He and Groom were crossing the bridge now. Winston pictured Colleen as a child in the backseat, asking over and over about the bridge collapsing, about their car plummeting to the water below. As he considered Groom’s offer, Winston did not feel the accustomed dread he sometimes felt crossing the bridge—dread at the possibility of descending toward something that may have no bottom. Instead, as the car climbed higher, he felt a lifting, as if—at any moment—he could take to the sky.
Chapter 15
Colleen had set her alarm for 8:00 a.m., which would give her plenty of time to wake up and get dressed, have a cup of coffee, and then drive her mother to the beauty shop to have her hair done before Rodney’s funeral. She woke up thinking about Rodney, but she also woke up thinking about Tom Groom. He was set to take his miraculous flight that morning, and as she lay in bed, Colleen could feel that his presence was gone from the house. She could also feel the absence of her father, which was something she’d grown accustomed to as a little girl, and that feeling had only grown more familiar as she’d gotten older.
She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth when the phone rang. She stuck her head into the hallway, heard the shower running in her parents’ bathroom. She finished brushing and spit into the sink and walked into her bedroom and picked up the phone. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Colleen,” Winston said.
“Hey,” she said.
“Listen, honey.” The line went quiet for a moment.
“Dad?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m here. Listen, honey, I need you to do something for me.”
“What?” she asked. “I have to take Mom to get her hair done.”
“What time is her appointment?”
“Eleven a.m.,” Colleen said. “What’s going on?”
“That’s plenty of time,” he said.
“For what?”
“I’m going to fly up to Wilmington,” Winston said.
“You?” she finally said. She laughed. “You’re going to fly in that plane?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it’ll be fun. And I have to drive up there anyway to drop some stuff off.”
“What stuff?”
“I’ll tell you about it later,” he said. “Listen, I need you to come pick me up at the airport. We’re going to leave here soon, so if you don’t mind, go ahead and leave. I’ll be waiting for you when you get there. Same spot I picked you up.”
“You’re going to fly?” she asked again. “You?”
“Yeah,” Winston said. “I’ll see you in a bit. Tell your mother you’ll be home in time for her appointment.”
“Okay,” Colleen said. “This is crazy, Dad, but I guess I’ll see you in Wilmington.”
“Okay,” her father said. “See you in a bit.”
She walked into her parents’ bedroom and poked her head into their bathroom, where her mother was still in the shower, steam pouring from behind the curtain, the mirror fogged over.
“Change of plans, Mom,” she said.
Colleen drove her mother’s Buick Regal down Oak Island Drive with her eyes scanning the sky, the clouds, the tops of the trees for any signs of the airplane.
By the time she reached the bridge stretching over the waterway, she’d given up hope of spotting it, knowing that she’d missed the takeoff, or at least, she thought, she’d missed the scene of it not being able to get off the ground after all. She’d missed it because of those few moments she’d sat on her bed, thinking about her father’s sudden willingness to get on an airplane, those few moments of talking to her mother before getting into the car. As she drew closer to the top of the bridge, she looked to her left down the waterway in the direction of her parents’ house.
And that was when she saw it in the water’s reflection as it emerged low over the trees across the waterway. Colleen’s eyes followed the silvery glint of the airplane as it rose sharply into the sky, its metallic shell so close it seemed that she could have rolled her window down and reached out and run her fingers over its shiny belly, the huge black propellers on either wing so close that she almost felt their power buffeting the side of her mother’s car. She watched the plane through her driver’s-side window as it rose slowly, nearly hovering in the air, and she followed it in her mirrors as it passed. She slowed her car to a stop at the top of the bridge, and she climbed out in time to see the wings wobble as the plane leveled off over the ocean and then banked left. It circled back toward land in a magnificent sweep and headed north along the coast toward Wilmington.
As she watched the plane go, relief washed over her body that Groom and her father had made it off the ground, that she had not seen the airplane plow through the trees on its course toward the waterway or nosedive into the ocean after climbing into the sky.
When she arrived at the Wilmington airport, she cruised slowly through the pickup area. She expected to find her father there, standing on the curb, but she didn’t see him. She parked near the same spot where her father had when he’d come to pick her up only a few days before. Outside, she could hear and see airplanes taxiing, landing, and taking off, and although Colleen knew her father and Groom would’ve arrived before her, she could not help but search the skies for the silvery plane she had seen take off in Oak Island. Taxis were lined up at the arrival doors just as they’d been lined up when she’d arrived from Dallas. Although she did not see him, Colleen wondered if the taxi driver she’d spoken to when she’d first arrived was watching her now. What would he have to say about her? A few days ago she had been a woman waiting for her father to come get her after she’d done something unpredictable. Now she could not help but think of the irony in the fact that she was a woman coming to get a father who’d done something even more unpredictable.
Inside, the small airport was alive with people standing in line at the handful of ticket counters, checking luggage and making their way toward the airport’s single terminal. Colleen didn’t know where her father’s airplane would have landed, so she walked toward the huge windows at the terminal’s mouth that looked out on the runway, expecting to see something—police cars or FBI vehicles or the DEA or some other sign that people had been waiting to meet her father’s plane. But nothing outside the windows appeared any different than when Colleen had arrived days ago.
A small information desk sat in the middle of the airport, and an older woman, probably a volunteer from the community, sat behind it. The woman smiled when Colleen approached.
“My father just landed,” Colleen said, but she stopped. She tried to think of what to say next, how to explain what she needed to know in order to find him. “He’s with the FBI.”
“Oh,” the woman said, as if it were the most surprising thing she’d heard all day. “Okay. Well, what airline did he fly in on?”
“He wasn’t on an airline,” Colleen said. “They flew in from Oak Island. They should’ve landed maybe half an hour ago. I just don’t know where to meet him.”
“Okay,” the woman said again with a slowness that Colleen thought might cause her to scream. “Let me check on that.” The woman picked up the phone on the desk and then searched a piece of paper for the correct number she wanted to call. She lifted the phone to her ear and waited.