Aloft

eleven

I REMEMBER, from the time I was old enough not to care so much, Pop liked to say to me, with a put-on twang, "You're okay, Jerome, but I'd like you a whole lot better as a nephew than a son."

And I'd say to him, "Likewise, Uncle Hank."

We'd have a chuckle about it, our little hick routine, and often we'd play along that way for a while, through whatever we happened to be doing, driving in the car or painting the fence, and talk about stuff that we normally wouldn't talk about, which was pretty much everything, though this was of course only when Bobby didn't happen to be with us. When the three of us did go out together I was happy to sit in the back and let them shoot the shit and razz each other and just focus on my books on flying aces of WWII. It's no great shock that after Bobby went to Vietnam we didn't play the game anymore, and not because I was getting too old. But it was sort of fun while it lasted. Maybe we'd be driving out east to buy shrubs for a job and Pop would ask me about my girl and whether I'd finally gotten my fingers stinky, to which I'd make like I was hoisting my rig and say, If my big one counts, and we'd stupidly yuck it up like that all the way to the nursery, yakking like nimrods about women in the street and the latest car models and the merits and demerits of certain brands of beer. It was all a dumb joke but it was easy and comfortable and it doesn't take an advanced degree in psychology to figure out what we were doing, or why, or that those times were probably in fact when we felt closest to one another, most like a father and son.

I recount this with less nostalgia than a kind of wonder that we played the game at all, though at that moment in the jostling ambulance with the sirens wop-wopping and the sturdy EMS gal barking in Brooklynese his sorry vitals ahead to the ER, when it was clear that this was Pop's last careen on our side of oblivion, I thought for sure that I heard him try to drawl some avuncular sobriquet to me through the misty oxygen mask, some snigger to of Jerry-boy to check out the lushly ample hindquarters of the lady paramedic. But it wasn't that, of course, rather the muffled gasp of a death throe, in equal parts pissed and terrified, punctuated by his grasping my hand so tightly that I had to squeeze back as hard as I could to make him relent, actually crackling the little bones in his hand. Pop then kind of wailed and the butch paramedic possessed of these huge caramel-brown eyes noticed us holding hands and said with a fatalism and tenderness that walloped me deep in the chest, "It's really all we got, huh?"

I guess I blurted a yeah, not thinking much about what she was referring to, and it's only now, a few weeks later, when things have settled down and I'm finally up here again in sleek Donnie, Theresa serving as my copilot, cruising at a smooth altitude above this familiar patch of planet, that I'm able to peel away to the fuller meanings.

I should note without further delay that Pop has not been lowered into the ground, or sifted into an urn, or shelved away in a granite wall cabinet, nor is he otherwise in any way closer to the netherworld than he was when rescued from the Ivy Acres ground cover, but ensconced in the lap of Jack and Eunice Battle luxury, bain en suite, satellite TV clicker and walkie-talkie in hand, so he can squawk down to Rosario and order up a Bloomin' Onion or other microwave treat whenever he feels a lonely hollow in his gut. He is convalescing in style after the combination heart attack and mild stroke (an extremely rare occurrence, we're told, both to experience and then survive, particularly with no extreme ill effects). Eunice I hear has been especially solicitous, turning down his bed herself while he receives his daily bath from the hired home nurse (female, un-tattooed), and then fans out the dozen or so journals and magazines she replenishes weekly for him on the west end of the king bed, pillows fluffed and propped, the forever-blab of Fox News on the big tube awaiting his scrubbed pink return. Jack, too, is being extra helpful, keeping Pop up at night with a special subscription to an adult channel, his favorite program being the Midnight Amateur Hour, in which we are introduced to the porn star aspirations of excruciatingly ordinary middle-class folks, one couple Pop swears featuring the head cook at Ivy Acres. Even I have been going over there every other day, bearing gifts of guilt-larded fruit like biscotti and Sambuca and twine-wrapped soppressata or other such items that might bolster his memory of another time in his life when things weren't any better or worse but when at least most of his family and friends were still alive. Maybe it should be no surprise that it takes a serious brush with death to really land oneself in Nir-vana, which in this case for Pop — and soon enough me, soon enough you — is a convening of family predicated not so much upon either obligation or love as on a final mutual veto of any further abandonment.

And if family is the "it" the ambulance gal was talking about, the all-purpose F-word for our times, really all we got, like anybody else I'm not sure whether that's an ultimately heartening or depressing proposition, though perhaps that's not the point. I will confess that at the very moment I thought Pop was a goner, kicking the bucket, croaking for good, I didn't much feel love for him, even as I had love; I felt intellectually sure, is what I'm saying, which is no excuse. What this might suggest about families in general or ours in particular or just sorry old me is that while prophets tell us we're innately bestowed with enough grace to convey righteousness and bliss to entire worlds (much less one person), we mostly don't, at all, just pure potential that we are, just pure possibility. And the people who most often witness and thus endure the chasm between our exalted possible and our dreary actual are the ones we in fact love, or should love.

This is why Pop is in fact so lucky now, so very lucky, which has nothing to do with his being alive. (We're all alive, aren't we?) And for a host of reasons I doubt this attention lavished on Pop will be duly lavished on me when my time comes due, the primary one being that unlike Pop I'll probably be pushing hard for special treatment, and thus receive none in return. I should wise up and probably start getting chummier with Jack's (and eventually Theresa's) kids, besides just appearing in the doorway of their double-height foyer with the Disney video-tape of the week, waving it like Fagan might a piece of bread above the dancing urchins. In addition I can't bear to tell Pop that his only grandson and bearer of the Battle Brothers torch will soon have to relinquish several lifetimes of accrued capital for a final grand blowout liquidation sale, which even then won't cover the various notes come due. I can't bear to tell him that our sole recent investment in the property is a fix for the section of cyclone fence that one of the guys accidentally ran through a few years ago with a backhoe, and only because Suffolk National Bank ordered us to secure the grounds and garage.

Richie Coniglio tells me that Battle Brothers will be pretty much stripped, but assures that Jack himself will be safe, if safe means still owning the big house and big cars but no longer possessed of the salary to maintain it for too long.

Lately Theresa has been accompanying me on my visits to her brother's, and to my happiness has been exceedingly warm toward him and Pop and also toward Eunice, who has taken the news of Battle Brothers' demise quite hard. After Pop had his trouble Jack suddenly came clean and opened the books to her, and apparently for a week or so she didn't do anything different, quarterbacking the household offense as always with Rosario blocking upfield, picking through the various ladies' lunches and kids' pool parties with that austere English-German efficiency, even audible-izing an impromptu single-malt scotch tasting at the country club followed by a raclette party back at the house. But then the next day while waiting to pay at Saks, somebody allegedly nudged her and she pretty much freaked and actually started singing a pop song, quite loudly, all of which she couldn't remember, and then bent all her credit cards in two and had to be escorted out to her Range Rover by mall security. She's been seeing a counselor twice a week since, and appears to me to be calmly, perfectly okay, though perhaps calmly, perfectly okay is a worrisome drop-off for someone accustomed to rolling forth at full throttle and being all-time 4WD-engaged. Though we don't know whether she is on medication, Theresa has recognized the imbalance as potentially serious, and has taken her, without a whiff of irony, on a couple let's-just-be-girls outings, including a longish session at the fancy new Korean nail salon on Deer Park Avenue and an even longer one at the all-you-care-to-eat Brazilian meat palace, where at least Eunice thoroughly ruined her manicure clawing and gnawing on char-grilled short ribs and baby backs.

Theresa, I'm sure, practiced her current form of all-you-care-to-eat, as she did earlier this afternoon at the marina restaurant near Bar Harbor where I ordered us each a two-anda-half-pounder with drawn butter and dinner rolls, she barely touching her meal. We're heading back now along the seaboard, our flight path taking us past the southern beach suburbs of Boston and over Buzzards Bay, to cross the Sound at its wide mouth and then follow the northern shoreline of the Island, until the final turn to MacArthur Field. Having Theresa along is an unusual circumstance, and one she initiated. In fact, I'd normally never fly on a day like this, when the weather, although supremely fine on the journey up, holds the chance for an inclement change. At present, we're approaching the start of the Cape and I can see far off in the distance and probably still southwest of New York City the broad white cottony mass of the approaching system, nothing like dark thunderheads fortunately but to this exclusively fair-weather flyer material stuff all the same, and a sight I've never seen, at least from up here.

At breakfast this morning Theresa was in an expansive mood and talking about how she was starving. Paul instantly whipped together some French toast from day-old challah bread, which was excellent but she couldn't eat, and then after Paul sort of slunk away deflated she expressed an intense hankering for lobster and asked me if we could fly to Maine. I called the weather service for the forecast and told her probably not, as a low front was moving rapidly up from D.C. and could make for uncertain conditions on the return. I offered to pick up some lobsters at the fish market instead but she insisted and said she was finally feeling hungry for something and I figured who was I to say no to her. Paul thought it would do her (and clearly himself) some good to get her out of the house, and so we drove to Islip and went through our checks and got Donnie right up, riding a strong tailwind to Maine in what had to be record time.

On the bleached-cedar dining deck of The Peeling Skiff the sun was undiffuse and brilliant, both of us sporting baseball caps and sunglasses, Theresa's hand aglitter with the ring Richie bought for Rita and that I attempted to give back to her and that she and I quickly agreed to put to better use, by be-queathing it to the next generation. With the fat candy-store rock on her finger and her Yankees cap, Theresa was looking particularly girlish, and for a moment I felt a strange blush of accomplishment, for no other reason than that I had known her for the entirety of her years, now not so few, which is no great feat, of course, but still the sort of stirring that can make you almost believe that there might not be any more crucibles ahead, just this perennial interlude of melody and ease. When our plates arrived she got all excited and quickly tied on her white plastic bib and took the cracker right to a meaty claw, but after forking out the chubby little mitt she just sort of nibbled on it like it was her second or third lobster and after putting it down chewed idly on a couple of the small legs before neglecting it altogether. I didn't say anything because I wasn't that mad and really what was there to say that wouldn't be completely fake or depressing. After I finished mine, she pushed her plate over and I ate her lobster, too, even though I was already full, solely because I couldn't bear it slumped there unrequited between its lemon wedge pillows, staring up at us one-armed, thoroughly wronged.

"Hey, what's that?" she now says over the headset, pointing ahead to a strip of small islands off the Cape. "Is that the Vine-yard or Nantucket?"

"No, no, they're over there," I say, motioning farther out.

"You're looking at Naushon, I think. Or Pasque. Those are old-money hideouts, where I think they choose not to have electric-ity. They boat in ice and candles."

"Ice and candles?"

"That's what I hear."

"Sounds kind of kinky."

"Definitely not."

"I guess that's class."

"Yeah. Class."

We nod to each other, for emphasis, though neither of us is caring to make much of a point. This is how we talked on the way up, too, with her asking about a certain geographic or urban feature, to which I'd offer a bit of trivia about the nuclear submarine yards at New London or the history of Portuguese immigration to Providence or mention a surprisingly excellent fish-and-chips place in Buzzards Bay, where they brew their own malt vinegar. Conversing over the headsets is never like a real conversation, the overlaps and separations and pauses and canned feeling of the sound making for brief information exchanges at best, not to mention the constant pulse of the motor buzzing every nook of your being, which is not a bad thing at all if you want to feel as if you're busy just sitting there. This used to frustrate Rita sometimes, that we'd spend a whole day in the plane and seemed to have chatted nonstop but not about anything remotely personal, which suited me okay and in the end perhaps suited her as well. And why shouldn't it? Because when you're up here and aloft and all you're really trying to do is figure a word for the exact color of the sky, or count the whitecaps risen in a certain square of sea, or make sense of the almost infinite distance between yourself and the person driving his car on the lonely dead-straight road below, you don't want to engage in the familiar lingering intimations, allusions, narratives, all that compacted striated terra-firma consideration, but instead simply stir with this special velocity that is in itself worth the whole of any voyage, this alternating tug and weightless-ness of your constant departure.

"What do you think is going to happen with Jack?" Theresa says, speaking of terra-infirma.

"Jack? At some point he's going to have to sell that house.

And probably a lot of that stuff they have."

"Eunice does love that house."

"I don't think Jack does, or ever did."

"Where will they go? They have so much stuff. Not to mention Pop."

"I don't know," I say, instantly picturing the movers bubble-wrapping and crating him right there in the bed, propped up with clicker and Hot Pocket in hand.

"I can't see Jack and Eunice in a rental."

"You can get a real nice condo these days. They'll do fine."

"But there's no more Battle Brothers."

"Jack will get something going again."

"Are you going to help him?"

A loud rasp of noise squelches the end of her question, and I pretend it got lost in the wires.

After a moment, she says, "Well, are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Are you going to help Jack?"

"I'm retired, remember? And I'm not rich. At least not enough to start a new business."

"You should still help," she says, with clear alarm, her emphasis actually squawking the sound. "You have to."

"Of course I will," I say. "It's just not yet clear how."

"I can tell you how, Jerry."

"Okay."

"Why don't you invite them to live with us?"

"Are you nuts?"

"We have plenty of room."

"Plenty of room? There are three bedrooms, last time I looked. Jack and Eunice would need one, the kids another, and unless Pop is willing to go back to Ivy Acres, which I doubt, then one for him. That still leaves you and Paul, and then me, the owner of the house."

"You can convert the study to another bedroom for yourself, and Paul and I can move downstairs."

"Downstairs? That's the basement!"

"Maybe Jack can build some walls. There's already a half-bath down there. Besides, we're not going to stay with you forever."

"What are you talking about?"

"You forget I'm on leave. I'm going to have to teach again."

"What about extra maternity leave?" I say. "Isn't that the law these days?"

Theresa says, "I suppose so," though without much conviction, and not because she's someone who doesn't keep up on her worker rights and benefits. There's not been much pessimism in the house, if at all, the only indication of worry and trouble being that Paul sometimes has to excuse himself from the room or take a stroll around the neighborhood, probably so his heart doesn't suddenly shatter into a thousand jagged pieces; but by the same token there hasn't been any talk whatsoever of the future, or of any future past a few days out, which I can say over the last couple months we've been together has been a pretty liberally bestowed mercy among us, and judging from the sudden panicky hollow pinging in my gut, one I haven't appreciated near deeply enough.

I say, "You should take unpaid leave and stay longer. Paul can finally finish his book. When you have the baby you can take the master bedroom. There's an old crib in the basement that I'll clean and move up for you."

"That sounds nice."

"No problem."

"But what about the others?"

"What about them?"

"Come on, Jerry."

With the light shining from behind her sunglasses I can see her eyes searching me, perhaps not so much looking for the desired answer but rather the glimmer of a character somehow more wise and generous and self-sacrificing than the one that for some fifty-nine and fifteen-sixteenths years have come to possess. Being who she is, Theresa would never have cared for the kind of father with whom she could discuss fuzzy intimacies, talk interspersed with full-on hugs and remembrances of previous challenges righteously met and overcome, all at a pitch of loving confirmation muted only by the wistful minor-key note that we couldn't always be together every moment of our lives. Then again, I don't know if she would have even wished we were that rare pair who could take turns riffing, say, on the Lacanian imbrication of contemporary family life (another few words I've learned this summer), or talk fast and loose in slick jump cuts between our favorite neo-Realist films and hip-hop marketing and the sinister global triumph of capitalism.

No doubt things could have been different between us, much different, and maybe there's no actual alternative reality that would have proven any better than what we have now, or at least that we could practically abide. We are consigned to one another, left in one another's hands whether we like it or not, and perhaps the sole thing asked of us is that we never simply let go.

Still I say, "Jack won't want to come back to the old house."

"That's not what Eunice tells me," Theresa answers. "She's ready, too. All you have to do is call."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Nope."

This confounds me, even thrills me, but still, I say, "What about Rosario? There's definitely no room for her."

"She could come three times a week, to help tidy up, until she finds another full-time job."

"Who's figured this out already?"

"Take a guess."

I look at my daughter, lightly touching her controls. I say,

"The house will be a zoo."

"We'll all have to pitch in. Including you. Including me."

"Myself I can see," I say. "But you're doing fine."

"Come on. I let Paul do everything."

"Which he's pretty damn good at, if you ask me."

"Doesn't make it right."

"It does at the moment. Besides, if he didn't work so hard, he'd go crazy."

Theresa starts to say something, though her mouth must have come too close to the headset microphone, because the reply is distorted with noise. We're quiet now, just the steady blenderizing of the 150-horsepower Lycoming engine. She's gazing off to the northwest, over toward Hartford, or Albany, where there's still clear sky overhead. To the southwest, where we're headed, it's definitely going to be a bit soupy, which is plenty alarming, and it's probably good that I've already decided to fly back on a pretty direct route, in the hope that we'd somehow cut a few minutes off the trip, a few minutes maybe proving the difference between a cloudy or clear touchdown.

The specter of not seeing the field for the landing is one I've often imagined, nosing down into the murk and trusting only the instruments, hoping for enough daylight between the mist and the field to get a comfortable sighting before the final approach, for which I have some practice but not enough to make me happy. This is no pleasing challenge for a guy like me, who likes very much to see where he's going to step next, especially when life is a Paris street, fresh piles of it everywhere.

"Pop is going to be tough. But I suppose I have to heat and cool the whole house anyway," I say, disbelieving the Real as now embodied in myself. Which must always be a sign of deep trouble. "We can try it for as long as people can stand it."

"Okay, Jerry," she says without a note of congratulation.

"Maybe you can call Jack when we get home."

"Can't you call him? You could just tell Eunice, couldn't you?"

She waves me off with a flit of the hand as a mother might a too-old child begging for a nostalgic piggyback. I want to tell her that she's not quite understanding this one, that even though she thinks it's about my laziness and long-practiced avoidance of appearing tender and loving before my son, it's really about Jack himself, that he should be spared the ignominy of having to hear and acknowledge such an offer, which, as modestly as I might play it, and I will, naturally abounds with all sorts of subtle and excruciating indications of shame and failure. Or maybe I'm not giving Theresa enough credit, maybe she knows this to be the case and thinks Jack should face the paternal demonhead straight on, just accept whatever that minor if terrible god will extract of his vital mas-culine juices and afterward get on with the quotidian work of replenishing.

"You two have plenty to talk about anyway," Theresa says.

"The business notwithstanding."

"What now? Is he having trouble with Eunice?"

"There's tension, but only because of the money troubles.

They're actually pretty devoted to each other, beneath all the nickel plate and granite."

"That's good," I say, "because it's only Formica and chrome from here on in."

"It's just time to call him, okay? He's shaky."

"Yeah, okay, but he seems the same to me." This is mostly true, at least to my perception, everything about his manner and dress unchanged, save for the odd sight of his unwashed black truck, the alloy wheels grimy and the usually mirror-shined body splattered with dried work site mud and dull all over with a toffee-hued grunge. He's cutting back, which is necessary, as I know he always had the truck washed once a week on Saturday mornings for $22.95 (the #4 Executive, with double polycoat and tire dressing), for I'd meet him every other month (and spring for the #1 Commuter, at $8.95) and have a big breakfast at the Pit Stop Diner next door. And yet on this one I kind of wish he weren't economizing, because at certain times you really do want your loved ones to keep up appearances, and for all the worst truth-blunting reasons. If I had a personal voice recorder I'd note to myself that when I do call as Theresa recommends I'll offer to treat him to the #4 Executive, plus blueberry pancakes, this very weekend.

"He even mentioned Mom the other day."

"Daisy?"

Theresa nods, taking off her sunglasses, as the sun has now dipped behind a high bank of clouds, many miles in the distance. "Actually, he was talking about the day she drowned."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," she says, squarely looking at me, and not in the least somberly. "It's amazing. It turns out he was around when it happened."

"What are you talking about?" I say. "You were both at your day camps. When I got home there wasn't anybody but Daisy."

"I guess that's true," she says, "but Jack was there before."

"He was at lacrosse camp. You were at music camp "

"Drama camp," she corrects. "I was at mine, but Jack told me he turned his ankle and got an early ride home. Do you remember that he was limping?"

"No."

"It's funny, but I don't either," she says. "I really don't remember anything, which I'm happy about. But Jack says he was there. He has no reason to lie."

"Why didn't he say something then?"

"I guess he was upset, and scared. Besides being a little boy."

"So what else did he say?"

"Just as he got dropped off, someone was coming out of the house. A delivery man or something. Except this guy was drinking from a bottle of beer, and Jack remembers feeling angry toward him, though it was nobody he knew."

I don't answer her, because I don't know how much Theresa recalls of that part of Daisy's life and I'm certainly not interested in educating her here and now, but she says, "I assume he was there to see Mom. That's right, isn't it?"

"Probably so," I say. I suddenly remember all the empties in the house that afternoon, almost a whole case in all. Of course it wasn't the first time I'd come home to find that she'd been drinking heavily, though she mostly drank her sweet plum wine when she drank and the party-Iike litter of beer bottles had seemed unusual. I'd figured she'd been entertaining, a fact that wasn't so terribly hurtful to me at that point, the literal mess of the house more pissing me off, which really says it all, and after finding her suspended near the bottom of the pool the likely fact of some random guy having been there simply dissolved away among the thousand other details and duties that follow any death, and it never seemed important to mention to the cops who came around later that day that Daisy hadn't been drinking alone. But still the flashes of that day quicken my breath, and all at once I feel as though I'm flying at 50,000 feet, or maybe 150,000; it's like the air is thinning so rapidly we're in danger of floating up into the exosphere, right out into the black.

"Anyway," Theresa goes on, "Jack went inside and saw a lot of beer bottles in the kitchen, but not Mom. She wasn't in your bedroom, either, but while he was there he saw the bed all messed up and her underclothes on the floor. And more empty bottles. That's when he saw her out in the back. Sack was going to step out the sliding door of your bedroom and say he was there but I guess he didn't. He just watched her for a while. She was standing naked on the edge of the diving board, drinking a beer. He told me she looked very beautiful. Like a Roman statue, before any ruin."

"Jack said that?"

"I'm quoting verbatim," she says, unwistfully. "But he said he was scared, too. And I guess still angry, though he didn't really understand why. You can imagine what a bizarre and sexual sight it was for him. So he's just standing there watching her, and he realizes all the pool floats have been taken out of the water. The tubes and the swan raft and then that big pink doughnut she always used."

This was true, and something I didn't really think about when I got home. I'd assumed the pool had been cleared out by the cops or ambulance people, though it was an odd sight to see all the floats neatly lined up on the concrete deck, like the audi-ence for a swim meet.

"So what did he do?" I ask.

"He said he ran," Theresa answers. "He just ran out of the house, as fast as he could. He went to the playground, he was so scared, and went on the swings, for like an hour."

"Oh, Jesus, Jack."

"So when he finally comes home it's all over. He knows exactly what's happened. The driveway's full of police cars and fire trucks and the ambulance, with its lights going. That's what I remember."

"Why didn't he say something?"

"I'm sure he thought he was responsible."

"I guess so," I say, remembering now how he kept asking if little kids were ever sent to jail.

"But of course nothing happened to him. And then you were so efficient afterward."

"What? Because I had her cremated? That's what Daisy wanted, you know."

"I didn't know, no," she says, finally a little bitterly. "And I'm not talking about cremation. I'm talking about how you managed everything so quickly after that. I mean, come on, Jerry.

It was a world speed record for goodbyes. I didn't think it then but it was like a freak snowstorm and you shoveled the driveway and front walk all night and the next day the sun comes out and it's all clear, all gone. And then the fact of our not even being allowed inside the funeral parlor."

"You were there, but Nonna kept you two in another room."

"Yeah, Jerry, I know. We sat in the back of an open-casket wake."

"Jesus. I didn't know that."

"I'm sure you ordered her to keep us away."

"I didn't say to go to somebody else's funeral! Anyway, don't you think that was the best way? You were little kids, for chrissake. I don't care what anyone says. Kids don't have to mourn.

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!"

"I don't know. I've never flown there."

"Does it really matter?"

"It shouldn't. But this doesn't seem the time to experiment."

"Can't you use your chart?"

She reaches back and hands it to me, and I don't want to waste any time looking, but now that I'm really flying again I can see we've strayed from our flight path in just the direction she wants. This fact isn't material; even though I can't see much for the thickening haze, I know we're in fact much closer to New Haven than we are to Islip, which is probably twice the distance from here and definitely shrouded with the same weather. So I flip through the charts as quickly as I can while we remain on our due-east heading. And I see that there in fact is a field, which of course I knew some time before in a normal frame of mind, called Tweed, in East Haven, just a few miles from her hospital.

"All right," I tell her, "we'll go where you want. How you doing?"

"I feel okay I think."

"Are you sure?"

"Owwww…!"

"What the hell is wrong?"

"Something hurts," she says, suddenly breathing short and fast. "Oh shit. . shit… owwww!"

"We should be there in ten minutes, if I can do it in one run.

Let me try to call the tower now so I can ask for an approach, and an ambulance."

She nods, her eyes closed tight with the pain. When I get on the tower frequency for Tweed and explain the situation to the controller he rogers me for an instrument clearance for immediate landing on a south approach, runway 2–0, and places the other traffic in a holding pattern. At least the airspace and field will be exclusively ours. I'll head west over the Sound for a minute and then veer northwest overland before banking back for the landing. The problem is that it's now cotton candy up here, the visibility diminishing fast, and the guy in the tower warns me that it'll probably be a few feet as I'm approaching, which means I won't be able to see any landing strip lights until just before the wheels touch down. I know Theresa can hear all this but between the rapid lingo-laden technical instructions and sketchy audio quality and the astoundingly equable tones of our aeronautical exchange she probably isn't fathoming the potential peril ahead of us. When I finish talking with the tower and give her a thumbs-up I'm heartened to see that she shoots me one right back, no matter what she really knows.

But as I make the turn inland the vapor steadily thickens, puffy baits of mist moving quickly past the windscreen and thus reflecting what seems our now inhuman speed, the ground wholly invisible below, the last blue patches of sky fatefully re-ceding above, and I'm seriously beginning to wonder why this should be the moment of payback for my years of exclusively fair-weather flying, why I couldn't have simply been torn apart all by my lonesome in a nasty gray-black thunderhead a la Sir Harold. Why I couldn't enjoy your basic heroic romantic disappearance from the radar and been interred and eulogized in absentia, which really ought to be my fitting end.

Theresa says weakly, "Thanks, Jerry. For taking me flying."

"Are you kidding? I can't believe I let this happen. It's all my fault."

"I'm the one who wanted lobster."

"Doesn't matter. I'm your father."

"So?"

"I should have said no."

"Maybe you're right"

Theresa laughs, or screams, quite volubly, I don't know which.

"Are you comfortable?" I ask her. "What can I do? Are you cold?"

"I'll be okay," she says, tightly cradling her still gently mounded belly. "Just fly, Jerry, okay? Just fly."

So I do. The tower takes me over what must be land, and then has me turn 180 degrees for the runway, adjusting my heading as he lines me up with the field, and I check my airspeed, my altitude, my localizer, my glide slope, every indicator a go, and I take us in. And the air down here isn't rough, not rough at all, in fact it's the lightest meringue and we're a clean, sparkly knife, which is exactly what I'd hoped, for Theresa's sake. But what it is also is totally blanking, we've been swallowed up whole, the world outside gone completely opaque; I can't see the wings, or the struts, I can't see the damn nose. It's pure whiteout. I could be flying us upside down, or on our side, or pointing us straight toward the ground, and despite what the gauges posit my surging instinct is to pull up sharply and break off what is surely a doomed course, for whoever these days can fly blind and still so faithfully true?

Not Jerry Battle, for sure. But as we descend the floating crosshairs in the crystal magically align, literally right on the dot, and I take a hand off the wheel and grab hold of my daughter's unperturbedly cool fingers and palm, and at the last moment I actually shut my eyes, clamp them as tight as the engine housing, because what does it matter when there's nothing to see anyway, no real corroborative signs? And in the strangely comforting darkness I see not some instant flashing slide show of my finally examined and thus remorseful life but the simply framed picture of Theresa's suggested grouping not in the least difficult to delimit or define, all our gentle players arrayed, with scant or even nothing of me in mind.

I'll go solo no more, no more.

A skidding bump, the back-tug of the flaps, and we're here, running at neighborhood street speed on the field. To the port side, parked next to the terminal, an old-time ambulance is waiting in the fog, its lights silently spinning.

"We're here, baby," I say, my eyes giddy with tears. "We're here!"

But when I let go of her hand to turn and taxi Donnie back to the terminal it falls limply between us. I look over and her head is thrown back, her eyes closed, the band of her headset scraping at the side window, and for a second it feels just like that one summer when I was taking us home at the end of her failed runaway junket, when after the first couple of hours I truly wasn't angry at all, and was even secretly pleased, in fact, to be driving down the straight-shot highway as I watched her sleep the beautiful sleep of her at-last-exhausted adolescence, the bronzed arid palettes of the Dakotas rushing by at eighty-five.

"Baby?"

And when I look once again, I'm confused, for her face and throat, I think, are surely not cast in such a light-shaded stone, or wan papier-mache; they can't be that null newsprint color.

When I undo the seat belt and pull her over she slumps sideways on me with such a natural drape that I'm almost sure everything will be perfectly fine, my girl's just tired, and as we jounce along the paneled tarmac, it's like both of us are now guiding this little ship in, both of us at the controls.