Flight (4 page)

Years of experience have taught Carol that leaping out of bed and trying to check on everything is inevitably counterproductive. She has taught herself to lie still and clear her mind, not addressing the fear but not banishing it, either, just allowing it to float in like fog. She stares right into it, and eventually, as happens when you stare into fog, something will glide into view—usually the thing that generated the anxiety. Then she can get up and address it calmly.

As a mother, Carol always prided herself on her intuition. “I’ve
got eyes in the back of my head,” she would tell the girls, and for years they believed her. Fights were nipped in the bud before they began, guilty silences always led to a shout: “What’s going on in there?” Even Will was impressed by how quickly Carol could burrow to the heart of a lie. But all of those things come with mothering’s territory, if you just pay attention. The only thing Carol considers unusual is her talent for predicting disaster.

So this morning, when anxiety struck, she lay very still and looked at the ceiling until the image came to her: the doves. It wasn’t clear what had happened to them, but something was wrong. Immediately, her brain raced through scenarios: poisoned feed, lethal stray wires, foxes burrowing into the garage. She stood up and threw on a robe, trying not to wake Will. He lifted his head as she moved toward the hall.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m just checking on those doves.” She slipped out before he could say more.

Her heart pounded as she pattered down the staircase and to the door. The garage was gloomy and still. She moved toward the cage and heard a rustle of distress at her approach. She could see two soft gray lumps in the dim light, but she couldn’t tell if anything was wrong. She went back and turned on the light. There was a small cooing sound, as if the birds recognized the light as a sign to wake up. Returning, she stared at them. They were both hunkered down, feathers fluffed around them like quilts. They regarded her steadily with beadlike black eyes. She willed them to get up and walk around, do something to prove their well-being, but they didn’t move. Finally, she unhitched the cage door and stuck a hand in, fluttering it clumsily toward them. They both rustled to their feet, eyes fixed on the hand, and scuttled back. Perfectly fine. When she pulled her hand out, they looked at her with obvious reproach.

Now, finished vacuuming the living room, she is tempted to check on them again, but she has gone into the garage four times already this morning, and if Will comes in from the mailbox and
finds her there again, she’ll never hear the end of it. She decides to focus on the problem of Doug.

Already she can hear her own voice, defensive but unconvincing. She can imagine the look of absolute horror Margaret will give her when she finds out what Carol did. Margaret has always been good at killer expressions.

He seemed so genuinely pleased for Leanne,
Carol hears herself saying.
It just slipped out before I thought about it.
It’s all true. She considers adding how nice he looked, there in Harding’s, his cart full of frozen dinners and granola bars and instant vitamin shakes. Shopping for his mother, he explained. Mrs. Johannsen had a hard time getting around these days. Doug’s devotion to his mother was widely accepted in town as the reason he had never married, and he had smiled such a fond smile when he spoke of her that Carol’s heart melted. The fact that he was a pig farmer’s son who had dated Margaret slipped her mind, and all she saw was a fine young man—nice broad shoulders, too—who remained, in his thirties, an attentive and loving son.

No, strike that. Margaret would be angry at her for singing Doug’s praises in front of David. In fact, Carol has no idea whether David even knows about Doug. Presumably, a woman who teaches history at one of the nation’s very best universities—
She could be teaching in the Ivy League,
Carol always tells people,
but she wanted to stay close to home
—doesn’t go around bragging about the Future Farmers of America she dated in high school. Carol makes a mental note to herself to speak only of “your old friend Doug.”

There’s even some hope that Margaret’s reticence to admit her connection to Doug might save Carol from her daughter’s scorn. After all, who could possibly get upset about her mother inviting a childhood friend to her sister’s pre-wedding cocktail party? In fact—and here Carol recognizes the flash of maternal insight that is the only thing preventing worldwide familial discord—Carol can simply pretend to have forgotten that Doug and Margaret were ever romantically involved. After all, they were just kids. It wasn’t as if it was some big passionate love affair. (A little voice in Carol’s head
pipes in that her own dislike for Doug always suggested the opposite—that he was actually a threat even then, and ever since, she has secretly suspected him of never getting over Margaret. Decisively, she squelches it.) As long as Carol refuses to acknowledge that there might be a problem, Margaret can’t create one without explaining exactly why she doesn’t want Doug there.

How did it come to this?
Carol wonders as she winds up the vacuum-cleaner cord. Margaret was always determined, always focused on the next thing, while Leanne was Carol’s baby, clingy and content. But Carol always encouraged Margaret, always appreciated her drive. She nurtured ambition in both her girls, pushing them to use first-rate manners, to succeed in school, in short, to rise above the place where they were raised. And Leanne, her baby, was the one who rebelled, running off to New York, while Margaret achieved everything Carol hoped she would: college, graduate school, an impressive career, a brilliant and cultured husband, a lovely son. Now, with everything Carol has ever dreamed for her, Margaret seems to have forgotten who helped her find those dreams in the first place, who encouraged her to think big and promised her she could do or be whatever she wanted. She comes home and looks around with disdain, and Carol is the one who’s terrorized. “Mom, how can you stand those curtains?” Margaret will say, or “Really, Mom, you ought to be eating better,” or “What do you mean you told Brenda Moran I’d be in town?”

It’s always been easier to be close to Leanne. Even after her decision not to go to college, a decision that still makes Carol’s throat feel dry and tight, as if she’s choking. Even after Leanne moved to New York and lived God knows what kind of life for several years after high school, working in some awful bar. By the time of Margaret’s wedding, Leanne was drinking so much she appeared to be slightly waterlogged. Although this was something Carol never could have imagined for either of her girls, she felt like she could talk to Leanne. After Margaret’s wedding, Carol flew to New York and stayed there a month and talked to her. Through sheer persistence—simply refusing to pack up and leave—she found a way to
help. Now Leanne lives in Cold Spring, an hour north of the city, in an adorable small house she bought with her own money once her store—specialty high-end crafts—became successful. Though Carol still thinks Leanne could have been anything—a doctor, a lawyer, an architect—she has to admit that Leanne’s life suits her. It ought to—it cost Carol fifteen thousand dollars.

The front door opens, and Carol hears a strange clattering that she recognizes, after a few seconds, as heavy rain. Okay, so it’s raining. The wedding is three days away. Saturday’s sure to be gorgeous. June weather is reliable; that’s why it’s traditional to have weddings then. She glances at the clock. They need to go to the airport to meet Leanne and Kit, and she wanted to stop at Meijer in Grand Rapids on the way, to pick up some items the Ryville Harding’s won’t have. She also needs to grab a few sundries—shampoos, fancy soaps, hand creams—to stock the guest bedroom. Kit’s mother flies in on Friday morning from Atlanta, and after many phone calls with Leanne, Carol has prevailed on the woman to stay with them.

“Tell her it will be good practice for me,” Carol kept saying, “for running my bed-and-breakfast.” Kit’s mother had been concerned about Carol having too many people in the house, but Carol told Leanne to explain to her about rambling midwestern farmhouses. With the attic Will fixed up on a whim, the house has five bedrooms.

In the end, Bernice Lewiston was prevailed upon to stay with her son’s future in-laws. This will give a Carol a chance to try out her hostessing ideas, and it will be a lot easier, because the closest motels are in Kalamazoo, over thirty miles away. That’s another reason her B&B will be a success.

Her stomach flutters happily as she thinks about the project. Will doesn’t know it yet, but she’s already scheduled and paid for an ad to run in one of the special advertising sections of the
Chicago Tribune.
It’s not a glossy ad, just a small one-eighth page of text, but she worked long and hard on the copy, getting every word just right. It will appear in a few weeks, at the end of June, just as people
in the city will be in the mood for weekend getaways. Carol is sure she can have everything ready by then. This is one project that’s really going to happen.

Leanne’s wedding is really going to happen, too, and Carol needs to make sure she’s thought of everything. She sits down at the kitchen table and contemplates her shopping list. Shrimp. Cocktail sauce. (Margaret will disapprove—she would make her own.) Cherry tomatoes for the vegetable tray. Olives from the deli section. (“Canned olives?” Margaret yelped on a visit last summer. “You guys are still eating canned olives?”) Sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese for a recipe Carol tore out of a magazine. Some nice crackers. Everything else, she should be able to get in Ryville.

Water runs upstairs, and then she hears the thud of Will’s feet coming down. She looks around for her purse. Once he’s ready to go, he can’t stand waiting for anyone else to get ready. When the girls were little, Carol was always scooping them up and rushing to the car, shoes untied and jackets unbuttoned, hair ribbons clutched in their hands. If she grabs everything now, she might have time to dash out to the garage and check the doves one more time.

“Okay!” Will booms, bursting into the kitchen like an event. “Time to go to the airport!”

Planes always wait to take off at Newark for at least half an hour. Leanne would have preferred to fly out of the Westchester County airport, or even La Guardia, but the only direct flight to Grand Rapids leaves from Newark. Kit didn’t mind having to come down. He works in the city, as a video production editor, so the Metro-North trip from Cold Spring to Grand Central is no big deal for him. Leanne proposed taking the Carey bus from there, but Kit pointed out that with luggage it would be a huge hassle, and a cab wasn’t that expensive.

“Besides, you only get married once,” he said, “at least to each other.” His voice was level, but he raised an eyebrow in his arch
way, and Leanne, as always, had to laugh. Kit’s dry wit puts people at ease, rather than making them feel left out. It’s what makes his real work—documentaries—so good.

They stood on line for forty minutes before having to remove their shoes and jackets for the amped-up security screening. Kit was sent back to empty his pockets a second time, because on the first he had forgotten to remove his BlackBerry and the metal detector pinged him. Leanne was carrying the box containing her wedding dress, and the security screeners watched it glide through their machine without so much as a smile. It’s all grave intensity now, the fun and excitement of travel forgotten.

Kit steered Leanne to a coffee bar for double lattes. “Don’t you feel safer now?” he asked her, only half in jest. He held his hand out to her, palm up, his habit whenever he asked a question. As if waiting to take hold of the answer, cradle it like a small bird.

Now they are sitting on the tarmac, inching forward every few moments, in an excruciating waiting game that seems designed to mimic their earlier slow progress through security. Leanne twists in her seat and sighs. All of this would be fine—nothing has gone badly, really—if only she had done what she has been promising herself to do for weeks, what she swore to do last night. If only she had told Kit.

With the trip in motion, telling him will be even more complicated, because what if it changes everything? Before this moment, they could at least have canceled their trip if he freaked out, avoided the embarrassment of arriving in Michigan and then not getting married. She will have to tell him on the plane and hope for the best, breaking the news that his intended wife is a drunk—a reformed one but a drunk nonetheless. That’s putting it melodramatically, of course, and she despises melodrama, which is perhaps why she has avoided speaking of it all this time.

The right moment to bring it up just never seemed to come. She couldn’t tell him right off, when they met in a Cold Spring café a year and a half ago, or when they went on their first date, or even their second. It was too early then, and then suddenly it was too
late. By the time he moved in with her six months later, he had asked her so many questions—he was inquisitive, after all—and they had talked about so many things, it seemed like he must know everything about her. When he proposed marriage on a hike up Storm King Mountain, Leanne looked down on Cold Spring, its steepled church and clapboard houses nestled between hills and river like a model of a town, and thought,
What is there to tell? It’s not important.

But it is important, and as they have thundered down the track toward the wedding, she has felt guilty and anxious, as if she was purposefully deceiving Kit. Because her past has an effect on their future together. On Mexico. Kit has received a grant to go to Mexico City and make a documentary about street kids, and he wants Leanne to go with him. But she can’t. Somehow she knows that if she ends up in Mexico City, her carefully cultivated life of restraint and respectability will fall apart, and Kit will see her for what she really is: a lost cause.

The engines wind up and the plane bounces twice before moving forward ten feet. Once they get to Michigan, it will be impossible to talk. Leanne leans back and stares at the window across the aisle. Her heart clamps down on a cold, dull sensation: regret. What led her to say yes to this? She has never had a strong desire to be married. In truth, the thought alarms her. Kit is great, and they really enjoy being together, but a husband? She looks at his arm, taking up all of the armrest. He has a mole on his wrist, and she never noticed before that it has three or four very light hairs growing out of it. She stares at them, outlined in the glow of his reading light. There are probably a million things like that she doesn’t know. She has no idea what’s going on in his head, whether he has secrets, too. Suddenly, the whole idea of marriage seems ludicrous, just a way of pretending to be together when people are actually alone.