Flying High

by Gwynne Forster

  “Thanks for my lunch, and especially for that great massage. I’d better get back to work while I’m still pain-free.”

  He looked at Ricky and marveled that the child didn’t jump from the chair and trail after him as he usually did. Ricky ignored him.

  “After you give me my ice cream, Audie, you can play with my robot.”

  He went upstairs, almost reluctant to leave them. As he worked, their chatter and laughter buoyed him, but after a time quiet prevailed. He walked over to Ricky’s room to find them both asleep, Ricky in Audrey’s lap with his head on her breast and she with both arms around him. The longer he stared at them, the lonelier he felt. Disgusted with himself, he put on a leather Eisenhower jacket, went out in his back garden and busied himself building a fire in the brick oven. He couldn’t say exactly why he did that, but he was certain of his need to change the scene and recover that part of himself that, within a split second, Audrey Powers had stolen. He sat there in the cool and rising wind until after dark, warming himself by the fire and reminding himself of Carole James, the one woman, the betrayer, he’d allowed himself to love. Thoughts of her brought the taste of bile to his mouth.

  “I’ll die a bachelor,” he said aloud, shoveled some dirt on the coals, and went inside.

  * * *

  Audrey prowled around Ricky’s room, fighting a vexation at her aunt that was rapidly escalating into anger. It was time Ricky had dinner, she didn’t know what to give him, and his hotshot uncle was nowhere to be found.

  “I wanna eat, Audie. I’m hungry.”

  She looked at her watch for the nth time. Seven-fifteen. Of course he was hungry; so was she. She heard the back door close, grabbed Ricky’s robot and rushed to the top of the stairs.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Sorry, Audrey. It didn’t occur to me that I might frighten you. Lena isn’t back?”

  “No, she isn’t, and Ricky’s hungry. Maybe you’d better phone a restaurant and have something delivered.”

  He reached the top of the stairs where she stood holding Ricky’s hand—or maybe Ricky was holding her hand. The cloud covering her face and the set of her mouth told him to tread carefully. He didn’t enjoy tangling with women in the best of circumstances, and this one was angry. Moreover, she had a right to be.

  His hands went up, palms out. “I’m sorry about this. I was out back, thinking Lena—”

  “She isn’t here, and—”

  He wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted, but he thought it best not to tell her that. “As I was about to say, if you’ll tell me what you’d like to eat, I’ll order dinner. I know a great seafood restaurant that will deliver full-course meals within forty minutes.”

  “I’ll take shrimp and whatever goes with it.”

  A deep breath escaped him. Thank God for a woman who didn’t feel she had to wash his face with his errors. “Great, so will Ricky. Be back shortly.”

  He went into his room and ordered dinner for the four of them. He had a few things to tell Lena, but that didn’t mean she should be deprived of a good meal.

  His hunch told him the less Audrey was required to do, the better her mood would be, so he set the table in the breakfast room and opened a bottle of chilled chardonnay.

  “Would you like a glass of wine while we wait for dinner?” he asked Audrey.

  Suddenly, she laughed. “I may be furious with my aunt, Nelson, but I won’t bite your head off.”

  “Thanks for the assurance. You’ve got such a dark look on your face that I wasn’t sure I should say a word to you. This wine is usually pretty good.”

  “Thanks, I’ll have half a glass. I don’t drink when I have to drive. Say, that’s the doorbell, isn’t it? Mind if I answer it?”

  “Uh, no. If it’s Lena, give her a chance to explain before you blow her away.”

  She rushed to the door with Ricky and his blanket trailing behind her. “Oh. It’s the food,” she called to Nelson, looking up to find him beside her. He paid the delivery man and took the food.

  “Come on, you two, let’s eat.”

  They sat down, and the doorbell rang again. She moved as if to get up, but he raised his hand. “I’ll get it. You should have cooled off by now.”

  “I never cool off till I get my due,” he heard her say as he headed for the door.

  “Sorry. Forgot my key. How you doing, Colonel? I know Audrey’s mad by now, but I got back quick as I could.”

  “Audrey? What about me? I’m the one you’ve got to reckon with.”

  “Now, now, Colonel. Give me a chance to get in. I bet your neck feels better.”

  The audacity of the woman! “Dinner’s on the table. I’ll speak with you later.”

  “Miss Lena. Guess what? I had toast this morning, and I didn’t have to eat any veggies for lunch. Audie gave me san...sandwiches.”

  “I bet she did. Audrey, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “No problem,” Nelson said. “Audrey’s mad at you, but you two can deal with that later. Right now, she’s going to smile if it kills her. We’re going to enjoy our food.”

  They listened to Lena’s tales of the famous Crystal Caverns and her picturesque account of the view along the highway as they’d approached it. He knew she meant to placate both him and Audrey, but he didn’t think she achieved her goal.

  “I’d better be going,” Audrey said when they finished eating. “Be sure and take care of your neck, Nelson. My judgment is that if you don’t, you will have serious trouble down the road.”

  It struck him as silly; he didn’t want her to leave. “Uh, thanks. I... It was good to meet you, Audrey.”

  “I want Audie to stay,” Ricky said. “I don’t want her to leave, Unca Nelson. Please don’t let her leave.”

  Audrey knelt beside the child and placed an arm around him. “I have to go, Ricky. I hate to leave you, but I have to go home.”

  “No!” Ricky ran and stood with his back against the door. “No, you can’t go.”

  Nelson looked down at his nephew and wondered whether Audrey had sprinkled some kind of dust over him and the boy. Then, he reached to lift Ricky into his arms, but the child evaded him.

  “I don’t want Audie to leave.” Then he sat down on the floor and began to cry. “Unca Nelson, don’t let her leave. I don’t want her to go.’

  Lena bent to take the child into her arms. “Ricky, darling,” she said. “It’s time for bed. Kiss Audrey goodbye and off we go to bed.”

  He twisted away from her. “No. I want Audie to stay.”

  “I’ll come back to see you, Ricky. I promise.”

  Nelson stared at her. “Don’t tell him that if you don’t mean it.”

  She squinted at him, and a frown clouded her face. “I wouldn’t dare lie to a child. If you don’t want me to come see him, say so.”

  “I’m sorry.” He picked up the recalcitrant boy, hugging and comforting him. “It’s all right, Ricky. She said she’d come to see you, and she will. Now give her a big kiss and let her go home. She’s tired.”

  Ricky reached out to kiss Audrey. “I’m sorry you have to go, Audie. Bye.”

  Ricky didn’t usually hold on to Nelson so tightly, and it struck him with considerable force that the effect of so many losses in the child’s young life lay close to the surface of Ricky’s emotions. He wondered if Audrey reminded Ricky of his mother. She didn’t bring to his mind any other woman he’d ever met, and he doubted he would forget her soon, if ever. Remembering her promise to visit Ricky, he turned and, still holding the child, loped with him up the stairs to his room. Who was this woman who had changed both their lives? He put the boy to bed and stood looking down at him as he dozed off to sleep. You will forget her long before I will. For the first time in seven hours, pain streaked through his neck.

  Chapter 2r />
  Audrey took the Capitol Beltway, by passing the city to avoid traffic on her way home to 68 Hickory Lane in Bethesda, Maryland, a Washington suburb. The day had been less stressful than she’d anticipated, though she certainly had not expected to meet Nelson Wainwright. She drove into the garage, as she usually did when getting home after dark, and entered her house through the kitchen. Faced with the choice of an apartment in the District or a town house in Bethesda, she hadn’t hesitated to take the latter. She loved her home, a gray two-story brick with green shutters set among evergreen trees and shrubs, and she had a special fondness for her garden and the woods beyond.

  She walked into the kitchen, turned on the light and hurried to the hallway to answer the phone.

  “Well,” Lena said, without preliminaries, “what did you think? Is the problem with his neck serious?”

  Audrey rested her left hip against the marble-topped walnut table on which she kept the phone, and took a deep breath. “Aunt Lena, you have a lot to account for. Nelson Wainwright is perfectly capable of taking care of his nephew for one day. I could have been doing I don’t know how many things I’ve been postponing. You didn’t need a substitute sitter.”

  “Yes I did, too. I wouldn’t be shouldering my responsibility if I just up and went off for a day.”

  “You told me last week that you weren’t going on that trip.”

  “I changed my mind. Besides, his neck’s been getting worse. How bad is it?”

  “I don’t know. Without an MRI or a CAT scan, I wouldn’t be able to make a diagnosis. I think it’s a problem, and he’d better have it diagnosed and treated.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling him. Did you at least examine it?”

  And she had almost lost herself in the process. “I did, but I gave him a good shock. I think he thought at first that I was coming on to him. I eased the pain for a few hours.”

  “What did you think of Ricky?”

  Where was all this leading? “You created a problem for me, you know that? I didn’t have a reason to go back there till I had to promise Ricky I’d visit him. I’m not happy about that, but I have to keep my word to him.”

  “Cute little tyke, and sweet as he can be. Don’t you think he’s handsome?”

  “Ricky? He’s too little to be handsome.”

  Lena’s sigh of exasperation reached her through the wire. “Not Ricky. The Colonel. Girl, where’re your hormones?”

  Audrey rolled her eyes and looked toward the ceiling. “Under lock and key.”

  “Now, child, don’t let one little experience sour you on men. Nothing is sweeter in this life than the love of a good man. You’re thirty and in the prime of your life. You ought to have a...a nice man, Audrey.”

  One little experience, indeed. That one had been catastrophic. “Right you are, Aunt Lena. We’ll talk again soon. I’m pooped.”

  She hung up, took a shower, and crawled into bed with a mystery novel, but the story wouldn’t engage her attention. A nice man. Any normal woman would want one. But the “nice” man who’d sworn he loved her had courted and seduced her, taking her most priceless possession from her, and then confessed that he hoped he hadn’t made her pregnant because he couldn’t marry her. He had a wife, two children and another one on the way, something he kept secret until after he took her virginity.

  She sat up in bed. One of these days, I’ll get even with him. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make him pay.

  Nelson Wainwright. Everything about him bespoke honor and integrity. Surely he wouldn’t... “He’s a man, isn’t he?” she said aloud. But, heedless of her admonition to herself, her mind’s eye flashed into her memory the way he’d looked at her when he stood in the doorway and let her pass him. His eyes...as seductive as soft June moonlight over a garden perfumed with roses. Beguiling and... She got up, downed a glass of wine, got back into bed and fought the covers until, exhausted, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  The following Monday morning, Audrey arrived an hour early at her office in the Howard University Hospital. With the files of some of her patients, videotapes and several relevant research papers, she studied possible causes for Nelson’s discomfort, because she didn’t believe it could be attributed to a whiplash or that a whiplash would take so long to heal. She was deep into her research when her first patient arrived at nine-thirty.

  It’s just as well you got out of my head, Nelson Wainwright. She cleared her desk, but Nelson remained in her thoughts. My interest is purely professional. She recited it as if it were a mantra. Purely professional. If nothing else, any man that good-looking is bound to be a ladies’ man, and I never could stand those.

  “Ms. Carmichael, I’ll see Mrs. Blanchard now.”

  * * *

  That night when Nelson sat down to dinner with Lena and Ricky, he could hardly bear the pain in his neck, though he wore a soft collar in the hope of easing the discomfort. The memory of Audrey Powers’s fingers soothing his neck only made the pain worse. Lena said grace and then asked Ricky to repeat it. The ritual meant as much to Ricky as the evening meal, and he prided himself in being able to say the grace without making a mistake.

  “I see your neck’s got you again,” Lena said. “Here, have some of this salmon paté. I know you like it, so I made a big batch. If you don’t do something about that neck, you’re gonna be in serious trouble. I declare—”

  “Lena!”

  She didn’t stop eating. “What is it, sir?”

  “You always call me ‘sir’ when you know you’re out of line. I don’t want this conversation at the table again. And I haven’t told you what I thought of your little scheme to get Audrey Powers over here.”

  She chewed more slowly. “You didn’t like her?”

  “Lena, you could twist the Bill of Rights till it read like an indictment. Of course I liked her. Why wouldn’t I? I’m a living, breathing man, aren’t I? And for goodness sake, get that satisfied look off your face. I just made a statement of fact.”

  “I ain’t said one thing, Colonel. Me and Ricky just sitting here watching you lose it. All I did was ask her to come stay with Ricky.”

  “Audie said she’s coming to see me, didn’t she, Miss Lena?”

  “Yes she did, darling, and she will, too.”

  “Watching me...Lena, would you please pass me that salmon paté?”

  She looked askance at the dish and then at him. “Why, yes. But that’s the first course. We supposed to be on the entree now. Have some of this roast pork. It’s delicious.”

  “I’m sure it is. Pass me the salmon paté, please.” He loved roast pork, but he was damned if he’d let her tell him what he couldn’t eat. “And would you please give me Dr. Powers’s telephone number? I want to thank her and apologize for the inconvenience you put her through Saturday.”

  “You going to call Audie, Unca Nelson? Can I talk to her?”

  “When I call her you may, but tonight you’re going to bed early, and I am not going to read Bobby’s First Kite ten times tonight, either.”

  “How many times can we read it, Unca Nelson?”

  “You and Lena are intent on ringing my bell tonight, but it won’t happen,” he said at the end of the meal. “I’m oblivious to both of you.”

  He picked Ricky up, hugged him and gave his bottom a playful swat. “Come on.” In a little over three months, the child had become a part of him. And as overbearing and motherly as Lena tended to be, she made his house a home, endearing herself to him in so many ways.

  * * *

  As he left for work the next morning, a feeling, warm and satisfying, pervaded Nelson, a sense that he was leaving, not the empty house that had been his for years, but a home that protected the loved ones who would greet him when he returned. As he headed down the corridor to his office, he greeted several young officers wit
h a smile that reflected his sense of belonging, and noticed the look of amazement on their faces. Surely they didn’t consider him a sourpuss just because he didn’t grin at them. He dealt with war and espionage, and that did not inspire him to walk around here with a smile on his face. He went into his office and got busy.

  Nelson knew he was blessed with an intuitive sense about human beings, an insight that, to his knowledge, had failed him only once—and what a crucial failing it was, misjudging Carole James.

  “That’s because I let my emotions rule my head,” he told himself as he began to search through the thirty personnel folders on his desk. He needed five officers for a mission in sub-Saharan Africa, and the act of choosing nearly unnerved him; they had to be the best, but they had barely any chance of getting back home.

  “It’s like playing God,” he said to himself. “I don’t like it.” After several hours, his mind made up, he telephoned Captain Jack Jefferson. He believed the man had the stuff that constituted bravery under intense pressure, but he had to be sure.

  “Good morning, sir. Did I make the cut?”

  Nelson stood and shook hands with the officer. “First one. This is voluntary, Captain. If you decline, it won’t be on your record.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  He leaned back in his chair and summoned the willpower not to grasp his neck. “We’ll do all we can to protect you and to rescue you if you get into trouble. You’re not married. Would you be leaving a woman behind?”

  He watched the man’s demeanor and was relieved when Jefferson shrugged. “There’s someone I like, but it’s nowhere near serious. I’m free.” He leaned forward. “I want to go, Colonel. I’ve been studying and priming myself for this for the past year. I’ll get what I’m going after. Believe that.”

  Nelson did believe him. The man lived up to his notices. He shook hands with him. “You’ll get your orders in a few days. Good luck.” He’d almost said, “God bless you,” but that would have been out of character, and he didn’t want to sound ominous. He chose the other four, sent their names and serial numbers to the Commandant and called it quits. He had warred with his nerves for ten hours, and it was enough for a day. He headed home, looking forward to Ricky’s laughter and Lena’s mothering.