Flight

by Darren Hynes

“What?”

  “How are you today?”

  “Oh. Very good.”

  “Not at the shop?”

  Anique just stares at her, then leans back and peers out the window. “Looks like rain.” Then, “Pat!”

  “Coming.” He goes to move, but stops himself. “Top up, ladies?”

  Emily covers her mug. Shakes her head.

  “Not if I got to pay for it,” Heather says.

  He laughs. Comes over and fills her cup. “I’m not that far gone, my dear.” He moves toward Anique, then says over his shoulder, “Not yet.”

  They watch him and Anique for a while. Then Heather says, “Good thing I’m going, I’d say.”

  Emily takes another sip. Puts the cup down but keeps her fingers wrapped around the handle. “I can talk to Terry, you know. Get your job back.”

  Heather leans forward. “Don’t you dare. I was one shift away from setting fire to the place anyway.”

  They both laugh. Then Emily says, “You never said anything about leaving.”

  “Not gonna pack groceries all my life.”

  “Terry said you were going to St. John’s.”

  Heather nods. Runs her index finger around the circumference of her mug. “Toronto…eventually.”

  “To do what?”

  “Music, what else?” She takes a sip of her coffee. “By the way, you missed one hell of a show last night. Standing room only.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah well, you can catch me on MuchMusic one of these days.”

  Emily laughs.

  “What’s funny?”

  “MuchMusic.”

  “What?”

  “You told Terry to watch for you on Much.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “He had no idea what you were talking about.”

  Heather laughs herself now. “Someone should tell him that there’s more to watch on TV besides Land and Sea.”

  In the silence, Emily looks beyond the younger woman, through the window. Sees a boat in the harbour, crest-tipped waves sending its bow crashing downwards and then up again. Waves are hammering the dock, some of the water coming over the sides. The boats tied to the wharf undulate like modern dancers.

  She looks back at Heather. “What about your mom?”

  “Why do you think I’m leaving in the first place? Can’t make it ‘big’ in Lightning Cove now, can I?”

  For a while it’s quiet. Then Emily says, “When?”

  “Week from tomorrow.”

  “Friday?”

  Heather nods.

  Across the room, Pat pulls out Anique’s chair and then helps the old woman to her feet. Hands over her walking stick. They walk slowly to the cash.

  “Take care,” Emily says as they pass by.

  “Who’s that then?” Anique asks.

  “It’s Emily.”

  “Oh.”

  “Take care.”

  “You too.”

  Pat guides Anique to the entrance and then holds the door open as she passes through. He slams it shut after she’s gone and disappears into the kitchen.

  Emily finishes what’s in her cup, then starts buttoning up her sweater.

  “That’s five minutes already?” Heather says.

  She grabs her handbag hanging on the back of the chair. “It’s been longer.”

  Anique passes by the window, her pink shawl fluttering, and her walking stick fighting to free itself from her hand. She’s able to hang onto it though, able too to keep her methodic pace through the wind. When she’s gone, Heather says, “Eighty-two her next birthday.”

  Emily pauses for a second, then says, “Always by herself. Must get lonely.”

  Heather turns back to the window. “I think she’s happy just to wake up.”

  Emily thinks about that. Waking up happy. Had there ever been a time? The closest she’d come, she thinks, was just after Lynette was born. Kent – or so she’d thought back then – had gone through a reformation of sorts. Hadn’t so much as raised his voice in anger, let alone his fist in months. She’d slept soundly, and woke full of energy. Managed a laugh from time to time too. Perhaps her mother had been right after all about marriages needing time to work. Time for the rough edges to smooth themselves out. How surprising it was then when he’d leaned across the supper table one evening and smacked her across the mouth with the back of his hand. Blood trickled from the cut on her lip. Her happiness too. Drip, drip, drip, down her chin and onto her slacks.

  “Emily?”

  She snaps back into the moment. “Hmm?”

  “Here, I said.”

  She looks down and sees a slip of paper by her hands. Her eyes go back to Heather’s. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a phone number of a social worker in Grand Falls.”

  She picks the paper up, bringing it close to her face. “Evelyn Sharpe.”

  “She specializes in cases like yours.”

  For a moment longer Emily stares at the name, then she folds the paper and puts it into her pocket. “Thanks.”

  “If Mom had only listened to a quarter of what she said…” Heather looks away, then, after a moment, turns again to Emily. “Promise me you’ll call.”

  Before she can, Pat comes back out with a full pot of coffee. He raises it in the air. “More, ladies? She’s fresh.”

  “None for me, Pat,” Emily says. “Gotta get back to work.”

  Heather raises her empty cup like a beggar. “To the rim, Pat.”

  Pat goes over and refills Heather’s mug, then goes back to the kitchen.

  Emily gets to her feet. “Terry’ll have my head.”

  Heather smiles. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Terry. You can do no wrong in his eyes.”

  Emily picks up her handbag.

  “The way that man looks at you.”

  “What? How does he look at me?”

  “Like a heartsick schoolboy, that’s how.”

  Emily feels the heat in her face. “Don’t be foolish.”

  “You’d have to be blind not to notice. Always with his hands in his pockets whenever you’re around. More than loose change he’s playing with, I bet.”

  “Heather!” She can’t help but laugh.

  Heather does too.

  After they stop, Emily says, “Well, if I don’t see you, good luck with your music.”

  Heather stands up too. “Sure I’m not going ’til next week. I’ll see you again.”

  Emily nods and walks around the table and gives her ex-co-worker a hug. “Thanks for everything.”

  “You’re welcome.” Heather sits back down. “I’ll just relax here for a bit, work on this new song I’ve been writing.”

  “Oh. What’s it about?”

  “Nothing much. Smokin’ up and eating Crunchets and telling your boss to stick it up his arse.”

  Emily smiles.

  Heather smiles too.

  Emily turns and heads for the door. Yells, “Thank you, Pat,” towards the kitchen.

  “You’re welcome, love,” Pat shouts back.

  She struggles against the wind in order to pull open the door. The air’s moist now, almost raining but not, like a cold sweat. She leans into the wind, wrapping her arms around herself, her purse underneath. Waves to Heather as she walks past the window.

  Heather waves back.

  6

  7:00 a.m. – WAKE

  7:05 – Wake kids.

  7:07 – Get suitcases from downstairs.

  7:10 – Fruit Loops for Jeremy, Honeycombs for Lynette.

  7:20 – No showers. Just wash faces. Everyone gets dressed.

  7:30 – Pack. Basics. Don’t forget Lynette’s GIRAFFE !!!

  7:50 – Get coats and bo –

  “Where did you say the leak was?”

  She straightens up with a start, drops her pen. “Jesus!”

  “Didn’t mean to frighten you,” Terry says.

  She balls the paper up and puts it in her pocket. Looks at him. “Your feet touch the floor when you
walk?”

  “Didn’t realize you were in the middle of something. Sorry.” He’s holding a yellow bucket and a mop.

  She bends over and picks up the pen. Less than two thousand people in Lightning Cove, she thinks, yet there’s hardly a moment when someone isn’t looking over her shoulder or standing right behind her.

  She steps out from behind her cash, slips past him. “Follow me.”

  She takes a left and then a right towards the produce: a few bundles of spotted bananas, four or five bags of apples, some spoiled tomatoes, and several mutant cabbages.

  So much for the rain that Pat had said would not be starting until after midnight, she thinks. All afternoon she’s had to listen to it hammering the windows and roof.

  She looks at her watch: twenty minutes until the end of her shift, until the end of the grocery store for good. No more uniform with the logo of a grocery cart on the breast pocket, and no more name tag with EMILY in block letters.

  “It’s right here,” she says finally, pointing to a huge puddle on the floor.

  Terry looks up towards the ceiling. “Gonna cost a fortune to get that fixed.”

  For the first time she thinks she sees worry on his face, in the corners of his eyes. The town’s been falling apart for months, layoffs every week, the few young ones moving away with their young families, and the whole time Terry’s never said a word. Not a thing about his business needing the plant as much as the plant’s workers do. Who do you pack groceries for when no one’s left?

  Terry lays down the bucket. Begins moping up the water.

  Emily starts to head back to her cash.

  “Wait,” Terry says.

  She stops. Turns around.

  He lays the mop aside and slides the bucket underneath the leak and then goes over to where she is, stopping right in front of her. Jams his hands into his pockets.

  Heather’s words from earlier come back to her: More than loose change he’s playing with, I bet. She lifts her gaze from his belt buckle. “What is it?”

  The sound of coins between his fingers then, and keys too, mixing with the raindrops. He clears his throat and says, “The other day…”

  She goes to speak, but he lifts his palm as if to silence her, as if to say: Please let me finish.

  She doesn’t say what she was going to.

  “If you tell me it was nothing…what I saw, then I have to believe you,” Terry says.

  She keeps still. Her eyes on him.

  “It’s just that…” He stops fumbling about in his pockets and looks at her. “…well…I didn’t know that, did I?” He looks up at the ceiling, as if his next words, like the leak, might materialize through the hole in the roof. At last, he focuses on her. “I mean, as far as I was concerned, he was hurting you.” He breathes deep and lets it out. Shakes his head. “And what did I do?”

  For a moment, because of his silence, she thinks he’s expecting her to answer, but before she can come up with something, he says, “I walked away, is what.” He looks towards the front window, then back at her again. “During the whole drive back to the store I’m telling myself to turn back around, you know, go right up to that son of a bitch and tell him to take his Jesus hands off you. Or, at the very least, I could have called Roy Driscol. Had him take the police cruiser on over. But I didn’t do anything. Not a goddamned thing.”

  He looks like a youngster all of a sudden, she thinks, a youngster who’s wandered away from his parents and is now lost. She goes to reach out to him, offer comfort, but then changes her mind.

  “A coward is what I am.”

  “No,” she says.

  They’re silent for ages then.

  Rain hammers the roof.

  The steady drip, drip, drip into the bucket.

  Finally Emily speaks. “Okay, say you did one of those things: got in Kent’s face or called Roy. What then? After you’d gone, I mean? And after Roy had written up his report and then wrinkled it up in his fist on his way back to the car because he thinks the sun shines out of Kent’s ass, what then? I’d still be left, wouldn’t I? And Kent’d be even more pissed, wouldn’t he? And what do you think would happen?”

  Terry lifts his gaze from the floor and looks at her. “So it’s true then?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. But if it were, I mean.” Her dream from the other night comes back to her again: the knife going in and out. She pushes the thought away. Moves a little closer to Terry. Then says, “Perhaps sometimes… walking away is helping.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “But it wasn’t what you thought it was, Terry. Honest. So there’s no need to feel bad, okay?”

  Although he nods, she doesn’t think her words have offered him any comfort.

  He’ll miss her the most, she thinks. She imagines him looking for her in one of the aisles and then suddenly remembering she’s gone. Up and left without telling anyone. Him driving home in the dark to that empty house, falling asleep in front of the television, the volume blasting from his surround sound. Waking up in the middle of the night, the cushion under his chin soaked with saliva, not bothering to find the stairs in the dark, or to sleep for once in his own bed.

  He’s just said something.

  “What?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  He takes a hand out of a pocket in order to scratch the back of his neck, then runs that same hand over his head, as if searching for stuck-up hairs even though there aren’t any. “I said…I’m fond of you, that’s all.”

  How many packages of Wine Gums had he slipped into her pocket over the course of her working here, she wonders? How many surprise cans of Ginger Ale and bags of ketchup chips? How about that finger-and-a-half of whiskey they’d share in his office at the end of every month? A reward for all their hard work, he’d always say. She’d obliged him because she knew there was no one else for him to share a drink with. That, and perhaps, despite her own family, she was lonely too.

  “I’m fond of you too, Terry,” she says.

  It’s his simplicity that’s always drawn her to him, his matter-of-fact approach to living, taking things as they come and resisting the urge to look too far ahead. His predictability too. She knows that the man she sees when she pushes open the door in the morning is the same one she says goodbye to at suppertime, and still the same one when she walks in the next day. She knows, for instance, that when he smiles he’s happy to have her near, and that his hand on her shoulder means that he appreciates her. There are times too when they’ll graze each other as they pass on the stairs or in one of the aisles, and she’ll know he’s watching out for her somehow. He’s been her comfort food, her extra glass of wine, her few minutes longer in the bath.

  “Are you okay?” he says.

  “Hmm?”

  “You look sad.”

  She shakes her head.

  Another silence. Then Terry says, “Should get back to that leak, I suppose.” He starts to go, but Emily’s voice stops him.

  “Hang on a minute.”

  He turns around.

  She walks up to him and stops so close she can feel his breath on her face. Cinnamon. She reaches out and undoes the top button of his shirt. “There,” she says, “That’s so much better.”

  Terry rolls his neck to one side and then the other. “It is easier to breathe.”

  They both laugh.

  After they stop, Emily says, “Thank you, Terry.”

  He needs a moment before saying, “What did I do?”

  She shrugs, and says, “I don’t know,” then hugs him.

  He hugs back. Not too tight though. Terry gives her room to breathe.

  7

  SHE’S RUNNING, RAINWATER SPLASHING with each footfall. Despite Terry having loaned her his umbrella, she’s soaked. It’s because the wind keeps blowing the umbrella inside out. Her handbag is pressed against her ribcage, its strap digging into the groove of her neck, in the space between her breasts.

  There’s a ca
r pulling out of the half-flooded parking lot of the Royal Bank, water up past its tires. Farther along, she notices an uprooted tree in the playground, its trunk lying across a broken teetertotter. There are deep puddles beneath the swings. A gust of wind nearly blows the umbrella from her hand. She struggles to hang on as cool rain pelts her eyelids, the top of her head. She thinks of Jeremy and Lynette walking together in the likes of this. She should have left work early and gone and picked them up. She looks at her watch: 4:30. Should have been home half an hour ago.

  She turns onto Trinity Street. Hanrahan’s Seafood has taken the sign displaying the special on trout and shrimp out of its window. Anique’s Antiques has a ‘Going out of business, everything must go’ notice on the front door.

  At the end of Trinity, she turns right, continuing along the slow rise. Chest and thighs burning, gasping for breath. She slows to a fast walk. Thinks of tomorrow morning. The three of them lugging their suitcases. She doubts she’ll even notice the burning then.

  She’ll call the airline when she gets in, she thinks, make sure the flight’s on schedule for tomorrow. She’ll ask them about the storm too, if it’s supposed to move out by early morning as Pat had said.

  At the top of the street she starts running again. Wind and rain and sneaker soles against the pavement in her ears. Her bangs in her eyes.

  Lynette’s staring through the curtains and waving when she turns into the driveway. She waves back.

  At the top of the porch she closes the umbrella. Goes to reach for the handle of the door, but Lynette is pulling it open before she gets the chance. “Hello, baby.” She steps inside.

  “You’re soaked, Mom.”

  “I know, sweetheart.” She shakes the wetness from Terry’s umbrella, then holds it out to Lynette. “Take this for Mommy.”

  Lynette takes it, leaning it against the coat closet.

  Emily shuts the door. Runs her hand through her hair. Lifts the strap of her handbag over her head. Starts unbuttoning her sweater. “Where’s your brother?”

  “Watching TV.”

  She kicks off her sneakers. “Did you get caught in the rain?”

  Lynette shakes her head. “We got a ride.”

  “From who?”

  “Clancy’s dad.”

  “Myles, you mean?”

  Lynette nods.