Sunsets of Tulum. Mr Raymond Avery Bartlett
sucked, he’d done something incredible for part of it.
A light on the controller panel turned from amber to red: the signal was live. Any poor slob who was up at 6 a.m. with their television on was seeing a few seconds of Fenway Park splashed by morning sunshine. All courtesy of Reed Haflinger and the rest of the Saber Traffic Team.
The light went from red to amber. The shot was complete.
Reed pushed the intercom.
“Got it. Now let’s try a shot from the north.”
“Roger,” said the kid.
But instead of the usual dip into a new direction, the chopper’s nose dropped like an elevator with the cable cut, descending so quickly that the heavy control panel in Reed’s lap flew up and smashed him in the forehead. His cup of coffee splashed on the roof, and anything not bolted down was suddenly floating: pens, candy wrappers, the flashlight, papers. All of it suspended in the cabin, the chaos of an uncontrolled descent.
At the same time, instead of holding tight to the northeast compass point where it should have been, the nose of the copter turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, stopped, reversed and did another full three-sixty. Instead of seeing Fenway Park below him through the bottom-mounted camera, Reed Haflinger was staring at it directly through the cockpit window.
Is this how it happens? was what came into his mind. Is this how it happens? Instinctively, he hit the intercom.
“We okay?!”
Nothing but the hiss of a live microphone feed.
“Rabbit?”
This is how it happens.
Reed could see the kid through the Plexiglas fighting with the controls. He saw Boston. What a beautiful city. He wondered if he and Laurel could have made it work out somehow. He thought about whether she’d put him in his folks’ plot or somewhere else. He saw the sunlight scintillating over the mouth of the Charles and wished he’d found a way to let Laurel teach him how to swim. The kid they’d almost had; the kids they’d never had since. The rut they’d been in. Everything he’d let slip by thinking there’d always be time. Things popped into his head faster than he could process them. Not sadness but just an overpowering sense that everything had happened too fast.
Then: “I got this!” Rabbit’s tone, a note or two below sheer panic, made it clear that even Rabbit remained unconvinced. “I got this! I got this!”
The helicopter’s rotors howled as they struggled to gain purchase against gravity, and slowly, slowly, the trajectory of the chopper shifted away from vertical. The heavy control panel slammed down again onto Reed’s thighs. He saw the readout. Only a few seconds had passed.
“We’re good,” Rabbit yelled again, as they began to rise, so close to the rooftops that Reed saw laundry strung on clotheslines and newspaper pages curled into rain gutters and a collared calico cat that hadn’t thought to look up quite yet. He rubbed the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and saw it was covered in blood.
Another news request came in and the nose of the helicopter dipped, they veered, and headed off to get the next live shot for Saber Traffic network.
* * *
When they landed back in Beverly, Reed stood on the tarmac long after the rotors had wound down and stopped, pressing a piece of oily rag onto the gash on his forehead and watching Rabbit walk all the way back towards the terminal, cinching up his hoodie against the cold. Just a kid, he thought. Just a poor fucking kid.
The sun hadn’t burnt off any of the cold, but Haflinger allowed himself to shiver, relishing the sting of the cold air. Winter on its way. These sensations. Being alive.
Finally, inside, still shaking, Reed took out his cellphone.
“Reed,” Dan said, answering before it even rang. “What can I do you for?”
“I’m taking some time off.”
“What do you mean? When?”
“Now. Next two weeks. Hell, maybe three.”
“You can’t do that. Saber Traffic needs you.”
“We had a goddamn tail rotor malfunction. Almost died. We were so close to the rooftops the pigeons were getting out of the way.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. You’re still here.”
“I mean it, Dan. And I’m not flying if I’m not with someone who’s dealt with a couple crash landings under enemy fire in some Asian desert somewhere.”
“Rabbit’s green, but he’s got potential. He was top of his class.”
“At Acme Flight School? I want to see his log.”
“Give him a chance.”
“Rabbit almost turned us into stew.”
Then a spontaneous call to Laurel. Voice mail. Which could mean anything: she was still sleeping, she was on the T, she was avoiding him, anything. Which wouldn’t matter any other day, but something depressed him about leaving a message. He kept it short.
“Laur, call me back.” He waited, willing words to come. “Something happened today and it gave me a crazy idea. Let’s get away for a couple weeks. I know you’re busy and there’s a zillion things that you need to do but don’t think it to death this time. Just say ‘yes.’ Pretend it’s old times.”
He hung up, staring out the plate glass at the brown leaves scampering across the asphalt. Even the Cessnas, wrapped in tarps and chocks on their wheels, looked cold.
Moments later, he redialed.
“I’m thinking Mexico.”
Day One
Arrival
The 737’s wings dipped on final approach into Cancún International, waking Reed from shallow, in-flight half-sleep. He rubbed his eyes, shifted position in the soft leather seat, and looked over at Laurel. For a moment, in that drowsy distance between dreams and waking, he saw his wife’s legs as a complete stranger might: how impossibly toned they were, taut and sensual, too long even for the added room of business class. That the modeling career she’d seemed born for never quite materialized still seemed unjust to him, to both of them; it was criminal to keep those legs hidden away beneath the Channel 3 anchor’s desk all day. She had draped herself across the window area with the entitlement reserved only for the dangerously beautiful, and—just for an instant—he saw those legs and felt a flicker of hope. That she’d agreed to come at all on such a last minute trip seemed like winning a small lottery. That she’d juggled her schedule and gotten the time off had to mean he wasn’t the only one wanting to find a way to reconnect. The deep discounts thanks to it still being hurricane season were what clinched it for her. Even Laurel, thrifty to a fault, agreed they were too cheap to refuse.
These marriage issues were pushed back by something less important but more immediate: Laurel had closed the shade and fallen asleep soon after take-off, and now that the seat belt sign was turned on there was no chance to get up and look out from another part of the plane. Despite his fear of the water, or perhaps because of it, Reed had been imagining what the Caribbean would look like from above. With Laurel’s pillow tucked against the opening, any attempt to lift it would involve waking her up, and waking her up would not end well.
Risking a reprimand from the flight attendants, Reed unbuckled his seat belt and lifted himself into an awkward crouch. Balancing so as not to bump his wife and disturb her, he reached toward the window shade until he could just barely hook two outstretched fingers onto the handle. If they’d been in coach it would have been simple, but the seats here were huge, and reaching over without placing a hand on Laurel or her chair took care and concentration.
With the slowness of someone defusing a bomb, he began to slide the plastic panel upward, behind his sleeping beauty’s pillow. A horizontal