“I haven’t come back to stay,” Colleen said. “I think Janelle would go back to Atlanta to stay. That makes sense for her.”
“That’s good to hear,” Scott said. “The part about you not being there to stay, I mean.”
“I think Janelle should go back because it’s not safe for her and her family here, and she doesn’t have an anchor,” Colleen said. “And she hasn’t been here long enough for the place to get inside her, you know.”
“Do you think Dallas could ever get inside you?” he asked.
“God, I hope not,” Colleen said. She heard Scott laugh. She waited, wanting to say the right thing, the true thing. “But you’re my anchor,” she finally said.
“And you’re mine.”
After she hung up the phone, Colleen realized that her body was humming with contentment. She lay back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling, fighting the urge to call Scott back to fan the flame of what she now felt. She had not realized that she had spent the past few months hungering for this feeling until the very moment she felt it. And then she realized something else, something that both pained her and healed her: the conversation that she and Scott had just had was the first serious conversation they’d had without mentioning their son since the day they had lost him. That alone made her want to call him back, made her want to share this news with him, made her want to ask him what it meant. Had they healed? Had they forgotten him? Had they grown used to him being gone? Or had their lives—which is to say life, really—just moved on?
She recalled the feeling she’d had as she’d flown over the waterways before touching down in Wilmington, the feeling that her son’s ghost or spirit had followed her from Texas. She thought of the nursery door she’d kept closed since coming home from the hospital, of the remnants of her child that she’d hoped to store there without them escaping. But he would be with her—was with her now—no matter where she went. She thought of Janelle and her baby and her brother, Jay, loading up the car for Atlanta, Rodney’s spirit watching them leave and then trailing behind them as they headed south, flying alongside the car, peering through the back window at his child where he slept in his car seat.
Colleen dozed off and on, her mind never far from Scott or Janelle or her father or the feeling of holding Janelle’s baby in her arms, the scent of powder that lifted from his body and clothes. From her bed, Colleen heard Winston come home, heard him speak to her mother, heard him refuse dinner on his way up the stairs. She opened her eyes. It had grown dark outside.
When she opened her door, she could hear Groom’s voice downstairs, talking with her mother in the kitchen. The light was on in her parents’ room, and she walked across the hallway and found her father sitting on their bed in his undershirt and pants. He looked exhausted.
“Hey,” she said. She leaned against the door frame and crossed her arms.
“Hey,” he said.
“You done for the day?”
“Done for the day,” he said. “But not for the night. I’m on runway duty.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. With her father in his undershirt, she saw how thin his arms looked, how much older his body appeared now.
“But I’ve got some good news,” he said. “Groom finished up with that rear landing gear today. We’re cleared for takeoff, as they say.”
“That is good news,” Colleen said.
“One half of the puzzle solved,” he said. He had his shoes off, and she could see his socked toes curling against the carpet. “Thanks for going out to Janelle’s house with me today. That made it easier, I think. For me and for her. Hopefully, we can find out what happened to him.”
“Any word on the bust down in Myrtle Beach?”
“No, no results back yet,” Winston said. “But I’m hopeful we’ll get a break.”
“Me too,” Colleen said. “I’m hopeful too.
Friday, November 2, 1984
Chapter 13
Maybe it was the strafing beam of the airport’s beacon light that gave Winston the dream that he had, or perhaps it was his sitting up in the driver’s seat, his head cocked back against the headrest, his mouth open, sucking damp night air through the cruiser’s open windows. The light was in his dream, and so was his breathlessness, and so was the dampness. And so was the airplane.
In the dream it is dark, and Winston and Marie and Colleen are all floating in the ocean, the bright winking light of the Yaupon lighthouse hovering above the horizon in the inky, black distance. Winston knows the three of them are floating with the aid of something hard and buoyant, and as the lighthouse revolves and casts a weak beam like an arm reaching too far to touch you, Winston is able to make out the piece of the airplane’s wing that he is clinging to. Colleen and Marie float within earshot, close enough for him to see that they too are clinging to pieces of the airplane, close enough to hear Marie’s panicked cries, close enough to hear Colleen’s terrifying silence. The ocean roars around them. Winston knows they are being pushed toward the shore, closer and closer to the breakers, where walls of water will soon crash down upon them. His clothes are soaked, and they are so heavy he fears they will either pull him down or be ripped from his body, exposing his skin to the sharp plane debris that floats around him. His fingers grip the wing as tightly as they can. He is terrified of letting go, going under and never seeing Colleen and Marie again. And then he thinks of them floating somewhere behind him. He looks back, sees that the ocean is on fire with the plane’s wreckage, oil slicks burning like torches, Colleen’s and Marie’s faces lit in terror by the orange light.
“Hold on!” Winston screams.
When the radio blasted a voice into the quiet car, Winston lurched forward as if tossed by a wave, his feet kicking as if trying to swim to the surface. He was in the cruiser on the runway, the beacon light behind him, the airplane’s silhouette lit by the moon.
“We just got another fire reported in Plantation Cove,” Rudy’s voice said over the CB.
“I can be there in ten,” Glenn’s voice responded.
Winston caught his breath, shook the image of the fiery ocean from his mind, and picked up the receiver.
“I can be there in two. I’m right out here at the airport.”
“Meet you there,” Glenn said.
Winston looked at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. He cranked the engine and threw the cruiser into reverse, cutting a wide semicircle before pulling it into drive and gunning it down the runway back toward the parking lot.
There was no traffic and he was already so close that there wasn’t any need to turn on his siren or roof lights, but he drove as fast as he could down Beach Road before turning right into the development. He’d known the arsonist would keep setting fires, but he was surprised that he was back at it—especially back at it at the same place—so soon. It meant that, at least to the arsonist, the fires he was setting were personal.
Winston killed his headlights once he’d driven into the neighborhood, the cruiser’s running lights giving him plenty to go by. He followed the road to where it ended in a T-bone at the marsh-front properties, and he looked to his left at the house he’d investigated the night before. It appeared quiet and vacant, but across the street from that house he caught the flicker of orange flames coming from another home that was under construction. He watched a truck pull into the muddy yard and turn its high beams on. Someone had beaten Winston there. He turned left and barreled down the road as fast as the cruiser could accelerate.