Unbound (14 page)

“
So when did you learn to fly?” he asked.

“
When I was in college. It had nothing to do with my career path; it was just something that I had always wanted to learn to do.”

“
What did you study in college?” Grandfather asked.

“
Not much,” Jack said. “I dropped out after three semesters and joined the Army.”

“
Oh, yeah? See any combat?”

I noticed a hesitation in Jack’s answer and, unless I was just imagining it, a flicker of doubt in his usually cool exterior.

“
I did. In Afghanistan.”

My heart dropped. My brother had been killed in combat in Afghanistan. To hear Jack mention the place was almost like a slap to the face. I saw that Grandfather was looking sympathetically at me. He reached over and took my hand.

****

After lunch, we walked back to The Outdoorsman where Grandfather gave Jack a tour of the place. He invited us to stay for dinner as well, but I didn’t want to be too late getting back home and Jack claimed to not be entirely comfortable flying at night.

I manned the store—not a huge task, as only as single customer came in for the hour we remained there—while Jack and Grandfather cracked open the crates in the back. I listened to them work as I thought about David and how devastated I had been when I’d gotten the phone call about his death. Back then, I’d still had a husband to rely on for support and, oddly enough, I had felt as if David had died again after my husband had walked out.

Jack and Grandfather came back into the store, slightly sweaty. We started saying our awkward goodbyes, Jack and Grandfather shaking hands again and exchanging phone numbers. Jack apparently sensed that we needed some privacy to say our goodbyes, so he stepped out, heading down the pier to start the plane.

Grandfather smiled at me once we heard the engine start up. He sighed and shook his head.

“
What?” I asked, putting a hand on my hip.

“
So what’s wrong with
that
one?”

“
That one?”

“
Yes. Him. What’s wrong with him? I can sense that he irritates you.”

“
He does most of the time. It’s stupid, though. A spoiled brat sort of thing.”

“
Mad that he bought the plane before you?”

I gave my own sigh then. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“
Fair enough. He seems nice, though. Would you maybe give him a chance?”

“
Grandfather… really,” I said.

He held up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “I know, I know. But hey, I liked him. If you ever head out this way again, it wouldn’t be so bad if he tagged along.”

“
I’ll keep that in mind.”

“
I also saw how shocked you were when he mentioned Afghanistan. You been thinking about David lately?”

“
Daily, yes, but not enough. Not as much as he deserves.”

“
It’s okay to move on,” Grandfather said. “It’s remembering respectfully that counts… even if it isn’t as frequently as it used to be. I’m the same way about your grandma, you know.”

“
I know. Thanks.”

He gave me a hug then and I realized that I missed him terribly. At one time, I had tried convincing him to move to Sitka, but he wouldn't even considered it. I think he much preferred the solitude and being able to do as he pleased. He didn’t like the idea of someone looking to him for support, even if it
was
only emotionally.

“
Take care of yourself, Mac,” he said.

“
You, too.”

I gave him a kiss on the cheek and then he walked me to the front door. He waved me away as I walked down the street and to the pier. I followed the sound of the plane’s droning propellers and saw Jack standing by the opened door, waiting to help me inside.  He looked up and smiled briefly.

“
You okay?” he asked when I reached him. “You look sad.”

“
It’s hard leaving him,” I said. “He’s the only family I have left.”

And with that statement, it dawned on me that I had revealed more to Jack about my personal life at that moment since I had met him.

“I'm sorry,” he said.  “I'm sure it must be hard.”  He helped me into the plane and when he took my hand to help me up, God help me, I didn’t want him to let go.

14—Devlin

I had never really been sure why I didn’t like to fly at night. I had done it several times before, mostly during my lessons, and found it to be daunting. When there wasn’t any land to clearly see below you in miniature, it was easy to feel like the entire world had disappeared and left you all alone in the sky.

Mac and I had declined dinner with her grandfather mainly to try to avoid flying through the darkness for too long. But even then, we’d ended up leaving about forty-five minutes later than we had planned. I found myself flying to beat the night and, obviously, losing the race. We were still about one hundred and twenty miles away from Sitka when dull darkness fell.

But a funny thing happened; I found that I didn’t mind flying in the dark with Mac sitting next to me. It was nothing romantic or sentimental about the feeling. I think I would have felt the same if anyone had have been there. I felt guilty in that moment because a very small part of me wanted to be with Aubrey. For the slightest, briefest of seconds, I wanted Aubrey to see me flying, to know that great things were possible outside of cosmetics and Hollywood.

“
You okay?” Mac asked.

“
Fine. Sort of sliding into a zone, I think. Not as nervous as I thought I would be.”

“
Good.”

She was looking out of the window and appeared to be deep in thought about something. I wondered if she was thinking about her family. She had given at least a few clues just before boarding the plane to leave the Queen Charlotte Islands that made me wonder what sort of painful history she might have.

“
Your grandfather... he's Native American?”  It was the most innocent family question I could think of.

“
He is.  Full-blooded Haida.”

I nodded.  “So that makes you...?”

Mac smiled at me.  “I'm just a quarter.  Grandmother was white and so was Mom.”

“
That must be pretty interesting though?”

She shrugged.  “I suppose it is, but it's what I'm used to.”

“
Me, I'm pretty white bread, so I can't imagine that.”

Mac laughed and turned back to the window.

I couldn’t help but grin. This whole day—hell, the last
few
days in getting to know her and living through the ordeal with the plane—would make a great movie. And I think I’d be able to fit the part of the male lead perfectly.

Mac was an interesting character. I had already determined that the anger she felt towards me wasn’t as deep-rooted as she wanted me to believe it was. I also thought that Mac, deep down, always wanted to please everyone…and that was something that was hard to do when you were busy faking an intense hatred for someone.

“
Any thoughts on our first excursion?” I asked her.

“
It went really well. Thanks for your willingness to help me with the order. It meant a lot to him. And to me, too.”

“
Of course. Still pissed at me?”

She shrugged. I could see something resembling a smile working at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you, Jack. I don’t even know why—,”

She was interrupted by a loud banging noise, followed by a tremendous jostling of the entire airplane. Mac yelped and I went rigid at the controls as the plane dipped hard to the left. An alarm started going off overhead, a whining beeping noise accompanied by a small orange flashing light.

“
What happened?” Mac asked, clearly, and understandably panicked.

I had been fortunate enough to have never experienced any sort of mechanical troubles during my time in the sky. I had logged in nearly one hundred and fifty hours, so that was saying something. I made use of my army training and shoved my panic of an unfamiliar situation to the back of my head, looking up to the alarm as I righted the dip. The plane fought against me and I could hear a peculiar grating noise coming from the left side of the plane.

“Uh, w
hat’s happening?”

She was close to tears now, sitting back in her seat so far that I thought she might snap the back of the chair straight off.

“
One of the engines has gone down,” I said. Once I voiced it, I was surprisingly calm. I knew that it was very possible to fly a plane that was down one engine. Of course, I had never done it before. And, worse than that, I knew that I needed to land right away. The problem was that it was dark as hell below us and we were flying across the sea. I could cruise to the east, towards the coast, but I wasn’t sure if that would be pushing my luck.

The plane shuddered and jerked. Mac let out another yelp. “Can we make it?”

“
Yeah. I just need to land. Quickly.”

“
Do you know where we are?”

“
Not close enough to make it home,” I said. “We’re looking at a water landing. Which, because this is a float plane, shouldn’t be an issue. It might be a bit rough, though.”

“
So we aren’t going to crash?”

“
Not unless something else goes wr—,”

The plane jolted and dropped suddenly. I felt my stomach lurch as we dropped at least fifty feet before the plane righted itself.

“
What was that?”
Mac shrieked, nearly climbing up her seat like a frightened cat.

I had no idea what it was, but didn’t dare tell her that. Instead, I lied and said, “That’s normal for engine failure. But I need to land right now. You ready?”

She shook her head for a moment and then sighed. She closed her eyes, wiping a tear off of her cheek.

“
We’ll be okay,” I said, pretty sure it was the case.

I still had control of the plane, although I was having to fight it a bit. I felt a vibration in the steering column that hadn’t been there two minutes ago. I was also starting to smell something burning, coming from the left side of the plane.

I gradually eased the plane down. It tilted to the left again but I righted it quickly. Outside, the night seemed to shift. I was getting slightly nauseous and did everything I could to keep it from Mac. I tried to look in control and confident as I continued to lower the plane.

The sea became much clearer below us, the crest heads of waves like little white cracks in the ocean. I figured we were, at worst, two and a half miles from the coast and an hour or so away from our destination. While we were far from in the middle of nowhere, I thought it might take a good amount of time to have someone come get us.

Then, like some random blessing spit up by the sea, I saw an island creep into view ahead of us. While the land looked flat and relatively plain, it was as gorgeous to me as any imagined Paradise.

I wasn’t sure if the plane was going to make it that far, though. I wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but the important thing was that I still had control of it. We were descending a bit quicker than I would have liked, but it could have been much worse.

“
I thought you said a water landing was perfectly safe,” Mac said.

“
It is. But it also means that we’d be bobbing up and down in the Pacific Ocean until someone comes to get us. And that could be a very long time. If I have a choice between water and land, I’m always going to choose land. We have to land just along the shore, of course, because this is a float plane, but it shouldn’t be too hard.”

“
Okay,” she said.

I could tell that it killed her to be in a position where she had to trust me. But when her life was on the line, I guess it was easy for her to do.

The alarm continued to shriek and the little blinking orange light filled the cabin with an eerie pulsing glow. The sea kept drawing closer, the shapes of each wave more defined now.  The readouts showed that I was now at fifteen hundred feet and from what I could tell, the island was slightly closer than that. If I could keep control of the plane, we’d make it to the island.

But if the plane continued to shake the way it was, I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to contain it. The failed engine was easy to diagnose; it was hard to miss. But I couldn’t immediately figure out what other problems the plane was having. For now, though, I did my best to focus only on getting the plane safely out of the sky.

We were at twelve hundred feet, then a one thousand. The ocean kept hurtling towards us and I had a morbid thought… I wondered if this was what it looked like to a man that launches himself off of a building when killing himself, watching the concrete come barreling up towards you at dizzying speeds.

Mac was making a slight screeching sound as we descended. The plane continued to vibrate, with the occasional lurch. We neared the ocean and I pulled up just slightly. I observed the island ahead of us. The water surrounding it was calm for the most part. A few scattered trees sat in the distance but it looked like a fairly safe landing.

For one sickening moment, right around the time we were at two hundred feet, I thought about Afghanistan. I recalled flying away from the scene in the helicopter, covered in the blood of the only man I had been able to pull from the battle zone, only to watch him die. The memory came out of nowhere and made me feel dizzy. I was going up in the memory and coming down in the present.

This memory snared me until I felt the plane hit the water. Mac and I were jolted violently forward and the plane spun slightly to the right. I instantly felt the slow-rolling waves rocking us gently and knew that we were okay.

Mac looked over to me, fear in her eyes. We shared a weird look between one another, part terror and part relief. We were still staring uncertainly at one another when the plane made a soft skidding noise as the floats made contact with the stony beach.

“
Okay,” I said, speaking out loud not only to inform Mac of what needed to happen next, but to also walk myself through the process. “We need to get out and I need to tie us off somehow. So when I get out, you come right behind me, okay?”

“
Yeah,” she said, still frazzled.

I reached behind the pilot’s seat and grabbed the tie-downs that Mr. Tanner had also used for countless years. It had been years since I had secured a float plane, but it all came back to me as we sat there in the plane, the waves lapping at the bottom.

I took the tie-downs and opened the door. The smell of salt water and a chill to the air seeped into the plane. I nearly hopped out and go to work right away…I didn’t want to have to deal with a drifting plane
as
I was messing with the engine.

But I stopped long enough to look back into the plane. Mac wasn’t in shock per se, but she was trembling slightly and looking out of the plane’s window as if she was still trying to figure out just what in the hell had happened.

“
Mac,” I said.

Her eyes widened slightly as she turned to me. “Yeah?”

“
We made it,” I said. “We’re okay.”

“
Yeah,” she said again, nodding absently.

“
Come on,” I said, offering my hand.

She took it and came slowly across the pilot’s seat. I jumped down into the water and helped her down. The water only came up to our knees, but it was frigid. And the chilled air did nothing to help.

As if the cold had pulled her from her state of disbelief, Mac looked around and gave a defeated smile.

“
What now?” she asked.

I fastened the end of one of the toe downs to the left float, looking at the smoke issuing from that side of the plane.