A seven-year-old boy?
The floor dropped away, and Connor felt himself begin to freefall. Faster and faster into an abyss that couldn't possibly have a bottom. The math was not difficult. Seven years old? He'd been with Kiahna the summer of 1996.
There could be only one reason attorney Marv Ogle was calling him now.
“Mr. Evans, are you there?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and shielded them with his hand. “Yes … I'm sorry. How … how does this involve me, Mr. Ogle?”
Another pause. “The boy is your son.”
So there it was. With five short words, the man threw a spear at Connor that caught him in the chest and tore open his heart. A spear that burst his nicely fashioned reality and ripped a hole in all the justifications he'd ever made about that long-ago night. He had a son? A son he'd never known about nor heard of until this moment?
“Mr. Evans,” the attorney went on, “Kiahna left very specific instructions for the boy, and part of those included contacting you.” The attorney paused again. “The child has no one. Kiahna wanted you to consider taking him for two weeks, getting to know him before he was made a ward of the court.”
His head pounded harder with every word. He had a son? A seven-year-old boy named Max Riley? If he was the child's father, why hadn't Kiahna told him sooner, as soon as she'd found out she was pregnant? And now … now she wanted the boy to stay with him for two weeks? What about Michele and Elizabeth and Susan? What about the way their lives were going so well, exactly as he'd planned for them to go?
But with every question fighting for position in his mind, only one demanded his immediate attention.
He had a son?
After all these years, there was a boy in Honolulu who was his very own?
The truth twisted his heart and made a logjam of his words. He knit his brow together, concentrating until the clog broke apart and his words began to come again. “How … how do you know, Mr. Ogle? She never told me.”
“I've known Kiahna since she was in high school, Mr. Evans.” The attorney sighed in a way that rattled Connor's nerves even further. “She was a good girl; she didn't sleep around. After … after she found out she was pregnant, she told my wife and me what happened. The whole story.”
Nausea welled up in Connor. With every sentence the weight of the millstone around his neck grew.
“We told her to contact you, but she wouldn't. Never told a single person your name or how she'd met you. Just that you'd been together.”
“How …” Connor didn't recognize his voice. He had five minutes to report to the gate, and he was barely able to think, let alone move. “How did you find me?”
“When Max was born, she brought me an envelope. Inside were two documents—a will, and a letter for Max. She replaced the letter every year on Max's birthday. But the will stayed the same. In it she named you and the airline you work for. She asked that we do everything we could to find you … before her son be given over to the state.”
“Is he mine? Legally?”
“No. Your name isn't on his birth certificate.”
“Oh.” Connor was buying time, trying to fit this new information into his framework of reality. “She wanted me to adopt the boy?”
“Not that either. At least not at first.” The man's tone was kind, not accusing. “She wants him to visit you for two weeks. During that time he would be told only that you were a friend of his mother's. When the trial period is over, you would have a choice.”
“A choice?” Connor's hands shook. Sweat drops rolled down either side of his face.
“Yes. You could send him back and never contact him again. Or tell him the truth and keep him forever.”
The nausea grew worse. All his life he'd prided himself for his quick reactions, his ability to confidently tackle any problem he'd ever faced. He had run bombing missions in the Gulf War and pulled himself out of a death spin when his tail was hit by enemy fire. Twice he'd made emergency landings that had caused the airline to rewrite that part of the handbook. Connor could count his mistakes on one hand.
But this?
This was so far out of his league he couldn't remember how to breathe, let alone think up a way to unravel the ball of knots he'd just been tossed. For the first time in his life, he had no idea what to do next, no clue what to say. The news was still detonating in his soul, taking no prisoners as it worked its way through his consciousness and into the reality of his world.
“Mr. Evans … I realize this is probably somewhat of a shock. Do you have any thoughts on Kiahna's request?”
Thoughts? Yes … he had thoughts, but what were they? Across the concourse he heard the first boarding announcement for his flight. He opened his eyes and let them dart around the empty gate area that surrounded him. As though maybe the answer lay somewhere out in the open.
“I …”—he chewed on the inside of his lip—“can I have a week to … to talk to my wife?”
“Of course.” The man's voice was sympathetic. “But I'll need to know, Mr. Evans.” He made another loud exhale. “Max is staying with his baby-sitter, but she's not well. If he's going to be put up for adoption, we should set the procedure in motion as soon as possible. Homes for seven-year-old boys are not easily found.”
At mention of the child, anxiety tightened the knots even more. He still seemed to be falling, still couldn't stop the spinning in his head, but even so he couldn't hang up without asking one last question. “What's the boy like?”
“He's …” The attorney's voice cracked.
In that instant Connor knew. Everything the man had said was true. He'd known Kiahna all her life, and he knew the boy, as well. This phone call was probably as difficult for him as it had been for Connor.
“I'm sorry.” The man coughed. “He's … he's a very special boy, Mr. Evans. He's striking looking, tall and well built for his age. He loves baseball and football. He has his mother's tanned skin and green eyes, and a face that must come from someone in your family. He laughs and loves easily. He and Kiahna seemed to … well, they seemed to share one heart, really.”
Connor closed his eyes. He could almost see the boy, the way he must've looked throwing a ball or walking alongside Kiahna. Because after all these years, he still had not forgotten what she looked like. If he had his mother's eyes, the boy would stand out in a crowd of a thousand seven-year-olds.
The second announcement came over the PA system.
“Look …” Connor glanced at his watch. He needed to switch gears, become the professional pilot once more. Not the broken man he'd been that awful summer. “Give me a week. I'll call you as soon as I know.”
They ended the call, and Connor blocked everything he'd just learned from his mind. As he jogged to the gate, not one detail was allowed time in the foreground of his mind. Not one.
He checked in, took his place in the cockpit, and went through the motions of preparing for the flight. Concentration was a must in any piloting situation, and this one would be no different. Connor gave the matter at hand his full attention, making appropriate conversation with his copilot, and taking the plane full of passengers through a textbook takeoff.
Not until he was up at thirty-three thousand feet, disconnected from everything that awaited him on the ground below, did he let down his guard and then, like the rush of airspace that surrounded his plane, the memories came. Vivid and in full color, they came, and in light of the news the attorney had shared with him that morning, he could do nothing but let them.
TEN
There'd been reasons for his fall.
But they had little to do with the bizarre circumstances of that stormy August night when all Hawaiian air traffic was grounded for three full days. Rather, they involved the five months prior, at least that's how Connor saw it.
He pressed back into the seat of his cockpit and stared at the vast stretch of blue before him. No, if he was honest, the problems started a year before that, in the days after Michele's mother woke up one m
orning vomiting, and wound up dead two hours later of a brain aneurysm.
Connor had been flying a little more than three years by then, and competition for schedules and hours was tight. But after her mother died, Michele—who was five months pregnant with Susan—slipped into a depression that frightened him. She spent entire days in bed, doing nothing more than feeding and clothing Elizabeth, who was almost two at the time.
One afternoon when he came home from work, he found Michele asleep on the sofa, their daughter toddling around the kitchen alone. He knelt near his wife, frightened that somehow she, too, had died.
“Michele!” He shook her, and when she stirred, relief flooded his heart. “Michele … how long have you been sleeping?”
The scene happened again three times in the next two weeks, until finally Connor was forced to make a decision. His wife wasn't dead, but she might as well have been. She was no longer capable of taking care of herself, let alone little Elizabeth. He contacted the airline the next morning and requested two weeks off, with a shortened schedule after that.
Michele's improvements were immediate.
They found a baby-sitter who could come in while they attended counseling together. And after a two-month dose of antidepressants, and the prayers of their friends at church, Michele was herself again.
But by then the damage at work was done. Connor had fallen to the bottom of the seniority chart, and after Susan was born in November, he was assigned a temporary move to Los Angeles.
The memory broke apart and he tightened his grip on the controls. He'd thought about that assignment a thousand times since the night with Kiahna. If only it hadn't been temporary. If the airline had been willing to move his entire family to Los Angeles, then at least he would've had more time with Michele.
The transfer was effective in March, but from the beginning they both knew it could last months. Which meant Michele and the girls would stay in Florida, while he set up a company-funded, furnished apartment in Los Angeles.
“I'll be home at least once every week,” he told Michele.
And he was at first. But after a while, the commute was hardly practical. Twice-a-week flights from Los Angeles to Hawaii with a layover in Honolulu left him exhausted, struggling to find the energy to go on.
Michele became friends with Renee Wagner, and since both of them were often home alone, they helped each other. Knowing that Michele had a friend made it easier to sometimes let as many as three weeks go by without a visit home.
Then in May, the unthinkable happened.
Connor was bringing a 737 into Los Angeles International Airport when the tower gave him orders to land on one of the western runways. The request was unusual—every other time he'd been instructed to land from the east. But something else made it strange. As far as Connor could tell, another jet a few miles south of him was headed for the same runway.
Even now, Connor remembered the fear. LAX was one of the busiest airports in the world. Every pilot knew how possible it was for an air traffic controller to make a mistake.
He made the request without giving it further thought. “Flight Four Zero Three requesting change of runways, over.”
Silence filled the airways, and Connor glanced out the right side of his cockpit. The neighboring aircraft was closer now, narrowing the distance that separated them. Normally, he would've made a second attempt at the request, but time had run out. If he was going to avoid a possible collision, he needed to make a northern angle and land on one of the adjacent runways.
“Hey.” It was his copilot. The man sat straighter in his seat, his voice tense. “What're you doing?”
Connor felt sweat on his brow. He snapped at the man, “We've got company.” He nodded his head toward the first runway. “Another aircraft coming in.” His eyes narrowed. “I had to make the change.”
“But you didn't get—”
“I did what I had to.” He glared at the man. “I know what I'm doing.”
He was partway through making the move when he tried again. “Flight Four Zero Three, requesting change of runways, over.”
“Name your reason, Four Zero Three.”
“Congestion coming in on the assigned runway, over.”
The pause that followed was Connor's first sign that something was wrong. When the controller's voice came over the air again, his tone was frustrated, almost panicked. “We're picking you up moving away from the designated runway, is that correct?”
“Yes. My first request went unanswered, so I made the decision to avoid a ground collision.”
“That decision isn't yours to make, Captain.” The controller gave a huff loud enough for any incoming flight to hear it over the radio. Then he cleared Connor's flight for a landing on the other runway.
Long before he landed the plane that day, Connor knew he was in trouble. Representatives from the FAA ushered him into an initial inquiry the moment he was at the gate. At the end of the brief meeting, a red-faced man in his fifties stared at Connor and shook his head.
“This type of defiance is unacceptable, Captain Evans.” He tapped his pencil on the sheet of notes he'd taken. “I'll be recommending a formal FAA investigation first thing in the morning.”
The demotion came before his next flight.
He was informed that until the investigation was completed, he would fly as a copilot only. Michele was frightened by the change, worried Connor would be stationed in LA longer. For the next month, every time he and Michele spoke, things felt strained between them. Tense. As though they'd become strangers.
Finally, in June that year, Connor made a decision. He would purchase a small regional airport near their home in West Palm Beach and he'd forget commercial aviation for good. The FAA could figure out their investigation without him.
The airport had been on the market for nearly a year, and after his transfer to Los Angeles, Connor checked on the price every month or so. It had dropped from nearly a million dollars to $550,000. With a hundred thousand down, he could have payments that would easily be covered by the small plane owners who used the airfield.
Finding the hundred down was the problem, but not one Connor couldn't see past.
Connor's father, Loren Herman Evans, had been more than an ace pilot in his day. Long before he hung up his wings, he and Connor's mother invested heavily in real estate. It wasn't so much what they bought, as where. They purchased open land and rental houses in an area of New Jersey thirty minutes outside of Manhattan.
By the time his father retired and sold their real estate holdings, the value of each piece had gone from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. When it was all sold and counted out, his parents netted nearly two million dollars.
Pilots were a different breed, and though Connor had never had an intimate relationship with his father, they shared a mutual respect and admiration for each other. There was no one Connor would rather shoot a round of golf with, but hugs were stiff and rare, declarations of love all but nonexistent.
His parents settled on a ranch in Cambria, California, not far from San Luis Obispo and the Pacific coast. His dad was healthy and hearty, a man whose gray hair and piercing blue eyes only made him more attractive as the years passed. For a while he dabbled in stocks, but he showed a continual penchant for buying high and selling low. Finally Loren Evans relaxed and left his money alone.
Once a year in the spring he organized a family vacation for Connor and Connor's three sisters and their families, and over time the lot of them came to expect glitches in the itinerary. One year their hotel reservation ran out three days before their outbound flights. Another time they were forced to bring cots into each of the rooms to make up for his booking three rooms instead of six.
In the summer, Connor and Michele would meet up with his father at the Cambria ranch, where he cranked up a bucket of homemade strawberry ice cream and convinced the group to play a round of croquet. At some point in the visit the conversation would turn to the paperwork towers in his father's office.
“Hire someone, Dad,” Connor would say. “You shouldn't have to live like that.”
But always his father's answer was the same. “I like it this way. I know exactly where everything is.”
His answer was typical pilot speak. Always in control; never admitting error or defeat. It took utter confidence to take hundreds of people into the air every day, so Connor understood. He was the same way, after all. Still, sometimes Connor wondered how his father had ever been organized enough to fly commercial airplanes.
In the end, their visits were pleasant enough, and Connor did more than respect his father when they were together. He enjoyed him.
So when the idea for the regional airport came up, Connor used his two-day break to drive north to Cambria and talk to his father. He felt certain of the outcome. What would a hundred thousand dollars be to his father? Besides, the man had always been generous, giving to charities and scholarship funds. Why would this time be any different? By then, Connor's mother was dead and his father had already suffered one heart attack. It wouldn't be long before at least part of the money was his anyway.
Connor waited until they were seated at a table on his father's back veranda, overlooking acres of rolling green hills and oak trees.
“Dad, I'm thinking about leaving commercial aviation.”
His father looked up, but said nothing. The lines on his forehead froze, and his expression turned to stone.
Connor gulped back his sudden doubts and launched into an explanation of the airport and his ideas about running it. “The place could handle twice the air traffic it has now. With a little advertising and promotion, profits could double in two years.”
Silence hung in the air for a beat. “You know my feelings on finishing a job. Work now, invest now. Make a hobby out of a regional airfield later, when everything else is finished.”
“Dad.” Tension sprouted between them. “I'm a man, and if I don't want to wait for retirement to change careers, I don't have to.”
“Fine.” His father's gaze was unwavering. “Why are you here, then?”
Oceans Apart (Kingsbury, Karen) Page 9