Chapter 1
She was gone now. Gone just now, and he was alone in their house, their home, and memories seemed to push in on him from every corner. They all seemed so dark now, too. Had it always been so?
Twenty three years together. Gone now, shot down in flames, a once assumed destiny reduced to the lowest common denominator by depositions and endlessly faultless absolutions. The more contrived recriminations, he reminded himself, came later. False memories, misplaced motives and desperate loneliness. His lawyer said it was all in a day's work, nothing new. Don't sweat it; just roll with the punches.
"Don't sweat it?" he remembered saying to the lawyer. "How do you do that?"
He'd heard it first through a grapevine he'd never known existed, that she was having another 'new' affair. Young guy this time. Some kid with too much time on his hands...time enough to take care of her liquid dreams, her unmet needs. There had been the quiet confrontation, then an equally quiet agreement that, once arrived at, meant it was all over - that there was nothing left to say, little left to do but pick up the pieces and carry on.
Or...was there?
"Like...what does come next?"
And he caught himself saying this to the mirror one morning. Steam from running water fogged the mirror and he wiped the silvered glass with his hand, looked at the distorted image through the rising mist. He realized he didn't recognize the face in there...that man was a stranger now. Someone he'd known once. Maybe.
He moved his belongings down to the marina on Lake Union, moved onto the boat they had sailed on weekends - together. It was big enough, he told himself, to hold the remnants of that life, the things worth holding onto, anyway. He'd spent a few hours carrying things to the marina, another unpacking all his broken dreams - then he'd looked at the galley, the teak-lined main saloon, and he'd laughed just then. He laughed until he cried, like an over-wound Jack-in-the-box burst free - left to wobble, disused and alone until the next time someone wound him up again.
He went back to work two days after he moved aboard.
He drove down to SeaTac, walked to the dispatch office, picked up and scanned through the preflight briefing for the first leg of the morning, to KSLC. He read the Met synopsis, checked off the squawks and signed the fuel load-out, then walked through the quiet terminal to the security line. He checked his watch - 4:20 in the morning - while he shuffled through the crew line, then, when he was through, he walked out to the gate and onto the old 757.
All the lights were off - save a few in the galley that cast oblique little pools of blue and amber where the Jetway met the open door, and he grinned at other memories - of other airplanes. How long had it been, he wondered, since he had been the first to board? How long ago had he worn three stripes on his sleeves? How many years since the Grand Canyon?
He went to the cockpit and reached into the darkness, feeling for the switch on the overhead panel that would turn on the dome light, but it was second nature now - and had been...for fifteen years. He had to admit...this confined little space was home now, his real home - the only home that really mattered now. Barbara had never understood that, not really, and had never been willing to share him with this other world. Even if she was proud, in a way, of his calling, she hated him for this one chaste passion. Who knows, he thought, maybe she was right all along.
He sat adjusted the seat, started flipping switches on the overhead panel, activating electrical buses and checking ground power status, then he started entering data in the old girl's nav system. He heard a couple of flight attendants come aboard, listened to their careless banter - because they assumed they were the first aboard this morning - and he smiled when he heard one of them notice there were lights on in the cockpit.
Then...footsteps.
A knock on the door.
"Captain? You already here?"
He turned, looked at Marcy Stewart and smiled. "Yup. That does indeed seem to be the case."
"Can I get you some coffee, Jim?"
"No thanks, darlin'," he said. He liked Marcy, had been to her wedding two summers ago and, because her father had recently passed he had walked her down the aisle, given her away - as best he could. Barbara had told him later she was proud of him.
Proud? Of what, he'd wondered. That he stood for something, or someone, other than himself?
"We heard about Barbara," she said, walking into the cockpit just a little. "I'm sorry, Jim. Is there anything I can do?"
He nodded, turned back to the panel and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment - then he felt her standing right behind his seat, her hand on his shoulder.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm copacetic," he said, forcing back the tears.
"Got the load-out?" she asked. "How many we got this morning?"
"Looks full. Sorry. No rest for the wicked."
"Orange juice?"
"Oh...yeah, sure. A little one, maybe?"
"Comin' right up."
He watched the fuel boss down on the tarmac supervising the fueling, then heard his FO walk through the galley on his way to the cockpit...
"So, it's true," Will Eberling said as he came in and hung up his coat. "How long you been here?"
"Half hour, maybe."
"Leave anything for me to do?"
He almost laughed. "Maybe. I hear the aft head port-side is clogged. Why don't you go do some of that plumber shit..."
Eberling ignored him, contorted his way into the right seat and ran through his procedures, and even managed to set up his FMS in less than ten minutes. "Ready to hit the bricks?" Eberling said, when it was time to do their walk-around down on the ramps.
"Starting to rain a little," he said as he made his way to the galley. It was cold out, too, like not quite 40 degrees, and it was still snowing like crazy in Salt Lake. He made it down to the concrete and walked to the number one engine, confirmed oil and hydraulic levels were good, then he walked around the gears and tires, giving them a practiced look over. When he was finished he walked over to the fuel boss and took the chit, looked it over once and signed the paper.
Eberling was waiting for him at the metal stairway, looking southeast. Mount Rainier was barely visible in the blue light - just a dark gray hulk, really - and, looking through the dim, early morning drizzle, he stopped and looked into the shades of gray for a while, before they walked up to the vestibule that connected the old 757 to this earth.
Marcy was waiting for him, glass of orange juice in hand, when he came back to her amber pools of light.
"You sure you don't want something hot?" she asked, looking at the water running off his rain-coat, and his nose.
He took the juice and downed it, shook his head. "Maybe before we shut the door?" he said, shivering.
"Got it," she said.
He noticed the way she looked at Eberling just then. Kind of a "keep an eye on him this morning" look.
"There are no secrets between crew members," he remembered one of his training captains telling him once - almost twenty years before. Just the opposite of life in the Navy, he'd had to remind himself. Everything was always different - again, and again.
Yet there'd been one constant all through his life so far: Barbara. And Ted, he had to remind himself.
She'd been by his side since their second year together, at school. She'd stuck with him when he'd decided to go into the Navy after graduation, and she'd visited while he struggled through OCS, and he couldn't have finished without her, he'd admitted to her more than once. She was his future even then, and they knew it. They got married after he finished up at Pensacola, and when they moved to Pearl she seemed to love him all the more for his calling.
But...things change, don't they? People change, too. Again, and again.
Eberling was calling out the pre-start checklist now, and together they woke up the old girl with her old, familiar routines, getting her ready for another day in the air. He was on automatic pilot too, and he knew it...going through all his easy motions. He didn't have to think about what he was doing now; all these things were in deepest muscle-memory. His fingers found switches without any need to look, because every little thing in this cockpit had it's own sound and feel. And he loved this place, of all places on earth, most of all.
"Yaw dampers - "
"One and two, check..."
"IRS - ALIGN to NAV..."
"One, check...two...and three...to stand-by..."
He watched the pushback truck line-up, felt the slightest jolt as metal mated with metal - then he was talking to the ground boss down there in the rain...
"Clear to start one, Captain..."
"Starting one..."
Eberling made the switch from ground power to internal buses while he kept his hand on the tiller, and the old girl seemed to groan as she pushed free from her umbilicus. The slow, steady motion, the moving away, then the push-back truck was away...and the old girl was free again.
