Flight (21 page)

Already there's a faint smell of baking fish.

Rain pattering off the roof.

She looks at Jeremy. He sees her watching but looks away, his face turned toward the window.

His profile so much like Kent's, she thinks. Same shape of chin and nose, same eyes with their long lashes. A carbon copy of her husband is what he is. Dad's boy. Slipping farther and farther away from
her
, but Dad's boy still. Always Dad's boy.

“Mom's sorry,” she says finally.

He turns to look at her.

“You know that, right?”

He shrugs his shoulders, makes a grunting sound.

“It's just that when I saw you on top of your sister…” She stops herself from going on. What good in telling him that he had reminded her of Kent? That, instead of Lynette underneath him, she had seen herself.

He looks away again.

“You should never hit. Not your sister, not anyone.”

Lynette stops drawing, looks at her brother, then her mother.

“And I should never hit either. Not you, not anyone.”

It's quiet for a moment.

“How about we say that we both made a mistake? Okay?”

Jeremy looks at her, then nods. “Okay.”

“Can you tell your sister, you're sorry?”

He looks over at her. “Sorry, Lynette.”

“That's okay,” Lynette says. She flips over her paper, to the drawing she was working on when Emily had first walked in. Raises it in the air towards Jeremy. “This one's you.”

Jeremy laughs. “I got horns.”

“I'll draw a new one.”

They all sit in silence for a while as Lynette takes a clean sheet of paper and starts working on her brother's portrait, a less devilish version.

Emily says, “Go play PlayStation if you want.”

Jeremy disappears so quickly she wonders if he was sitting with them at all.

Lynette colours while the wind moans between the spaces, while the rain drums against the house, while grey day slowly fades into greyer night.

Tomorrow
, she thinks.
One sleep
.
No, no sleep
.
No sleep now
. Hopefully she'll be ready when the time comes. Ready to do what needs to be done.

“Go wash your hands before supper,” she says to Lynette.

“I'm almost finished.”

“You can finish after.”

Emily listens to her daughter's steps in the hall, the opening and then closing of her bedroom door.

She sits back, slipping her hands into her fleece pockets, feeling suddenly lonely. Strange considering the many nights she's spent by herself at this very table, a cross-stitch in hand and warm milk in her favourite mug, the little ones in bed and Kent still at work. The radio playing lightly, the country station. Faith Hill and Carrie Underwood she'll turn up. Move her chair closer and sing along if she knows the lyrics, helping her forget for a time.

Everything seems bigger, somehow – the kitchen, the chair beneath her, the distance to the hallway, the bathroom, to her own bedroom. Maybe it's not so much that things have gotten bigger as it is that
she's
gotten smaller. Hardly noticeable now when she walks down the road with her youngsters, or checks someone's milk and eggs through. Sometimes it's like she needs to tilt her head back to see above the dashboard when Kent is driving them somewhere.

She gets a fork from the cutlery drawer and walks to the stove, opening it, her face turned away from the heat. When she reaches in, she brushes the edge of the pan and burns her pinky. She pulls her hand out, throwing the fork on the counter en route to the faucet. Lets water run over her smoldering finger, wishing that a little cold water could relieve everything as quickly: each foul mood, each threatening word, each slap across the face.

She turns the water off but has to turn it back on again because the pain returns. The finger's red now all along its length right up to the nail. A fluid-filled blister will appear later on this evening, she bets. Jeremy will want to pop it with a sewing needle. Lynette will watch between the spaces in her own fingers pressed against her eyes.

Emily holds the finger underneath the tap again, the pain instantly fading. Keeps it there as she goes over everything in her head. As long as they're at the ferry terminal by eight everything will be fine. She reminds herself that she'll have to get a taxi from Gander to pick them up when the ferry docks. She'll call before she leaves the house. Plenty of time, as long as the taxi's waiting, to catch the flight. No doubt Donny Boyle will ask where they're going with the suitcases and why Kent isn't with them. She'll smile and tell him St. John's. That Kent will join them on Saturday, after his fish plant business. She'll tell him to hand over the tickets then, so that the three of them can walk along the gangway and up to the canteen before the line-up starts. She'll say thanks when he wishes them a good trip.

The phone rings. She turns off the water and then grabs a drying towel hanging inside the door beneath the sink. The burning is back by the time she presses the ‘talk' button.

“Hello.”

“Mrs. Gyles?”

“Yes.” She moves the phone away, then blows on her finger. Puts the receiver back to her ear.

“…here in Gander.”

“Sorry, what?”

“This is Mrs. Butler and I'm a nurse at the James Paton hospital here in Gander.”

“Hospital did you say?” It's her father. A heart attack, or one of those brain aneurysms. On a slab in the morgue. The top of her feels heavy suddenly, almost too much for her legs to support. The countertop helps keep her upright.

“Are you still there?”

Despite the lack of breath, she's able to say, “What's happened?”

“There's been an accident.”

It's even worse, she thinks. Her dad mangled behind the wheel of his car. Mom too. Need to identify the bodies.

She can't speak.

“Your husband…”

Although she keeps the phone pressed against her ear, she can't hear anything the woman is saying. She's become blind and deaf, incapable of deciphering words.

“Mrs. Gyles?”

She doesn't say anything.

“Mrs. Gyles?” the nurse says again. “Did you hear what I just said?”

She forces herself back into the moment – in the kitchen with her hands pressed against the countertop, her head tilted towards her shoulder, the cordless phone trapped in between. “No.”

“No?”

“Tell me again.”

“I said your husband fell asleep behind the wheel…”

He can't be hurt, she thinks. Bruised maybe, cut too, but not hurt. Not really.

“…veered off the highway and down an embankment…”

She sees his eyes close in sleep, his head slump forward, his beautiful truck, his pride and joy, plunging over the bank and into the dark woods. Him waking long enough to be knocked unconscious, his body falling this way and that way because he's not bothered wearing his seatbelt.

“…glass from the windshield embedded in his forehead…”

Did he think of them, she wonders, in his brief moment of waking before the world turned black?

“…broken collar bone…”

Or was there nothing? Just the tumbling truck and the sound of crunched metal and snapping branches and him inside, alone. All alone.

“…overnight for observation…”

Quiet then. The headlights still on and his crushed chest fighting to rise and fall. Rain on the windshield, and only one wiper working.

“…released in the morning –”

“What?”

“I said, he'll be released in the morning. He's very lucky. It could have been a lot worse.”

She manages to walk herself over to the table and sit down.
Overnight for observation
, the woman had just said.
Released in the morning
. It occurs to her that the one thing she's been trying so hard to run away from now lies beneath white sheets at the Gander hospital. Bare chest, probably, his arms outside the blankets pressed to his sides, new wounds on his forehead to keep the nearly healed one above his eye company, and a broken collar bone. It's like he's left without bothering to close the door, left it swinging on its hinges in the wind. Nothing to prevent her now from walking right through it.

“He asked for you,” the nurse says.

“Did he?”

“Yes. He'll call, I'm sure, once he wakes up.”

“I won't let the phone out of my hand.”

“Can you come? He shouldn't be driving.”

“I'll take the first ferry out of Lightning Cove tomorrow morning,” she says.
I'd intended to anyway.

“He's going to be fine.”

“Okay.”

“In the best hands here, he is.”

“I'm sure. Thank you.”

She presses the ‘off' button before the nurse has a chance to say goodbye and brings a few fingers to her forehead, trying to massage the tension away.

How often has she wished for this very thing? Kent striking a moose on a foggy night or traveling too far over the median into an oncoming transport truck or spilling his Tim Horton's coffee and wrapping himself around a tree. A light pole. How comforting, for a time, those thoughts had been. So why then hasn't she run into the children's rooms and covered them in kisses, or poured herself a glass from the half-full bottle of cabernet sauvignon sitting on the counter, or run out on the porch and screamed at the top of her lungs, a scream of joy for being so close to what she's wanted since forever?

She tries summoning happiness. Imagines it as a liquid in the body of a needle, the tip being inserted into her vein. But happiness doesn't come. Not a drop of it. Instead what she feels is relief. That it wasn't her father. Her mother. That Kent was not badly hurt.

Lynette's there suddenly. Or perhaps she's been there all along.

“What, sweetie?”

“Something's burning.”

It's takes a moment for her to remember there's food in the oven. “The fish sticks!” she says, rushing over to the stove.

A cloud of smoke billows out when she lowers the door. “It's burned, I've burned your supper.” She grabs oven mitts and hauls out the pan. The fire alarm goes off as she lays the pan on one of the elements. “Ruined,” she says, “ruined.”

She slips off one of the mitts and walks to the fire alarm near the threshold of the hallway, close to where Lynette is. Stands beneath it, waving the mitt back and forth.

The commotion brings Jeremy out of his room. He stands behind his sister.

The alarm stops. She stays there looking up at it, expecting it to start again. It doesn't.

“How come you're crying?” Lynette says to her.

“Hmm?”

“You're crying.”

She wipes at her eyes, surprised to feel wetness there. “The smoke, sweetie.”

She walks back to the stove. Looks down at the shriveled, blackened fish sticks, the fries that look like charred bacon.

“What are we going eat now?” Jeremy says.

She turns around, the oven mitt still in her hand. Forces a smile. “How does take-out sound?”

FRIDAY

IN HER SLUMBER, SHE REACHES OUT TO HIM, then opens her eyes and remembers.

She's on top of the sheets, still in her clothes from yesterday. A miracle, she thinks, that some sleep has come. She turns towards the clock. 3:30. She'd been listening to the rain before drifting off, she remembers, her fingers interlaced underneath her head like a sunbather.

It occurs to her that she can't hear it anymore – the rain. Nor the wind.

On her feet now and moving to the window. Once there she parts the blinds and peers out. The street running past her house is slick-looking underneath the glow of the streetlight. A thin sheen of ice from the falling temperature and all that rain, she figures. Still cold despite it being May. A lot more nights like this still before the warm weather settles in. A lot of being fooled into thinking that the day's heat will carry on into the evening, that an open window at midday can remain so after dark, and that the sweater you wore earlier will suffice during your after-supper walk.

How strange not to see Kent's truck in the driveway. Usually it's so close to the porch steps that there's barely space enough to walk around it. Never enough space, she thinks. Always a situation to slither past, or a pair of eyes to avoid staring into. How funny to have the whole Atlantic Ocean just outside her window and yet feel as if everything is closing in around her.

She goes back over and sits on the edge of the bed. Rubs her thighs. Takes a big breath.
You can do this
, she thinks.
You can
. She turns on the lamp sitting on the night table, then waits for her eyes to adjust. Gets up and walks to the partially open door, slipping past it and out into the hallway, crunching up her face at each creak in the floor, not wanting to wake the children.

In the kitchen, she makes her way to the stove and then switches on the light above it. More breaths now.
You can do this. You can.

There's enough ground coffee from yesterday to make a small pot. She does, then sits at the table while it brews. Places her face into her hands, then massages her temples, her eyelids.

That's when she notices it – the blinking red light coming from the answering machine. Must have rung while she was asleep. Strange that, as light as she's been sleeping lately, it wouldn't have wakened her.

She gets up and goes to it. Presses the ‘message' button.

She waits. Listens.

“Hi there.”

She spins around, positive that he's standing right behind her.

“Sorry for calling so late. (A tired laugh.) Must be this stuff they're pumping into me.” (He pauses.)

She listens to his breathing.

“I'm fine. Been hurt worse shoveling the driveway.” (Another laugh, then a silence.)

She thinks he's switched the phone to his other ear.