She started to turn back to the terminal, but the thought of another lonely night seemed worse than the fear that sent her heart careening. She had to see Addison. Even if it meant going inside.
Slowly, she stepped into the doorway.
She saw him immediately, crouched down on the concrete floor, examining the pieces of the wing lying before him, as if some crumb of evidence might fall out of the metal and proclaim that they’d had it all wrong. His shirt was soaked with perspiration, its tail hanging out, as if he’d thrown it on as an afterthought.
Deep lines of fatigue and concentration were etched in the hard angles of his face. Shadows occupied the normally crinkled lines of laughter beneath his eyes. To any passerby, he might look awful. To Erin, he was light to a dismally dark heart.
She looked around, saw that no one else seemed to be here with him, that he was working alone. Tentatively, she moved toward him.
The sound of her heels on the concrete summoned Addison’s attention, and he snapped his head up. His eyes meshed with hers across the large room…questioning, welcoming…and yet condemning.
“Are…are you alone?” she asked.
He glanced around him, as if he hadn’t given the fact a thought until she brought it up. “Looks like it,” he said coldly. “Even NTSB people have to eat.”
“Not all of them,” she said quietly.
Her voice was lost beneath the sound of a passing plane, and Addison stood up, hands riding his hips, a screwdriver dangling from his fingers. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
He nodded in frustration and wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “Look, I don’t know why you came here, but this is not the best place for you…”
“I came here to see you,” she said, feeling the wrenching of emotion in her heart. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”
He shrugged, the indifferent gesture punctuating the uncracking facade he wore. “You would have found me here.”
“I did,” she pointed out.
He nodded. “Yeah. Guess you did.”
“I talked to Maureen today,” she said quickly, before they got into another round of meaningless banter that would rob the moment of its significance. “I wish I’d called her earlier. She told me about Saturday night. About how you were with Jason.”
He uttered a mirthless laugh and went to the table to toss down the screwdriver. “And don’t tell me. You came here to thank me for not coming on like the Hitler you had me figured for…”
“No,” she said. “I came here to tell you that I was wrong to manipulate you into meeting them.”
“You sure were.”
She felt familiar tears springing to her eyes, and turned away. Her hand swept through her hair. “Addison, I’m trying to apologize.”
“For what?” he asked. “For thinking I don’t have feelings? That I like it when my reports hurt people? For setting me up?”
A tear rolled down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away. “Addison, I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
Shaking his head, he ambled toward the corrugated wall and leaned into it, bracing himself on an elbow. She started to go toward him, but suddenly he ground his teeth and kicked the rippling metal, sending a loud clang echoing throughout the hangar. She jumped and muffled her sobs.
Addison turned back toward her. “Don’t be sorry, Erin,” he shouted, “because I’m not the big hero. I’m human. And as much as I want to, I can’t let that little boy’s pain, or yours, change my report.”
He stepped toward her, biting out each word. “I have…to tell…the truth. Can you understand that? Because as much as I felt for Jason Hammon and his mother, as much as I may even feel for you, I don’t have the power to change the facts. They are what they are!”
Erin set one hand across her stomach and covered her eyes with the other. Her nose was a shiny shade of crimson. “I know you can’t change them. Just like I can’t change the feelings I have…about the crash…and Mick’s dying… and my flying again…” Her voice broke off before she could list even half the things plaguing her.
As if he couldn’t bear to face her pain, Addison turned his back to her and leaned over a table, his head dropping down. She could see his own pain, his own despair, and though she ached—though he had made her ache—she wanted to heal him. Did it mean she was in love, she wondered dismally, that she could stand there and let him hurt her and still not want to see him hurt?
She went toward him, the sound of her clicking heels incongruous in the palpable tension of the room. “Tell me about her,” she whispered when she was close behind him. “Tell me about your wife.”
A moment of startled silence passed between them, but Addison didn’t move. A machinist’s jeep sped by outside, a voice in another hangar shouted to someone on the runway, a plane’s engine shook the building. Finally, Addison spoke. “I loved her,” he whispered. “Probably as much as Maureen loved Mick. As much as Jason loved his dad.”
More tears rivered paths down Erin’s cheeks, and her lips twisted, but she didn’t answer.
“She was going to New Jersey to visit her old college roommate,” he went on. “I was supposed to go with her, but I couldn’t work out my schedule, so I let her go alone.” The words seemed to come faster, louder, the more he spoke, but he still did not move from his position, slumped over the table.
“I was driving home from the airport when I heard the report on the radio…” His voice broke, then recovered, raspier as the tale unfolded. “I thought, ‘No, God, it’s a mistake.’ But I knew I had put her on that plane. I had watched it take off.” His shoulders heaved, and Erin longed to reach out to comfort him, but she knew it wasn’t the time. Not while he embraced his wife’s memory.
“It was a stupid, senseless accident. A collision with a private plane. Too much traffic in the area, and the controller hadn’t seen it.” He swallowed again, but the lump of emotion in his throat wouldn’t be dislodged.
“I swore that if I could, I’d make sure that nothing like that ever happened again…that no other husband on earth would ever have to suffer that grief. That’s why I asked the NTSB to move me to the field. But along the way since that time, I’ve learned that I can’t stop them all. I can’t protect every grieving widow. I can’t shelter the children. I can’t carry their load of misery on my back and still do my job.” He wiped his eyes roughly, leaving them red, and slowly stood up straight.
When he turned to her, the dullness in his expression told Erin that he’d slipped through her fingers once and for all.
“So think of me as the enemy if you have to, Erin, if it makes you handle your own grief better. Think of me as the one you can blame it all on. Because I’m going to tell the truth about this crash no matter what, so that every pilot out there in training will know that it can happen to the very best. That flying takes every ounce of concentration they have, and no amount of experience can substitute for it. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll stop one crash, and keep one little kid from suffering like Jason has had to.”
Erin’s sobs rose up in her throat. It was over. He was dismissing her, telling her that he was playing the game his way and that if she didn’t like it, she could hit the road. And while she understood his point and his pain, his dismissal hurt her.
“I wish I had known her,” she managed to say. “I wish I had known you then, when you were happy. And I wish things could be different.”
He didn’t answer, just stared at her with those dull, agonized eyes, those eyes that didn’t disappear from her mind even when he wasn’t there.
“Despite what you think of me now,” she choked out, “I’m still sorry for all the things I said and did. All the wrong conclusions. Next time I’ll take more care in checking my facts.”
And then she covered her mouth and left him standing in the hangar, surrounded by the sound of those engines rumbling through him like the thunders of hell itself.
Chapter Twenty
The Cessna’s e
ngine rumbled beneath Erin, but it, too, seemed like thunder from the underworld.
Her hands trembled as she followed through the mental checklist, mechanically doing what she had long ago been taught to do. Maybe she couldn’t forget the life-altering impact of the crash on her life. Maybe she couldn’t run from her misery over Mick’s sudden absence or Addison’s fleeting presence. Maybe she would never be happy again.
But she would not let her flying be one of those maybes she couldn’t control. It was likely one of the only bits of her old self she would have left when the report on the crash was filed and others forgot about it and life moved along normally again. She might not have Addison or answers or peace, but she would have her flying. She’d have that if it killed her.
If it killed her. The thought, like a fearful draft of icy air, sent a convulsive shiver through her body. But in its wake came a more rational fear. It will kill you if you don’t.
She took a deep breath and resolved to make the plane move. One step at a time, she would get it on the runway, then into the sky. Her brain struggled to find some hope, some help, and she grasped for the Scripture verses that had replayed in her mind so many times over the last few weeks. “Perfect love drives out fear.” And the one from Second Timothy, where Paul wrote, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” She knew she had that power, that love, and as soon as she took this step, her mind would be at peace again. She would be healed of this fear.
She would just sit here a moment, she told herself. Just a few more minutes, to pull herself together before she tried. She had all the time in the world. No pressure. Nothing at stake…
Everything was at stake, Addison thought, diving back into his work with the vigor of a desperate man. He had laid it all on the line, all of it. It was as if he were trying to hurt himself, as if he wanted to suffer the emptiness, the loneliness, that he’d had before Erin. It was as if it was some penance he had to pay…but for what? For Amanda?
He sat at a table where a stack of documents lay and began scanning the information there again. But the same thought kept haunting him. God required mercy, not sacrifice. He had done his penance. He had hurt. It was time to live again.
He heard the hangar door open and turned around, dreading the need to face another person in his darkest moment. The sight of his father-in-law, his face as stiff and harsh as the gray mustache he wore, only seemed fitting in the context of the moment. Like a prosecutor crossing the courtroom to the defendant, Sid came across the hangar and faced Addison with dull eyes.
Addison was torn between getting up and feigning welcome, and staying where he was. But the look on Sid’s face told him this was not going to be a cordial visit. He decided not to get up. “No one told me you were coming.”
“The decision was made as soon as I heard you had delayed filing this report again,” Sid said. “The Board thought it was high time I put you back in line.”
The usual familial friendliness lurking under his cloak of authority was lacking today, and Addison knew he still hadn’t gotten over finding out about Erin. “I wanted to double-check the facts,” he said. “Call it gut instinct, but I’m not satisfied with the results we’ve come up with.”
“Gut instinct?” Sid snapped. “I’ll tell you what I call it. I call it female manipulation. Hormones! You’re deliberately delaying things because of that woman you’ve been seeing!”
“Now wait a minute!” Addison shouted, his anger reverberating off the walls. “You’re out of line!”
“No, you’re out of line, Addison! And I’m here to warn you that someone with your position and your job can’t afford to get involved in a dead-end relationship! It doesn’t work! It only gets in the way, slows things down, confuses you!”
“The only one confused here is you!” Addison bellowed, coming to his feet. “I’ll see her anytime I please, and neither you nor anybody else on the NTSB is going to stop me! There’s nothing in my contract that says I can’t have a relationship with a woman, or even marry her if I feel like it!”
As he stood before Addison, Sid’s eyes narrowed with blistering hardness. “I don’t need a clause in your contract,” he said. “You’re not indispensable, Addison. Not even to me. Remember that. I won’t let you smear the good memory of my daughter with some kind of cheap affair that alters your good judgment. I’ll do anything to stop that.”
Addison ground his teeth and struggled not to hit the man, but before he had time to act, Sid had moved across the floor and was out of the building.
Not much later, Addison was sitting on the bare concrete floor of the hangar, leaning back against the corrugated metal wall, when his team came back from dinner. His face was drained and weary, but the deep lines of misery there were more pronounced than the lines of fatigue.
“You okay?” Hank asked.
Addison ignored the question and brought a big hand up to rub his face mercilessly. If Sid thought he could give him ultimatums, he was crazy. As angry as he’d been with Erin, he wasn’t about to let either his father-in-law or the NTSB take away his options. He could destroy those himself.
He thought of her tears, her fragile state when she’d left him. Why had he let her go? his anguished heart asked him. Why hadn’t he accepted her apology? Did he think he could just forget her, as if she’d never entered his life? Did he think he could use reason to banish her from his heart?
Slowly, as though each limb were sheathed in lead, he pulled himself up and dusted off the jeans that had gone beyond the point of being called dirty hours ago. He leaned against the table next to him, fingered the disassembled parts of the wing, and thought how his life was in the same shape as the mess before him.
“Hey, Addison. Maybe you should eat something. You look a little pale.”
Addison again ignored the comment and strode across the room to where his shirt was draped over a chair. He grabbed it up and pulled it on, his expression distant.
“What you need is some sleep.”
Addison turned back to his men as he buttoned his shirt, scanning their concerned faces with vacant eyes. “I’ll be back later,” he said, in a barely audible voice. “Or maybe I won’t.”
Then he crossed the floor strewn with wreckage and left the hangar to find Erin.
It took over an hour for Addison to track her down. When Madeline said she wasn’t home, he had tried the youth center, then the health club, both to no avail. Finally certain that Madeline was covering for her, he’d called her apartment again and demanded to talk to Erin.
“I told you, she isn’t here,” Madeline said, irritated.
Addison leaned his forehead against the glass of the phone booth, closed his eyes, and came as close to begging as he’d ever done. “Please, Madeline. I have to talk to her. Make her come to the phone.”
“I promise I don’t know where she is!” Madeline repeated. “Scout’s honor. She hasn’t even been home.”
Addison turned around in the phone booth, weighing the truth in Madeline’s words. He wasn’t sure if he believed her. “Is there someplace she…someplace she could be that I don’t know about? Anywhere at all?”
Madeline hesitated, and Addison knew he’d asked the right question. He held the silence, refusing to give up until she told him. “Yes, Addison,” Madeline said finally. “There is one other place she might be.”
He found Erin at Pioneer Private Airport, sitting frozen in the small Cessna, its engine running. A sense of overwhelming relief filled him that she had taken this step, even if she’d kept it from him. It was good that she was working to overcome her fear. He hoped it would lift one more obstacle from their way.
Unwilling to upset her concentration, he took a chair in front of the glass panel and watched, waiting for her to move. Sunshine beat down on the runway, and the summer sky was clear. Visibility would be excellent when she flew.
But she never did.
“If you’re watching that little lady in the Ces
sna,” a janitor said as he swept the floor near Addison, “you’re gon’ be disappointed. By my calculations, she’s been sittin’ there for goin’ on two hours.”
A look of alarm flashed in Addison’s eyes. “Two hours? Has anyone checked on her? Is she all right?”
“Yep,” the man said, moving his broom in long, expert strokes. “Keeps sayin’ she’s about to take off anytime. Just never does.”
Addison stood up and grabbed the rail cutting across the glass. Peering out, he could barely make out her shadowed shape in the cockpit, slightly illuminated by the bright lights over her head. The urge to go out there, to apologize, to comfort her, surged through him. But even as it did, he knew it would only make things worse. She had to conquer this herself, just as he’d had to conquer his despair over meeting Jason. Only she could make that plane move.
He watched for more than ten minutes, pacing like a madman as he did, whispering encouragement that she would never hear. “Come on, Erin. You can do it. Just move the plane.”
Finally, as if she heard the words and believed in them, she started to roll forward. Addison grabbed the rail again and watched, his eyes alive with anticipation. “’Atta girl, Erin. Come on. You’ve got it.”
The plane turned onto the runway, then began to move faster, picking up speed as it traveled. Addison’s palms sweated on the cold chrome, and his heart hammered the way it had the first time he had flown. “Let go, Erin,” he muttered against the glass, his hot breath fogging the pane. “You can do it.”
As if following his order, the plane lifted off the ground. Erin was airborne. “All right!” he shouted, paying no heed to the amused janitor, still sweeping across the room. “You did it, Erin! You did it!”