Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  “Peace or Victory?” Suzy says.

  “He’s like me,” Billy says. “Two ’SC parents but didn’t go himself.”

  They park out front and Billy doesn’t struggle to convince Suzy to follow him down the side yard and through the side gate. The lights are out in the big house. It’s gotten late all of a sudden. Billy takes a minute to search his pockets for his keys, before shouldering the door open.

  “I always forget to lock it anyway,” he says.

  He’s quick to pour some warm whiskey into two glasses and he’s quick to put the needle down into the Bowie. BWAH—“Pushing through the market square…”—BWAH—“So many mothers sighing…” He reaches for her hand again, and they do some soft swirling around the center of the room, spinning for spinning’s sake, overly dramatic hits on the big strums, Billy pulling her into a sort of slow dance, one hand on her hip, the other with her freckled arm stretched out to full extension, a modified waltz. Suzy left her shoes at the door, and the tightly coiled rug feels slippery on her soles. They start spinning a little faster than the music again, dizzy all over. It’s a soft ending but they’re still moving, left foot to right foot, waiting for the layered percussion of the next song.

  In the quiet gap the phone rings. Billy makes a disgusted face. Ring and ring and ring. The music’s going again and they both stand there wound up, waiting to hear if the phone will ring again, if he’s gonna be forced to answer. But the phone holds so still it’s as though it maybe didn’t ring at all a moment before. Billy grabs a scarf off the dresser and tosses it across the room toward his bedside lamp. It falls well short and he excuses himself with an exaggerated One minute index finger, and he pulls the scarf wide like a parachute and lays it over the lamp, dimming the light. They make slow little circles in the rug in the center of the room as they dance through the A side.

  At some point somebody kisses somebody else. There’s kissing in the middle of the room, Suzy catching a glimpse of their height difference in the mirror. It kinda snaps her out and she finishes her drink. He takes the breather to finish his, too. But then they don’t move, they just keep hovering there to the weird waltz beat of the last song on the side. And then someone kisses someone again, but this time they outpace the music, and shirts and belts and socks come off. They’ve been here before, but before it always felt impulsive. Satisfying on the surface but uncertain. This is something else—built-up, earned, inevitable. She felt their bodies moving for hours toward this squeezing together, as though guided from a deeper place. Suzy senses his fingers on the fly of her jeans, and she can feel the individual teeth of the zipper uncouple, it’s happening that slow. He’s left the button hooked, and as his hand slips the eye over the brass, and her pants V and she feels his thumb snap the exposed elastic playfully, she can’t tell, really, whether it’s a kick drum on the track or something else that’s beating. An explosion or just music. Which is when she feels Billy leap back from her, and catches his eyes as they dart toward the door and the heavy knock that’s happening there.

  “What the fuck…?” Billy says, moving toward the door. He looks out the crack in the window and says to the center of the room, “It’s my dad.”

  “It’s twelve thirty,” Suzy says.

  “He never comes back here,” Billy says, waiting as Suzy pulls her shirt back on and zips her pants back up.

  He opens the door slightly but keeps the screen where it’s at.

  “What is it?” Billy says.

  Suzy can only hear the voice.

  “Do you have a friend over?” he says.

  “What?” Billy says.

  “Are you by chance with a woman named Suzy Whitman?”

  Billy looks at Suzy and she begins walking toward him.

  “There’s a man who called our house phone looking for her. Says it’s an emergency.”

  “What?” Suzy says.

  She steps to the door. Billy’s dad is in a robe. He’s slight for a man and missing most of his hair. He has glasses and the purposeful look of someone on a military graveyard shift.

  “Who was it?” Suzy says.

  “A man named Mike Singer. Says he’s your brother-in-law. Asked if I could check to see if you were here, ’cause he’s been trying all over for you. He didn’t stay on the line, he wanted to keep trying other numbers. Just told me to have you call him if you were here.”

  Without saying another word, she moves through the screen door. But Billy grabs her arm and points toward the phone in his room. “Suzy, just…we’ll stay out here while you call.”

  On her way to the phone in Billy’s room, she imagines it just as it must’ve gone. Dad’s died in the night. Right on the eve of surgery. Or it’s suddenly inoperable and he has only days to live. Maybe not even a matter of days, but merely hours.

  All the things she could possibly think about, and her mind goes to an afternoon in the garage when she was nine or ten, a winter lesson in engine repairs. Suzy riding the dolly around the perimeter of the garage, as though it were a racetrack. Sliding on her back beneath the Alfa Romeo and emerging on the other side, beneath the I AM SUZY! sign, her father’s face registering upside down, eyes and nose and mouth, discernible but uncanny, like the letters in the end zone: OIHO. That inverted smiling face is what her mind holds fixed as she dials Mike and Grace’s number.

  “Mike, it’s Suzy.”

  It’s so quiet. She presses the receiver hard against her ear.

  “Mike,” she says.

  “Grace. Crashed.”

  “Mike, I can barely hear—”

  “Grace’s…plane.” There’s a sticky click of a swallow. “Grace is dead.…Her plane crashed.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There’s…”

  She waits and then waits some more and then screams: “MIKE!”

  She runs through what she’s said, to make sure she has indeed said something. To make sure it’s not her fault there’s only silence on the other end. But when what she hears next is Mike choking on his own breath, she drops the phone, grabs the skateboard in the corner that’s the twin of her own, and blows past Billy and his father, quick to get the wheels on the asphalt in the alley, to get rolling toward home. And even as Billy shouts “Suzy” over and over, all Suzy can manage to whisper in the wrong direction is “Grace.”

  Part III

  Fly Me;

  or, The Momentum

  of Last Resort

  Suzy makes the drive alone. It is identical to other drives in all ways but one. A set of familiar stretches and signposts, the unchanging sequence of billboards for tire repairs and cheeseburgers, so much as they should be that they articulate the edges around what’s absent, who’s absent. In early February there’s an absence of color in the pavement and the trees and the snow, and there’s an absence of Grace in the car. It’s a familiar context with a Grace-shaped hole at the center.

  Suzy passes sixty-five cars on the four-hour drive. She counts to mark the distance. She drives most of the way with the radio off, counting cars, hunting, like a race from the back of the starting grid. She used to prefer it that way, a girl starting at the back, an opportunity to doubly defy her competitors’ expectations. Some kids would carry over the sting of a grid penalty from qualifying, let it corrode their confidence. Suzy would relish the challenge, just pick them off one by one, as she does now. Suzy is a good driver in the snow.

  It happened so fast. Five weeks gone, as though snipped. The phone call straight through to here, experienced with the speed of a daydream, a mind’s projection into the future. A phone call, followed by a weightless ride to Mike and Grace’s. The details of the plane crash—over and over from a thousand vantage points. Grace in Hawaii, Grace in the prop plane. Just Grace and the pilot and, of course, J.P.

  It was a revelation at first, an aftershock, what would’ve been the leading surprise were it not for the deaths. Grace in Hawaii with J.P.—the first Mike or Suzy had heard of it. Grace and J.P. in Hawaii at the same t
ime, coincidentally or not. They wouldn’t know that first night and still don’t really know now. But the three of them—Grace, J.P., and a local pilot. On a private little tour of the west coast of Maui. Out from Ka’anapali, down the S curve to Wailea and Makena, and then back again. Low is how their plane ride would be described by witnesses, low and unassuming. And then suddenly, just below Ka’anapali, not low at all, but high. Higher, and in short space, getting greedily high. So that when the engines cut, when the engines stalled out and all went quiet, they fell into the bay as an inevitable body with no force acting on it but the original force, the apple force. Thirty-two feet per second per second—it was the first thing Suzy thought when she heard they’d stalled. Her miserable physics retention, but this was the first-day-of-class equation. There were witnesses, but there was nothing much to do. Witnesses driving on the road watched the plane fragment upon impact and disappear beneath the surface. But the cliff at the edge of the water was steep—fifty, sixty feet, sounded like—and nobody was getting down there fast enough to do much. The plane was just off the edge of the island.

  There was one man in a boat. A little fishing boat with an engine and a till. He got to the wreckage first. He dove. The cabin floated just beneath the surface. He dove again—found the door, clean lines and smooth rivets, nothing to grab hold of. He dove again, and this time he approached a window. Not to the cockpit, but to the little cabin. And there he saw the two—young woman and young man, their heads hanging from their bodies the way flowers hang when their stems have been snapped. The fisherman surfaced, caught his breath, nothing to be done. But he dove one final time, and by then water had filled the cabin. The entire thing was filled and it was beginning to sink, slowly, the way a party balloon falls from the ceiling when its helium has thinned. The fisherman made it to the same window for one last look—the same woman and the same man, buckled in side by side. But this time their heads were lifted off their chests, almost upright, buoyed by the slow-motion descent. He saw it then. The one thing through that window that cut the other way, that cut in an impossible direction of beauty, the thing he kept saying over and over, to police and reporters and eventually to Wayne and Edith and Suzy and Mike: the image of Grace’s head held tall, her long blond hair reaching toward the surface, extending itself up in all directions.

  They learned only the basic facts that first night. It was the trip they took the next day that brought the details. Mike and Suzy on the first plane out in the morning. Wayne and Edith the day after that, meaning another postponed surgery. By the time they arrived, the pieces of the plane on the surface had been cleared and the three bodies had been pulled from the cabin. But the rest of the plane was still on the ocean floor, to be retrieved with less urgency. Wayne and Mike IDed the body at the morgue and arranged for it to be shipped back, in an expedient three weeks, to Schuyler. Boat to San Francisco, train to Reno and Salt Lake and Omaha and Chicago. Truck from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland and Erie and Syracuse, where Wayne could wait with the owners of Schuyler Glen’s Gibson and Sons Funeral Home to pick up the package and prepare her for burial at the Painted Post cemetery, where Grandpa and Grandma Whitman had been for a while.

  On Maui, Wayne spent an hour with the fisherman, working out the details, pressing him for all the sensations, all the images, he could recall. When Wayne told the three of them about her hair in the water, the way her head rose up, Edith attributed this to sweet Gracie’s soul ascending to heaven, and Suzy said it sounded like a made-up memory.

  It was not a good few days. It was different from Suzy’s last time in Hawaii. There was not much to do besides fill out paperwork and sit still and uncomprehending, careful just to keep breathing. It reminded her of when Grace used to sit on Suzy’s head. Pin Suzy down on the bed or the couch and just sort of rest there, heavier than Suzy by twice, at least earlier on, and how Suzy would just stay still with Grace’s weight, scared at first that she might suffocate and break something, until she’d ward off that fear by breathing slowly from the little gap near her mouth where there was light. That’s what it was like—Grace sitting on her brain. Suzy couldn’t think of anything to do or say, except take one breath at a time.

  Edith spent thirty-five of the first thirty-six hours on Maui crying—as much for Grace, Suzy figured, as for Wayne, the potential halving of her family. Wayne spent it being sick. Mike stayed in his hotel room, mourning in private, undoubtedly wondering, beneath all the immediate grief, what the fuck Grace was doing in Hawaii with J.P. Suzy wondered, too. It made plenty of sense—at least, as far as surprising things go. They had such an easy compatibility. Suzy didn’t plan to talk about it with Mike, but it was forced in their face when J.P.’s parents called from their hotel and asked to meet with the four of them. It happened on the third day, after J.P.’s parents’ trip to the morgue. There was a round of hugs, but they had nothing to say to one another, really. In her mission to eliminate awkwardness, Edith treated the situation as though they’d all just met at a wedding. She asked about their lives in California, smiled, said sweet things. Edith and J.P.’s mother played along together, and Mike left for his room without acknowledging them.

  It went like that for a couple more days and then everyone headed home. The doctors were able to fit Wayne in the very next week on account of a cancellation. Mike and Suzy flew to L.A. on the same flight, in separate rows. They shared a cab home with a slighted cabdriver. They got dropped off in between their houses and then started in opposite directions. But before separating, Suzy asked Mike if he wanted her to be there with him when he walked into the house. Mike said it was fine. And that was the last they spoke. Or at least the last they’d spoken in a month.

  The airline canceled Suzy’s flights that first week. She said she was good to go, that she wanted to keep flying, but they insisted. One week and then a second and third. She spent her days on her back in her bed watching the ceiling fan. She did some other meaningless things, too, but it didn’t really matter, ’cause it just floated away with the rest of the film that had been scissored out. LBJ died—that’s something she remembers. She read a lot of newspaper stories, watched a lot of television reports: the death of another ex-president. Billy came by every couple days. And you know what? He didn’t say a word about runs. She admired that about him. Or admired the idea of a Billy that understood the order of significances in the universe, a Billy that granted space, that exercised restraint.

  Wayne had surgery and he woke up from it—that happened, too. He was in the hospital for a week and then he went home. It was an all-world terrible January in Schuyler Glen, but Wayne was home, and he wasn’t dead. Consider it a win. Before she went back to work, Suzy got in a couple hours with Millikan. She got in a small plane and flew around the southern edge of the county. When they landed, she said it was nice it had gone like that, since her sister had just died in one. Millikan didn’t get the joke and then recognized that it wasn’t a joke at all. Suzy smiled sweetly and scheduled more time for the following week.

  And then, finally, early February, here she is, heading home. She makes the drive alone. It is so cold.

  It’s the kind of cold that memory refuses to bank. She lived this cold, months without a break, each of her first twenty-two years. And yet when she steps out of the car to fill up in Owego, the sensation is all new, impossible seeming. It’s not just below freezing—it’s not that gradual dip into discomfort, the relief of a reasonable twenty when she’s bundled up for ten…this is much worse. This is zero. Zero plus or minus a couple. This is a shotgun blast to the face and body from northernmost Canada. The parts that are practically Greenland and Norway and Russia—the convergence. That’s how it feels. Her boots crunch on muddy ice, ice that’s resigned to holding tight to the blacktop until May. She shuffles to the white light of the service center, the only light for miles, a star around which a weakly populated system might orbit. Leftover sleigh bells clatter lazily when she passes through the door. Long shelving units line the floor like ro
ws of corn, but they’re sparse, fallow, quarter stocked. Near the register the goods are bunched: candy bars and motor oil and ROAD WARRIOR trucking T-shirts.

  “Five on two,” Suzy says.

  The man behind the counter moves with heavy hips. He is thinner than she is but carries himself like he’s fat. He’s young, not much older than Suzy, but his skin falls off his face, a wet sag around the eyes, muddy stubble, a mouth that’s cracked and stained by tobacco spit. It’s that stained lower lip, that stained corner of the mouth, that dominoes her toward the realization that it is in fact late, that it is desolate. That she hasn’t been careful enough. That she’s had her guard down. That though Suzy used to not worry about men, it was because those men were boys in literature seminars, boys at rock concerts, boys on footpaths on the New Haven Green. This winter is different.

  In part it’s Sela’s fault. Sela has felt so safe. When did she last fear for cracked lips and loose skin and a lack of advantage? To calm her nerve, she assures herself that she is—in heavy pants and snow boots and a giant, shapeless tube of an overcoat—hardly a woman just now, except at the hole where her eyes and nose and mouth ask for gas. But when she catches a quick glimpse of herself in the mirror behind the attendant, she sees that the strangest accident has transpired: the wind outside has torn her hair out from under her jacket and whipped it up and over the fur of her hood, strands of long light-red hair folded back over the mane, almost like eyelashes. Big, luscious pink hair-lashes framing her face as this single, giant, beautiful batting eye.

  She ruffles her hood and tightens it around her face again, casts her eyes downward, reaches for the five in her pocket, places the five on the counter. She waits with a lowered head for some acknowledgment of payment, of services rendered.

  “Cold one,” the man says.

  Suzy smiles and nods to herself.

  “Anything else?” he says.

  Suzy lifts her face and catches his eyes for the first time. She sees Mike eyes, not Manson eyes. Isn’t it strange how the Manson eyes have absolved all the other eyes from posing a threat? The hungry, the blameless, the searching.…These are closer to those, and she feels better. Suzy tries to say “No” and it comes out like a cough, so she tries again and says “No thanks” like a stew, and the man smiles and turns back to the pot of coffee he was brewing when she walked in. Out the door she crunches through the snow with a little trot, some speed to get out of the wind. It is so cold.