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Authors: Chris Jordan

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Chris Jordan

invisible someone, and seems satisfied, relieved of a great

burden. The air leaves him. His dark eyes stare up at the

bright vastness of the deep blue sky and then glass over, gone

forever.

“Everybody okay?” asks Leo Fish, standing there in his

little boat, lowering a smoking rifle.

I never even heard the shot.

“Sorry it took so long,” he says sheepishly. “I can’t run

like you young folk.”

EPILOGUE

Six Months Later

The plane looks so small, the sky so big.

We’re all of us waiting at the airfield in Monticello, New

York. Me and Fern and our new friend Seth Manning, who

turns out to be a really neat kid—excuse me, young man.

Shane had wanted to be here but he’s off on a case, search-

ing for another missing child. He told me recently that the

kids he recovered were for him like an extended family, he

keeps in touch with all of them, as he does with both Seth

and Kelly. It doesn’t make up for his loss, but it helps.

It was a near thing with Seth, a raging blood infection that

put him in a coma for a while. God bless Jackson Memorial

Hospital in Miami and all the folks who worked so hard to

find the right combination of antibiotics, and who never gave

up. Probably didn’t hurt that his father was pledging to build

a new wing, but I’d like to think they saved him because

saving people is what they do.

Not a bad mission in life, come to think, and one Kelly

has lately been drawn to. Whether from her own experience

or Seth’s, I can’t be sure. Maybe both. Anyhow, she’s been

talking about a career in medicine. Maybe one that somehow

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involves flying, which is just like a kid, wanting everything

rolled into a nice, neat package.

If only life worked that way. But she’ll learn.

That’s her up in the ridiculously small airplane. All by her-

self at, Seth tells us, five thousand feet. Soaring over the roll-

ing, snow-dusted Catskills on a brisk but sunny December

day. I wanted her to wait until summer—anything to put this

off—but she really, really wanted to solo by Christmas, please,

Mom, please, and so here we all are, giving in to my willful

daughter, even though the idea of her up in a plane all by

herself is scaring us to death.

Okay, scaring me to death. Seth and Fern seem to be okay

with the concept. Seth because he taught her, and Fern

because she thinks Kelly can do anything she sets her mind

to.

It isn’t setting her mind to it that worries me. It’s all the

things that can go wrong. Engines stall or catch on fire. A bird

could hit the windshield. Planes fall out of the sky. It happens,

don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.

Fern, sensing my anxiety, goes, “Ya need a bag, lady?”

Making a joke of it. Amazingly enough, I haven’t hyper-

ventilated or had a panic attack since Miami. Actually it was

before Miami, come to think. Whatever, I still get anxious,

but seem to have lost my need for those little white paper

bags, as Fern well knows.

“Let me fret, okay?” I say irritably. “She’s seventeen and

she’s flying a plane, for God’s sake! I get to fret—that’s my

job.”

Seth shakes his handsome head and smiles. He knows me

pretty well by now. “She’s doing great, Jane. See how steady

she holds the wings? There, she’s starting her bank for the

final approach.”

Trapped

389

“Don’t call it the final approach. That sounds
terrible!
”

Fern gives me a squeeze to let me know it will be all right.

Fern always thinks things will be all right, that’s one of the

reasons we’ve been friends for all these years—because she’s

so generous with her strength.

The wings of the little plane teeter slightly as it straight-

ens out and begins to lose altitude.

“You go, girl!” Fern shouts up at the sky. “You come on

home!”

Fern knows my secret, finally. I kept my promise to

Randall Shane and told Kelly first and then him, and even-

tually all the important people in my life.

It’s simple, really. When I was a kid my parents used to

vacation in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, for two weeks

in August. It was cheap enough for a state trooper’s family

in those days, and we always rented the same rinky-dinky

cottage six blocks from the beach, teetering on the edge of

the salt marsh. It was the highlight of the year because I got

to roam the boardwalk by myself. Being pathologically shy

with strangers, I never said a word to anyone, but used to bop

along on my lonesome, secretly checking out the boys. Of

course if one of them chanced to look back I’d instantly drop

my eyes and hurry away. Boys were fascinating but also ter-

rifying and I wasn’t ready, not for dating, not for kissing, not

for anything.

Until, one moonless night, I was. Not just ready for dating

or kissing, but for anything and everything. I’m sixteen and

it’s summer and there’s a great local band at the old ballroom

on the boardwalk, they do covers of all my favorite groups.

My mother says fine, go, just be home by midnight. It’s a

scene in there, all these sweaty teenagers strutting to the

pumping music, shaking their fine little booties, hooking up

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for quick summer flings. Some of them grinding against each

other in ways that border on the obscene. In the dim corners,

lots of face sucking, furtive feels, you get the picture—you’ve

probably been there. That particular night the place had a

wild, overtly sexual vibe that was fascinating to observe

because that’s all I was there for, just to watch. Not to par-

ticipate. If a boy mumbled a request to dance I’d quickly

shake my head and avert my eyes. Do that a few times and

most of the boys will leave you alone.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, all those mixed-up

feelings blending into the incessant beat—why, oh why

couldn’t I be like them?—and I fled that musky dance hall

and had a little panic attack on the beach. Ashamed of myself,

really. I was sixteen and I’d never been kissed! What was

wrong with me! And so on. The usual adolescent mishmash

of feelings, and hardly the first time I’d ended up alone on

the beach, feeling sorry for myself.

What was different about that night was the absolute

darkness. Black darkness. No moon, an overcast sky and

therefore no stars. Lights peeping along the boardwalk, of

course, but out on the beach, a hundred yards away, it was

so dark I could barely see my hands. And that particular

night the darkness made me feel different in some important,

life-changing way. It freed me, made me feel not only in-

visible and anonymous, but invulnerable. Like whatever

happened in the dark did not count. I could be someone else,

a girl without a name. Anyone but plain Jane Garner the shy

girl. All those mixed-up heady feelings from the dance hall—

they weren’t something to be hidden or to be ashamed of,

they were to be acted upon.

Who would know? It was dark, no one could see me.

You can guess the rest. How I found a boy on the beach,

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391

a boy at least as shy as me. A boy who flinched at my touch,

though not for long. A boy who wanted to know my name,

but accepted my refusal when I made up some flippant non-

sense about how I’d be the beach girl and he’d be the beach

boy and that was all we needed, just the made-up names. Nat-

tering on as I unbuttoned his pants.

Oh yes, I was definitely the aggressor. My nameless beach

boy knew about as much about having sex as I did, but if you

put two young bodies together, the bodies themselves figure

it out. And when the deed was done, I was the one who got

up and ran away. Running away as if it had never happened,

as if it was some other girl doing it in the dark, not me.

Not only did I not know his name, I never even really saw

his face, beyond the fact that he had a bump on his nose and

a cleft in his chin. So when the time came there was not only

no father to name, there was no one to look for.

What happened? What made me act so wild and out of

character? Years later, I’m reasonably sure it was a hormonal

surge. I was ovulating, obviously, and my body was telling

me to fertilize that egg. Very dangerous for a sixteen-year-

old who yearns to live in the moment and doesn’t want to

consider the consequences.

Don’t take this as an endorsement of anonymous adoles-

cent sex, but in my case it all worked out for the best, even-

tually. The best in this case being a perfectly amazing human

being name Kelly Garner. Who, upon hearing my story, joked

that she should change her name to Cleft, as in Montgomery

Cleft. Or I could be Chin, she said, no wait that’s a Chinese

name. Joking me out of my shame and telling me that if she

ever really wanted to find her biological father she’d put an

ad on the Internet, asking did you get lucky on such and such

a date, at Hampton Beach, in the summer of love? and I said

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the summer of love was way earlier and she said not for you

it wasn’t, Mom. And Fern said, well he must have been good-

looking, even in the dark, because look at Kelly. He was

your flyboy, Jane, even without the plane.

All of which made me wish I’d fessed up years ago.

“Any second now,” Seth is saying. “She’s almost there.”

Excuse me, but I have to stop breathing until this is over.

When the little plane is only a few feet from the ground, all

of a sudden the wings flutter and the plane rocks back and

forth.

“Ground effect,” Seth says soothingly. “A little extra lift

under the wings. Perfectly normal.”

And then the plane is down, bouncing along the runway—

is that too much bounce? Is she going to crash?—and then

like a miracle everything is okay and the plane is under

control and it slowly comes to a stop fifty yards from where

we’re standing.

Fern holds me back. “Give her a moment,” she suggests.

“She wants to savor. Plus, knowing Kelly, she wants to make

an entrance.”

After a moment the cockpit door swings open and my

baby girl climbs out and plants her two feet on the ground

and raises both hands in the air and flashes a world-beating

grin that’s as bright as all the snow in the Catskills, and then

I’m running, running to my beautiful, my brilliant, my totally

amazing daughter.

®

ISBN: 978-1-4268-0785-5

TRAPPED

Copyright © 2007 by Rodman Philbrick.

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or

utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic,

mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including

xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or

retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher,

MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are

either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and

any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

events or locales is entirely coincidental.

MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered

in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark

Office and in other countries.

www.MIRABooks.com

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