A short little riff today, just a few ideas to consider.

[ELP \\ Take a Pebble]

First You Make a Stone of Your Heart

Part II

C2.1

There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and perhaps there is purpose in the rhythm.

C2.2

Time, like an arrow. 

Like red and orange leaves drifting on a cool autumn breeze; their life under the warming sun has come and gone – and now they are left to drift along gray cobblestones, waiting.

But the arrow does not care about the passage of time, and who knows what leaves feel?

Time, in the human realm, had almost always been a relative measurement; when the sun was highest in the sky it was midday – and that worked – most of the time. When the smallest human settlements formed, clusters of buildings encircled open areas where sundials measured noon, and soon enough markets and trade fairs developed in these open areas. Time became an organizing principle even though time was still relative to place; the sun might be highest overhead at noon along the banks of the Thames estuary while along the banks of the Rhein it would already be mid-afternoon.

But that relativity was hardly worth a passing thought. There was no need for such precise measurements of time as most humans lived their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplace. 

Mariners at sea were the first to need a standardized locus of time. While it was easy enough to determine a vessel’s latitude by taking a single measurement of the sun’s angle above the horizon at local noon, deriving that vessels longitude was another matter. The globe had to be partitioned into 360 degrees, and time at zero degrees longitude had to be precisely known for meaningful calculations of local longitude to be made.

At that same approximate point in time, iron horses began pacing along evenly spaced rails, and soon enough both passengers and freight began moving faster than humans had ever moved before. Interconnecting railway lines converged at distant stations and soon enough railway companies, as well as their agents and passengers, needed accurate timetables, and for those tables to provide meaningful information local sundials would no longer suffice. Clocks, and clock towers, began to appear as humans continued to redefine their relationship to time. In time, the telegraph and then radio waves sent out their standardized time hacks, for the first time allowing coordinated human activities to occur over distances unimaginable even a few decades before. Traders in New York City could coordinate their economic activities with their counterparts in Tokyo or London almost as easily as they could converse with neighbors across the street. 

Time, in a sense, was no longer relative to place, and man’s understanding of his place in the cosmos began to change.

+++++

An old man walks along a waterfront crowded with merchant ships; the night is still and a thick fog is settling over the water in the bay. Sailors sing shanties in distant taverns and horses seem to sleep in their harnesses, waiting for the whip. Streetlights cast flickering pools of light on damp cobblestones as fallen leaves gather in gutters, while amber light bathes the scene in sepias and gold. Cargo from the latest ship to berth is being unloaded into horse drawn carts, and a handful of passengers walk down the gangplank and gather in the pools of light, and as it has been a rough passage most seem more than grateful to be back on land. 

The old man watches these passengers intently before disappearing among the leaves and shadows; a blue sphere no larger than a Danish kroner hovers over the ship, it’s sensors focused on just one of the passengers, a rather pleasant woman in her twenties.

The ship had just arrived from Königsberg, perhaps a half hour ago, and while the woman feels more tired than she ever has before, there is a hopeful patina of joy covering her lingering fatigue. She is a music teacher, yet in her heart of hearts she longs to write symphonies; she has been engaged to teach piano at a school for girls in the heart of Copenhagen, but even now she longs to travel on to Paris. Her name is Anna Regina Kant, and she was born in the small coastal city of Memel, just north of Königsberg. She has recently graduated after studying music at the university in Königsberg, and this at a time when few women gained admission to such schools, but there had been no denying her gift. Even now, as fog pressed in from the harbor and as sailors back to their ships, she felt the possible frameworks of a new composition taking shape in her mind, for in everything she found music – but most especially the sea. Still, she could not break free of the black and white ‘whales’ that had frolicked beside their ship for hours earlier that day, because one of them had seemed to stare at her for time without end.

As she stepped from the gangplank onto the bricked walkway beside the ship she looked for a carriage from the school, for they had promised that a representative would be on hand to help her out to the school’s grounds. She had all her worldly possessions with her, all that would fit into two steamer trunks, anyway, and as she had no desire to return home again, she had included all her earliest compositions.

So she felt some modest relief when a carriage pulled up and a young man called out her name. Her trunks were located and loaded atop the carriage, and soon she is on her way into the city.

And curiously, no one noticed a small sphere hovering over the wharf, even as the young woman in the carriage looked out over the harbor – where a large male orca circled patiently in the night.

The old man looked after her carriage as it rattled away from the wharf. After the carriage was out of sight he turned to the creature standing by his side and sighed.

“And so it begins. Again,” the Old Man said quietly, patiently.

“Yes. Again,” the creature said. He stood just more than two meters tall, his skin was the purest white, and his name was Pak. “We cannot fail.” 

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, every last word…

Let’s start a tale most fitting for this bitterest season, a simple song for the unrequited among us.

[Al Stewart \\ End of the Day]

Her Book of Dreams

Chapter One

She finished taking notes then put away her writing materials; she turned off her Olympus Pearlcorder and slipped it into her briefcase, making sure that everything was just so, that everything was in the exact place she liked them. One of the physicians sitting next to her shook his head as he watched her rigid routine unfold and take shape, but she simply didn’t care what other people thought. Maybe she had once, but not now. Once her materials were secure she left the conference room and made her way to the elevators, then rode up in silence and walked to her room. She picked up the itemized bill that had been slipped under the door and looked over each entry before nodding and placing the envelope in her carry-on, then she grabbed her rolling suitcase and made her way back to the elevators, and from there on to the taxi stand beyond the ornate lobby entrance. She didn’t have to wait long and was soon on her way.

She was a physician, an ophthalmologist by training, though she considered herself a surgeon first and foremost. She had long ago decided to specialize in ophthalmologic trauma medicine, and so she spent most of her time working on eyes damaged in motor vehicle accidents – or perhaps even the occasional sliding glass door. Her’s was a most difficult specialty and few physicians chose to embark on the long journey required to gain even basic proficiency, but she had been driven to succeed in this field during her earliest training. After four years of medical school and a two year internship, she had spent a further eight years in various residencies and fellowships – and even now she spent at least a two weeks each year attending conferences such as this one in Chicago, learning about the latest research or absorbing new surgical techniques.  

She watched people hurrying along on crowded sidewalks as the taxi drove through the always congested downtown area between The Drake and Union Station, and only after she had exited the rancid old Ford did she notice that a light snow was just beginning to fall. She paid the cabbie and made her way inside the massive old station, and once inside she handed off her suitcase to one of Amtrak’s red capped attendants. She was in due course directed to the Metropolitan Lounge but, after checking the time on her phone, made her way to the upstairs food court. She’d been buying fresh roasted nuts from a vendor up there for years – every time she made this trip to Chicago, anyway – and today would be no exception. She purchased walnuts and macedamia and pistachios and put them neatly into her carryon.

The Metropolitan Lounge was just about full this time of day – it was mid-afternoon local time –  but she found a seat and looked at all the various departure times on monitors scattered around the room. Storied trains with legendary names like the California Zephyr, the Southwest Chief, and the Empire Builder all departed within a brief window of time in the late afternoon, and even a few overnight trains headed east were already showing up on the departure board – though they wouldn’t leave until later in the evening. She always booked a so-called Deluxe Bedroom, because the included bathroom space had private showering facilities, not one of the communal shower cubbies down on the lower level. And while meals were also included with sleeper service, she usually had these delivered to her room.

A half hour before their scheduled departure an announcer came on and advised that sleeping car passengers for the Empire Builder should line up by Door 6, and the usual collection of disoriented tourists shuffled over to the locked doors – but there were, she noted, a few oddballs waiting there, too. Twenty-somethings with skis headed to Montana, a wheelchair-bound woman in her twenties, and a couple of singletons like herself: business travelers who simply loathed flying, or who grew faint at the mere idea of having to board an aircraft – any aircraft – and all had queued up and were waiting anxiously. Another red cap appeared and escorted the group out onto the platform, and almost everyone remarked how much colder it suddenly seemed.

When she made it out to her assigned car she stepped aboard and made for the steep stairway that led to the upper floor, and once up there she made her way to the same bedroom – E – she almost always enjoyed this time of year. Located near the center of the car, Bedroom E was most isolated from the vibration and noise that plagued rooms over the trucks and nearer to the vestibule, a lesson her father had imparted decades ago.

She unpacked her overnight bag and found her dry-roasted macadamia nuts and had a few, and she watched as a nearby Metra commuter train pulled out of the station and headed north just as her room attendant came by and introduced herself.

“Let’s see…you’re Dr. North and I see you’ll be with us all the way to Seattle?”

“I am indeed,” Rebecca North, M.D., F.A.C.S. said. “Is the dining car back in full operation this trip?”

“It is, yes! You’ll be one of the first to try it out, too!”

“Could you put me down for the seven-thirty seating?”

“The dining car attendant will be by in a few minutes; just tell him what you want.” And with that the attendant disappeared, leaving Rebecca kind of flummoxed. Sleeping car porters had always taken care of little things like this in the past, but things change, and she knew that all too well. So had her father.

She slipped her laptop out of her carry-on and then pulled out her hand-written notes from the conference, her immediate desire being to transcribe these notes and go over the week’s high points. Almost immediately the train’s conductor knocked on the door and stepped inside her compartment.

“Ticket, please,” the gruff old man mumbled, the effort required to smile apparently too much for the old man.

She handed her travel documents to the conductor and he punched her ticket here and there before he handed it back, then he too departed wordlessly – and without smiling even once.

She started in on her notes and hardly looked up when the train pulled out of the station, heading for Milwaukee. She looked out at snow now blowing almost horizontally over the river then turned back to her notes, looking up again only when the dining car steward knocked and stepped into her compartment.

“Will you be joining us in the dining car tonight?” the polite old man asked. He was black though his hair was as white as the snow falling on the other side of the glass, and his smile was big and bright enough to warm even the grouchiest curmudgeon’s stony heart.

“Yes. What times are available?”

“Your attendant told me you wanted seven thirty. Does that still work for you?”

Rebecca smiled and nodded. “Do you happen to have the trout?” she asked hopefully.

“You know, I think we have a few steelhead. Should I put your name on one?”

“Oh, could you please? That would be wonderful!”

The old man smiled and nodded as he scribbled notes on a pad. “We’ll see you at seven-thirty, then.” She knew these old timers survived on tips, so she made a mental note to make sure she left him a nice one.

The car swayed and rumbled through a series of switches as the train made it’s way through the vast yards north of downtown, but soon enough they began picking up speed and a series of north side suburban stations reeled by as a feeble sun gave way to the evening. Lights came on in the sleeping car and the conductor made a few announcements as Rebecca resumed working through her lecture notes. She looked up from time to time, saw lights wink on in distant houses and she realized they were out of the city now, streaking through rolling farmland on the way to Wisconsin – and she found it easy enough to wonder what life was like out here on the prairie in the dead of winter – like how the warmth of a wood stove and a hot dinner waiting on the table would be the biggest reward for another day tending small herds in their milking barns. 

She’d hardly ever treated rural patients like these, she thought. She’d studied medicine in Chicago and completed her training in Boston before returning home to Seattle, so had spent her entire career helping urban “city dwellers,” not farmers and ranchers. People were people, however, and eyes were eyes, but she’d recently grown more and more aware of a divide between people that lived in large cities and their rural “cousins,” a divide she recognized but hardly understood.

Rebecca leaned back in her seat and soon enough her eyes closed as her mind began to drift on other currents, and it seemed as if only a few seconds had passed when the sleeping car attendant poked her head in the door to inform the doctor that her seven-thirty dinner seating had just been called. Rebecca sat bolt upright as the momentary disorientation that had gripped her began easing off, but she nodded and smiled and stood to make her way forward to the dining car.

The kindly old steward met her as she entered and graciously escorted her to an empty table at the far end of the swaying car, and she noted this table was empty and sighed in hopeful relief. One of the few things she disliked about travel by rail was having to share a table with – more often than not – complete strangers, and she found these chance encounters awkward – at their best. Pleasantries were typically exchanged, followed by the usual banter: ‘Is this your first trip on Amtrak?’ or the dreaded ‘So, what do you do?’ That question invariably led to unwanted rants about the ills of Social Security or a recitation of bad encounters with “obviously incompetent” physicians, so when asked she usually shrugged and said she was ‘Just a housewife,’ and let it go at that.

The steward helped her get seated and poured a fresh glass of ice water, then asked what she wanted to drink with her trout.

“What are you serving with the fish?” she asked.

“A salad to start, and I’d recommend the Caesar. The trout is served with rice pilaf and broccoli. We’re having wine tastings tomorrow afternoon, so we have a nice selection from Oregon and Washington state onboard.”

“A chilled Riesling, by any chance?”

He nodded and beamed proudly. “Should I bring out a bottle? What you don’t finish this evening will be ready for you tomorrow,” he added.

She thought a moment and then nodded – just as a lone diner appeared at the far end of the car. The steward raced off to greet the man, then brought him along to Rebecca’s table – and all the while she peered out the window at the raging blizzard on the other side of the glass. As they approached she turned and gazed at her new companion and inwardly groaned.

He appeared to be about her age – in his mid-50s or thereabouts – and the man was wearing pressed jeans and a white button down dress shirt, but what really caught her eye was his purple rag wool socks and teal green Birkenstocks. Eclectic, to say the least. He had to be about six-foot four, but he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and fifty pounds. He was pale, his face hadn’t seen a razor in a few days, and he was moving stiffly, as if his joints ached. The man smiled at her as he sat and his eyes pulled her in, if only because there was something vaguely familiar about them. About all his features, really.

“Howdy,” the man sighed more than spoke, but he made good eye contact and held her there – before turning to the steward.

“Could I get you something to drink?” the steward asked.

“Ice water will do me fine,” the man replied, his accent hard to place.

A waiter appeared as soon as the steward walked off, and he gave the man a menu and a form to fill out before he too disappeared.

“Anything good on this menu?” he asked her.

And she shrugged. “I understand the flatiron steak is pretty reliable. I’m not sure about the salmon.”

“What are you having?”

“I asked earlier if they had trout available. Sometimes they do, but it’s usually not on the menu.”

“Kind of a secret, then?” he sighed before he changed position a little. “Not in the mood for fish, anyway. What am I supposed to do with this form?”

“Name and room number up top, then you just check off your selections.”

He scribbled his name and room number but then gave up. “Could you handle the rest for me?”

She smiled and took the form and looked it over, noting his name was Sam Stillwell. “So, you get a salad, choice of garden or Caesar, then with your steak – let’s see, that comes with a baked potato and broccoli – and you also get dessert – cheesecake or the apple crisp, which I recommend.”

The man nodded. “I guess a Caesar salad and the crisp.”

“You may have coffee or tea, and they have wine available.”

He shook his head absentmindedly. “Just water for me tonight.”

She had already measured his pulse by watching his carotids, and counted his respiration rate as she checked out the color of his lips and nail beds, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to tell that the man was in pain. A fine bead of perspiration lined his forehead and upper lip, and his right hand was shaking a little.

“I’m having wine, a Riesling, if you’d like to try a glass?” She couldn’t believe what she’d just done and was more than a little disoriented by this reaching out, but she heard a voice inside telling her this was not the time for inhibited reticence.

But he once again shook his head, then suddenly taking deep breath he steadied himself by holding onto the edge of the tabletop – before he closed his eyes and slowly let go of the inhaled air. “Sorry,” he said.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what’s troubling you?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “Sorry, but no. No pity parties for me.”

“Alright,” she said as she handed the man’s selections to their waiter, then she looked at the man and held out her right hand. “Rebecca North. And you are?”

He looked the woman in the eye again, then at her extended hand, and a moment later he reached out and took her hand in his. “Sam.”

“Sam? You running from the police or something?”

He shook his head and shrugged. “Where you headed, Rebecca?”

“Seattle. You?”

“Palo Alto. Santa Barbara, eventually, but I wanted to walk around Seattle again so I’ll probably hang there for a few days.”

“Oh? Did you live there once?”

“No, just visited a few times. Always thought it would be a good place to live.”

“It is, despite what you hear these days.”

He shrugged. “I don’t pay much attention to the talking heads. All they seem to be peddling is fear.”

The steward brought her bottle of wine and poured her a bit to taste, and after she smiled her approval he filled the glass with a modest amount.

“Are you sure you don’t want a glass?” she asked the man again.

And again he shook his head.

“So,” she began, “what’s in Santa Barbara?”

“Home. I grew up there – and I just wanted to see all the places that used to be important to me.”

“Things change. When was the last time you were there?”

“Fifteen years ago. When my dad passed.”

“Your mother?”

He looked away. “She died a few years before he did.”

“Any friends there?”

“We’ll see.”

“Sam? Do you have any friends – anywhere?”

He looked at her and shrugged. “Used to have all the friends in the world, but like you said – things change.”

“What are you on, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Fentanyl, a patch. Why, does it show?”

“What’s it for?”

“Retroperitoneal dissection.”

She closed her eyes in a deep grimace for a moment, then looked at him again. “Seminoma?”

“Mixed. Seminoma and teratoma.”

“Chemo?”

He nodded. “You a doc?”

She nodded and smiled. “Sorry,” she sighed. “I hope I haven’t ruined your evening.” Again she stared into the stranger’s face, and again she felt something familiar about him. ‘Sam Stillwell…where do I know that name from…?’

Their salads came – just as a wave of recognition washed over her. ‘Of course…Mason and Stillwell – and their second album. West Side Wind, released in the 90s. She’d worn out that album, listened to it all through med school, and a few of the songs on that record were still among her favorites…

“So, Dr. North, what kind of doc are you?”

“Eyes.”

“An M.D.?”

“Yes. I pretty much just do trauma surgery.”

“I guess you’ve seen it all, then,” he said, and she noticed his easy going smile fade away, but for a moment she had seen the same smile that was on that album cover.

And now she felt a little flush of her own, and maybe she was a little weak in the knees too – and she really didn’t know how to respond to her feelings. As her mind struggled she found her fork and took a bite of salad, then she met his question head on. “Most of the time I deal with the results of MVAs, car accidents and the like. What about you?”

“Me?”

“What are you doing these days?”

He hesitated and she looked at his hands. Long fingers, just like her own. Clean, well kept fingernails, so at least that part of his personality was still intact. “You mean before I became a full time cancer patient?” he finally said.

Once again she met his gaze and held it, and she decided to change her course. “Where’d you go for treatment?”

“Sloan Kettering.”

“Can’t do better than that. Did they give you a prognosis?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact they did. And that’s why I’m on this train.”

“Oh?”

“I guess you could call this my farewell tour because, you see, they gave up and now I’m off to see the wizard.”

“The wonderful and all-knowing Wizard of Oz? So, you’re following the yellow brick road?”

“Something like that. I’m going to stop off in Palo Alto and see someone there. You think maybe I could have a few sips of that wine?”

She caught the steward’s eye and waved him over, asked for another glass and the old man smiled as he walked off to fetch another wine glass.

“You ought to try your salad while it’s still cold,” she said, taking another bite of her own.

He tentatively reached for his fork but she immediately saw the problem: his hands were shaking so badly he could barely grasp the thing, and he instantly looked defeated as it slipped from his hand.

So she took his fork and speared some lettuce, then looked into his eyes again. “Meet me halfway?” she asked.

And he leaned over the table and let her feed him.

“Good?” she asked.

He smiled and nodded. “You have no idea.”

When she had a second wine glass she filled it halfway, then leaned over and helped him drink; he closed his eyes and sighed. “Riesling, did you say?”

“That’s right.”

“God, it’s been a while. That tastes just like heaven.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten real food?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’ve been drinking those protein shakes…”

“Ensure?”

“That’s the one. Dark chocolate. Um-um, so yummy,” he said, his sonorous voice dripping with honied, well intentioned sarcasm. 

She laughed a little but saw the pain in his eyes and backed off, then she fed him the salad before she finished her own.

“Why are you doing this?” he finally asked, his eyes locked on hers once again.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, the fact that you don’t know me comes to mind. That, and I’m probably ruining your evening.”

“You don’t strike me as a cynic, Sam. What’s wrong with lending someone a hand?”

“Nothing. So, tell me something…I assume you know who I am?”

She nodded slowly, gently, almost imperceptibly. 

He sighed and looked down, then slowly shook his head. “I guess I already knew that,” he sighed.

“And I assumed you didn’t want that to intrude,” she countered, smiling gently when he looked up again.

“Intrude?”

“It’s been my experience,” she said, “that celebrities often prefer anonymity – at times like this.”

“You’ve dealt with many…celebrities?” 

“A few. Last summer comes to mind. A child ran through a sliding glass door on a large yacht. She was helicoptered in with her parents, and keeping the media walled-off was a priority.”

He shrugged.

Their salad plates were taken away and their entrees were served, and he of course looked at her plate, then his. “Looks good. Why don’t you go ahead,” he stated.

And she reached over and slid his plate close, then she sliced the steak and fed him a piece before she sliced a piece of trout. She speared this and fed the fish to him. He rolled his eyes a little and shook his head, but he never broke eye contact with her. “Which do you prefer?” she asked.

“Is that a steelhead?”

She nodded, then she took another slice of trout and fed it to him.

“I think I like this more than salmon, and that’s saying something.”

“Less fishy,” she advised, “but the texture is similar.”

“You must get great salmon in Seattle?”

“The market at the Fisherman’s Terminal. They unload every morning at five-thirty.”

“I always thought Pike Place was the place to go.”

“Too touristy, too many people.”

“You have kids?”

“No. Never went down that road.”

“That’s surprising. You give great fork.”

She smiled with her eyes, then helped him take some wine. “Which do you like more?”

“They’re both decent, but I think the trout agrees with me.”

She cut more fish and started to lift it across to him but he shook his head. “I’m not going to take your dinner…”

“You’re not taking it, Sam…I’m giving it. There’s a difference, you know?”

Again, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this to you,” he said, suddenly getting ready to leave.

“I wish you’d stay,” she said, startled by this retreat.

He leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms protectively, then he looked out the window at the lights of a big city just visible through the raging blizzard. “I wonder where we are now?” he muttered to his reflection there in the glass.

“Milwaukee,” she replied after she checked the time on her phone. “There’s usually a station stop here, ten minutes or so for the smokers.”

“You’d better eat your dinner before it gets cold.”

“I will if you will.”

He nodded, then leaned forward to take the next bite. After he finished chewing and while she was cutting more steak he looked at her anew. “So, tell me about Rebecca North. What’s her story?”

“Simple, really. My dad worked for the Northern Pacific Railway until he retired, and my parents had a house in Tacoma. Mom was a teacher, high school chemistry and physics. I have two sisters and they live in Seattle too.”

“Where’d you go to med school?”

“University of Chicago, and I did all my post-grad work in Boston.”

“Married?”

“No, never. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of school, so I think I conscientiously just decided to put all that off until I was through with school and, well…after I moved back to Seattle my life became more and more hectic. There was a time, I think, when I realized I’d never be able to devote the time necessary to be either a good mother or wife, so I turned away from all that.”

“Regrets?”

She nodded. “Never getting close to anyone, never experiencing…that kind of life…”

He looked at her and nodded. “And if you could do it all over again?”

She too looked out the window, then back at him a moment later. “I think I’m doing what I was meant to do, and while I’m happy with what I’ve done with my life there’s still an empty place inside me. I guess I’ll never know what was supposed to…” – and then suddenly she stammered to a jolting stop.

“What is it? You looked a little shocked?”

“Gawd…I’ve never talked like this to anyone. Really, I’m so sorry…”

“You don’t need to apologize…not to me…”

“I can’t…I shouldn’t unload on you…”

“Gad, are you crying?” he asked, grabbing an unused napkin off the table and leaning across to wipe her cheeks, even though his trembling hands got in the way of the gesture. 

She took the napkin and dabbed her eyes, then looked at him. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me?” she sighed.

“Well, it sure isn’t the wine. You’ve hardly touched yours,” he said, smiling innocently now. “And who knows, maybe you’ve been holding onto your feelings a little too tight, and maybe for too long. You got to get these things out from time to time, you know? Take ’em for a walk…”

“But you’re a complete stranger…”

“And who better to listen? In a few days we’ll go our separate ways and no one will be the wiser, and the only regret you’ll have will be not eating that trout!”

She laughed at that, then leaned forward and sliced more food for them both. “How about we just share. You know, like surf and turf!”

“I won’t tell anyone if you won’t,” he said conspiratorially, now smiling broadly.

“So, tell me about you?” she said as she resumed feeding him. “What’s your story? In a nutshell?”

“Mine? Let’s see, I grew up in Santa Barbara and music was always my thing. I grew up listening to Tears for Fears and The Police; by the time I was getting good on the guitar the big groups were all slipping into metal.”

“But not you?”

He took a deep breath as he reflected on the cascading memories that came for him. “You know, I liked Nirvana – a lot, really. I really, really liked the Stone Temple Pilots too, but I couldn’t see myself going down that road. For a long time I felt drawn to Sting and Pat Metheny, but when I think back…none of us could escape Paul Simon’s gravity. He turned folk into something new, but at the same time he was reaching deeper and deeper into the past, and he kept coming up with…with strange new languages. All those guys up on Laurel Canyon, really.” He paused as he thought about meeting those people. “Stephen Stills. I think I kept coming back to Stills probably more than anyone else, but Seals and Croft, Loggins and Messina, all those guys were impossible to ignore.”

“Laurel Canyon?”

“It’s a street in Bel Air, above Beverly Hills. Close enough to the scene on Sunset and the studios in Culver City and Burbank. Lots of bungalows back in the 60s, rents weren’t bad and it was close enough to UCLA so every drug known to man was available. I heard they made acid in the organic chemistry labs late at night…”

“I think that’s an urban myth.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Anyway, then came The Graduate and The Sound of Silence and Mrs. Robinson and then The Beatles splintered and for a while the universe shifted to Laurel Canyon. Stills met Crosby and Graham Nash and then Love The One Your With morphed into Judy Blue Eyes. Elton John was English but by the time he was ready to record that little corner of the universe had shifted from Penny Lane to Hollywood and Vine, and like everyone else he came to California.”

“Why California?”

“Brian Wilson is as good a reason as any. The Brits had Lennon and Paul McCartney; we had Brian Wilson. The music scene in LA would have never come together the way it did without the Beach Boys. Then things shifted north for a while, to San Francisco. Seattle didn’t really happen until the late-80s.”

“When did you get serious about music?”

“In the womb. Mom always said I came out the chute with a twelve string in one hand and a pick in the other.”

She smiled. “How does cheesecake sound?”

He nodded. “You know, I’m picking up the vibe that you know my work.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “West Side Wind got me through med school.” He nodded, but then he looked away and she thought he looked disappointed. 

“Mason was the real deal. He wrote all the music on that one; I did the lyrics.”

“You’re a poet.”

“Thanks.”

She assumed he must’ve been used to the constant adoration of a million lovelorn teenagers at some point in his life, but now he seemed almost embarrassed by the compliment. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through when he died. A motorcycle crash, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “His girlfriend was with him too.”

“You knew her too, I take it?”

“We were close.”

“It never goes away, does it?”

He looked at her and held her in his eyes for a long time, then he smiled. “You sure are easy to talk to.”

“Two ships that pass in the night,” she sighed. She noted the train was stopped now, and that they were inside the new station in Milwaukee, the concrete around them bathed in bilious yellow sodium vapor light – and very little snow was visible in this part of the station. She ordered cheesecake and coffee, and she wondered – hint-hint – if the steward might find the makings for Irish coffee somewhere in the kitchen, then she turned back to Sam.

“So, your dad worked for the railroad?” he asked. “Is that why you’re on the train?”

“I hate airplanes. It’s a genetic thing.”

“Understandable,” he said knowingly. “The airlines have grown into monsters.”

“We all have, Sam. We let them treat us the same way we treat each other. We used to expect more from them because we expected more of ourselves, I guess.”

“So, you are a cynic!” he said lightly.

“I may well be – about some things, but I usually consider myself a realist.”

“When you find out the difference between those two, let me know, will you?”

“Why did you give up on music?”

“I don’t think I did, really. After I moved to Maine I usually played for coffee or a bowl of soup. No advertising, no tours…”

“And no new albums?”

“You know, oddly enough I started producing and that was enough for me. New faces, then I got into all the new recording technologies. I got into session work for a while, until rap and hip-hop came along, anyway. You can’t fight the big labels; they want what sells – nothing new about that. Even so, I still make enough to live comfortably.”

“Will there ever be a new album?”

“From me? Hell, I don’t know. I never stopped writing but my voice ain’t what it used to be…and don’t you dare tell me voices mellow with age.”

“Like fine wine?” she teased.

“Gawd, how many times have I heard that one.”

“How many people have asked you to put out a new album?”

“Okay…okay. Point taken.”

“Maybe at some point you’d consider it a gift to all the people who loved your music.”

He nodded. “Nice thought. So, what do you do when you’re not working?”

“No such thing, Sam.”

“You’re always working?”

“I have a pull out sofa in my office at the hospital, and my own shower there, too.”

“Dear God. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but that sounds just awful.”

“I know. The thing is, I’m in my fifties and my hands won’t last. A few more years and I’ll be done, only able to take on the easiest cases, and I’m not sure I’d like that.”

“What’ll you do then?”

“Teach.”

“That’s it? Burn out your body then put yourself out to pasture?”

“Interesting way of looking at it.”

“Well, pardon my French, but what the fuck! You’re fixing eyes so your patients can get back out and see the world, and guess who’s never going to see the world?”

His words slammed home and she seemed taken aback for a moment, then she collected her thoughts. “I’m not even sure what I’d go looking for. I wouldn’t know what to do?”

“And that’s the beauty of it all, Rebecca. The uncertainty. Not knowing what’s around the next bend in the road. The complete mystery of going to the airport and getting on the first plane to anywhere, then getting off the plane and looking around for the unfamiliar. When one direction looks more interesting, or more mysterious than the other directions, you head off in that direction…”

“Where would you go?”

“The Dolomites. Never went, always wanted to. I’d get my camera and just go, walk those mountains until my legs gave out.”

“Would you write music?”

“I always tried to listen to the mountains, tried to hear what they had to say. I haven’t done that in a long time, but yeah, I might try to put that into music again.”

“Maybe you ought to do it, then.”

“I’m not sure I’m up to it now.”

“Would it hurt to try?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said softly, looking down at his shaking hands.

“There’s no one in your life?”

He shook his head. He never looked up and simply shook his head like this was a shameful admission, and for a moment she thought he looked like a little boy.

“No one?” she asked again.

He looked up at her for a moment, then turned and looked out the window. “When did we leave the station?”

“A few minutes ago,” she said, looking at the now empty dining car. Only the steward and their waiter remained, and they were cleaning up the car, getting it ready for breakfast in the morning. “Sam, I think we closed the place down. We’re the only ones left…”

He looked at his watch and shook his head. “Nine-thirty. We’ve been here almost two hours.”

“Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.”

“Do you think that’s all this is?” he asked, his eyes unfocused. “Two ships passing in the night, I mean?”

“What? You mean why it’s been so easy to talk?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Sam.”

“What’s the deal with breakfast?”

“The dining car opens at six. The French toast is really good.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience talking again,” he grinned.

She smiled too. “I look forward to it, actually.”

“You going to be here at six?”

She shrugged – with a bit of larceny in her eye. “You sleepy?”

“No, not at all,” he answered.

“In the lounge car, well, downstairs there’s a little café; they usually have a few liqueurs on hand. Want to try our luck?”

“I’m game if you are.”

He tried to stand but she saw he had to use both hands to steady himself on the table, and it was obvious there’d been extensive nerve damage – and she knew his cancer was in his spine so the worst was yet to come. She went around and took his arm in hers and led him to the next car forward, to the lounge car, and after she got him seated she went down the steep stairs to the little café. They had Irish whiskey, Tia Maria and Gran Marnier in tiny bottles behind the counter, so she picked up three of each as well as two little plastic cups filled with ice. With these in a little box she marched back up the stairs and found him staring out the windows at the blizzard raging away in the night.

“The snow looks so strange flying by,” he said, lost in thought as he watched the ghostly streaks flying by, then he held fingers up to the window and placed his open palm on the glass. “So cold,” he whispered. “Do you remember Saint Judy’s Comet?”

“Paul Simon?”

He nodded. “‘…and leave a spray of diamonds in its wake.’ Man, talk about poetry…”

“I loved that album, too,” she sighed.

“What was your favorite? Surely not Kodachrome?”

She smiled. “Something So Right.”

“Oh, so you are a romantic after all.”

“You didn’t know that already?”

“I was leanin’ that way but I wasn’t quite sure yet. So, what did you find down there?”

“Tia Maria and Gran Marnier. And it looks like Jameson’s Irish Whiskey if you want something a little less sweet.”

“Tia Maria for me,” he said. He made a fist and pumped his fingers a few times, then reached out for the little plastic cup – but his hand was simply trembling too much and he shook his head as he fought back the anger of impotence.

“Let me give you a hand,” she whispered.

And again he let her baby him – if only because she seemed to enjoy herself – then he leaned back and rolled the liqueur around under his tongue and closed his eyes as a memory came back to him. “First time I had this stuff was down in Mexico. Puebla. I have a place down there, for a while, really. Big courtyard, palm trees, noisy birds. Have a housekeeper and a cook. The cook makes fresh tortillas every morning after breakfast; I remember the soft slap-slap-slap as she shapes them with her hands. The smell as she fries them for just a second. And she made guacamole just about every day. Went to an open air market every morning. Both of them live in the house, and the cook’s little girl lives with her. Already teaching her to cook. On weekends they would make tortillas together.”

“Sounds a little like paradise,” she sighed. “How long have you had the place?”

“I picked it up twenty years ago.”

“What? You mean…”

“Yup, I usually go down in October, stay through Christmas. Didn’t make it this year. Really wanted to. I need to make arrangements for them.”

“Arrangements?”

“I’ve been putting money away for them, so they’ll be able to stay in the house after I’m…you know…”

“Do they know?”

“No, not really.”

“Do you have a lawyer down there?”

He nodded. “I guess I should call him, you know?”

“I think you should go down and talk with them. Obviously they’re important to you.”

“Chattel,” he sighed. “They literally conveyed with the property when I bought the place. Almost like any other part of the house. They were being paid about fifty bucks a month.”

“What about the cook’s daughter?”

“She was supposed to be trained to step into the job when her time came. I sent her to school. She’s in college now, in Mexico City. I spent more Christmases with them than I did with my parents growing up.”

“Really?”

“Spoiled her rotten, I reckon, but I loved every minute of it.”

“Why didn’t you move there permanently?”

“Too hot. Now the cartels have made life down there a little too dicey – for everyone.”

“Drugs…don’t get me started,” she snarled, her anger right out there on her sleeve.

He shrugged. “Drugs aren’t the problem; they’re a symptom. People take drugs to escape reality, or to somehow make their reality more palatable, more bearable. You’d think after thirty thousand years we’d have figured out how to do that.” 

“So, is it ironic we’re sitting her sipping a drug?”

“Ironic? No, I don’t think so. This tastes good; it’s socially agreeable. A needle in the arm is neither.” 

“Many of the people I see on the operating table are there – indirectly, most of the time – because of alcohol…”

“Moderation,” he sighed. “Somehow we forgot how to live – well…I’m thinking of balance and harmony – not just with the material world but with each other. Everything seems out of balance right now, at least it feels that way most of the time. Everything started coming too easily, and maybe we forgot that sometimes it takes hard work to maintain that balance, that there are relationships we just can’t take for granted.” 

“But we do, don’t we?” she added. “So, you were living in Maine?”

He nodded. “Camden. Kind of a quiet place these days, or at least it’s getting back to quiet.”

“Oh?”

“Same thing, Rebecca. A credit card company – MBNA, I think – moved a lot of their operations to Camden and Belfast, built these huge facilities and pretty soon everyone in the area was working there. Then the bottom fell out and all those people lost their jobs, but worse than that, there were all these massive buildings suddenly sitting empty – almost overnight. Everything was out of balance, boom-bust only now the town was in trouble – only there wasn’t anyone around to pick up the pieces. It was hard to watch, and it’s taken ten years but things are finally getting back to something like normal.”

“Sounds hard to watch, but Boeing was like that in Seattle, then MicroSoft and all the rest. Savage inequality, I think they call it.”

“Which is just people being people, and I’d have never made a dime without music companies and radio stations and MTV.”

“I don’t know if I should ask, but what’s in Palo Alto?”

“Some research going on with immunotherapy.”

“Did they stage you?”

“Four.”

She nodded and looked out the window. noted they were already past the Dells. “Brave,” she said. “Most people would just give up.”

“I’m in no hurry to die.”

“Were you serious about the Dolomites?”

“I’m not making any plans just yet, but yeah.”

“Is your patch holding up?”

“The fentanyl? Not really, but I’m not sure I want this to end.”

“This? To end?”

“Sitting and talking, with you. It’s the first time in months that I’ve felt almost human.”

“I’m not sleepy yet. We can go sit in your room for a while if you’d like. Once you put on a fresh patch you’ll want to go to sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“And I can’t sit here doing nothing, not if you’re in pain.”

“The Hippocrates thing, right?”

“Something like that,” she said, smiling a little. He was perspiring more now, and he had winced when he got worked up talking about Camden, so she knew it was getting close to that time.

“Let’s at least finish our drinks first?” he sighed, signaling defeat. 

“Alright.”

“So, where would you go? If you were in my place?”

She shrugged. “I read Heidi once, when I was little. I always wanted to go to Switzerland.”

“And you’ve never been?”

She shook her head. “Only time off I get…well, I go to the annual convention in Chicago.”

“So, the only time you take off is still work related?”

“I hate to say it, but I’m pretty dedicated to my work.”

“It’s admirable, Rebecca. At least in a way it is.”

“I know, I know. But it’s also kind of sad,” she said, her voice now almost a whisper.

“No time like the present. Why don’t you just go? Pack up your bags and just head on out to the airport…?”

“I’m afraid I’m not exactly the spontaneous type.”

“You know what?”

“Hm-m?”

“The last two things you said just now are ‘kind of sad’ and ‘I’m afraid.’ I see a trend here…”

“Do you indeed?” she said, suddenly brightening.

“Yup. I do. I think you need to go over there and eat fondue ’til you’re so fat you can’t move. Maybe even walk some alpine meadows. With a dog…one of those big, huge, furry Swiss dogs.”

“A Saint Bernard?”

“No-no-no. The black one.”

“Ah, the Bernese Mountain Dog. Why that one.”

“Because after I die I want to come back as one of those.”

“Oh really? Why?”

“I want to lie on my back and have a doting girl give me belly rubs all day.”

She smiled at the image in her mind’s eye. “You are such a guy,” she sighed.

“Hey, it works for me…”

They finished up their Tia Marias then she helped him stand, and he held onto her as she led them through the dining car and then back to their sleeping car. He had Room B so the compartment was almost right over the trucks, or wheels, but she noted the noise wasn’t all that bad. The attendant had, however, made up the bed so there wasn’t a lot of room to move around.

“Well damn,” Sam said when he saw the constricted space…

…but before he could object she went in and raised the bed, restoring the long sofa to its daytime position. “Let’s get you down,” she said, helping him out of his coat and getting him seated. “Where do you keep your patches?”

“Camera bag. There,” he pointed. “In the back pouch.”

She handed him the slate colored bag and he opened the pouch, removed a fresh patch. “You want to do the honors?”

She shrugged as he handed the sealed white envelope to her. “You’ve been perspiring for hours,” she said. “Would you like to shower before you get into your nightclothes?”

He shook his head. “I’m feeling too nauseated right now.”

She took his wrist and counted-off his pulse as she looked him over. “Do you have any Zofran?”

He nodded and pulled a little amber prescription bottle from the bag, took out a tiny pill and slipped it under his tongue. Rebecca then prepared the site with a swab and applied the patch.

He thanked her, then she sat beside him and waited.

And it didn’t take long; a few minutes later he leaned against her, but then she moved over and laid his head in her lap. She hesitated, but then started gently rubbing his head – and with gently swirling thumbs she massaged his temples until he started snoring gently.

But she did not get up and leave. She did not stop massaging his head. And when she was sure he was sleeping soundly she reached down and rubbed his chest for a while, and she smiled as the idea of a big black Bernese Mountain Dog pranced into her mind.

She continued rubbing away until she too felt sleep coming, then she quietly leaned against the window until she felt her eyes close, and the dream came. 

And on the other side of the glass, as their train rumbled through the night, an impossible storm gathered strength, then settled its fury on the way ahead.

(c) 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | just fiction, plain and simple, every word. 

[Seals & Croft \\ We may Never Pass This Way Again]

It has been a difficult autumn, and I will not bore you with the details. I’ve not been writing because the words would not come, and in a way I was reluctant to try again. It is inevitable that events surrounding one’s life make their way onto the page, and I simply did not care to see my work become a reflection of events beyond my control. Writing is, after all, often about control. Controlling thoughts, moods, the dynamics of life – and death – and painting those things with words is hard enough as is.

This story was born of such reflection, and I dare not say more.

[I Dreamed Last Night \\ Blue Jays]

So, grab a cup of tea and read on…and do let me know your impressions.

Why Do Stars Fall Down From The Sky?

There was a moment up there, right when the power came off, that the universe seemed to give up for a moment and time just seemed to let go of me with a sigh. Who knows, maybe the whole ball of wax relaxed, maybe everything everywhere took a deep breath before getting back down to business. Strange, because for a moment that’s what I felt. The jet’s engines powered back and little spoilers popped up on the top of the wing and I could feel the aircraft’s nose kind of drop away a little as gravity and drag got back to work. Sitting in the first row in economy – I think it was seat 7A – I sighted along the wing’s leading edge and could just make out the distant skyline of the city, out there inside misty gray hazes lost somewhere in the forbidden spaces between now and then.

Even from this distance I could make out landmarks that had defined my childhood: the Southland Life Building, the pin-striped  First National Bank building, and I could even see the blocky white form of Union Station, too. With that landmark in view I knew it was only a few blocks from there to Dealey Plaza and the infamous School Book Depository. If you knew where to look – and I most certainly did – you could follow the motorcade’s route from the Grassy Knoll along Stemmons to Parkland Memorial Hospital – where once upon a time our little universe really did come to a stop.

That moment seemed to define my generation, especially those of us growing up in Dallas at the time. Or maybe it didn’t define us so much as it haunted us. When people asked where I was from I always answered Highland Park and left it at that. It was the way people looked at you if you answered Dallas. I think it’s called guilt by association, but it’s not hard to see it in peoples’ eyes.

I’d been in the library – at High Park High School – when the principal’s scratchy voice came on over the intercom and announced that the president was dead, that he’d been murdered downtown and that school was done for the day. Two years later I graduated and as I flew west to San Francisco I swore I’d never return to Dallas, and I managed to hold true to that oath for almost ten years.

By that time I was wrapping up a five year hitch in the Air Force, not fighting in Vietnam but flying KC-135 aerial refueling tankers for the Strategic Air Command out of Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. The -135 was operationally similar to the Boeing 707, and in the early 70s airlines needed pilots with such experience; I found TWAs offer irresistible and headed off to Kansas City to start training, then on to Boston – where I soon found myself flying across the Atlantic twice a week, usually to London but occasionally to Paris or Frankfurt, in the right seat of a 707-320c. Dallas receded in my mind to a distant, unpleasant memory, and I was happy to let it stay there.

And I might have been successful if not for the determined efforts of my father.

A physician, he too had gone to Highland Park High. He’d met the woman of his dreams there, too, and in due course he married her. I was the result of that union, by the way, but my mother was an actress – and actually a rather good one. When I was three years old she left for Hollywood and, like me, never looked back. A year later the divorce was finalized and dad drifted for a while before meeting another former classmate at the Dallas Country Club. She played golf and tennis and poker and could put down a half bottle of Jack Daniels without batting an eye and this wild-eyed woman became the mother I was destined to remember most. She gave my father a daughter, a timid, diaphanous creature who played the piano by day and read Agatha Christie novels all through the night as she charted a jagged course through looming mental illness in a constant search for our father’s love and attention.

Father was a thoracic surgeon and always busy, while Joan – wife number two – spent all her waking hours at the country club playing cards and drinking bourbon. Like many alcoholics, she possessed two personalities: an aloof sober variety of patrician princess and; a drunk bully. I rarely saw her when she was sober, but soon enough learned her modus operandi: When she and father made it home in the evening see launched into him until, after a few years, he found other, less stressful ways to spend his time. After she ran him out of the house she turned on me for a few years, until my voice dropped, anyway, then she turned on her daughter, my sister, Carol. Perhaps my time in that madhouse had something to do with my oath to never return, but I’ll let others be the judge of that.

Not long after I settled in Boston I met a girl that seemed to punch all the right buttons and while we dated off and on for a year nothing came of it and in the aftermath I seemed to fall into a rut. I would spend the occasional layover with a stewardess but remained otherwise serially unattached – and after a while realized that I ‘almost’ liked living that way. ‘Almost’ being the operative word to keep in mind.

I went back to Kansas City and transitioned to the L-1011 TriStar, but was soon back in Boston – flying to Paris now all the time and growing more comfortable with the time I spent in that city but increasingly feeling at odds with my life. I was still in my thirties – though just – and though I spoke to my father weekly – as in almost every Sunday – I realized I had almost no attachments left to the people who were supposed to be my family.

Father was still technically married to Joan, my mother-in-law, but now, twenty years after I’d left she was by all accounts beyond redemption. My sister, Carol, had developed an apparent affinity for razor blades and overdoses and had been in and out of Timberlawn – the gentile psychiatric hospital east of downtown – so many times she had her own room there. Father still lived in the same house at the end of Willow Wood Circle he always had, a low pink brick thing that looked vaguely French, but every time I talked with him he sounded more miserable than the last time we spoke; by this point I was starting to worry about him.

I suppose I shouldn’t have. He’d been seeing someone, of course. For years, as it happened.

And oddly enough, neither my father nor Deborah Baker felt the least bit ashamed of the arrangement.

They played golf together. They spent Sundays fishing at Koon Kreek together. And then they decided to go to Paris together, but first they stopped off in Boston.

+++++

I knew her, of course. Genie and I, Deborah’s daughter, had known each other since grade school and we had been an ‘thing’ during our senior year at Highland Park. We’d gone our separate ways after graduation, me to Berkeley and she to Tulane, but I’d neither seen nor heard from her since – and had no idea what she’d been up to. Seeing my father and – ahem, Mrs. Baker – walking up the Jetway at Logan left me feeling at little disoriented because, let’s face it, they were both married – just not to each other, and I had known Deborah most of my life – just in a very different context. And I guess I was supposed to either go along with this charade, or be gracious and not say anything untoward about their new relationship.

To put this whole mess in sharper relief, I really didn’t know my biological mother – beyond what I’d seen of her in movies and on television – and I think is by now apparent that I really disliked Joan, my mother-in-law. I’d always appreciated the sense of family Deborah Baker created in her home, and under the circumstances perhaps that was inevitable – because I felt safe there. Holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas felt stilted and coldly contrived under my mother-in-law’s stewardship, yet the same holidays had felt warm and cozy when I dropped by the Baker house, and yet it was those few instances that rattled me most. I’d simply never known what the fuss about Christmas was all about, as Joan was always too drunk to give a damn and Dad was usually in surgery taking care of another broken heart. By the time I was ten, and Carol was, I think, around seven years old, Christmas had become something all of us dreaded – and after seeing Christmas in the Baker’s home I knew that was all wrong.

So as I watched Dad and Mrs. Baker walk up the Jetway I felt that lingering dichotomy; Dad with his faint grimace of a smile and Deborah Baker with the same welcoming eyes I remembered from my teens. It was, after all, just a few days before Christmas.

With their luggage checked through to Paris/Charles de Gaulle all that was left to do was shake my father’s hand and hug Deborah Baker, then we walked along inside uncomfortable cocoons of silence over to the international terminal for our flight – and with the two of them in first and me up front in the right seat, it promised to be an interesting flight. After we made our way onboard I clued-in the head stewardess and asked her to take care of my old man, and after we arrived early the next morning I helped get them into the city and to the Crillon, their hotel. We enjoyed an early dinner after long naps then I left them to enjoy the first week of their vacation, though they had convinced me to take a week off for Christmas and to stay with them in the city when I returned later that week. I dared not ask what their other halves were doing for Christmas, and from what little I could see my poor father seemed really not to care. I think taking care of Joan had simply worn him down, like stones under a pounding surf.

When I returned to Boston the next day I found a letter from my mother, not my mother-in-law, in my mailbox. She was, it seemed, now between husbands and with the holiday fast approaching it appeared she was feeling abnormally blue. She wondered, or so she wrote, if I had plans for the holidays – and if not she wanted to spend some time together. The tone of this missive was more plea than request, and this was a first in my experience.

And this was notable to me, as this outpouring of loneliness represented a vulnerability I’d never suspected in her. She’d done well in Hollywood, really very well, and was now a regular on a popular television series and still making movies; fans adored her and reporters followed her everywhere. We’d spent a little time together when I was at Berkeley, and I found the life she’d created for herself to be an intoxicating brew of glamour and ego; it was hard to imagine a life more comfortable than what she had in Beverly Hills.

Yet within her words I felt something uncomfortably dangerous. Loneliness was not something a vulnerable soul like her’s tolerated well, and her reaching out to me was a first in my experience. Thinking about her out there suddenly by herself at this time of year felt wrong, so not knowing what else to do I called Dad. I explained my concerns and as he always did he listened attentively, carefully, then he agreed with my assessment. Go out to LA, he said, and help her get through the holidays. We could do Paris again next year.

That was, of course, the last time I ever heard his voice.

+++++

It was a few weeks after that. I had just walked into the flight dispatch office inside the TWA annex at de Gaulle when one of the dispatchers handed me a note, and I could tell by the look in the man’s eyes that bad news had come calling. 

The facts were all laid out there in concise corporate speak: Father dead. Car accident. Return DFW soonest…

The dispatcher handed me travel documents and sent me on my way, and I sat in numb silence as a series of airliners carried me homeward. A stewardess I knew sat with me from time to time on the way, held my hand as we crossed the Atlantic, and after a change of planes at JFK I fell into a restless sleep. I seemed to remember dreaming about cellophane Christmases all wrapped up in terrible cartoons full of red-nosed reindeers and foul-spirited grinches stealing the true spirit of Christmas, and then the throttles retarded and the spoilers popped up on top of the wing and there was Dealey Plaza off in the distance and I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or not. Maybe all of this was, I told myself, little more than a bad dream, and I found myself wondering what John Kennedy had thought as he looked out at this skyline before he landed at Love Field.

But then, looking out over the city I could see Highland Park over by Love Field, and then we passed over Addison airport – where I’d learned to fly once upon a time – and right then I knew this wasn’t a dream. So many familiar landmarks, yet it struck me now that there was nothing familiar about anything down there. This was terra incognita, a dangerous place that existed within a series of very bad memories, and the only good thing down there was had been laid out on a marble slab being prepared for burial. This was January, after all, and bare limbs and dead grass do not make good homecomings. 

Yet I wanted to get up and run into the warmth of a home I’d never known, but there wasn’t any such place – not now and certainly not then, and it hit me: there was nowhere like that for me, and for the first time in my life I realized I had been well and truly homeless for most of my life.

The thought made me so sick I had to laugh.

I could see DFW airport ahead and soon felt the little 727 was landing, her thrust reversers announcing our arrival to the world, but still I felt detached from this noisy routine, detached and alone – as if lost inside a never-ending dream. Watching the jet turn into the gate I realized there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for me, so after the Jetway connected I watched all the other passengers deplane before I gathered my flight bag and overcoat and made my way off the jet and up the ramp into the terminal.

And so I was quite surprised when I saw Deborah Baker waiting for me up there beside the waiting area. And even more surprised when I saw Genie, her daughter and my old girlfriend, standing by her side – and I felt myself falling back into a dream that just didn’t want to end.

+++++

As it happened, my mother-in-law had learned of her husband’s death and broken out in what could most charitably be described as genuine hysteria. Laughter for a time, then a wailing lament followed by a durable catatonia. She was now resting at Parkland, heavily sedated and jaundiced. Carol, my sister, was as always living inside herself, still warmly ensconced in Haldol and wrist restraints out at Timberlawn. This I learned from Deborah in the terminal, before I realized just how fragile was her current state of mind.

Her husband was off somewhere in Mexico, Cuernavaca she thought, with his latest mistress, and it turned out that the only person she well and truly loved – besides her two children, of course – was my father. And now she was crumbling before my eyes, hanging on to me as if I was the last remnant of that love. Which, when you get right down to it, I suppose I was.

And then there was Genie.

She looked now just as she had when we had last said our goodbyes – now almost twenty years ago. Tall, short brown hair, a face that seemed born to smile, she stood back and watched as I held onto her mother and I felt the same empathic warmth in her eyes. Well, empathy and compassion, though maybe a little pain, too. 

And yet I stood there in silence, lost in that dream, not knowing what to say.

+++++

My father had died in an accident, of sorts. He’d been playing golf, had just finished the first hole at the country club and had gone into the little field stand by Mockingbird Lane to use the restroom and get something to drink, then once again in his little Cushman golf cart he had gone over to the crossing at Mockingbird and pushed the button to get a crossing signal. When he had a green signal he started across and was immediately hit by a speeding Mustang driven by a kid who’d had his driver’s license for about a month. 

Death. Senseless Death. Pointless in the extreme. One of the most gifted thoracic surgeons in Texas run down by a kid smoking pot while he was out and about and oh, by the way, skipping school, too. My father had been alive one moment and gone a split second later; he had literally never known what hit him. Pronounced dead at the scene. Closed casket service, burial at Sparkman Hillcrest, classmates from Highland Park High and the med school in Galveston lined up in shock.

And there I was, sitting in church with Deborah and Genie by my side. Both of them holding my hands, and quite possessively too, I thought.

I stayed in town long enough to settle my father’s affairs, but in truth I had no idea what to do about Joan and Carol. My mother-in-law had been an alcoholic for so long her physicians were astonished she was still alive; my half sister Carol’s affinity for razor blades and secobarbitol  notwithstanding, we’d hardly been close but now here I was: when the music stopped I was the last man standing. In short, it had been my father’s wish that should something happen to him I be appointed guardian to both Joan and Carol – so there really wasn’t anything I could do about the situation other than see it through.

They were, you see, family, and though that was a word that did not come easily to me, I had a secret weapon, or what you might call an ace up my sleeve.

+++++

He’d always been an overtly simple man. He worked hard, never drank much and managed to go to church only when the situation absolutely called for such nonsense. He’d studied engineering in Massachusetts back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, or so he liked to say, then he’d fallen in with some truly evil people. Men who called themselves things like geologists and petroleum engineers. He’d got in on the big Texas oil boom and made some real money, then he started a company that made offshore drilling equipment and got filthy rich. Along the way he picked up a wife and in due course the man and his wife had a son.

The man was my grandfather.

And in point of fact he still was. Sitting right beside Deborah, as a matter of fact.

My grandparents had built one of the first homes in Highland Park – and my grandfather still lived there. When I was a kid, when life in my father’s house became too much for me, I’d walk over to my grandparent’s house in search of calmer shores – and it was a long walk, too. Maybe two hundred yards. I still remember how he would open the door and look down at me, and how he would nod his head knowingly and let me in; this happened with increasing frequency and after a while my grandparents had a bedroom in their house set aside just for me. They didn’t pass judgement on anything or anyone, either; I was simply welcome in their home. Come hell or high water he made pancakes every Saturday morning, and we always had lunch at their home on Christmas Day.

My grandmother died when I was ten, when I was still going to Bradfield, and my grandfather and I only grew closer after that. He taught me how to fish the spillway at Koon Kreek, and how to hunt ducks with retrievers on the Old Lake, and when I expressed an interest in learning to fly he saw to my lessons and drove me out to Addison Airport every Saturday morning for a year. He and my dad watched my first solo flight early on the morning on my sixteenth birthday and because of him I ended up with my pilot’s license before I’d even learned how to drive.

He was old now but still tough as a boot, and he stood next to me at Dad’s funeral and I think we sort of held each other up. In the aftermath, his lawyers helped decipher my father’s wishes, and his financial advisors helped modify trusts for Joan and Carol. He’d never tried to hide his feelings about Joan but Carol was, whether he liked to admit it or not, his granddaughter – and his sense of duty to her was therefore absolute.

The problem, as he saw it, was my own sense of duty. I could see that doubt written all over his face.

Carol was my sister – again, whether I wanted to admit it or not – yet in his eyes my sense of duty to her was an unknown, and my grandfather didn’t cotton to such equivocation. In other words, I needed to prove myself – to him. I needed to prove – to him – that I was worthy of my father’s trust.

But why?

Why was that important to him? And to all of us?

In a way, when I first thought about it I had to look no further than my own mother – and how she had simply left us to pursue her own dreams. And now I could tell that grandfather harbored vast reservoirs of ill will towards my mother – and perhaps to my own departure for Berkeley and then the Air Force. Guilt by association had festered in his mind. Then the distance I’d kept for almost twenty years, in effect denying the very existence of my family. Just as my mother had.

I had very little experience to fall back on, too, as my fondest recollections of family came from the year or so in high school that I spent with Genie.

And yet…Genie was here, now, and like good friends everywhere we had simply said hello and started talking right where we’d left off all those years ago. Talking with her still felt natural, and by extension I still found in Deborah a kind of surrogate mother figure. But yes, Genie was different now, too. She’d finished-up at Tulane and then went to law school there. She’d married and had a boy of her own now, though she was apparently a single mother now. For more than a while, too. She’d moved home after her separation, returned to the comfortable embrace of the familiar, and now her son, Tom, was at Bradfield – and I guess you could say he was following in our familiar footsteps.

If anything, Genie was the ideal counselor for me now. She knew me as well as anyone, and she knew my family dynamic. Best of all, she and my grandfather were close; they had been since I’d started learning to fly.

But right now I had two weeks emergency family leave, so I had two weeks to put all the pieces together, and I had two people who could help me make that happen. Yet there was one piece of the puzzle I had yet to size up.

Joan and Carol. They were the last great unknown, as in Beyond Here Thar Be Dragons.

When I spoke with Carol’s psychiatrist I was underwhelmed by her use of jargon, which I  vaguely understood: borderline personality, bi-polar, depressive disorder. In truth, I had little real idea what these things meant, but I could see the results strapped in a bed at Timberlawn. The little kid I’d known in high school was long gone now, replaced by a gaunt, gray skeleton looking thing, her wrists swaddled in gauze. Carol’s eyes, almost always wide open, looked like they were focused somewhere beyond infinity.

Her shrink wanted to try ECT, or electro-convulsive therapy, which I think everyone else called ‘shock therapy,’ but this was a controversial treatment option and, as I was Carol’s guardian, she needed my permission to proceed.

What, I asked, did she hope to accomplish? Would any meaningful change in her condition result?

And she informed me that her team had run out of ideas, and that they no longer knew quite how to proceed – beyond keeping her so medicated she was not able to move. Carol was, they implied, being warehoused, and in time her skin would begin to breakdown, her physical health would deteriorate and perhaps quite precipitously. Due to the medications she was on, organ failure was a near term possibility, and a long term certainty. ECT was an unknown frontier, and they had no clear idea how it might impact Carol’s mental condition. It was, one of the other psychiatrists told me, a Hail Mary play, a last ditch effort to change an almost certain outcome.

Genie was dubious. My grandfather was curious, but doubtful. He’d been watching Carol’s slow demise for years and he was now ready for anything that sounded even remotely hopeful. I wondered about asking Joan; she was, after all, Carol’s mother, but Deborah, Genie, and my grandfather all advised against getting her involved. When he growled that Joan was a scheming psychopath I had the good sense to move on to another subject, namely what the hell were the options if ECT didn’t work?

Genie looked at me and as kindly as she could uttered one word: hospice.

I was thunderstruck. A thirty-something year old girl with no chronic illnesses going into hospice? Seriously?

Yet Carol was being fed via a gastric tube and she was urinating via catheter. She was currently unaware of her surroundings and was developing bedsores. Her brain was broken.

And it was costing, on average, about thirty thousand dollars a month to keep her in that state; medical insurance covered the first five hundred dollars – and not one cent more – per year. Of course my father had easily afforded that sum, and the trust he’d left for her care had more than enough to cover the expense for decades, but in the end that wasn’t the point.

“Pat, if you were in your sister’s place,” Genie asked, “what would you want?”

“If I wasn’t really conscious, if I couldn’t lead a productive life or even take care of myself? Man, I don’t know. It’s easy to say ‘pull the plug’ when you’re talking about things in the abstract, but it’s a completely different thing when it’s someone you know.”

“When that person is family,” my grandfather added gently.

And I nodded. “I hate to say it, but I’m hoping ECT works. If there’s even the slightest chance of an improvement I think we have to go with her team’s advice.”

Grandfather nodded, and so did Genie. Deborah seemed to want to say something but held back.

I talked with Carol’s lead psychiatrist the next morning, and of course she had the papers she wanted signed all ready to go. I had a five o’clock flight back up to Boston that evening, so Genie ran me out to Timberlawn and helped me with all the paperwork, then she went with me to Parkland to check in on Joan, my mother-in-law.

What I remember most about that visit was the color orange. Really more a yellowish-orange. Joan’s skin was orange and the whites of her eyes were yellow tinged with orange and red. What her doctors called advanced liver disease, and she was in terminal decline that day. And sober, too, for the first time that I could recall. We talked about the accident and Dad’s funeral – which she had missed – but she really wanted to talk about her daughter, Carol. 

“I know you two were never really close,” she began, “but she is all the family you have now. Please take care of her, Pat. Please. For me, if not for your father.”

Of course I assured her I would, but I didn’t linger over Carol’s prognosis, nor did I mention ECT, while under the current circumstance a word like hospice seemed hideously cruel. We talked about a few good times we had enjoyed as a family and Joan seemed content enough with that, then she came to the heart of the matter…she had, at best, another week to live…and then, the bombshell.

“Your father told me he wanted a divorce a few months ago, and I really fell apart after that,” she said as she looked at Genie. “I don’t blame him, Pat, I really don’t. I was always too high-strung, too tightly wound…”

“I assume he knew who you were before he asked you to get married,” I replied.

“No, not really, Pat. I was always pretty good at hiding my worst impulses, and I think he was in a state of denial after he figured that out. I took advantage of him, you know? You too. I counted on you to take care of Carol even then, but you know what? Your grandfather was the only one who had me pegged from the get-go.”

“I know. He was always the great and powerful Oz, working away behind his emerald curtain to make things right for…”

“For you.”

I nodded. “I know. We’ve always leaned on each other.”

“I’m glad he’s still here for you.”

Our eyes met, and she looked at me now with just one question left to ask. “What are you not telling me, Pat?”

“Nothing important,” I said, lying through my teeth. “We just came from Timberlawn and I got the low-down. They know how to get in touch with me, so don’t worry. I won’t drop the ball.”

She nodded, unconvinced. “Will you come for my funeral?” she asked, looking away.

I cleared my throat, took her hand. “Don’t worry about all that now,” I told her.

“I’d like it if you came. There are a few papers you’ll need to sign.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Your grandfather has everything.”

“He didn’t mention that.”

“He wouldn’t. I asked him not to, until…the time was right.”

I nodded. 

“So, when will you be able to come back?” she asked.

“Next week. Probably Monday.”

She squeezed my hand and then let me go, but I did something uncharacteristic just then – I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead – then I turned and left the room, with a surprised Genie hastily bringing up the rear. When she caught up to me at the elevators I was trying to stifle the tears that had suddenly come calling, and I think she was more surprised than I was.

 So Genie ran me out to DFW, but as we were early she went in with me and we sat in a little restaurant – but it wasn’t too hard to tell she had a few important things she wanted to talk about, too.

“How come you never married,” Genie asked as I looked over the menu. 

And I shrugged. “I don’t know, Genie. Maybe I never really saw marriage as something I wanted to do.”

“I can’t blame you. Not with Joan terrorizing the two of you.”

“Terrorizing?” I asked. “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”

She shook her head. “No, not in the least. My mother always called her a rattlesnake…”

I laughed at that, but I’d felt the same more than once. 

“I think that’s why you were always over at our house, Pat. Just getting away from her.”

Of course I had been, and there’d never been any real reason to hide the fact – now or then. “Survival instinct, I guess,” I just managed to say, but I was thinking of Joan again – and trying to reconcile the painful cascades of memory with who and what I had just seen at Parkland. Worse, I knew now that the only person who might have possibly prevented Carol from taking the full brunt of Joan’s tortured madness…was me.

“Tom likes you,” she said, out of the blue.

And I looked at her, and at the meaning behind those words. “He seems happy.”

“His father is working in Norway most of the time now, but he’s shown little interest in being a father.”

“Oh?” Now I was wondering when she was going to get to the point.

“Tom needs a father,” she sighed.

I nodded. “Who’d you have in mind, Genie?”

“I’ve dated a few men, Pat, but Tom has never liked any of them. He likes you.”

“So, who’s calling the shots?”

“Pat, I’ve been in love with you since kindergarten, and he’s heard me talking about you all his life. And let’s face it…you’re a pilot and what little boy isn’t going to be…”

I held up a hand. “Genie, all that happened a lifetime ago. You and me…I haven’t seen you in, what? Almost twenty years…”

“And I’m still in love with you, Pat. What’s more, I’m pretty sure you still love me.”

“Genie, look…”

“Pat, you just lost your father. Joan is dying and now you’ve got Carol to deal with. I know your grandfather is a great guy, but you really don’t need to be alone right now. At least when you come home.”

I nodded. “This isn’t home, Genie. Not anymore.”

“Look, all I’m saying is let’s give us a chance. When you come back, could we spend some time together? Not as friends, but as, well…more than friends?”

I nodded. But I looked away, not sure how I felt about all this – only that the whole day was beginning to feel a little like an ambush. “It’s a lot to take in,” I sighed.

“I know. The past two weeks have been a nightmare. Just give it some thought, would you?”

We talked about little things after that, over salads and iced tea. About how Bradfield had changed since we’d been students there, and about all the changes the country club had in the works; typical Highland Park stuff, I guess. All the things I’d turned my back on. All the things I had no interest in. We picked at our food like we picked our way through the minefield of my denials – slowly and carefully – at least until it was time to head to the gate, but by then she’d worked up enough courage to try one more shot across the bow.

“God knows you had reason enough to run, Pat, but don’t you think it’s time to stop?”

I felt helpless, defeated. Maybe I even felt alone as I shrugged. “You know, Genie, believe it or not I’m actually kind of happy. I’m doing what I want…”

“And you’re running into a dead end,” she countered. “One day you’re going to take a look around and realize you’re all alone, and it didn’t have to be that way.”

Her words felt heavy, heavy and burdensome.

“Will you at least call me when you’re coming? I’d like to meet you here?”

“Of course,” I said. “Like I said, next Monday. I’ll call you with the flight number as soon as I have it.”

She smiled then. A hopeful smile, but her eyes were full of doubt. I suppose because my words didn’t quite ring true. We hugged before I walked down the Jetway, and the more I walked the lighter I felt, and pretty soon I felt like running.

+++++

A few days passed and I found myself walking along the banks of the Seine, looking across still waters at Notre Dame and Sainte-Chapelle, as ever in total awe. I’d never been a particularly religious sort, yet from time to time I sought out the solitude of these old medieval sanctuaries, and while I didn’t know why, or even care how this came about, I enjoyed the timelessness I felt inside these places. And it seemed today was going to be such a day. 

I wandered over to an old favorite, to the Église Saint-Séverin, and walked inside, found an empty pew and sat in a pool of kaleidoscopic light. The stained glass in the main sanctuary was mesmerizing, and as I sat there in the light thoughts of my father came to me slowly. Then came the raging torrent of responsibilities and duties that waited for my return. Joan and Carol. Genie and Tom, and of yes, Deborah, too. And my grandfather, patiently waiting for me to come to my senses and come home…

“Well, I’ll say one thing, Pat. I never expected to see you walk into a church.”

I knew that voice, and it certainly wasn’t God’s.

I turned to see not an omnipotent old man in flowing gowns but a stewardess I’d known for years, and known rather well. Ellen. Ellen McGovern. Sweet kid. Kind of a ‘fresh off the farm’ midwest vibe and really, really good looking, too. Every now and then we had the same flight so we usually got caught up on those layovers, but it hadn’t been physical between us in a while; once she’d figured out I wasn’t the serious type she’d moved on to steadier, greener pastures.

So I smiled at her and nodded at the door, then got up to leave. Once out in the open she took my arm and leaned into me. “I heard about your dad. You doin’ okay?”

“I’m not sure,” I said with a grin. “I was about to ask God and then there you were…”

She gave my arm a squeeze as we walked back towards the Seine. “Aren’t you cold?” she asked. “It’s freezing out!”

“I think it’s more like fifty degrees. At least that’s what I remember from the forecast. So, what are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

“Following you.”

“Really?”

“No, not really, but I was showing a couple of the new girls the sights and we saw you.”

“And you just dumped them?”

“No, they’re around the corner at the crepe place.”

“That sounds good.”

“Come join us.”

So I did. 

Two old hands and the three new girls made room for Ellen and I and we shot the breeze for an hour, then I led them all on a tour of Sainte-Chapelle and Notre Dame, glad that, once upon a time, I’d taken several electives on medieval art and architecture and could finally put all that knowledge to good use. An afternoon later we made our way to the Marriott and we all had dinner together, and Ellen thanked me for being such a good sport before she made her way up to her room.

I heard a knock on my door an hour later, but not really wanting to be more confused than I already was I feigned sleep, then tossed and turned the rest of the night. 

In the dispatch office bright and early the next morning the sympathetic man handed me another note, this one indicating that Joan had passed away a few hours earlier – I assume while I was out chaperoning stewardesses around the city. Another first officer had been called in to work my flight to Boston and I would, therefore, be flying back to Boston in the cabin, connecting with a flight to Dallas from Logan. I called Genie and left the flight number on her answering machine, and wondered what it all meant.

So Ellen found me in seat 1A when she boarded with her brood, and I filled her in on recent events, told her I was back on family leave and en route to Dallas once again. I was in uniform so on best corporate behavior; she brought me orange juice and handed me a hot towelette. I tried to stay interested as we taxied and took off but the truth of my life was slowly dawning on me.

I was looking forward to seeing Genie. To talking with my grandfather. And I suddenly felt a surge of energy when I thought about the things I might do to help Carol along, because truly, if there was anyone capable of helping her fight her demons, it was probably me. We had, when all was said and done, suffered in silence together, through all of Joan’s abominations.

What was it they called this? Survivors guilt? I had been able to run to my grandfather’s house when things got bad, which looking back on it now meant I’d left Carol to take the brunt of it in my absence. Why had I done that? Maybe because she was ‘just’ my half sister I’d never developed the empathy I needed to protect her? Or maybe I’d just been born stronger and more resilient but had mistakenly assumed she could take care of herself? Yet what was the point in laying blame anywhere now? Assigning some half-baked idea of blame wasn’t going to help Carol reconcile her past, only compassionate support would help her now.

I thought about the little church of Saint-Séverin. The vast pools of faceted light cast by walls of stained glass, the silence within her cold stone sanctuary, and I guess I was really thinking about faith and how that spark had always eluded me. To me, faith stood in stark opposition to observable truth, and my engineers’ mind had always sought certainty – and never the vagaries of the spirit. And yet I almost instinctively sought out such places as Saint-Séverin when I needed a quiet place to think.

Looking out over the Atlantic, looking down at low scudding cumulus clouds and the shadows they cast on the blue-gray sea, I wanted to see something beyond the obvious. I wanted to see allegory and symbolism, not the stark reality of the hydrologic cycle, but my mind hadn’t been wired that way. Then I saw another airliner, below and a little to the left of our track, and I could see that it was a Swissair DC-10 and probably headed to Boston. We flew along in formation like two migrating birds above the clouds.

Ellen brought me lunch and sat with me for a while after the meal service was cleared, and apparently she still wanted to talk.

“How’re you doing?” she opened.

“I’m not really sure. Conflicted, I think.”

“You look so lonely sitting here.”

I nodded. “I think the past few weeks, well, I’ve never felt more alone. I don’t think I was ever really willing to admit how much my father meant to me, yet I’m coming to realize that his dedication to medicine was our family’s undoing, and I don’t know how to reconcile that.”

“Do you think he was aware of what was happening?”

I shrugged. “He was smart and he was perceptive so I have to think he was.”

“And yet he didn’t intervene?”

“He got Carol help, but I think by then the damage had been done. Beyond that, I think he had affairs just so he could stay away from Joan. He played golf, he went hunting or fishing…”

“Did he drink a lot?”

“At one point, yeah. After I went off to college he always seemed pretty bent when I called, but not so much the past few years. I think he was going to divorce Joan and marry again, and I think that helped pull him away from booze.”

“Do you know who he was in love with?”

I nodded. “Old friend. They’d known each other since…well, they were in grade school together.”

“So Joan wasn’t your mother, right?”

“Yup. Dorothy Mahoney is my mother.”

“The actress? Really?”

“Really.”

“Now that you mention it I can see the resemblance. You have her legs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

“Do you talk with her much.”

“Only when she needs me. Which so far has been every five years or so.”

“I guess I can see why marriage doesn’t really ring your bell.”

I nodded. “Marriage, to me, is a battlefield – where no prisoners are taken and no one survives intact.”

“You know, there was a point when I wanted you so much, when I wanted you to ask me to marry you…”

“I’m sorry I let you down.”

“That’s just it, Pat. You didn’t let me down. You were always pretty clear about what kind of future you wanted.”

“Oh?”

“You don’t trust people, Pat. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you don’t trust love.”

“Maybe. But I also don’t like living by myself,” I sighed. “How’s that for a contradiction.”

“That’s a whopper, but why do you have to live alone?”

“I guess all that’s frowned on, you know?”

“Well, maybe you could live with someone for a while, figure out if marriage is right for you?”

I sighed. “It always ends in marriage, doesn’t it? It’s like a moral imperative…”

“Maybe it is,” Ellen added.

“Tell me something, would you? What’s the point of marriage if you don’t want kids?”

“Commitment, I guess. Shared struggle to reach a goal? To take care of one another and maybe just have someone to laugh at your corny jokes and a shoulder to lean on when things go wrong…?”

“You need a piece of paper for that?”

“No, not really, but Pat, do you not want kids of your own?”

That was the crux of the matter, really, and she’d come to the point easily enough.

“Or are you afraid you’d create the same misery for your own kids,” she added.

I looked down – and I think I nodded in defeat. “That would kill me,” I whispered.

“So don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t let that happen; don’t create the same environment your parents did. Find the right girl and hold on tight, be there for your kids and help them on their way. Just because your parents messed up doesn’t mean you will too.”

But that argument always came full circle again, didn’t it? Faith in the unknown versus the reality of cold, hard truth. The scattered light of stained glass or shadows passing on the sea below. “Is it really that simple, Ellen?”

“I don’t know, but I’m willing to try if you are.” I knew she was teasing me just a little and that she really wasn’t serious, but then she took my hand and gave it a little squeeze before she went off to deal with a passenger.

Maybe my thinking really was caught in a rut. Or maybe I simply couldn’t imagine a life with a wife and kids because deep down I really never really wanted to live that way.

I watched the spoilers on the wing when they deployed, felt the subtle transition to our gentle descent, but this time I felt anxious little butterflies of uncertainty were circling in my gut. Only not about Ellen.

Genie was on my mind. Hell, she’d always been on my mind, all the way back to Mrs. Murphy’s first grade class. I’d always looked at her when she came into the classroom, even then. The same butterflies visited me on those mornings. We were just little kids but I was drawn to her like a moth to the flame and something was once again pulling me towards her. Momentum? Some weird kind of reverse destiny – like you can never ever really truly walk away from your past? Instead, we wear our past all our lives, like turtles wear their shells.

Genie was, like me, tall. I was a lot taller than all my classmates, but she was the tallest girl at Bradfield, too. She had a face that reminded everyone of that girl on TV, the freckle faced girl that played The Flying Nun. The same big smile, open, friendly eyes, brown hair cut real short, like Maria in The Sound of Music only Genie’s was shiny brown. By third grade we always sat together in the school cafeteria during lunch, and almost every day we walked home from school together – which explains the how and the why of Deborah becoming like what a real mother was supposed to be like. So, hadn’t Genie – in a way – become more like a sister to me?

By the time I was in sixth grade, like by the time I was eleven years old, I was taking care of Carol when she came home from school because Joan was always at the country club playing cards and getting smashed. And I don’t know how many times Genie came home to help. Some nights Carol and I walked over to Genie’s and had dinner there.

So, where was Dad during all this?

After surgery and rounds he was at the club playing golf. Cocktails with friends in the nineteenth hole then more cocktails with Joan in the main lounge that overlooked a large, four hole putting green. By the time they made it home Joan was primed and ready for combat and she’d start in on Dad, in a heartbreaking instant turning into a world class bully. After a half hour of that Carol and I could hear him thundering out the door and getting into his car and taking off for God knows where. When I finally learned he had a mistress waiting in the wings I could hardly blame him.

But as soon as he was out the door the real fun began.

Joan would come in to our rooms and tortures us for a while, the pure emotional abuse of a sadistic bully. She’d usually have a few more drinks then pass out in the living room, and that was when Carol and I could finally get some sleep. The thing is, this was our routine. It happened every night.

So when I looked at Carol I was looking at a fellow survivor, yet I was also looking at my kid sister, a defenseless little girl who’d always counted on me to take some of the heat from Joan. When I left for college Carol lost what little protection she’d had, and now she was coming apart at the seams. If that was my fault, was I supposed to be her caretaker for the rest of her life?

But now I was, and quite literally would be, her caretaker – for the rest of her life. And now…I had to make some very painful decisions on her behalf if she didn’t snap out of it, if these ECT treatments proved fruitless.

But then the Tri-Star landed and her thrust reversers pulled me back into the present. I had a tight connection so I smiled at Ellen before I dashed through customs and over to the domestic terminal to hop a ride down to DFW, yet I felt conflicted as I ran from one terminal to the next. Genie and Carol, two sides of an old coin, dominated my thoughts – which did their best to keep me company on the next three hour flight.

Genie was, of course, waiting for me at the head of the Jetway in Dallas, and she held me and kissed me just like all the other husbands and wives were doing. So natural, like falling from one life to another without so much as a passing thought. As we drove back into the city she told me about all the arrangements she’d made; the service for Joan and the actual funeral – all followed by a small get together with some of my parents closest friends at the country club. A perfect Highland Park wedding – or funeral – but really…what’s different but the passage of time?

And Tom, Genie’s son, was waiting for us at the house. My father’s house. Doing his homework, a book report on Tom Sawyer, and I thought ‘How appropriate’ – given the circumstances.

I carried my flight bag and a small duffel to my old bedroom – because I absolutely, positively wasn’t going to sleep in my parent’s bed – and Tom followed me and then waited for me to put my things away. My room looked exactly as it had at the end of my senior year at Highland Park High, which is to say that there were shelves and bookcases loaded down with all the model airplanes I’d built – probably starting somewhere in second grade – so a good ten years worth of plastic and diligently applied paint and decals.

And Tom was fascinated.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he started a bit hesitantly when I looked up at him, “but I came in and looked at your airplanes.”

“No. I don’t mind. You interested in building models?”

He nodded solemnly, as I guess he was still pretty shy, even for a nine year old.

“So, what have you built so far?”

And Tom shrugged. A shrug that represented long, lonely nights tossing and turning as daydreams came and went unfulfilled. His shrug represented all the things he wanted to do but hadn’t been able to…yet. He had all the signs of a kid caught in the tug-of-war of a disintegrating marriage; divided loyalties; not knowing who to believe, or even what to believe, as his parents used him to get at one another. The boy needed a father, desperately, and though it was easy enough to see what Genie had in mind I felt for him.

I still had a few kits in my closet, a couple of nice Tamiya 1/48^th scale Navy jets, and I pulled them down and watched his eyes light up when he saw an A-7 Corsair II. I pulled that one from the stack and put it on my desk and opened it up, and Tom picked up the rows and rows of pieces and parts and looked at them almost reverentially…

“Look over the instructions,” I said gently, “and tell me what you think.”

I turned and saw Genie leaning in the doorway, taking us in with her all-knowing, appreciative eyes, but then she looked over at me and smiled before she turned and walked off to the kitchen. She was making herself right at home now, cooking up a storm because, well, she was in her comfort zone. I assumed it had been a long time since she’d had an appreciative husband around the house and, well, we had a certain history, didn’t we?

Then Tom looked over at me and he unflinchingly asked the one question I’d not expected: “Could you teach me to fly?” he asked.

So I looked him in the eye and took a quick measure of his sincerity. “You interested in that?”

He nodded. “Every time we go somewhere. There’s something magic about flying.”

I nodded. “There is. So tell me, subtract 90 from 360. What do you get?”

He thought for a moment then replied: “270,” he said – and quite confidently, too.

“Add 65 to 95.”

“160.”

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yup.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, “now what about that kit?”

“I think I’d need help with painting it, but it doesn’t look all that bad.”

“Ever used an airbrush?”

“A what?”

I smiled and shook my head. I’d put away my airbrush equipment years ago and had no idea if it would still work, but Genie called out from the kitchen just then – “Dinner’s ready!” – and I couldn’t help but hear her mother on a distant afternoon and I drifted along on my memories for a moment.

“Well,” I finally said, breaking free of the past, “come on, Tom. I guess your mom has other plans for us right now.”

We ate spaghetti and garlic bread and I fielded a barrage of questions from Tom about flying lessons, at least until my jet-lag hit – and I went down hard after that. When I woke early in the morning and found Tom asleep in Carol’s bedroom and Genie down for the count in my parent’s bed, and I looked at her while she slept and wondered why all this felt so natural. Like this was the way it should have gone down twenty years earlier, and standing there I went from feeling a kind of contented bliss to emotionally disoriented, like Time was this flexible, yielding thing that could entertain two such wildly disparate emotions in my mind.

I’d had my eight hours so went to the kitchen and was not exactly surprised to see that the ‘fridge had been completely stocked, and I stood their, exasperated and yet full of wonder, in awe of Genie’s mastery of the finest detail. She would have been perfect as Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff when he was laying out Operation Overlord, and I felt certain the war could have been shortened by at least a year if she had been organizing the invasion of Europe.

I called my grandfather at 0500 because I knew he’d have been up for at least an hour by then, and that he’d have his morning calisthenics out of the way already, so I asked him to come over and help me whip up a bunch of pancakes for Genie and Tom. Fifteen minutes later and with his excitement barely contained, he was whipping up batter while I was putting the bacon in the oven, then whisking eggs and dicing onions and green peppers for a huge scramble. When the bacon began doing it’s job – filling the house with that eternally seductive aroma – and thereby waking Tom and Genie – the old man and I began ladling out hotcakes on the griddle while Genie set the table and poured glasses of fresh squeezed OJ.

And I could see she was in seventh Heaven, that her version of the universe was coming together nicely – that the cosmic tumblers were all falling into place. Like any other nine year old, Tom dragged his ass into the kitchen still rubbing sleep from his eyes, but the prospect of a hot breakfast made by someone other than his mother snapped him to full attention. Full of unasked questions, he sat there staring in utter disbelief at my grandfather, and I even think I understood his confusion. It was beyond surreal that any old man could move with such certainty and speed and, as long as his hearing aids were set correctly, carry on multiple conversations with any and everyone in the room. Poor Grandfather was still as sharp as a tack and Tom just couldn’t relate to that.

And soon the Old Man and I laid out a nice forty-thousand calorie breakfast, just what we needed to get us through the day ahead. Tom plowed through five pancakes and asked for more, so the Old Man went to the griddle and whipped-up another batch of perfect flap-jacks.

When Genie drove Tom over to Bradfield the Old Man got down to business.

“Joan’s father and grandfather had some serious money,” he began, “and it’s parked over at Northern Trust. After consulting with her attorneys she decided to split the trust in two, seventy-five percent to you, and twenty-five to Carol, I think to take care of her medical costs, and assuming you would have no objections I went ahead and consolidated your new shares with your father’s trust…”

I shrugged. I knew the money was there, somewhere, but refused to touch it, and had continued living on my salary from TWA. I just looked at the Old Man and shrugged.

“Look, I know you don’t give a damn about these things, but Joan’s father made some good money, her grandfather even more, and she inherited it all. With what your father left you, well, you aren’t exactly poor.”

“And I told you…”

“I know what you told me, Pat. Now you’re going to need to tell me what your plans are for the foreseeable future.”

“I thought I’d been clear with you about that. I’m going to fly and I’m going to keep living in my apartment in Boston. I have no plans beyond that.”

“Pat, do you even own an automobile?”

“No. I don’t need one. I can ride the T anywhere I want to go.”

“What are you going to do with this house? And if I may, do you have any intentions concerning Genie?”

“Why would I sell this place?”

“Because it’s a shame to let it sit her and rot. And what about Genie?”

“Paw-paw, last I heard she was still married…”

“Divorce is inevitable.”

“You’ll excuse me, but you sure seem particularly well informed about things.”

“Well, you’ll excuse me, but in case it’s slipped your attention, I ain’t exactly getting any younger and I’ve got plans of my own to tend to. And, in case that too has slipped your mind, you figure into those plans as well, so you’ll pardon my curiosity but I kind of need to know what you have in mind.”

“You mind if I ask what you and Genie have cooked up for me, or is that question none of my business?”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Pat.”

I knew that look, the glare he was sending my way just then. You didn’t mess around with the Old Man when he sent that one your way. My dad had taught me that much…

I sighed, but I didn’t dare look away – because the Old Man hated human weakness and frailty of any sort. “You know my position on marriage,” he snarled. “Maybe it’s time you changed your mind about living your life like some kind of monk. It ain’t natural, Pat. Your life won’t ever be complete without the responsibility that comes with bringing up a family and taking care of them. That’s what defines a man, in case no one told you.”

“That thought has been on my mind a lot recently,” I sighed.

“And?”

“I think about destiny, too. Growing up, I always thought that Genie was my destiny, and then…”

“And then California came calling – but your mother was behind all that. Then that lark in the Air Force. Yes, yes, I know that story all too well.”

“Paw-paw, in case you’ve forgotten, Genie met the man she thought was her destiny – and it wasn’t me…”

“Because she thought you’d walked out of her life – all our lives, really – and she didn’t know what else to do. She knew she wanted a family…”

“Gee, I wonder where she got that idea?” I said.

“That was a dumb-ass thing to say, Pat, and don’t you dare talk to that woman like that…not while I’m still around. I hear about that and I’ll come kick your ass from one end of the Commons to the other.”

And he could probably still do it, too. “I hear you,” I sighed.

The garage door opened and Genie walked into the kitchen, stopping short when she saw the piles of papers spread out on the kitchen table. “Did I come at a bad time?” she asked.

“No, not at all,” my grandfather said – in that perpetually chipper, matter of fact way of his. “Pat’s just got to sign a few things. What time is the service?”

“Eleven,” she replied. “Would you like us to pick you up? It’s on the way?”

“Thanks, that would be nice. Say Pat, bring your father’s car, if the damn thing’ll start. It needs to be driven some while you’re still in town.”

Of course all this felt like one blistering insinuation after another. I could see that the lawn care had slipped and that there were leaves in the gutters, things my father would have never allowed. And there were three cars in the garage; his two Jaguars and Joan’s Cadillac. Those Jags were an affectation of his, an expression of his love for all things British; he had a new XJ-12 as well as an older XK-E, an inline six model, but it was a ragtop– though I’m not sure the top had ever been raised to close off the cockpit. That car…oh how he’d doted on the thing…and how many times had we waxed it together?

But after I’d dressed I went out to the garage and noted battery chargers had been hooked up to both his cars, and only my grandfather would have thought to do that. The XJ started easily and burbled to life, and after I backed her out I went around and opened the door for Genie.

“It still smells like your father,” she sighed, her eyes closed as her senses roamed. “God, I miss him.”

“I know the feeling,” I said as I settled in and adjusted the mirrors, yet the truth is I felt like I was on autopilot, going through the motions while lingering memories beat the air over my head. It was like the last thing I wanted to do right now was rock the boat – because if only one thing was apparent right now it was my grandfather’s agenda. He wanted me home and he wanted me married to Genie. He wanted me taking care of that boy, opting to take over my father’s memberships at the country club and Koon Kreek, and it all seemed like he wanted me to slide into my father’s life because, I was beginning to see, he just couldn’t admit that his son was gone. I needed to step in to validate the future he had always considered a done deal, the future he’d imagined it ought to be. And would have been but for kid in a Mustang.

Grandfather lived at most about 200 yards away, on Bordeaux, in the same house he’d built when the developers of the newly incorporated Highland Park had first offered lots for sale. I pulled into his driveway and he walked out the same front door I’d knocked on, stopping once to check the sky on his way out to the car. No doubt he’d checked the weather reports before getting dressed, chosen what coat to wear while standing graveside, because that was the way you did things. In his world you thought things through. Everything. All the time. Certainty created precision; uncertainty bred chaos. He’d drilled that into my father’s head, and my father had done the same to me. Now it was my turn to pass on the distillate of his being, to pass on the secret of his success. Precision: Good. Uncertainty: Bad.

And hadn’t I done that my whole life. Hadn’t I studied that way? Wasn’t that why my grades were always the best in my class, whatever class it happened to be? Take precise notes. Highlight the text in precise detail. Avoid uncertainty. Avoid chaos. Come out on top?

I drove, precisely, to Lovers Lane Methodist. I acknowledged all my parent’s friends with a precise nod. I delivered a carefully constructed eulogy with concise precision, including only the highlights and omitting all of Joan’s transparently chaotic flaws. I was, as precisely as I could be, the dutiful son, and here I was with precisely the right woman hanging onto my arm, in effect validating everyone’s worldview of my place in their lives.

After the burial and during the reception at the country club I was stunned by how many of my parent’s friends came by to say how good Genie and I looked together, and more than a couple stated flatly that we had belonged together from the beginning. And every time I heard that blather I thought I could feel my head swelling up, getting ready to explode.

“You’ll be moving back to Dallas soon?” one said, and it was a proclamation, not a question.

I was still the class valedictorian, the star wide receiver that made All State my senior year. 

“And just why did you leave?”

“Good to see you’ve finally come to your senses.”

And my favorite: “Your father would be so proud.”

At one point I walked over to the small dining room that overlooked the swimming pool and I looked down into the water, saw a few forlorn leaves gathered in the deep end, and I envied their silence. the chaos of their rotting in the bottom of a swimming pool.

True to form, I’d put up my perfectly cleaned airbrush so when I took it out a few days later the damn thing worked flawlessly. Tom and I had driven in the XK-E out to Halls Hobby Shop and picked up new paint and a few tools, and we spent Saturday working together on that model of the A-7, and I found myself talking just as my father had. Careful encouragement. Positive criticism. Always in service of the ideal idea: precision over uncertainty. Take your time and do it right the first time.

Becoming my father came to me naturally, so naturally, and the thought made me sick to my stomach.

+++++

I spent one morning – alone – out at Timberlawn, talking with Carol’s psychiatrist as well as the internist charged with her rather complicated medical care. Carol had been through two ECT treatments so far, and she seemed lucid for a few hours after each but had soon slipped back into her hallucinatory existence. Her psychiatrist proposed two more treatments, to see if the latent intervals of lucidity increased, and if so to continue with four more treatments over the next two weeks.

“And if she doesn’t improve?” I asked.

“That will be up to you, but as we discussed last time you might want to consider hospice care.”

“When is her next treatment. I’d like to talk to her just after.”

“Tomorrow morning. She should be out of anesthesia by ten or so.” 

So I was there at ten or so the next morning, and Carol and I talked for the first time in twenty years, and we started where we had left off. She was with me again, clear as could be, and I explained what was happening and why I was there.

“I can’t go back there, Pat. You have no idea…”

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t know,” I said, and as empathetically as I could. “What’s it like? When you go there?”

“Flames. I’m surrounded by flames and my skin is burning and then the demons come. They rip away my flesh and push me deeper into the fire…”

“And that’s…”

“That’s all I can see or hear, Pat. Don’t make me go back there…”

Those words clawed at my throat, broke my heart. “You don’t have to go back, Carol. Come, stay with me, let me help you fight them…”

And yet two hours later she slid back into the flames, began writhing in agony and screaming as her tormenters returned. Thorazine was administered and within a few minutes she was back in her stupor, but her psychiatrist explained these medicines only quelled the external dimensions. Whatever it was tormenting her continued to do so even now.

“Is this unusual?” I asked.

“Yes, fairly. Thorazine usually stops almost all hallucinations, but not in all patients, and certainly not in your sister’s case.”

“So she gets no relief?”

“That’s correct. She’s in, for all intents and purposes, Hell, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. Inside her hallucination, she’s roasting in Hell while constantly being attacked by demons, and I’ve watched these attacks, so to speak, on an EEG – even when she’s sedated on Thorazine. It is a completely unacceptable outcome.”

“Do you know what caused this?”

The physician shrugged off the question. “Genetics? Upbringing? We just don’t know yet, and we don’t have the tools we need to find out the why or the how of such things. This woman, her mother? I can say she must have been a monster. A complete monster.”

“Cobra,” I whispered.

“What’s that?”

“I called her a cobra once, when I was about fifteen. She slapped me senseless.”

“What else do you recall?”

I shrugged. “The list is endless, but if I could come up with one common denominator I’d say that Joan was trying to destroy everything my father stood for, everything he valued, and the more she drank the more violent she became.”

“She beat you too?”

“Both of us, yes.”

“You’ll excuse my asking, but did she molest you?”

I looked away, but I nodded.

“May I ask how?”

“She’d bully my dad until he’d had enough, and after he left she came to my room. She’d crawl all over me and play with it, usually with her hands but sometimes using her mouth. She’d sit on me and piss on me and then tell my father I was still wetting the bed, telling him to spank me…”

“Did he?”

“No. I think he knew something was wrong, but I don’t think he ever really put all of the pieces of the puzzle together…”

“These pieces? They were pretty big, too big I think for a physician to ignore.”

“Maybe.”

“Have you ever considered the possibility that your father molested your sister?”

“No. And I’d say that was an impossibility.”

“Why?”

“Because he was hardly ever home. Joan ran him off – almost every night.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t really know, not with any certainty, but I always suspected he kept a mistress.”

“What about after you left for college?”

I froze. From the inside out. “Dad wasn’t the type.”

“You know this with certainty?”

I nodded.

“Then the origins of her hallucinations will remain a mystery. Joan was not your biological mother, correct?”

I nodded again. “That’s right.”

“Who raised you?”

I shrugged. “My grandparents, my girlfriend’s mother, but mostly my father. I always thought my grandparents knew something was going on…”

“Do you trust women?” the psychiatrist asked, out of the blue.

I looked at the shrink and nodded. “I never considered that Joan was normal. My grandmother was a saint, and so too was my girlfriend’s mother. Hell, for that matter my girlfriend was too.”

“But you’ve kept your distance from women, haven’t you? Maybe you find it hard to commit to a relationship?”

“I’ve always considered myself a confirmed bachelor.”

“I think if I was in your position I would too.”

“So, you think…”

“I think I am not your physician, Mr. Healey. What I know of you and your family is a distortion, or a series of distortions your sister conveyed, so I would not dare to presume anything at this point. I am curious, however. What happened to this girlfriend you mention? The saintly one?”

“Long story, but the short version is she’s still out there, waiting for me to come to my senses.”

“What an interesting way of putting things. What do you think is going to happen next?”

“I have no idea.”

The psychiatrist looked at me and smiled. “Oh, but of course you do. You’re the only one that does. You just have to know where to look.” But then the shrink turned and faced me, and just then she pointed right at my heart. “Life is a hall of mirrors, Mr. Healey, and from time to time as we walk along we think we catch a fleeting glimpse of reality, but make no mistake – what we see is an illusion, and there is no place we can hide from that one simple truth.”

And for a moment, in a brief flash of time, I felt the wind in my hair and saw dead autumn leaves skittering alongside the Seine before they fell into the black water. I looked up in time to see Sainte Chapelle covered in blood, my blood, and the sky beyond was turning crimson and gold as flame-filled clouds, writhing in my sister’s eternal agony, marched across an unsuspecting Earth.

+++++

“You look pale,” Genie said as she walked into my father’s house. Tom was trailing along at a discrete distance, his eyes cast down and looking very put upon. It was so obvious now, too. The boy missed his father and didn’t understand what had happened to his life.

‘Welcome to the club, kid,’ I said inwardly. The face of the country was rapidly inverting as no-fault divorce and legions of freshly minted lawyers scoured the land in search of a new clientele, and kids like Tom were the faceless, nameless victims of this latest inversion of family life.

“Bad day,” I grumbled.

“Carol?” Genie asked, though the question was hardly necessary.

“I picked up a bunch of steaks for dinner,” I said, changing the subject.

“A bunch? You must be hungry.”

“I asked the Old Man to drop by.”

“Are we intruding?” she asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“Tom,” she said, “why don’t you get started on your homework.”

The boy nodded and put his book bag down on the floor next to the kitchen table, then he pulled out a copy to Twain’s Tom Sawyer and got to work. I drifted back to Bradfield, to Mrs. Dunsworth’s fourth grade class, and I remembered making my way through the same book on my way to writing my very first book report. I tried to reconcile that experience with the sight of this kid following down the very same path, yet it was impossible to forget the shrink’s comments about a hall of mirrors – and the impossible vision that followed.

“Pat, what’s wrong?” Genie said, her voice shaking just a little.

“I’ve got to go back out there in the morning, but I’m a little scared…”

“Scared? You?”

“The implications of these treatments failing…well, it really became crystal clear today.”

She came over and took my hands in hers, but she as quickly gasped: “Pat…your hands are like ice!”

I remember nodding, and trying to smile just a little, but I was lost inside my very own hall of mirrors. “I told you I felt scared.”

“You feel up to cooking?”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’ll handle the grill if you can put together a salad.”

“How ‘bout a spinach soufflé?”

“Perfect,” I added, knowing the freezer was full of Dad’s favorite side dish, little orange boxes of Stouffer’s spinach soufflé – which was his side of choice when grilling steaks out back – and the thought that Genie knew that left me reeling. “Did Dad stay over at your house often?”

She hesitated, but then she relented. “More and more the past year or so.”

“How’s your mom?”

Genie shook her head. “Not good. She went down after you left last time; it was like losing him all over again.”

I nodded, felt sick to my stomach. Genie had been well on her way to becoming my stepsister, and wouldn’t that have been just ducky – best laid plans and all that nonsense. I didn’t really know what to say so went out back to get the Hasty-Bake ready for duty, filling the charcoal tray just like father      did, getting the coals just so then using the same wire brush to clean off the stainless steel grates. Back to the kitchen to make his marinade – equal parts ketchup and mustard, a dash of Worcestershire sauce and a little squeeze of anchovy paste and half a lime. Drop in the ribeyes and let them soak it all in before dropping them on a bed of 500 degree coals.

“Salads ready,” Genie called a bit later, and I pulled the steaks from the grill and closed the dampers before I carried them into the house. Both my grandfather and Deborah were sitting at the table, lost in conversation while Tom sat there still trying to figure out what the Hell was going on with his life. I said my hellos, but after I put the platter on the table I walked over and gave Deborah a huge, bone-crushing hug – if only because I was genuinely glad to see her right now – then I blushed and took my seat.

Genie fixed our plates and passed them around – just like she always had twenty years ago, only at her house. Grandfather said a prayer while Tom and I exchanged knowing smirks – just like my father and I always had – at this very table. We made small talk, anything really that would keep Carol and all her problems away for a few more hours…

“You ought to take the XK-E out for a run while you’re here,” Grandfather said.

I nodded. “Not sure I could stand the attention.”

The roadster was fire engine red with a black interior, and everywhere you went in the damn thing people stopped what they were doing and drooled.

“Better check the oil first, if you do,” he added – because like all Jags the engine leaked oil 24/7.

But I had checked her fluids already. And yes, after checking the garage floor I confirmed the oil was down almost a quart. “Maybe I’ll take it out tomorrow,” I sighed, if only because I hated crawling into the driver’s seat, contorting my frame over the wide sill and under the oak steering wheel, but a car like that needed to be driven. Hell, it screamed to be driven – and fast – but oddly enough it wasn’t a great car. It was sexy as hell, but while smooth the inline six lacked power, and Dad’s XJ handled about as well on a mountain road.

“How was Carol?” he asked, breaking the spell.

I shook my head. “We’ll know more tomorrow,” I managed to say before I asked Genie for some more grub.

Then I cleared the table and Genie got the dishes loaded in the washer – and soon enough she came over and asked if it would be okay if she and Tom slept over again.

“Why don’t you ask Tom,” I replied. “He seems a little out of it right now, like maybe he’s a little confused about where things stand.”

Her jaw tightened but she just caught herself, then she smiled and nodded as this setback became too obvious to ignore.

A half hour later I was alone again.

It was time, I realized as I looked at this dated appliances in the kitchen, to sell this mausoleum. It was time to move on. From everything.

+++++

When Carol failed to come out from under the spell of her hallucinations after her fifth treatment, I met with her treatment team in a small conference room, and I could see this latest defeat in their eyes.

“We’re back to square one,” Amy Stottlemeyer, her lead psychiatrist, said.

“And that means what, exactly?” I asked.

“We try one more time, and if that fails we have two options. Warehouse her on anti-psychotics and sedatives, or hospice care.”

“I thought we’d resolved that earlier,” I said.

“People change their minds,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Ah. The hall of mirrors,” I added.

“Precisely,” she said, satisfied that I remembered our discussion from the day before. “People change their mind all the time.”

“I’m listening.”

“We think it’s too soon to throw in the towel, so we’d like to try some orthomolecular treatments.”

“Linus Pauling, right?”

She nodded. “Right. So you know about his work with Hawkins out at Stanford?”

“The basics, yes. I also found that the NIH and others in mainstream psychiatry consider this regimen to be little more than snake oil.”

“We don’t have a whole lot left to try.”

“Well, I guess as long as you don’t blow out her liver there’s not a lot to lose.”

“So, you agree?”

I shook my head. “I’m not qualified to make this decision, or am I missing something?”

“Well, the option is palliative care.”

“Warehousing her, you mean. Until her liver fails.”

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Or we can try the orthomolecular regimen for a while, perhaps try another round of ECT. If we still find she’s made no progress…well…at least we’ll know we tried everything.”

“And you need my permission? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you have more papers for me to sign?”

Stottlemeyer grinned as she nodded my way. “Always.”

+++++

I met my grandfather at his favorite place, the S&D Oyster Company down on McKinney, after I left Timberlawn, and I filled him in on the results.

“So, you signed their papers?”

“I did.”

“I don’t trust them, Pat. All they’re after is money, more and more money.”

“Welcome to modern medicine,” I sighed.

“Bullshit! Psychiatry isn’t medicine, it’s voodoo with a few crystal balls thrown in for good measure.”

“Don’t leave out the smoke and mirrors.”

“And don’t make fun of me!” he snarled.

“I wasn’t.”

He settled down before his half dozen arrived, then he made his cocktail sauce in the little silver bowl, adding what I considered way too much Tabasco sauce, then he speared an oyster and dipped it in his sauce before he slammed it down, chasing the slimy thing down with a long pull from a Lone Star longneck.

“So, how’d the car do? Still running okay?”

“Not bad – for a Jaguar, anyway.”

“And you’re such an expert, right? The boy who still doesn’t own an automobile!”

“I’ll get one when I need one.”

“And what about Genie?”

“I’ll get one when I need one.”

“You’ll never get another chance for happiness like this one. You know that, right?”

“That was a broken dream, Paw-paw. It was never going to work out, and we always knew it.”

“Nothing works unless you try to make it work.”

“That doesn’t sound like love to me. That sounds like a job.”

He sighed. “That boy needs you.”

“He needs his father, not another disposable marriage.”

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

“I think I found my answers to this place twenty years ago. That’s why I don’t live here.”

“I wanted it all, you know? Again. I wanted to watch you start a family, know that somehow you’d be carrying on the name, but I guess Joan killed all that, too.”

“I like to think Dad didn’t really know her, but…”

“But some mistakes we never get over. They chase us to our grave.”

I nodded. I understood what he was grieving for, because I had been too, and perhaps I had been all my life.

“So,” he continued, “I take it you’ll sell the house? And I can take your name off the list at the country club?”

“And Koon Kreek.”

“It’s to be a clean break, then,” he sighed, and while he indeed understood, he was now broken hearted.

“I think it has to be. There aren’t many good memories here, and the good ones mostly came from you.”

“I tried, Pat. I saw what was happening, so I tried. I know it wasn’t enough…”

“You made all the difference in the world.”

“Thanks.” He was still too tough to shed a tear, but I could tell he was upset. “So, you’ll stay in Boston?”

“I may be moving to Frankfurt later this year, but that will be a short term assignment. I’ll probably go back to Boston after that.”

“Frankfurt, as in Germany? What the hell…?”

“We’re expanding our route network in Europe. I’ll be making evaluation flights for a few months, but there’s a possibility I could end up based over there.”

“Dear God.”

“And just think…I’ll be flying in and out of Tempelhof, too.”

“Oh, you’re full of all kinds of good news, aren’t you?”

“I think I’m going to get my promotion to captain, but with this European thing that’d mean I’d be flying 727s.”

“That’s the little three engined one, right?”

“Yup. Great airplane, though.”

“I thought you liked the TriStar.”

“I do, but it’s not a short haul airliner.”

He nodded. “I guess you’re right, of course. Moving around like that…a family would never work out.”

“I’m not ruling it out. I am not, however, going to rush into a marriage with Genie – or anyone else, for that matter.”

“You may be right about that, but don’t underestimate that girl, or her love for you. She’s not the type to give up so easily.”

I shook my head. “As soon as she understands I’ll never move back to Highland Park she’ll lose all interest in me. Again.”

“You’re too cynical.”

“You might be right, but actually I kind of doubt it.”

“What’s going to happen to Carol?”

“If this latest effort fails, then palliative care.”

“Dear God. What did she do to deserve a life like this?”

“Good question. Why don’t you ask him when you see him.”

“God damn atheist…” he muttered.

I laughed just a little at the unintended ironies within that statement. “Have you ever considered hooking up with Deborah?”

“What? Are you serious?”

“She’s still cute, and I bet she could clean your clock.”

“And you need to get your mind out of the gutter, young man.”

I held up my hands in defeat. “Okay…if you say so.”

“Do I look like a cradle-snatcher to you?”

“No. You look lonely. And I’ve seen the way you look at her.”

“Balls!”

“Use ‘em or lose ‘em, Old Man.”

“Yup. It’s high time I kicked your ass. You ready?”

“No. But I bet you can’t eat another oyster…”

+++++

I flew back to Kansas City to finish up transition school, but I stayed with the L-1011 in order to remain flying our trans-Atlantic routes out of Boston, and after I made captain I bought a place on Louisburg Square in the heart of Beacon Hill. Four bedrooms, too. Just in case. Grandfather flew up for a visit and he liked the place. I heard Genie and her husband had reconciled after I left, and I smiled at the convenience of her ability to accommodate the bastard after he’d cheated on her, but mainly because I hoped things would work out for Tom.

I made one more trip to Dallas to visit with Carol’s treatment team at Timberlawn, and they advised she had reached the limits of what they considered possible, and while they recommended hospice as a near term option I wasn’t yet ready to go there. Just the idea that a physically healthy thirty-something year old could go into hospice to die by starvation was just too much for me. Still, when I considered Carol’s description of life in her hallucinatory world was simply overwhelming, about all I could do was ask myself what I’d want her to do if I was in her place. It was impossible, at least emotionally impossible for me to process, and I drove back to the house in a funk.

Later that afternoon I met grandfather and Deborah at the country club, and after my morning at Timberlawn I enjoyed their apparent happiness. I told him I planned to put the house on the market while still here in town, and he wasn’t surprised – again, he was just a little sad. I wasn’t surprised when the house sold just days after the listing posted, but it was a bittersweet parting of the ways, a final goodbye to the life I had once known – and turned away from.

I resumed flying the TriStar out of Logan on the Paris–De Gaulle run once again, only now from the left seat. I figured that when I got too lonely I could always count on Ellen to cheer me up, and somewhere along the way I started studying medieval art and architecture. I was soon carrying a camera everywhere I went, shooting roll after roll of Kodachrome as I walked around Paris, and I suppose life might have gone on like that indefinitely…

…until one night, when I’d just returned from Paris I listened to a voicemail on my answering machine. The call was from a Detective Ben Barnes, with the HomicideDivision of the Dallas Police Department; his voice was hard as steel, and asked that I please give him a call. 

“As soon as possible,” he added – as an after thought…

+++++

Barnes painted a pretty graphic picture over the phone: Carol’s bed at Timberlawn a ragged, blood-soaked mess, the mattress and pillow shredded by a long blade kitchen knife. But it turned out that there was one problem, and it was a biggie: there was no body. Anywhere. And now they had lab results on the blood, and it wasn’t human. In short, Barnes told me that it appeared to have been a ‘staged’ murder, and the old cop wondered why.

“Tell me about your sister,” Barnes asked.

And I told him quite literally everything I knew about her condition, up to an including the recent discussions to place Carol in hospice.

“And you say you didn’t approve that move?”

“No sir, I just couldn’t…I’m not prepared to give up hope.”

“Does she have any money?”

I felt a cold chill. “Yessir, actually quite a lot, but it’s held at Northern Trust and isn’t easy to access. In her case she would need my written permission to even get a dollar from the account.”

“And no one has been in contact with you about her holdings?”

“No sir, no one.”

“This is weird,” Barnes sighed, lost in thought. “Well, let me know if anyone tries to get in touch with you…”

I told him I would, then I called Northern Trust to check on any suspicious activity and there had been none. Next I called my grandfather. He’d been distraught for several days about all this, but he didn’t know what to do. 

“There’s no way anyone could get at her money, is there?” he asked.

“Not without my consent.”

“Could anyone fake that?”

“Doubtful. And I just talked to Cheryl at Northern Trust; they’ll be extra vigilant now, more so than usual, and she won’t authorize a thing without first talking to me in person.”

“Pat? What if she was kidnapped? What if they try to hold her for ransom?”

“Well, unless they have a shitload of Thorazine on hand they’ll have their hands full. Not sure they’d be able to manage her for more than a few days…”

“But, what are you saying – that they’d kill her?”

“Let’s not jump to any conclusions, Paw-paw. No one’s tried to contact me yet, and I assume no one has tried to touch bases with you…”

“No…no…not yet…”

“Well then, it’s a mystery, that’s for sure…”

And that word, mystery, suddenly popped to mind, flashing in bold red lights. Mystery? What about that word was suddenly so important?

Mystery?

Agatha Christie? Agatha Christie – mysteries?

Carol had been addicted to Christie’s novels in high school and had studied her life and works in college, at SMU, and I remembered her talking about the author faking her death and disappearing for a few weeks, and there’d been a later novel where the protagonist faked her own death…and as it had been set in ancient Egypt it had been Carol’s favorite.

Oh holy shit.

Could she have been faking schizophrenia? For almost ten years?

No way. No fucking way. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around that one, but…yet…something was most definitely up, only now, and quite suddenly, I thought that Carol was probably behind it all.

“Paw-paw?” I said. “Do you remember Carol’s infatuation with Agatha Christie?”

“The writer? Now that you mention it, yes, I do.”

“I can think of two incidents Carol mentioned where the writer faked a death…”

“What?”

“Yeah.”

“So wait a minute…are you saying you think Carol might be behind this?”

“It’s a theory.”

“Pardon my French, but – shit!”

“Yup, that’s the first word that sprang to mind. She told me once that Christie disappeared for a couple of weeks when she found out her husband had been cheating on her…drove her car out to a quarry and parked it next to a deep water pit. Just enough hints to implicate her husband, too. I remember that much about it.”

“You gonna call that detective?”

“I think I’d better.”

“Well, I’ll be a suck-egg-mule,” the old man said, and I had to laugh at that one.

“One of these days you’re going to have to tell me what that means.”

“Hell if I know. Your great-grandfather used it when he saw someone he hadn’t seen in a while.”

“Your father?”

“No, your grandmother’s. He worked on the Texas and Pacific Railway, he was a civil engineer. Laid out tracks, designed bridges, that kind of thing.”

“He’s the one who lost an arm, right?”

“Yup. Settled on a farm outside of Sherman, found oil in one of the pastures. He taught you how to draw when you were about four…”

“I almost remember that…drawing bridges…he helped me draw a bridge.”

I could hear the old man smile, even over the phone. “That’s right. Your dad always said that was a big deal, why you went into engineering. You never can tell, I guess.”

“Geesh, I haven’t thought about that in years…”

We shot the breeze a little after that then he rang off, and I called Barnes at the police department and told him of my latest suspicions, and a while later the idea of building bridges popped to mind. Agatha Christie and building bridges.

What the hell? What could that mean?

+++++

My routine on flight days was simple. Sleep-in late and have a small breakfast, dress and head to the airport – Logan – and check-in at the dispatch office in Terminal E then head out to the gate. Assuming the equipment was there, I’d drop off my flight bag in the cockpit then check in with the ramp agent on the ground, go over fuel load-outs and check tire pressures with him before I made my first walk around the aircraft. The flight attendants would usually be working in the galleys by the time I made it back into the aircraft, and I’d start programming the necessary waypoints into the INS, or inertial navigation system, a tedious routine that demanded absolute concentration. After all three INS systems had been programmed and cross-checked, the Flight Engineer and I would go down and do a more in-depth walk around, and after we returned to the cockpit the First Officer would go down and make sure the fueling was complete and then bring a copy of the load-out back up the cockpit. When the passengers were called, one of us, usually the FO, would step into the forward entry and do the obligatory ‘Meet & Greet’ – saying hello to passengers as they stepped aboard, before they made their way aft to their assigned seats.

A few weeks after my Agatha Christie revelation I found myself posted at the entry doing the Meet & Greet, and first to board were two elderly women, both dressed in black, and both rather frail looking – and one had an old book in hand. Ellen, working as the senior flight attendant that evening, helped me get the two old women to their seats, which happened to be Row 1 on the starboard or right side of the First Class cabin, and when I helped the frailest looking woman into her window seat I just managed to look at the woman’s face.

And I saw Carol’s face. Heavily made up and wearing a wig, but it was Carol lurking behind a Cheshire Cat’s grin.

And her seat mate, and I assumed her partner in crime, was none other than her psychiatrist, Dr. Amy Stottlemeyer, also equally well disguised.

Carol then handed me a book, Agatha Christie’s ‘Death Comes As The End’, and as I looked at her she pointed to a small envelope in the book she’d used as a place marker and she smiled, said “Thank you so much,” in a stilted patrician British accent before she turned dismissively and looked out the window.

“My pleasure,” I said to a grinning Amy Stottlemeyer. I noticed then that the two were holding hands, and that they were looking most pleased with themselves.

Now at a complete loss, I walked back to the cockpit and opened the book to get the envelope, and breathlessly read Carol’s message before I put her ‘gift’ in my flight bag. I then contorted my way into the captain’s seat while doing my level best not to laugh out loud, but I think only the years of discipline I had by then accumulated allowed me to focus on my duties during that flight. I do recall the usual seven hours seemed to last about a week.

I met them at the baggage carousel, but Ellen ambled up and asked if I was going into the city. I told her I would meet her in the lobby of the Crillon at six and she sighed then walked off in a huff. The two old ladies looked like expectant owls just then, their eyes fixed on mine, waiting for the obvious next question.

“So, ladies,” I said as I turned to address my fugitives, “what can I do for you this fine morning?”

“Help us find a place to live,” Carol said.

“Someplace with a nice view,” Amy said. “And a big bathtub,” she added.

And yes, I knew just the place.

+++++

A few months passed, autumn fell and winter assumed her rightful place in the sky, and a light snow was falling on the ramp outside Logan’s International Terminal as I finished my walk-around the TriStar. This was to be another momentous flight, my first time flying Grandfather – ever. He’d always hated flying and did so only when absolutely necessary, and as this vacation was absolutely necessary he was up in the Ambassador’s Club lounge nervously waiting for his flight to be called.

I of course stood in the entry to perform the evening’s Meet & Greet, and there they were, Mr. and Mrs. Denton Healey, walking down the Jetway together. I shook his hand then leaned in to give Deborah a peck on the cheek, then I turned my attention back to my grandfather and his nervous gaze.

“There’s no way something this big can fly,” he growled as he took in the hundreds of seats. “Pat! This thing is positively huge!”

“It is, a little.”

“This is a long way from Addison Airport, you know?”

I looked at him with all the love I had in my heart. “I’d have never made it here without you.”

He looked at me and nodded, then he stood aside and made way for Genie and Tom – and now I was indeed shocked and speechless.

“We’re on our way to our wedding reception, Patrick,” my grandfather said. “Surely you’d expect my daughter-in-law to be in attendance?”

“Oh yes, I see your point,” I said, as Tom walked up to shake my hand.

“Think you could show me around the cockpit?” the boy with the glowing eyes asked.

And I nodded. With a surprised smile, I think. “Yes, I think we can manage that.”

Genie of course looked radiant and I knew when I looked into her eyes that it was pointless to resist this life any longer. My destiny – and her’s too, I assume – had been written in the stars so long ago that not one among us would dare question such a thing.

Coda

Poor Grandfather was beside himself when he saw Carol waiting for us in the lobby of the Crillon, and I feared this might be the shortest reunion possible – but no, he was made of stronger stuff. He always had been, in case you didn’t know that by now.

We sat together that evening, all of us, getting caught up over dinner. Carol was writing and Amy was painting and both had resumed their affair with the piano, and Grandfather couldn’t wait to hear them play Debussy.

He had come a long way, I guess you could say. From growing up on a farm outside of Sherman Texas to eating caviar in the Palais Royale on Christmas Eve, from driving the first automobiles to watching men walk on the Moon. He watched Carol and Amy and felt their love, all our love, really, and I doubt any grandfather had ever been happier. Carol took the newlyweds back to the Crillon, leaving me to walk with Genie and Tom through the palace gardens. I stood between them and held their hands and we talked about simple things like love and family as a gentle snow started to fall, and once I thought I heard my father calling my name; I looked up and for the life of me the snow looked just like stars falling down to hold us in his embrace.

© 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple, every word of it…

[Close to You \\ The Carpenters]

So, adios for now…