first-class full service, which requires a touch more effort but puts her closer to the cockpit. She likes to pop in more often than necessary to ask questions, even though she knows how it looks, knows some of the other girls suspect she’s digging for a pilot.

  The pilots tell her how to adjust for the storms, the prep they can do, the elements they can control. She brings coffee with her, lingers like any stew trying to make a play. But they recognize her aptitude, the right questions, the fluency with the instrumentation.

  “Come on, get your hands on here,” the copilot says. He’s got a voice like so many of them, the up–outta–West Virginia voice, the sugary scratch and gravel, all calm conviction.

  Suzy hesitates, knowing how it looks to be leaning in over the pilots. She scoots her skirt down and moves into position. It’s black and white out the windshield, no use whatsoever. So she keeps her eyes on the attitude indicator, the artificial horizon. They’re level, there’s nothing much to do. She feels a nudge on the right side of the plane, some heavy winds.

  “No sweat, right?”

  “No sweat,” she says.

  She leans back up and thanks them, asks if they need anything else.

  “Once you’ve got everybody tucked in on approach, come on up for landing and we’ll walk you through it. You can sit on the booster there. Gail won’t mind, will she?”

  “Not if y’all insist.” She notices that she’s leaning into the drawl, twanging a little, mimicking without meaning to, like it’ll maybe contribute to her faculties at the controls.

  “Well, then, it’s required. There’ll be a little action. It’ll be a good look for you, especially if we can actually settle this thing down on the runway.”

  Suzy laughs. She loves this kind of joke more than she even realizes. She loves this kind of talk. She wants to talk like it forever.

  She sits behind them on approach, once all the trash is cleared and the drunks in first are passed out. (Suzy had handed out a tranquilizing “holiday surprise” courtesy of Grand Pacific.) She pulls down the booster and crosses her legs, and the two pilots walk her through the steps. They dive through the clouds that are too high for precipitation, and then submerge into the storm, fat, newly conceived snowflakes slipping off the windshield. They still don’t have eyes on the runway, but the tower’s given them a go-ahead and they’re on the right line. The right line, Suzy thinks. She’s silent, a little tense. Extraordinarily alert. The snow has given a point of context for the speed and they’re moving fast. They’re at three thousand feet when she finally makes out some lights on the ground and the plane starts rattling with winds, a heavy, two-handed shake of the body, a rattle that tests the seat belts. The pilots speak to the tower with a disaffected clip, flipping some switches she doesn’t recognize from the Cessna and barreling on
down toward a snow-covered Stapleton. The landing gear drops and the runway lights align like rails on a bobsled shoot, and suddenly they’re leveling and touching down eventlessly. There’s a sense of ultimate control. It’s the closest she’s felt to touching, by proxy of the landing gear, a physical inevitability—the right line. The captain keeps up the low chatter with his man in the tower, and the copilot turns over his shoulder, as if to say, Welp?

  And Suzy says, “Piece of cake.”

  Wayne and Edith book a place with an ocean view, halfway between Suzy and Grace, short walking distance to each of the girls. But after helping Wayne and Edith check in, Suzy hesitates even to place their bags on the floor—the carpet faintly damp and the walls dusted in mildew. Suzy insists that they stay at her place. She’ll just go back to bunking with Grace and Mike, she says, but plans to crash at Billy’s most of the time.

  Ten days. Ten whole days. Once they’re settled, Suzy walks Wayne and Edith down the hill to the Strand and they pick a bench, where they sit and watch the water without saying much for several still minutes. It’s not exactly sunny, but the sky is filled with a bright white fog, like if you dropped dry ice into a fishbowl. It’s a rich, almost three-dimensional light. It’s not hot, but it’s warm, high sixties. And this is the thing Wayne keeps doing: walking up to one of the houses on the Strand that has a thermometer hooked up to its fence. He says it over and over, “halfway between sixty-eight and sixty-nine degrees.” He’s not looking great—bald, pale, and thin—but he’s moving all right, walking straight-backed between the bench and the fence to verify the findings.

  “Halfway between sixty-eight and sixty-nine,” he says again. “On December twenty-first.”

  “And it’s always like that,” Suzy says.

  “It’s something,” Wayne says.

  “And a birthright to all of them,” Suzy says, gesturing down the Strand.