Dedicated to Jon –
May It All Come Back Someday;
And to The Others That Didn't Make It
*
There was no funeral. There was no body. Most people had forgotten him. I hadn't.
Years had past since the plane he was flying had disappeared. I was young and pregnant at the time – only twenty-seven years old. I can still recall every detail of that week. Jonathan had said he'd call every time he landed and even if I were out at least leave a short message about where he was. So I traced his flight from near where we lived in Bedford, Massachusetts, down the coast of the U.S., and out into the Caribbean chain of islands.
He stopped overnight at Roanoke, Charleston, and Boca Raton. His stop in Boca was the first, and only time we had phone sex, both of us masturbating as we talked dirty to each other, promising thousands of orgasms and kinky acts when we were together again. It was also the last time we had sex – or shared our love for each other. We'd been married all of two years at that point, however, we'd been high school and college sweethearts, and then waited patiently four more years while we piled up some money for our first home.
The last call I got from Jon was from the Virgin Islands early on an April evening. Jonathan had made the rounds of hotels in Charlotte Amalie, following up on dozens of telephone calls he'd made over the preceding month. All along his route down the Caribbean chain to South America he was trying to get the hotels to advertise on a group of vacation-oriented websites he and his best friend Matt were building. He was flying his own plane from resort island to island signing up clients and talking about how to best represent them on the sites. Jon and Matt's sites were already making money in the U.S., however, they knew they'd have to expand internationally to sustain their advantage.
Then the daily calls stopped.
I called the hotel Jon had been at the night before, however, he'd checked out the previous morning. I got his friend and partner Matt involved. We called some of their clients and prospects, enough to figure out that he'd left the Virgin Islands for islands further south. The airport verified that his plane had departed. Other stops Jon was supposed to make included St. Kitts, Montserrat, Antigua, and Dominica, but no one had seen him or his plane. Of course, the people I talked to all seemed overly relaxed, and had 'devil may care' attitude; it was the Caribbean Way. We called islands back towards the U.S. too, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nassau, and others – every airport, every hotel, every prospect, every B&B or Inn. Nothing.
The days merged into a morass of telephone calls, searching, pleading for help from anyone, getting the official and unofficial runaround, and occasionally finding someone sympathetic that would stay on the line for a while and brainstorm about possibilities that hadn't occurred to me – to us – Matt and me. Those new possibilities became dozens of new phone calls.
Various Search and Rescue organizations put Jon and his aircraft on their 'watch list,' but again little more came from that sector of things. Hospitals had no Jonathan Roberts, or even John Does that might be a possibility. Police departments promised to make note of the disappearance, but several informed me it was unlikely he'd show up in their jurisdictions. At the end of the week, neither Matt nor I had anything to show for our efforts. Jonathan had vanished.
The following week I hired a pilot to fly me to every airport or landing strip from Puerto Rico to South America. Before we even started, the pilot helped me wend my way through the assistance the Federal Aviation Administration renders to pilots traveling down the chain. That idea also proved a blind alley in finding Jon.
The Caribbean is made up of about forty-five major landmasses large enough to sport an airport and thousands of little islands, some no larger than the room you're sitting in. The longest distance between any of them is 250 miles or about a ninety-minute flight in Jon's Cessna 310 – a twin-engine aircraft he'd put over a thousand hours in flying around the States.
I'd accompanied Jonathan on many flights, including to some of the romantic places he'd taken me, for instance, a romantic little inn near the airport on Prince Edward Island, or the nude beach along the Outer Banks, or the mountain top retreat on a gorgeous lake in Northern Michigan he surprised me with.
As we flew along from airport to airport searching for his plane, I thought about all our times together and, of course, how much I loved him. I remembered the time he'd put the plane on autopilot and moved his seat back all the way. I'd stripped and got him hard with my mouth, slobbering over his cock as we flew towards Branson, Missouri at eight thousand feet. Eventually, I'd straddled his seat and let him drive up into me. We fucked and joined the Mile-High Club. It took a week for the smell of sex to finally leave the small airplane's cabin and the leather seat I'd leaked on before I could get dressed again.
My rental pilot and I flew up and down the island chain, back and forth, and in the end had nothing to show for it. I ran out of money, but somehow found the time and energy to keep going even though I was working part time. Our monthly telephone bills ran into the thousands – calls to the islands weren't cheap.
And then, one day, about four months after Jonathan's disappearance, I just stopped. It came to me that I'd done everything I could do, called everybody I could think of at least thrice and worried myself sick. It was time to move on.
Through my Dad, I contacted our family lawyer. The normal time to get a death certificate after a disappearance is seven years. Because an airplane over foreign soil and ocean was involved, he thought he could get the timeframe shortened slightly. I needed that certificate to collect the modest amount of insurance money Jon had taken out on his life. He petitioned the court. I got the certificate about six years after our last phone call.
Jonathan Douglas Roberts was born five months after his father's disappearance. Of course, I named the baby after his father and even gave him his grandfather's first name to distinguish the two. Matt, God bless his heart, had become my surrogate husband for the child birth process, even coming into the labor room with me and massaging my aching muscles through birth.
I muddled through economically with the baby, a hodge-podge of childcare, and a couple of part-time jobs that kept food on the table and the mortgage paid. The business Jon and Matt had started flourished. Matt hired me to help in it, working from home a good part of the time. With Matt's help, I learned website design and software development, and soon he declared that I was as worthy a partner as Jon had been and in a formal ceremony over a casual dinner one evening Matt knighted me 'His Partner.'
I don't know exactly when I fell in love with Matt. It might have been in the delivery room when Jonathan was born, or one time when he came over and fixed the washing machine that had spilled water all over the basement, or when he held me through one of my many breakdowns about Jon's loss and my plight, or over one of our increasingly frequent dinners together, or when he'd hang around the house and hold Jon in his arms, cooing at the baby in a caring way.
Matt, like Jon, was a good man. He was tall, dark, and handsome, and sported a great personality and sense of humor. He had an MBA from North Carolina, and had what I called business smarts. He was daring enough to start his own business with Jon, and then to keep it running successfully through the disappearance and loss of his partner and best friend.
One night about a year after Jon's disappearance, Matt and I finally made love. We'd spent the day together working on computers in my living room, and to tell the truth I was randy. I'd developed a serious relationship with a vibrator that Jon had given me years earlier to 'moderate my sexual desires' when he was traveling. It wasn't the same as Jon; however, I could find the right spots and create fairly effective orgasms with the little device.
As the time passed since the disappearance, the vibrator had become my nightly companion. I was lonely, and I was horny, a bad combination since I started to look at all men with a different attitude, particularly Matt. At first, I'd firmly decided not to become involved with anyone for three years – then two years – then, ... oh well. Matt was not to be on my consideration list; he was a friend, a new co-worker, and too close to home and to the missing Jonathan, but over time that resolve faded too.
Matt had made me his new partner only two weeks earlier, a fact that suggested with all the more certainty that I should not mess around with him, but then we worked close to each other one day, alternately leaning over each other's shoulders at adjacent computer screens as we added some major features to another vacation planning website that helped our burgeoning business.
When we were near each other, I could smell his masculinity. It wasn't just his aftershave, it was his pheromones – it was him, the real him. I knew he wanted me; there was no doubt. Nonetheless, to all outward signs he was the perfect gentleman and co-worker, polite and non-provocative – not a hand or remark out of place.
In return, I exuded my own aromas of seduction to Matt. I didn't intend to, they just floated away from my body and into his nostrils. I studied him when his back was turned, or as he worked on his laptop. My heart fluttered, and I could feel dampness between my legs, yet, to outward appearances, I focused with laser-like attention on the project.
I broke off about five-thirty to attend to young Jon. The babysitter left. Matt suggested a dinner of Chinese take-out that he'd go fetch, and I accepted. He puttered around and set the table, and then played with Jon as I tended to the house and a few other things. Jon was an agreeable child, settling down for a long sleep about seven each evening, waking only around eleven for a nighttime feeding and diaper change.
Thus, after Matt's trip to a nearby shopping center, we settled down at our dinner table to dine. We both had some wine, and more of our easy banter about life and work. He was so easy to talk with. Although I had every reason to be bitter, Matt made me laugh and always pulled me to a place of happiness. He wouldn't let me dwell on or be maudlin about Jon's disappearance. He'd lost his best friend too. I could always cry with Matt, yet know that I'd end up feeling better and happier because he was there.
