Fly Me Read online

  Suzy does her best to ignore the sound of his voice, imagines herself trickling down the stairs, down toward the court and the house, toward the cliffs and out to sea. She wants to run.

  “While I like to be in control, I don’t fuck with the universe. I don’t tempt her. I don’t tempt Mami. I control what I can control. This is a stacked game and I try to keep her on my side. I make sure I’m doing all I can, just to cover myself. Give it back to the water and the clouds and the cliffs, give it back to Mami when I can, you know?”

  Christ, she wants to run.

  “I sacrificed a pig up here a couple months ago. One that Mami had presented to me without my asking. It came with a message. Popped up out of nowhere. And I knew its purpose. The girls fell pretty hard for it, but on New Year’s I did the trick, knew it had to be done. I love that Aztec stuff, you know? Cut its heart out with a garden trowel.”

  Suzy sniffs the wind, senses her cool, wet head growing lighter not heavier, as though buoyed by her proximity to the clouds. Is that the line they’re allowed to leave on?

  “Don’t ever think about it,” he says.

  She can’t make full sense of what he’s saying anymore, but the words are out before she hears them, her own: “Don’t ever think about what?”

  He turns and catches both of them square, but it’s all for Suzy: “Don’t ever think about anything with me on your mind. No thoughts, no action, no words. You know all there is to know about me now—but as far as you’re concerned, I don’t exist. This is what I mean about an understanding, about trust. I hear you so much as mention my name to anyone, including this piece of shit here, and I’ll fucking gut you.”

  And he’s to the stairs, the soft padding of hard footsteps on the finely crushed shells of a half billion years. And she and Billy file behind him like long shadows. One-two-DOWN, one-two-DOWN, one-two-DOWN. You dig?

  Suzy makes the run. It’s a big one. Triple load. Fifteen pounds in her little bag. She feels the same strange heat and colors as she did that first trip back in July. The unflappable focus, eyes on the bag, while taking care of all the normal things, too. As they dip down beneath the clouds in New York, into a freezing platinum rainstorm, she feels as though she’s almost there, skims back through the trip to make sure she didn’t do anything that could’ve drawn attention, realizes, in that low coast to the runway, that she needs to find something new to do for so many more reasons than the big one. That she’s better than a job she can handle in full even when her mind’s occupied with something else entirely.

  And within fifteen minutes of the last passenger clearing out, she’s off the plane and into the bathroom. Cassidy and the cash. As Cassidy slings her bag over her shoulder and makes a move for the door, Suzy holds her up, sort of sadly. Apparently, no one’s told her.

  “What?” Cassidy says, and Suzy waits for a sign of recognition that this is the end, the last one.

  When it doesn’t come, all Suzy says is “Super good seeing you” and awkwardly clops toward her to hug her like she did at Christmas. Only this time she presses her cheek to Cassidy’s cheek, and feels Cassidy’s body progress from slack to tense to slack again, a freezing and a melting on account of the skin-to-skin. When she lets her go, Cassidy turns, wordlessly, and walks away. That’s it.

  Suzy heads to the lounge. She strips down, checks her watch to confirm the forty-five minutes she’s got before she needs to be back at the gate for the turnaround, and steps into a hot shower, just like that very first time. Everything as it was before, only different. Shower then, shower now, bookends on this defining phase of her life. The selfless, savior, up-to-the-edge phase.

  She flies home. She serves drinks with an extra-special smile. She falls asleep somewhere over the middle and has to be roused by a girl she recognizes from one of the new Grand Pacific ads. The blonde. “I’m Mia, Fly Me. Fly Mia. Fly Grand Pacific…to Tokyo!” The airline is expanding. The airline is growing into its name.

  She takes a cab from the airport. Shouts down the cabdriver when he starts bitching about her request: two stops in Sela del Mar. The first is a quaint little house with a cream Volvo and a lemon Bug. She sneaks along the side yard, through the fence, and to the screen door to Billy’s back house. She pins the envelope between the screen and the door, and runs back to the cab that’s idling in the alley. She didn’t take her cut—doesn’t really care if she ever sees it anyway, the relief is so distracting, to be through.

  The cab drops her at home, and she carries her half-packed bag up the stairs and into her bedroom and sleeps for a day—in bed, on the couch, on the floor in the box of light created by the mouth of the window. She sleeps in sunlight. She catches up. The sun’s down again, two days come and gone. The phone rings: it’s the airline, Janice saying how nice it is to have her back, that’s all, just really good to have her back and that she’s thinking about her and her sister. Suzy’s going to miss parts of stewing. They’ve been better than she sometimes gives them credit for. She feels the snake of paralysis slipping down her spine, the frozen feet and legs, the tingly fingers. Maybe Grace will visit her here in the night. Slip through the blinds with the moonlight. What would she say, what possible message could she have? “I’m Grace, Fly Me.”

  It’s then that the phone rings again, running the ringer out. She imagines a voice—Pick up pick up pick up.

  The phone rings again.

  They don’t usually call twice. It scoops her to her feet. She stumbles over, suspended in the in-between. Pick up pick up. It is difficult to tell if this voice is a deeper extension of her paralysis, a new room unlocked. But then the real voice announces itself, slicks around the cartilage cast of her ear like cold seawater.

  “Hey,” it says, “there’s a problem with what you left me.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “They say you’re short twenty grand.”

  “I didn’t even open it. It’s exactly what they gave me.”

  “Why didn’t you check?” Billy says. “Why didn’t you count the money?”

  “Because it’s none of my fucking business anymore.”

  “Look, I’m at a pay phone at the bottom of the Peninsula. I just left Honeywell’s. He opened the envelope and he said it’s twenty grand short. And he says it must be with you.”

  All things considered—the weird half sleep, the shock of the call—she puts it together pretty quickly.

  “He could say that no matter how much money is in there. You never told me what to expect, what the deal was. I’d never delivered this much before. He can say whatever he wants.”

  Billy is silent on the other end of the line. Billy gets it, too, is what the silence says.

  “He said that the people in New York claim it was all there. Whatever amount they agreed on.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing I can do,” Suzy says.

  She’s at the blinds, they’re turned flat. Her view is toward the water. She feels her shoulders curling over, her knees bending into a low athletic base. The gradual crumple, it’s like collapsing in the cold. It’s been years since she’s felt that impulse, but she remembers it precisely. Being broken down on the side of the road senior year of high school, caught out on the way between the track and home, flat with no spare, so unlike Wayne. No pay phone, no heat. And a need to cover a mile plus in the snow to the nearest gas station. Arriving after nearly an hour and finding them closed, shut down with frozen pipes, blacked out for the evening. The temperature dropping, the nearest station another two miles. And the inward turn away from panic. No shouts, no screams, no tears. Only a greater resolve to stay solid. To slow her toes and ankles and hips and shoulders. To slow her heartbeat to a record low. To slow her mind to a place of ultimate contentment—It isn’t even that cold.

  She hears Billy’s breath. Her mouth is small and she counts her pulse making noise in the fattest artery of her neck.

  “There is…,” Billy says. “There is something you can do.”

  He waits for her res
ponse. If he could see the glaze in her eyes, he might not expect one.

  “Something that was proposed by Honeywell himself…”

  Again, waiting for her gratitude.

  “He said you can make another run. Make up the difference.”

  “I didn’t take anything…,” she says.

  “Well, that’s not really a position we can take.”

  “‘We.’”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “You fucking ruined me.”

  “C’mon, let’s figure out one thing to end this, and then you can move on.”

  “Are you dense?”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “I have no real options.”

  “I think—if you’re interested in my opinion—that you need to do just one more. That we all make the terms even clearer. That you know what’s coming. That he can’t claim that you did or didn’t do whatever.”

  “He can say whatever he wants!”

  “But maybe this was just a misunderstanding. Maybe this was bad luck and someone out there really did just give the wrong amount of money, I don’t know. All I mean is this is the thing we have to do.”

  “He said he’d gut me.”

  “He was just trying to scare you. Trying to keep you quiet.”

  “And what’s this, then? Some more harmless rhetoric?”

  “I think he’s just in a pinch. I think one more and then you’re out.”

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I’ve been looking for a replacement. I’ve met a couple girls I think could be good. He just needs someone reliable, and then we’re close.”

  “I have no leverage whatsoever.”

  “I need…” He starts again. “What I really need, as much as you don’t want to hear it, is a commitment. I just need you to say you’re going to do this. I’m at a pay phone, but Honeywell’s in the car. I can’t really be saying this, but we really…there’s nothing we can really do except have you say you’re going to do this. Otherwise it’s more threats, it’s cops, it’s I don’t know what else. Maybe you figure something out. Maybe we figure something out. But we need the time. We need more than two minutes right this instant to work on it. I have to say yes.”

  “What can I even say to that?”

  “I’m telling him you’re in, but that it’s the last one for real.”

  “Billy, fuck. What am I supposed to do?”

  “It needs to be sometime in the next week. A slightly different thing. They need you to go to Honolulu.”

  “I hardly ever fly to Hawaii.”

  “Say it’s for your sister. Say it’s a memorial thing.”

  Her head actually falls forward, the way a fighter jet nods when it hooks up to the slingshot on a carrier. A little bow of incomprehension. Her lower lip cracks the seal from her upper lip, her mouth comes apart. There are no words, just a click in her throat, a click on the line like a bugged phone. And she will think about it for days, how regrettable it is that she can’t say what she means to say. How this simple request to get her off the phone—to keep her life moving along, a gesture Billy evidently regards as helpful—is the thing that marks the end of it all with Billy. And instead of saying something real, there’s just that fucking click that comes out, a little sound with no meaning, but also, on a bad phone in a hustled moment, an approximation of silence Billy takes to mean Okay.

  There is nowhere left to go. Midafternoon, Suzy bombs the hill at Nineteenth and pulls up at the edge of the Strand. Suzy carving, Suzy rolling the board with the arches of her feet—all of that. The Strand is crowded. Winter at the beach. The whole town is out for a stroll, but there’s no one in the water, no one on the sand. The sand is too cold. She plants herself halfway between the Strand and the ocean. Nearer the water an uncountable number of gulls stand at attention, facing the same direction in evenish rows. Edith had called it “Sunday school” for the birds.

  Suzy’s due to fly at eleven tomorrow. She feels backed up to the edge of Sela, to the edge of the state, her heels hanging over the precipice. The options have diminished: not Schuyler Glen, not New York, not Paris, London, Rome. Not Gracie, not Billy. She sees a man coming toward her with a stack of flyers, a savior. And she stands quickly to outpace him. He calls after her and she starts laughing scared. They are after her, they’re at her door. And there’s just one place left for Suzy to go.

  Mike is home and he looks crisper than he has since the accident. He looks like he’s spent the weekend in the sun. He’s had a haircut. His whole head looks as though it’s been moisturized. She expects the glow to mean good news, but Mike’s quick to say it once she’s inside the house.

  “I don’t have anything,” he says. “I can’t find him. And they don’t want it. They’re gonna kill it. Four and a half months for an unpublishable piece and a kill fee.”

  “They won’t give you more time?” Suzy says.

  “I’m out of time. I signed—” He pauses to swallow. It’s a blurry s on the signed, the sort he gets when he drinks. The slur Grace would poke at. “I signed a contract and the contract is unfulfilled.”

  He’s shaved, too. That’s the big difference. Mike never grew a full-out beard, but he always seemed long-days deep in stubble. The clean, wet cheeks draw greater attention to the stark sideburns, the contrast of their edges. The length of his hair, too, shorter than she’s seen it and parted to the other side. Everything is five degrees different.

  “I’m in a bad spot,” he says, running his right hand through his hair, crossing up the new part, not used to it himself. “I’m gonna sell the car.”

  “You’re gonna sell the car? Is that really the best thing?”

  “I’m out of money. I need money.”

  “But is not having a car really the best idea? That’s been the one thing you’ve liked most out here.”

  “Well, you liked it. I mean, you used it as much as I did.”

  It’s a slap like she hasn’t received from him since she moved out. She spots the green bottle of gin on the counter. She wonders how long he’s been at it.

  “I just mean it’s a thing you’ve needed most,” she says, “to just get out and see things when Sela got a little claustrophobic.”

  “I haven’t thought it out fully yet,” he says, returning to the kitchen, to the freezer and the ice tray. “But I might as well let you know now: I’m gonna move back to New York. I have a life here and everything, or at least some leftover pieces—I know some people, I know you. But I’m gonna have a better chance back there. I came out here, I tried. And I failed in a lot of ways.”

  The number of things there are to turn to is now zero. Suzy is silent. She feels exposed—she feels as though her life is threatened by the circumstances. She gets out a “What?”

  “I don’t mean to drop this on you,” he says. “And I don’t know how soon it would be or anything, but maybe a couple months, get out of the lease early. One month, two months.”

  “You’re just gonna leave.”

  “C’mon, Suz, is this really that surprising?” The s’s are softened again, like eraser smudges. “I came out here and I fucking failed. It never got me like it got Grace. It never got me like it’s gotten you. You found people, you’re doing well enough. You’re gonna find your way into a new good thing when you’re through with stewing. I dead-ended. I tried a marriage, I tried a magazine, I tried to get back into writing, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. It’s like I’ve reverted to being twenty-two. To being my younger self. A me who’s failed to build up any equity over the last five years.”

  “Are you suggesting that you lost your equity when my sister died?”

  “Suzy, relax. I’m not saying anything but what I’m actually saying: I fucked up, I don’t have much; bad things happened; I’m going back to where things will be easier for me.”

  She hardly hears him. She’s stuck on the relax. “Relaxshh” is what he says. She feels like kicking him in the mouth. But she lets it pass, the red
drains. And then the fact fully envelops her: Mike has somewhere to run to. Mike has somewhere to start again, with no baggage, with no threats. He’s trading a car in for an apartment and a job. It’s wide open. Hanging in the stillness of the house, the still-fresh absence of Grace everywhere, Suzy tries to solve her own problem in a single move. But there’s nothing that makes sense, nothing she can work out. She is still backed up to the edge.

  “Before you do any of this,” she starts. “I just…I really need your help with something.” He’s still in the kitchen. He’s pouring gin into a cocktail shaker. “I’m in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?” he says. He caps the shaker and throws it over his shoulder, the ice clattering so loudly that she’s forced to pause her disclosure until he’s satisfied with the temperature of his drink. He shakes, hard, for five seconds, ten, fifteen, and Suzy stands in the living room, silent. He uncaps the shaker and pours a martini. She’s still silent, and he says, “Well?” She’s beginning to despise him all over again. But she has just one opening.

  And so she tells him from the beginning. The first run on the Fourth. The runs over the past seven months. The money for Wayne’s treatment. Billy’s flip on her, the trap. The meeting with Honeywell on the Peninsula. Honeywell’s ties to Colombia and the LAPD. The death threat. It comes out in a crooked line, with diversions and asides, but he doesn’t interrupt. He sips at his drink, standing at the kitchen counter. And then, finally, she says it, as a capstone clause: “…between you and me.”

  He has a look on his face that reminds Suzy of when she’s watched him read. A small, tight mouth and a wrinkled forehead, eyes focused on the page. He betrays no sense of shock or judgment. He just waits for her to finish.

  “Mike,” she says finally, “what?”

  “What what?” he says.

  “What are you thinking? What the fuck do I do?”

  He holds steady and then a grin chops his face in half.

  “What?” Suzy says, her blood moving quick through her body.