Fly Me

by Daniel Riley

  The rest of the drive is elating. Or rather it’s the relative high of normal after her mind had drifted to kidnapping—to kidnapping, rape, murder. Normal—even a supercold normal—feels good after a glimpse of the very worst. Wayne and Edith have one daughter left—that’s all. It is important for Suzy, she realizes now, more important than it was five weeks ago, not to die.

  She hasn’t been home since the accident. The first flowers are still out, the winter whites and pale pinks of the daphnes and camellias. They’re all dead now, but they’re still on the table in the dining room. Edith has soup in a pot on the stove top, soup that was dinner a few hours ago, that’s been reducing into a paste during the double-digit evening hours. Suzy fixes a bowl anyway. Edith leads Suzy to the bedroom to see Wayne.

  “We’ve been waiting to tell you,” he says.

  “What’s that?” Suzy says.

  “We went to the doctor today, the local doctor,” he says. “To take some pictures. To see where we stand after three weeks.”

  “What do they really expect?”

  “We’re in a place of no expectations,” Wayne says. “But I thought you should know that we’ll have a better sense this weekend. We should know the score, is all I mean.”

  “And what’s your body telling you?”

  “It’s silent.”

  “Okay, then,” Suzy says.

  “Can I get you anything else?” Edith says. “You look not yourself.”

  “Weird,” Suzy says, gesturing her eyes toward her father.

  “I just meant you look exhausted.”

  “I’m gonna head to my room. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

  “I love you, Suzy,” Edith says.

  “Me too,” Suzy says, on her way out the door. “I mean: same.”

  The next morning, moving up the stairs from breakfast and along the hallway, in the psychic shadows of the family portraits and the heat pulsing from the room that was Grace’s, Suzy feels her feet and ankles grow heavier, as though she’s walking over flypaper. She opens the door to the bedroom and closes it behind her, closes her eyes, too, and collapses on Grace’s bed, on the quilt Edith pulled out each year when the clocks changed in fall. She rolls herself into a ball, sniffing Grace’s shampoo on the pillow, waiting for the tears to come, Suzy willing the tears to come.

  It has been over a month and she’s failed to cry a real cry: a heaving meltdown, a sob with cut brake lines. The scent on the pillow isn’t of Grace in California, but of Grace in middle and high school. Edith has been buying Johnson’s baby shampoo since they were toddlers and still keeps it in stock in their old bathroom. Grace evidently put it to use on recent trips. So it isn’t just the picture of Grace that the shampoo summons, but the picture of Suzy, too—sisters sharing sonically porous walls, a filthy sink clogged with honey-blond hair, half redder than the rest. Suzy has spent a life defining herself as distinct from Grace. A three-year gap in even middle school was practically the difference between child and adult. And that single year of high school together, they barely spoke a word—Suzy reading and racing, Grace plotting her exit with the folk crowd in Ithaca. Suzy sharing in her sister only insomuch as she was forced to wear her hand-me-down dresses, listen along to her music, wash her hair with the stuff that defined her sister’s smell. But there was no avoiding it, Suzy realizes now on Grace’s bed, gazing at the posters and the records that never made their way to New York or L.A. There was no avoiding the ways in which her sister, even when Suzy most resisted, infused herself.

  Suzy’s head is pressed flat on the bed, half on a pillow and half on the stitched edge of the quilt. She contracts the ceiling-facing muscles of her neck to press her face into the bed, making her eyelids stretch and her vision go fuzzy. She’s going to draw out some tears even if it requires physical force. She presses her head deeper into the springs of the mattress, deeper like a dive beneath a wave, eyes thin and sealed, diving below the surface of the bed, breaststroking through the secrets Grace stashed there—cash and grass and raunchy magazine clippings about sex—and then she comes up breathing. Breathing hard, in the real present, from burying her face, holding her breath, exerting the muscles of her arms and shoulders and neck.

  In the light lift of heavy breathing her mind floats to the ceiling and glimpses Grace at the beach that day with J.P., when the idea of flight lessons was first introduced, Grace in a sunray-colored bikini with the thick, sugary pleasure of grass on her eyes and lips, a little sweat on the cilia between her mouth and her nose, and the way she said it about flying like she’d always said it about racing: “Just do it, Suz. Just be so, so good.” And how she’d probably have said it about anything—about a desire of Suzy’s to dive into the ocean that instant, or to see a show at Howlers, or to order a turkey sub. But in that moment it meant something, it carried weight, and it pushed her off the edge of the diving board and out into the air. That look, that shove, made Suzy act. The months since have been such a series of shocks, a life beyond her control, a life lived in unwitting submission to forces greater than her own. But who is she kidding, it was that line—“Just do it, Suz”—that’s led her to here. And it’s that line, that iceberg tip that stands for all the support she provided for Suzy all along, that sits on her chest now, the bed pressing up and the memory pressing down, so that it’s difficult for Suzy to breathe again.

  She remembers what happened next that afternoon on the beach. The look on Grace’s face. As clear to her now as a classic family photograph she’s walked past all her life: that sweat on her lip, the sun breaking in a thousand directions off the lenses of her shades, a tickle on the end of her nose that made her sniffle, and then the pretty cracked lips, fighting off a giggle that came with the tickle, failing to hold it back a moment longer, and breaking into a floodgates grin and a low-throated laugh at no joke, her tongue and teeth and lips and skin dancing at a cellular level, uncomplicated joy, a plain disinterest in anything that had ever happened anywhere or anytime that was not there in that moment, which—like all moments—died the same instant it was born.

  The service is on Friday afternoon. It’s silver and cold, and Suzy spends the prep before the service worrying about the conditions at the cemetery, the snow, the extra effort it will take to get the body in the ground. She doesn’t understand why they didn’t just cremate her in Hawaii. How much easier it would’ve been. It was in part for Nana and Pop Rochelle, sure, but think about the money, the logistics. They’re at the big brick church on Fox Street, Saint John’s. Wayne’s in a wheelchair, with Edith greeting people as they come in. Mike’s at their side, silently shaking hands of strangers. He asked that they consider having a service out in Sela so that more of her friends from Grand Pacific might be able to make it. But after Wayne’s surgery, it was impossible. It would be a Schuyler affair. Nuclear family, cousins within driving distance, leftover acquaintances from high school. It’s not many people—not like you’d get if you died at fifty-five (a third of the town and half the glassworks might show up for Wayne) or seventeen (Suzy had one of those—drunk-driving accident involving a classmate and a gorge). There are good times to die, turnout-wise, and twenty-five—on the road, living away from home—is not one of them. The rector, Father Degan, confirmed Grace and Suzy, knew them both as younger girls, but has little to add besides referring to her love of life and music and her passion for flying. Suzy is embarrassed that stewing is all they can really talk about. It’s all there is and ever will be.

  Edith bawls through some remarks about Grace as a little girl, and then Mike reads what he clearly intends to be the last word on the matter, a short piece of writing he’s worked over. It’s about selfishness. About how unselfish Grace could be, but how hungrily she pursued the things she loved. That by skipping out on college, she was able to pack more living into those borrowed years than anyone else he knew. That while twenty-five is tragically, impossibly young, it wasn’t your typical twenty-five years. Et cetera, et cetera. That if there’s anything to take
away from this, it’s that all of us need to be more selfish, not less. That there will suddenly come a day when deferring life is no longer possible because it’s just ended. “Fuck everyone and everything else,” he says. “And live for you.”

  There’s a hurt confusion that moves through the pews, an Episcopalian murmur. Suzy gives three crisp, reverie-shattering claps. Just: thwack thwack thwack. Father Degan hustles to the microphone to steer the service back toward the intended conclusion. He urges the organ player into action. Suzy considers standing and following Mike with comments of her own, even though it hasn’t been planned. She hasn’t written anything but has thought about what she might say if she absolutely had to speak. She’s thinking all this even as Degan moves toward the lectern, even as the organ begins to play “Amazing Grace,” and then the window is shut and there will be no speaking on behalf of the sister who can’t speak anymore. Suzy regrets it immediately but starts warming toward the reality of what she hasn’t done: she’s kept the thing she most wanted to say about Grace all to herself, a secret she whispers to her hands as though in prayer.

  Suzy has a full extra day at home after Mike’s gone. She makes Wayne and Edith pancakes and eggs. Today is a big day. They try to busy themselves around the house, cleaning out the wicker food baskets and picking up the dying petals that have dropped from the flowers. Suzy asks Edith how long you’re supposed to keep the flowers, and Edith says she’ll keep them until they’ve turned to dust.

  Just after noon, as Wayne’s lifting a bologna sandwich to his mouth, the kitchen phone rings. He’s in his chair, no way of jumping to his feet, and Edith lifts it on the second ring.

  “Yes, he’s right here, just a minute.”

  She pulls the phone toward his seat at the kitchen table, uncoiling the cord so that it’s extended in full without its curls.

  “Hi, Doctor,” he says, and then he listens. There are some indiscernible reactions: “Mm-hmm,” “I see,” “And what does…,” “I see,” “Mm-hmm.” And then a long pause, longer than any other. Suzy stands at an opposite corner of the kitchen from her mother. Suzy has the scars of a frown on her face. “Well, thank you, Doctor,” he says. “Speak soon, you bet.” And he gestures for Edith to hang up.

  There are no words and no one presses.

  “They think it’s gone,” he says.

  “What?” It’s Edith.

  “They don’t see it at all. None on the spine and not at its edges, not spreading.”

  “Oh my God,” Edith says.

  Wayne looks disinterested, distrusting.

  “How are you just…reacting like that?!”

  “I feel the same as I did before they told me what it looks like, before they told me what they think. They could be wrong.”

  “Or they could be right. Dr. Bard has no reason to give you that news unless he’s feeling good about it. He always has three others look at it—that’s what he said. And they concur? Nobody sees a thing?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  Edith’s cheeks are wet all over again. Her face hasn’t had an opportunity to dry out.

  Suzy is at the table and bends down to hug her father and kiss his cheek. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know what she’d say anyway. She just holds him another second and then another, and she feels Wayne’s breath in her hair, smells the juniper from the gin he snuck into his orange juice. And then she feels his face shift, about to say something, and before Edith joins the embrace, he whispers it to Suzy’s ear only:

  “But what about Grace?”

  The shadow waiting at the base of her stairs surprises her badly, kicking up the little bird in her chest, but she approaches it with high shoulders and a bored, flat face.

  “What do you do while you’re waiting?” she says.

  “I haven’t been waiting that long.”

  “You eat a burrito, you read a magazine.” She gestures to the ball of foil on the ground and the large-format, folded-over Rolling Stone tucked under his arm.

  “I wanted to see how you were doing,” Billy says. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

  “You could’ve called.”

  “I have called. You have a stalker’s worth of messages.”

  “I went home. I told you I was going.”

  “You know I mean before that. I understand what’s been going on—I mean, I don’t understand—but I just wanted to check in.”

  “How did you know I’d be back tonight, anyway?”

  “Called the airline.”

  “I wasn’t even on duty.”

  “They skimmed the manifests.”

  “What the fuck.”

  “I sell to Janice. I cut her a deal.”

  “You could’ve been a serial killer.”

  “Yeah, well. Like I said, I haven’t been waiting that long. Good information.”

  “I’m pretty beat,” she says.

  “Just, let’s talk for two minutes upstairs.”

  “I really don’t feel like watching you smoke.”

  “Just let me come up. I promise I won’t stay long.”

  Suzy doesn’t like this, doesn’t like that he cares about something enough to be pathetic about it. This was always the appeal, the insouciant remove. Her eyes track up the long ascent and she hands him her suitcase.

  “How are you feeling?” he says when the door clicks shut.

  “The funeral was pretty horrible,” she says. “But my dad’s doing okay.”

  “That’s great. That’s really great.” He seizes on the uplift. He’s being careful—his enthusiasm is tiptoeing. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t react badly.

  “Better than expected,” she says. “Knock on wood.”

  “That’s great, Z.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “That’s great, Su-Z.”

  “You came here not to just ask me about my trip.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, spit it out—I wasn’t just putting you off, I want to go to bed.”

  Billy stands in the center of the living room, hands in the pockets of his dungarees, shoulders slumped like a marionette with slack strings.

  “I wanted to know…in addition to how you’re doing…whether you’d thought much about the near future with regard to your work.”

  Suzy wonders if it looks as though she’s smiling because of the upticks of her lips, the tonally inappropriate one-note repose of her well-shaped mouth.

  “I haven’t really thought about it beyond what I said at the football game,” she says. “I’m still out, I guess.”

  “Just so you know, it’s not me asking,” he says.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I know all the reasons why this is a horrible thing to have to talk about. But fact of the matter is, we still technically work for people, and they have questions and interests that are more important to them than the space I wish they’d give you. They need someone to make a run this week.”

  “I haven’t thought about whether I’m going to keep flying even generally.”

  “They want to know if they should hold out or find someone else.”

  “Tell them to find someone else. I was done anyway.”

  “They’re not going to want to find someone else, though.”

  “Then why did you just suggest that as an option?”

  “Look, I’m trying my best here to buy us a little space—”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Right. And they were cool with some weeks, a month.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell them I was done when I told you to?”

  “Because we hadn’t settled on it officially. And besides, that’s a big deal to them, it’s not as easy as just—”

  “It is, though! All you had to say was ‘Don’t wait around for this one.’”

  “Look, they’re actually open to the idea of you walking away eventually. Soon, even. But they need you to do this run to New York ASAP.”

  “I was just in New York.”<
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  “You weren’t working. And, frankly, they don’t know that. I lied and said you’ve been somewhere else.”

  “I really don’t owe them anything.”

  “It doesn’t—look, Suzy, it doesn’t matter. Don’t act like you don’t understand what I’m saying. It’s what they feel. How they perceive things. They feel like they’ve let you hang pretty loose on the line. They’ve lost stews before, that’s all part of it, but so long as you can physically do it, so long as you’re still working for the airline, they’re gonna put the screws to you to make runs.”

  “I’m not gonna fucking do it! Just tell them that.”

  “My whole position here,” he says, shifting up to a higher plane of conviction, “has been, all along, to protect you from these guys and what they’re really saying.”

  “Protect me? All along? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “After the first time…I put it all on the table, and it was your choice.”

  “Get the fuck out of my apartment.”

  “Suzy: listen to me. If you don’t make this run, they’re going to turn you in.”

  “That’s bullshit. They’d be implicated.”

  “It doesn’t really work like that. They have cops on payroll. You’re just a runner. You’re just a stewardess. They’ll point them to the surveillance tapes in New York. They have all sorts of records. It’s easy.”

  Suzy wonders what this conversation would feel like during the day. With the light sloshing through the blinds, with the boring constancy of the waves rolling in off the horizon on the pace of a dialed-down metronome. But instead it’s just a single naked bulb, the ceiling fan sprouting like a fern. The only light in a dark world, tar at the edges of the frame, all the threats and volleys caroming off the walls and settling around her in a whirlpool of distortion. What is he even saying?