Tie it up quick, Ali. End on a good note.
“So, um, I’ll call you when I figure out Thanksgiving,” I say. “Sound good?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Celia says. “And Ali, we’re better than I thought, so no need to call me back.”
“See, I knew you were talking behind my back,” my mom says.
“Hey, it’s all good, Sis,” Celia says. “You know we love you.”
“Yeah, right,” she says.
9
“Keep the bubbles going. That’s it.”
Clark’s voice warbles, since my head is underwater. I float in the shallow end of the indoor swimming pool located on base, learning how to relax in the water. Which, apparently, is impossible for me.
“Let your wrists go limp,” Clark says. He reaches for my hands and gently shakes my fingers. Yikes, they were stiff. Like rigor mortis stiff. “Wiggle your fingers. There you go.”
Clark swam competitively at Texas A&M, so he’s been helping me with my swimming, which I’ve struggled with since forever. I was a land animal through and through, growing up a gymnast, until I became too tall, and was gently encouraged to leave the sport. As a result, I didn’t see much pool time as a kid, nor as a teenager, which means my stroke basically sucks. I barely passed the swim tests at the Academy, same in flight school—a struggling member of the sub squad in both places.
But I’m tired of fighting the water, so I’ve finally decided to do something about it.
Although that’s easier said than done.
Exhaling my last bit of air, I stand, push my hair out of my eyes, and lift my goggles.
“Okay, that was better,” he says. “But this time, we’re gonna focus on the head and neck. Remind me, what’s the number-one rule in swimming?” He offers a playful smile, as this is the one hundredth time we’ve gone over this, and yet I still have issues with it.
“Release the head,” I say. “And relax.”
“Good. Let’s try it again.”
I swear, Clark is the most patient and encouraging person I think I’ve ever met.
I pull my goggles over my eyes, inhale, and flop over, letting my arms and legs hang. I wiggle my fingers, realizing they’ve already tensed. Cripe …
“All right, now let the tension go in your neck. No wrinkles!”
Aghh! I’m doing it again.
Head up and looking forward? Tension. Which you can see by the crunched-up wrinkles in the skin on the back of the neck. Head down and looking below? Relaxation. Smooth skin, no wrinkles.
“There you go,” he says, in a manner so soothing I’m sure he could coax me to sleep if he wanted. “Let the tension go. Let the water support you.”
I think I’m letting the tension go, until he tries to move my head. He’s met with sound resistance. Same with the shoulders. He moves them around—yep, they were shrugged up nice and tight, too. Geez …
I focus on relaxing, letting my muscles go limp, blowing my little bubbles. In the background, I hear the delighted screeches of kids, giggling as they slosh down the three-meter-high circular slide that empties into the diving well. For families stationed in such an out-of-the-way place, the pool is a godsend. And in the unpredictable weather we see here in the high desert, it’s doubly so.
Although, in the week since we completed our avalanche transceiver training in sunny sixty-degree weather in Mammoth Lakes, the weather has only continued to warm. Perhaps we can delay full-on winter just that little bit longer.
“Way better, Alison,” Clark says.
I blow out the last of my air and stand again.
Clark and I both turn to look when the interior door to the pool opens and several men in flight suits stream through. Ten? Twelve? The man in front wears captain insignia. The line of men stretches out behind him, but three lieutenant cronies remain close, all of them joining the captain in snide laugher.
“… just make sure you keep your eyes in the boat,” the captain says. “Fuckin’ faggots everywhere in the ranks now.”
With a whoosh, the locker room shuts behind them.
I whip my head around, wondering if anyone else in the pool area heard that. They must have, it echoes so much in here.
“What a—” I say.
“Yeah. Hammer is exactly that.”
“Hammer?”
“The air wing commander.”
“That’s the air wing commander?” I turn to him, mouth open. “That guy? Are you ser—”
He confirms with a nod.
“How can he say stuff like that?”
“He says that and a lot more.”
“But—”
“He’s my boss, remember? Trust me. I know.”
“DAD!” The shouts are a chorus from across the pool, aimed at one of the men in flight suits, who has just moved beyond the interior door. “Dad, watch!” a boy, maybe four years old, shouts before flinging himself down the slide, squealing all the way. Two older girls, I’m guessing six and eight, with wet pigtails and pink Hello Kitty swimsuits, scramble up the ladder next.
The dad is accompanied by another pilot, one I recognize—Shane “Snoopy” Forester, a Naval Academy classmate and an old friend. He was here just a few months ago, acting as a liaison for the air wing in preparation for their arrival this week.
“Alison!” Snoopy says. He leaves his friend and walks over to Clark and me.
“Snoopy!” I say. “When did you get in?”
Snoopy wears his flight suit, including a patch on his sleeve from the USS Carl Vinson. The dad who watches his kids has the same patch, and Clark wears one on his flight suit, too. I know Clark is happy to see his old friends from the Vinson again. If he was offered a ticket out of Fallon to return with this group to the carrier, he’d take it in a minute.
“Just yesterday,” Snoopy says. “So how are you?”
“Better lately, thanks.”
Clark raises his eyebrows. He knows all too well my feelings about being stationed here, feelings that match his. But I can only shrug, just as surprised that those words left my mouth.
“Dad! Watch me! Watch me!” The Hello Kitty–clad little girls have positioned themselves at the top of the slide.
“I’m watching!” the dad calls.
“Wheeeeeeeeee!” Splash!
“They’re so small. And so comfortable…,” I say wistfully.
“Hey, you’re getting better,” Clark says with an encouraging nudge. “You’ve made huge improvements since we started.”
“I am a work in progress, true.”
“Are you ready to swim?” Snoopy asks Clark. “I have to brief in an hour, so…” Snoopy holds a Navy swim bag, a former competitive swimmer, like Clark.
“You go ahead,” I say to Clark. “I said I’d help the guys with their training today, and it looks like they’re about ready.”
In the lap area of the pool, our rescue swimmers are finishing their swim workout. They have to pass a laundry list of swim tests to keep their qualifications current, and swimming laps in a certain time is just one of them. After their workout, they’re scheduled for rescue-litter training, doing an open-water rescue scenario. They asked if I’d pose as their victim, which, since my only job is to float, is something I felt capable of helping them with.
“All right,” Clark says. “We’ll schedule another session soon, okay? Remember, you did good today.”
“Yeah, right. But thanks, anyway.”
“See ya, Alison,” Snoopy says.
Clark climbs out, and as he and Snoopy walk toward the locker room, I turn my attention to the father in the flight suit, laughing as he walks toward his kids in the diving area, and who’s tackled upon arrival. I don’t know why, but the whole scene triggers something weird. A twang.
I’ve always thought I would have kids, but I’ve never felt like having them. And maybe that’s not even what I’m feeling now. Perhaps it’s that this week has been one of phone calls and texts and planning for the wedding. A wedding, which leads to a honey
moon, which leads to …
Kids … What would our kids look like? Rich, with fair skin and black hair, and me, olive-skinned with varying shades of red hair mixed with strands of brown. And what would they do? Baseball? Football? Gymnastics? I can’t picture it. I can’t picture it at all. I close my eyes a moment, waiting for an image.… Is that the twang? Is it so far out of reach, I can’t even imagine it?
Or is it that thoughts about kids always lead to guesswork about my father. Would his grandkids look like him? Do I? Unfortunately, the images I keep are hazy at best. I just wasn’t old enough to remember him. And my mother hasn’t been any help. She rid the house of anything that reminded her of him—photos, clothing, memorabilia. If any of it still exists, she’s got it locked up somewhere, because I’ve never seen it.
As a result, I’ve grown up with this, I don’t know, void, a missing piece of myself. At a loss when putting together that school project about my family tree. Left wondering why my skin is so much darker than my mother’s. Like something taken from me …
“Okay, ma’am. We’re done!” Beanie calls from across the pool. “Ready to play victim?”
I dog-paddle to get to them, arriving as they lower the rescue litter into the water. They’re going to practice loading me in and strapping me to the contraption.
“Just float facedown for us, ma’am,” Beanie says. “We’re doing unconscious victim, so go totally limp, all right? You don’t have to do anything.”
Beanie has no idea that for me, “not doing anything” actually requires an enormous amount of effort.
I push off toward the center of the pool, let my body go limp—at least, I think it’s limp—and float there, trying like the devil to relax. But I stop myself right there. I’m trying to relax. Which means I’m doing something. Alison, come on! You just relax. There’s no action required. Just let go and relax, for god’s sake.
I need to blow my bubbles.
That’s it. Just focus on the bubbles.…
But then Beanie shakes my shoulders and arms, pulling me up.
“The pagers!” he says.
Boom. Relaxing practice over.
I pull off my goggles and make for the edge of the pool as our pagers beep and vibrate in a clamoring harmony, a racket made far louder by the echoing in this high-ceilinged natatorium.
Hap gets to the side first, leaps out, and checks the screen. “All eights!” he says. The code for civilian rescue.
We fly out of the water and race to put on our flight suits and boots. Within a minute, we’re sprinting out of the building. And as our group spills out into the warmest afternoon I can remember, the door slams resolutely shut behind us.
10
“Sir, I don’t see how we can do this,” I say to Boomer. He keeps the controls as we fly south, while I run the performance numbers. “We’re going high, and it’s too hot.”
“How high again?” Boomer asks.
“North Palisade Peak is over fourteen thousand feet, sir,” Beanie says. “And with what the sheriff is describing—climber with a head injury in a bergschrund—it’s gotta be U-Notch or V-Notch. We’re talkin’ thirteen thousand feet, if that’s the case.”
“What’s a bergschrund?” I ask.
“It’s a crevasse, ma’am,” Beanie says. “But a special kind, formed when glacial ice separates from the back wall of a cirque.”
I may not have ever heard the term “bergschrund,” but I do remember the word “cirque” from a past training lecture. A wide, bowl-shaped area, carved by a glacier, that underlies a ring of mountain peaks above it.
“Thanks, Beanie,” I say. “But I have a feeling we’re not gonna get to see it, because it’s seventy-five degrees down here. Granted, it’ll be cooler at altitude, but not by much.”
“Shit,” Boomer says. “Did you account for the loss in weight by removing the doors? We can do that when we land at the airport.”
“I didn’t. Stand by.”
I go back to the aircraft performance charts, checking how much power we’ll have available and how much we’ll need to effect the rescue. The higher the altitude and the warmer the temperature, the less power you have. So if we need to pick guys from a peak at thirteen thousand feet on a sixty-something-degree day, we might have to lose weight first by dropping off one of our crewmen, throwing out some equipment, or even dumping fuel to be light enough to do it.
I fly through the calculations, surprising myself with the speed of doing it the old-fashioned way—using a pencil, a calculator, charts, and a scratch piece of paper on my knee board. In the H-60, a computer did it for us.
“No, sir, even with the doors off, we won’t have enough power.”
Boomer doesn’t look convinced. And when we finally land at Bishop Airport, I can see he hasn’t given up. “Let’s have a little powwow with the ground team. I’m sure we can figure out a way to do this.”
We step inside the airport operations building, and Walt, the assistant Mono County SAR coordinator, is there to meet us. He’s surrounded by the Mono County SAR Team, most of whom I recognize. But there’s one member in particular who’s missing.
Try as I might, I can’t explain the sinking feeling that weighs on me when I see that Will isn’t here. But that’s not the only thing I sense. This group is restless. Looking closer at Walt, I see that he shares the same worried expression as the rest.
Normally, no matter how dire the situation, the group maintains a certain levity, a lightness. But the room is thick with tension, no joking or smiles today.
“Boomer, Alison,” Walt says as we approach. No friendly banter or handshake.
Now that the men are moving to the side, I see they’re standing around a center table, a map spread across it.
“The victim fell into a bergschrund right here,” Walt says, getting straight to the point, using his pencil to tap on the location.
Wait a second. If Will’s not here … Something squirms inside. No …
“… at the base of V-Notch on Palisade Glacier. A hiking party—four of our team members—saw him fall. They called and—”
Walt looks up, and the rest of the SAR team members turn, as Will strides into the room.
A wave of relief washes over me as he pushes through the crowd, a mountaineering backpack slung over one shoulder. I could swear someone just turned the lights up a little higher, everything brighter, crisper.
“What do we have?” Will asks. His eyes dart from Walt’s to ours to the others’. “Wait, what is it?”
“It’s, uh,” Walt says, swallowing. “It’s Jack.”
The restless room goes still, just as Will goes still. It’s several long seconds before he speaks.
“What happened?” Will says.
“He fell into the ’schrund below V-Notch,” Walt says. “Thomas and Kevin are up there. They were camping at the foot of the glacier with Tawny and Kelly. Saw it happen. They’re hiking up to it now, but they don’t have the right gear.”
Will turns to Boomer. “Can you fly me up there?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. I’ve got the guys taking the doors off now. The charts say no, but uh…” He turns to me. His eyes narrow, his face screwing up, as he thinks. “Yeah … it just might work.”
“What might work?” I ask.
“Do you have the charts with you?”
I nod, raising my hands to show him.
“Redo the calculations, this time with only three people in the aircraft.”
“Three?”
He nods.
“But that’s you, me, and Beanie. What about Will? What about the victim? We’d need power for five, and we don’t have enough for four. Even if we don’t take Beanie, that still leaves four of us when we bring the victim in. We can’t—”
“We go single-piloted,” Boomer says. “Will rides in front, Beanie in the back. Will can load the victim, but stay on the ground after. Sound good, Will?” Boomer asks, turning.
“Yeah, I’m good with that. Eith
er I can hike out, or you can come back for me.”
Amazing he can sound so nonchalant about what Beanie said would be a half-day hike-out.
“Okay, let me run the numbers,” I say, plopping the charts on the table.
I lower my head, but look up just as fast. “Will you be bringing your gear?” I ask, motioning to the pack.
“Twenty pounds,” he says.
I plot the points on the graph carefully, double-checking the temperatures at the higher altitude, using a straightedge to ensure I’m reading the correct number. “Damn,” I say under my breath. Then, louder. “Still not light enough.”
A collective sigh resonates in the room, heads turning to me, to Boomer, to Will.
“What weight did you use for the pilot?” Boomer asks.
“Two-sixty, right, sir?”
“That’d be correct,” Boomer says, standing taller, his mid-section popping out just that bit further. “But let’s try it with one-thirty.”
“One-thirty? But you’re not—”
“No, I’m not. But you are.”
“What?” It takes a moment for the words to sink in. The meaning.
Oh, no. No way.
“But I’m not an aircraft commander yet. I can’t even sign for this aircraft, let alone take it up and fly it by myself.”
“Who says? That’s a paperwork drill, anyway. You’re as qualified as you need to be.”
“But you signed for the aircraft, sir. We can’t do this.”
“I signed for the aircraft, which means I’m responsible for the safety of it and its crew. There’s nothing anywhere that says I need to be the one flying or even physically in the aircraft to ensure everyone’s safe.”
“I think it’s implied, sir. You know, that the pilot who signed for the aircraft would be in it.”
Boomer puts his hands on his hips. “Implied, but not specifically stated,” he says, triumphant.
“But … you can’t…” I look around for help, but it’s clear. I stand on my own.
The longer I hesitate, the worse it gets, the collective energy in this room now directed solely at me.
“Is it possible?” Will asks, looking directly at me. “I mean, weightwise. That’s all I want to know.” He remains collected and calm, his voice steady and smooth, but his eyes communicate something else entirely.
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