And now that I know what Jack saw and had to deal with, all the better."
Theresa turns to her window. "You're probably right," she says, after a while, and tries to smile. Genuinely. I try to smile back. But none of it's any real solace to me. For I could say that I'm still reeling, that I've not yet begun to process all this new information, but that would pretty much be an outright lie.
Wouldn't it? Not because I had any knowledge that Daisy's death wasn't wholly an accident, because I didn't, but you'd have to be a complete innocent (or maybe a kid) to imagine such a thing not happening, that her drowning in the pool wasn't somehow foreseeable, given the way she was raging and downfalling and the way I was mostly suspended, up here before I was ever up here. And if any part of what I'm saying is confessional, it's not re: Daisy but rather the kids, who I knew years earlier would almost certainly end up witnessing some excruciatingly awful moment.
Outside the air is getting a bit choppy, the d-dump d-dump as if we're cruising in a speedboat on a rippled-surface lake, the meter even and steady. I can see the weather coming together maybe 50 miles directly ahead of us, not thunderstorms, thank goodness, but odd high-hung batons of cottony haze, odd because you'd normally encounter such a thing in the early morning before the sun rose and burned it off but rarely if ever now, in midafternoon in late summer. Because of the change in weather I've called MacArthur for an instrument approach, the new routing duly given, and taken us down to 5000 feet, and we've just flown over Westerly, Rd., passing over the mouth of the Pawcatuck River, and are now approaching Mystic and Noank and will fly along the northern shore of Fishers Island right down the line to Plum Island and then Orient Point, tracking in along old Route 25, hitting Southold and Cutchogue and Mattituck before buzzing the big outlet mall at Riverhead, where I'll pick up the Expressway and take it on in before banking south for my home field, the route so ingrained in my head and hands that I could probably fly it at night with shot gauges, just the long ropes of the car lights to serve as my guide.
But now the turbulence ramps up, the invisible pockets hitting us hard and fast (like speed bumps in midair), the up and down severe enough that I tell Theresa to tighten her seat belt and brace herself, just not on her control wheel. It's raining on us now, or better we're in it, and I hope like heck that we're not heading into a so-called embedded thunderstorm, surprise shit that no pilot wants ever to see. I glance over and Theresa's curled up a bit, and I can see she's already a little green about the gills, that sloe-eyed open-mouthed pant. I reach back behind her seat to where I keep the coffee bags for getting sick in and hand one to her. To my surprise she immediately retches into it, not a lot, because she didn't eat any lunch, but enough to make me worry that it's not solely airsickness. She folds it up and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
"You okay?"
"Yeah," she answers, leaning her head against the window.
"I'll be fine."
"We don't have long to go," I say, "but it might get rougher."
She half-smiles and gives me a thumbs-up full of irony and goofiness and cool, and for a mostly happy instant I think I can see almost every one of us in her, Battles and Daisy both. But suddenly I feel she's very young and I'm very old and I can't believe I've ever allowed her to come up here. For a while I considered keeping a parachute in the back for Rita but she hated the idea and now I'm wishing like crazy I had, so I could strap it on Theresa just in case one of the wing struts now fails, before she's trapped with me in the metal-heavy groundrush. And no sooner than I finish the thought does Donnie get a deep frontal wallop, Whompi, and then another, Whompt, the force of each rocking us in our hard cockpit seats, violently enough that my sunglasses fall off and land somewhere down near the pedals.
The rain is fearsome. Theresa's headset has rotated forward on her head such that the band is in front of her eyes, and I reach over and pull it back into place. She's wincing, and suddenly there's a blot of blood glossing her lower lip.
"Theresa!"
She touches her mouth and inspects the smear. "It's okay, I just bit my…"
Whornp-Whomp!
Donnie bucks, then feels like she's yawing straight sideways, and for a long, long second I lose hold of the wheel and accidently push the rudder pedal, and we dip hard to starboard like we're on a bombing run, diving to 4 o'clock, the airspeed indicator boinging inside the crystal like a fat man stepped on the scale; Donnie's motor screams, the wings shuddering right down to the rivets, the airframe racked to its outer tolerances from pulling a G or two more than it was designed to pull, and you finally understand in that continuous pregnant second what people are talking about when they hold there's a nano-fine and mostly philosophical distinction between falling and flying. Or fearing and fighting, which perhaps explains how despite my overwhelming impulse to curl into a single cell I not-too-consciously manage to right her, get her level and steady, only to see we've lost 1000 feet, an entire skyscraper, which is absolutely fine as long as there's no more funny business.
"Are you okay?" I ask Theresa, who is canted forward a bit awkwardly. "Hey, talk to me."
"Yeah," she says weakly. "I've had enough of this, though. I want it to stop. Okay, Jerry? Make it stop."
"Okay, honey. We just. ."
Whomp!
. . we just have to get out of this damn pocket!"
Whomp-Whomp!
"Shit!"
Whomp-Whomp-WHOMP!
This set is nearly concussive, and produces in me what must be the dream of a boxer as his clock is being supremely cleaned, the wash of giddy relief that this is not yours truly but some other chump caught in the klieg lights of ignominy. As the beautiful dream dissipates, though, I can feel that my neck is already stiffening, the little bones fusing, with everything else that's jointed, hips and above, feeling distinctly unhinged.
"Theresa, honey," I hear myself say, my eyes probably open but not really working, unwilling to witness what will no doubt be the coup de grace, "hold on, honey, hold onl"
But the final wallop doesn't come. The whomp just doesn't whomp. The rain has stopped. And all we have is the alto hum of Donnie's prop, the rpms in the key of A, a drone that's as sweet as any Verdi tenor crooning of a singularly misguided love.
"Theresa, baby, we're clear, we're clear."
She nods to me and even smiles but there's a look she's manifesting that I have seen plenty in the mirror, and on Jack, and Paul, and even Pop of late, but never on Theresa Battle—
namely, this face of deferral — and I say, "What the hell is wrong?"
She glances down to her lap. And there, between her tanned legs in black Bermuda shorts, on the red vinyl seat, is a shiny pool of wet. She lifts a knee and the clear liquid dribbles over the white-piped edge.
"Please tell me you peed."
She shakes her head.
"Oh shit."
"It's too early," she says. "The baby's much too young to be born. We're only at twenty-five weeks."
"Do you know how much time you have, before it gets dangerous?"
"No." And then, with the alarm of a hard fact, "I have to get to the hospital. Now."
"It's going to be twenty minutes to the field, maybe more."
"To what field?"
"The field we came from! The only one."
"You have to fly me to New Haven, Jerry," she says. "That's where my doctor is, at Yale — New Haven. I can't go anywhere else. Not now. Please!"