All storms pass -- eventually. Life goes on, if but for a brief time, and often tentatively at best, like storm ravaged limbs falling down into rushing streams before tumbling onward, and one day, perhaps, out to sea. The sun returns for a time, and with upturned faces bright eyes seek it's warmth. Spirits of wounded souls reach for the solace of sky; words of distant passion take wing on earth-borne breezes and drift inside the ancient rhythm of memory -- seeking release again and again.
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The man sat in the doctor's office, beside his wife.
Two weeks before, when a routine mammogram had found a lump in her left breast, their world had changed forever, the journey they had suddenly found themselves on had taken a hard turn away from normalcy and predictability -- and now they were well and truly on a road less traveled.
Now there were trips to foreign lands, quiet visits to strange places with names like Oncology, and Radiotherapy. A mammogram gave way to a fifty minute session in the MRI, and now a radiologist had his two cents to throw into the maelstrom of confusion. Surgeons recommended one course of action, oncologists another, but first things first, they all said.
'We have to go in and find out exactly what we're dealing with.'
And last Friday, they had done just that.
Now they were in an oncologists cheery office, waiting for his sure to be cheerful news. A print of Klimt's 'The Kiss' hung on one wall, while Klimt's 'Danaë' hung behind the physician's desk, and the man thought that image particularly ironic, indeed, almost obscene -- given the circumstances of their visit today.
The physician, a short, trim man with almost no hair on his head save for a severely trimmed beard, came into the office with a file folder in his hand. He came in silence. He came deep in thought, reading and re-reading surgical and pathology reports in the folder, then he looked up at Peggy Overton, and at her husband, Paul. He sighed, collected his thoughts again, then took off his glasses and put them on a polished rosewood desk.
"There's no easy way to talk about this, so let's just dive in," the physician began.
"First, the lump. Well, lumps. The first, the one we found in the original mammogram, is malignant, and aggressively so. Dr Karstens also palpated another lump in your right breast, as you'll recall, as it was too high for the mammogram to catch. It too is malignant. Your MRI revealed some involvement of the lymph nodes in your left axial, uh, armpit, and these were biopsied. Dr Karstens decided, when he saw the nodes on your left side, to go ahead and sample three on your right side, while you were under.
"We expected to find a few, perhaps five nodes on your left side to be involved. We found fifteen. Of course, Karstens had no expectations for those sampled on the right, but all three rapid biopsies of those showed involvement, and so he went in and dissected those as well.
"The overall staging, at this point Mrs Overton, is four, and I'm not going to lie to you, or try to somehow make this sound less serious than it is, but the bottom line is..."
And there it was.
Thirty four years of marriage, reduced to a single word.
'Terminal.'
Paul Overton had wrapped his arms protectively around his wife, he had held PeggySue while seismic waves of grief ground through their souls, and then, after the impact of the physician's words had crushed through his own meager defenses, he fell under the weight of his own reflexive grief, fell into the grip of his own emotional death.
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Heavy rain fell on the 747 as it pushed back from the gate. The airliner looked dark and almost perversely sinister in the evening light, like some kind of displaced prehistoric beast wallowing on the pavement, incongruously trapped in garish yellow light that bathed the crowded ramp. Open window shades along the side of the dripping beast dappled the tops of the wings with little amber shadows; when sharp knives of wind tore across the ramp, water collecting on the wings eddied and ran down to the safe embrace of the earth below.
An anonymous figure in an orange rain-suit walked under the nose of the aircraft, hooked-up an umbilical inside a little recessed compartment, then looked at all the activity winding down on the ramp.
"Clear to start two," the person below the aircraft said.
"Starting two," Paul Overton said from his seat some twenty five feet above the ramp. He reached over and pushed buttons, turned dials, then watched pressures build on the screens in front of him while he advanced a throttle lever to the start position.
"Pressure good," Denise Evans said. Evans was Overton's first officer on this flight, and her voice was full of a gravelly West Texas twang. "EGT good. EGP check."
"Clear to start three," the voice below called through rain and wind.
"Starting three," Overton repeated. He began the same sequence and watched the screens again, then moved a practiced eye to the latitude and longitude readouts on the tiny screen by his right knee to see that the aircraft's movement was still registering on the navigation display. "Good inertial lock," he said when he saw the numbers were unchanged.
The push-back truck slowed to a stop, and felt it disconnecting from the nose-wheel.
Another voice called, Kennedy Ground Control, and it burst into the cockpit from the overhead speaker: "United Two Three Heavy, clear to taxi on alpha foxtrot for runway two five left."
"Two Three Heavy to two five left," Overton replied to the ground traffic controller huddled somewhere far away in warmth and darkness. He saw the red panel light wink out indicating the push back truck was disconnected, then heard the voice below calling through the storm that they were now clear to taxi. Overton waited until the orange suited figure walked into view and turned to face him, then, when the figure below held out a glowing orange wand pointing to his left, Overton advanced the throttles for two and three with his right hand while turning the nose-wheel paddle with his left. The old girl hesitated, then began to move ever so slowly; he decreased the turn radius and backed off the throttles as her speed picked up.
"EGT on three is a little high," Evans, the first officer, said.
"Okay, keep an eye on it. Give me flaps seven and set V-ref for one two seven and rotate for one four three."
"Flaps seven, V-ref to one two seven and V-r to one four three."
Overton straightened out the nose gear and goosed the throttle again for just a moment, and the old girl steadied out at just under fifteen miles per and rumbled along the old concrete. "What's the EGP now," he asked.
"Forty five percent and holding. Temp looks good."
"Fine. Go ahead and give me lights and some wiper, would you?" The taxiway ahead lit up as Evans hit a switch on the overhead panel, then the windshield wipers burst into action and cleared the glass.
The two pilots settled into calling out the remainder of the takeoff checklist while Overton wove through the various taxiways, and about halfway out to the runway he and Evans started the two outboard engines and watched their readouts as they spooled up.
