Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1)

by Noel J. Hadley

  2

  “You know why I like coming here with you?” Elise straddled her surfboard within paddle distance of Bolsa Chica Beach, both legs dangling off from either side. I’d crossed paths with gorgeous surfer girls before, but nobody ever matched her beauty. She was like Helen of Troy with a wetsuit.

  “Because I’m the sexiest surfer you know with more skills to pay the bills than eleven-time world champion Kelly Slater?” I gunned my classic Chamberlain grin. Whenever I showed the pearly whites of my signature Chamberlain grin, women almost always tore their clothes off. Elise did no such thing.

  “No,” she said without the hint of amusement. “It’s because I finally feel like I’m in control of something when I’m out here surfing. It relaxes me sitting here and talking with you, waiting on the next perfect wave to roll in. But more importantly, you relax me.”

  “It must be the grin of a Chamberlain. It has the power not only to relax you, but simultaneously tare your clothes off.”

  “I’m being serious.” She splashed a handful of water my way. “In psychology, we have a term for people like you…chronic wise-ass.”

  “I kind of prefer alternative titles like incessant. It sounds so much more politically correct than chronic.”

  I pulled a genuine laugh from her lips. In my defense, I never was a chronic wise-ass until I married Elise. It had become my mission in life to haul a genuine laugh from the sexiest therapist in the world’s lips.

  “Elise,” I told her after a moment of silence with no hint of a pleasurable wave. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.” She responded rather mechanically, like so many veteran married couples do. It was the kind of sterile line that lost its meaning in the day-to-day repetition of conversation between two lovers.

  “No, Elise. I don’t think you heard me. I really love you. It feels really good to be home.”

  Elise smiled this time, stretching her fingers between our boards to caress my hand. “I really love you too.” She thought on it. “Now are we gonna sit here like two sappy wet logs or are we gonna catch what looks to be the only descent wave of the day?”

  I didn’t answer her. I tucked my body into position and let my board do all the talking. She was right. It was the only descent wave of the day.

  3

  I loved being home with nothing to do.

  And the best part about it was the beach cities were fashionably pulling out of the cool season. In Southern California we only had two seasons, cool and warm. Sure, I was favorable to cold weather, but I was somewhat biased when it came to girls in their summer clothes. Bruce Springsteen had recently penned a song about that. He had appropriately titled it Girls In Their Summer Clothes. I liked that song, but not nearly so much as I liked the actual women in which it was based on. Global Warming had its perks.

  I was reclining in a swivel chair from the living room of my second story apartment home in Belmont Shore, feet propped up on my desk, viewing the latest edition of ETIQUETTE Magazine when I decided to give Springsteen’s rendition a listen. I gazed down below into the small private courtyard, with its adjacent fourplex, just in case any lost or wandering girls sporting the seasonal uniform should happen to walk by as an illustration to his point. Nobody ever did. My wife, however, was lying out by the Jacuzzi reading Psychology Today, sunbathing… in a bikini. Had women actually wandered through the private courtyard, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed. The view was spectacular exactly as it was.

  In ETIQUETTE Magazine’s latest controversial edition, some photographer was crazy enough to travel all the way up to the Arctic Circle and capture the most beautiful pictures ever taken on the controversial subject of Global Warming and its current effects on the shrinking glacial and iceberg population. I studied the image of a sad-looking polar bear trapped on a miniature island of ice and then lowered the magazine to see the exact same picture, only magnified and printed on canvas, hung on my studio wall.

  “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” I told myself, and then flipped the page.

  The next centerfold revealed two polar bears stranded on an elevated berg barely held up by two melting pillars of ice. I lowered the page and studied the same exact same picture mounted on the wall of my studio, another clue. I must have been a professional sleuth in another life.

  I pulled a sip of coffee from my Charlie Brown t-shirt mug, tore a bite off from my meatball sandwich, and stared at my favorite picture in the series. A polar bear was plunging in the ocean, half of its body bobbing above the arctic, the other half swimming underwater, and apparently moving towards the crazy photographer.

  “Who is this masked marvel?” I said to Aristotle.

  Aristotle was a black as midnight hound dog, head to toe, almost the size of a Grate Dane, and a souvenir from my nationwide traveling. I was in San Antonio for a wedding four years earlier, crossed over to the Garden District of New Orleans, and long story short, caught sight of him as an eight-week-old puppy, the last to be sold off of his litter. I’d never seen another quite like the little guy, with his fat paws and long leathery ears, and had to buy him. Imagine the phone call to my wife when I told her there was a new love in my life, and that she was not only black, but a he. Aristotle was keeled over on his side sunbathing on the deck, with its New Orleans looking iron bars (where he likely felt at home), and lifted his head in reply to my inquisition. When he realized I wasn’t asking if he wanted a bite of my sandwich, he quickly returned to his dream pose, sighing with spousal sarcasm.

  I heard footsteps outside as pedestrians ascended the Spanish steps leading up to my front door. They were probably two girls dressed in summer clothes, like the song, maybe even Heidi Klum and a clone in person. I kept my fingers crossed. A man could dream, couldn’t he?

  When I answered the door a young couple introduced themselves as Bradley and Renee, potential wedding clients, and were clearly dressed for winter, not summer. They wasted little effort in describing themselves as progressive slash indie slash vintage slash hipsters slash something else that I couldn’t remember and clearly looking for the same flavor in their wedding day photographer.

  “Did you take these photographs?” Renee wanted to know. She sounded unimpressed. I considered telling her that some other idiot took them and hung them here anonymously like a thief in the night. I didn’t.

  “Only if you like them.” I gunned my Chamberlain smile. No woman on earth could refuse the smile of a Chamberlain. “But if not, I know a few names I could drop under torture.” Whenever I showed the pearly whites of my Chamberlain smile, women would go crazy and rip their clothing off. Renee did no such thing.

  Bradley and Renee interrogated the baker’s dozen of my latest Global Warming series, seemingly neutral with each one, faces that spoke of Oxford and lips that declared they’d once kissed the Blarney Stone.

  “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that one’s rather progressive,” I said, narrating each print as they roamed the room. “And that one’s sort of an indie piece, now that I think on it – and that one…. no, that’s not very hipster…. forget you ever saw it.”

  Renee shooed Aristotle away. And here I thought all progressive slash indie slash vintage slash hipster slash something else I couldn’t remember types owned hounds. It was the newest trend, sort of a revival of the Middle Ages, that and women’s high-heeled shoes with pockets in them. Aristotle returned to bed, head slumped. Maybe hipsters were cat people. I’d have to refer to the Urban Dictionary for full clarity.

  “I’ve never seen an all-black hound before,” she said. “What is he, related to Goofy or something?”

  “He had no father,” I said, straight-faced.

  She still wasn’t impressed.

  “You know,” Bradley stared rather emotionless at the picture of the swimming polar bear, “you have the same last name as that World War Two photographer. What was it again? Something Chamberlain.”

  “I believe you’re referring to Ira Chamberlain.”

  “No, that’s not it,”
he said.

  I didn’t argue. I returned to my desk and let the two of them figure it out amongst themselves.

  “Something Chamberlain. What was it again? I’ve seen his work in magazines and text books.”

  “That would be Ira Chamberlain. He’s my grandfather.” I showed them my nameplate with CHAMBERLAIN written across it. “Despite the fact that he was a hero of Omaha Beach and the 1948 Israeli War and I am not, you’ll be happy to know that I’m a frequent visitor and supporter of the battlefields that he photographed whenever I’m hoping the Pacific Isles, in Italy, Germany, Jerusalem or France. Would you like to see the stamps in my passport?”

  This was the perfect opportunity to dive-in, headfirst, for the salesman kill…. or perhaps more of a sunburn belly flop. I opened the drawer and retrieved an eight-by-ten photograph of my grandfather.

  “Don’t I look exactly like him?” I said, turning my head to the right, mimicking the picture. “It’s practically spooky how much we’re alike.”

  “No, not really,” Renee said. “Your hair is lighter brown and his head looks smaller.” She tightened her eyes at the photograph. “His nose is straight. Yours has more of a Roman crook.”

  I would have gone with Russian author Vsevolod Garshin, but whatever.

  “Jeff Daniels looks more like Chamberlain than you do,” Bradley said with one of those I went to Oxford and kissed the Blarney Stone sort of stares.

  “There you have it.” I smiled. “Joshua and Ira Chamberlain. We might as well be twins.”

  Of course, the thing with Jeff Daniels was (the guy who played Chamberlain in a movie that focused in on his one-time affair with actress Ingrid Bergman), he had a nose that harkened to Harrison Ford, who believe it or not had an uncanny resemblance to Emperor Philippus, which was, to my knowledge, as Roman-crook as you get. So there you had it. See, everything eventually comes back around in a full circle.

  “Oh well,” I told Aristotle, chewing on a sandwich as their heels descended the stairs. “Maybe the phone will ring. I hear ex-president Clinton’s only daughter is still unmarried and love is looking positive for Prince Williams. Perhaps the Queen will call.”

  When Aristotle realized I wasn’t asking if he wanted a bite of my meatball sandwich, he quickly keeled over and returned to bed. I turned my gaze back on my wife, who was still sunbathing by the Jacuzzi, and flashed the seductive teeth of a Chamberlain. Her bikini didn’t fall off, but by God, I was determined to die trying.

  4

  I often received a lot of inquiries concerning the time it must have taken to sort through the enormous build-up of wedding day photos, especially since I spent so much time on the road and still claimed free time whenever I was home. That secret was a young college aged woman by the name of Penny Parker. She lived in a small one-bedroom apartment near Cal State Long Beach, just off Atherton and Ximeno, a bit of a recluse, and sorted through, as well as worked on, all of my images – for a price. But she was well worth every penny; excuse the pun. I always worked her fee into my client’s contracts. She even filled any special orders, which included albums, and kept my website regularly updated and running.

  Occasionally I’d thumb through the thousands of photographs accumulated in a single wedding day and uncover one I liked that she’d overlooked, but that was rarely if ever the case. Recently I’d stopped second-guessing her altogether. She knew my style and her digital touch ups were both naturally organic-looking and amazing. Every month she’d have new hand-picked photos up on my website and I could never get over how she’d select the perfect image to compliment the emotional impact of the others. Penny Parker was the hidden muscle behind my operation, even if she was a little weird.

  “Joshua,” she opened the front door of her apartment. Penny was of medium height, a cute petite face with sparse freckles and black bangs that cropped over box-shaped glasses. They framed her green eyes well. She was wearing pajama bottoms and a skin-tight shirt with Elmo’s face imprinted on it, and her breasts were huge. Apparently she’d beaten Katy Perry to the bounce by a few years. “And why might I have the pleasure?”

  I entered her apartment. The place was lowly lit, only the computer was on, and Amy Winehouse was singing about not wanting to go to rehab over its speakers. A poster of Leah Bishop, both hands cuffing her cheeks (she was apparently in political turmoil) was hung above Penny’s couch with the bold letters REPUBLICAN BLUE written across the bottom. I knew she was a lover of live theater, but I didn’t think she had a clue that Bishop and I once knew each other. I noticed a couple of images from my recent wedding in Chicago illuminating the screen.

  “I have a present for you.”

  “Joshua,” she said in her best seductive manner, “if it’s what I think it is…”

  I delivered a handful of digital cards. “I forgot to give you this one in the last batch. More from my recent trip to Chicago. The rest are from New Orleans and Florida.”

  Oh, she sighed. I guess she had something entirely different in mind.

  I handed her a check. Penny perked up a little, but it still apparently wasn’t what she had in mind. If history repeats itself, then I was almost certain I knew what she had in mind. She walked over to the computer, slumped into a broken swivel chair, and sipped from a juice box. Her chair didn’t look very comfortable.

  “I saw that one girl you were photographing.”

  “Which girl?”

  “I don’t know. I think she was the maid of honor or something.”

  “Oh, Erica.”

  “Mm-hmm. You took more pictures of her during the ceremony than the bride.”

  “That happens sometimes.” I was able to hide my blush well in her low-lit apartment.

  “You liked her, didn’t you?” It took considerable effort to turn around in her broken swivel chair.

  “No, not like that, Penny.”

  “Don’t I look a lot like her?” Penny smiled. She turned her head in both directions. “You thought she was cute, didn’t you?”

  “Now that you mention it…”

  “How’s your marriage doing, Joshua?” I counted the time it took before the subject came up. Twenty seconds. Not her best time. “I bet your wife doesn’t respect your work the way I do. I bet she doesn’t cook for you, or clean house, or wear a Wonder Woman costume. I have a Wonder Woman costume in the closet, if you ever want to see it.”

  “Elise and I are doing great. Thanks for asking. And keep up the good work. Maybe you can come over trick-or-treating on Halloween.”

  “But if your wife were to leave you…. I’d never leave you.”

  “If that happened, you know I’d come knocking.”

  Penny perked up in her chair. “You want to ask me out. I know you do. But you’re married, and you’re chivalrous, and a gentleman of gentlemen, I like that in a man.” I started to say something when Penny interrupted me. “I’m discreet, you know.”

  “I’m sure you are.” I granted her the courtesy of a smile and headed for the door before I afforded her the opportunity to sexually molest me. “Let me know when you’ve finished these photos. I can’t wait to see them.”

  “Oh Joshua,” she stood up. “Take me with you. I’ll carry your equipment. I’ll bathe you every morning and night. I’ll even follow you around massaging your shoulders while you photograph. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “That’s kind of weird, Penny,” I said. I hoped she didn’t own a gun. It was probably sitting in a box right next to her Wonder Woman costume. But her work was amazing.

  “But if you weren’t married, you’d take me along, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe in another life, Penny.” I started to close the door behind me.

  “Oh, I bet you want that. We probably did it all the time, and we had lots and lots of children. Dozens of them from doing it all the time.”

  “It’s always a pleasure, Penny.” This time I was really going to close the door.

  She held my digital cards up to her nose and sniffed the
m. “Bye, Joshua. This is probably your best work ever. I know it is.”

  “Can you please wait until I leave to sniff them? That’s kind of weird, Penny.”

  This time I really closed the door.

  5

  I couldn’t stand that stupid dog. Her name was Sparky, and she was supposed to be therapeutic or something, or so the claim went. Well, let me tell you, she was not.

  Sparky the Therapeutic Schnauzer, that was the long of it, and she kept vigilance of Elise’s laps, revoking my hand whenever fingers strayed too close. She lifted glass-button eyes and a shaggy beard, flared nostrils and snarled. Don’t touch her, you sexist bastard. I really hated that dog.

  Doctor Barbara Kennedy was middle aged, but you’d barely know it. She took care of herself. She also had the astounding ability to recline in her chair scribbling mental notes without the partnership of a legal pad or ballpoint pen, and she remembered all of it, each little detail, organizing them in the manila folders of her inner file cabinet. Even now as Elise’s animated hands led the symphony of her one-year career as a third grader, I was fully confident that she was digesting it all.

  I didn’t know my wife when she was shrunken two feet shorter and fifty pounds lighter in size, but if time machines were easily available, I know exactly where I’d sign up to go. Crossing both of my legs, hands squeezed beneath hind cheeks in a faulty attempt to keep Sparky the therapeutic terrorist at bay, I could only imagine how ambrosial she and her twin sister must have been, even during the darkness that for years plagued them.

  My Little Pony lunchboxes, white saddle Oxford’s with bold black stripes, knee high knickers, Catholic school dresses of checkered plaid to match and freckles with pigtails; that was my wife and her identical twin sister as third graders. Also the year, she told Doctor Barbara, that their father was killed. It happened on the Embarcadero Freeway during the San Francisco Earthquake. Elise stroked Sparky the therapeutic schnauzer’s beard in silence, recalling the tragedy.