T
he Cessna’s engine 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…
E
verything 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.
N
ot 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.
I
t 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.”
H
e 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 Cessna,” 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!”
But the glory was short-lived. As he watched, she circled the plane and began descending back to the runway, as if she couldn’t get back to the earth fast enough.
Addison’s heart plunged to his stomach. “No, Erin,” he whispered. But it was too late. Already she was following the runway back to where she’d started.
The plane had scarcely stopped when Addison forgot his decision to leave her alone and burst through the doors, running toward the Cessna.
E
rin shut off the engine and slumped back in the seat, covering her distorted face with hands that shivered like leaves in an icy wind. Anguished wails ripped from her throat, and tears burned paths through her fingers. She had forced herself to take the plane up…but the fear that encompassed her once she was airborne was worse than she’d imagined. “Why, Mick?” she shouted in the small cockpit.
A knock sounded on the window next to her before she could analyze just what she was blaming her dead friend for, and she jumped when she saw Addison standing there. Beneath the overhead lights, she saw the expression of compassion and understanding painted on his features. Erin felt as if God had sent him at exactly the right moment, and relief washed over her like a cleansing tide. She threw the door open and fell into his open arms.
“I couldn’t do it!” she rasped, her sobs cracking her words. “I got up, but I could feel the panic coming on. I couldn’t do it, Addison!”
“It’s okay,” he whispered, crushing her racking body against his. “It’s okay, babe. I know what you’re going through. I went through it myself.”
“How did you get over it?” she cried.
“I kept trying. I didn’t give up. You aren’t going to give up, either. I’m going to help you.”
“No, you can’t help. I can’t escape it. The crash…”
“You’re not going to crash.”
Frustrated and still a victim of the jagged edge of panic, Erin pulled back from him. She shook her head wildly, begging him to see. “No, don’t you understand? It already happened, only I wasn’t there, and I should have been. It should have been me. It should have happened just as I keep seeing it, and you could have blamed me instead of Mick. No one would have been hurt if you’d blamed me. Not like Maureen and Jason.”
The foolish idea destroyed Addison’s gentle mood. “Erin, you weren’t there! You should thank God for that instead of cursing yourself for being the one who lived!”
Erin moved away from Addison, wind whipping through her hair and her blouse as she left the protective shelter of the airplane. Addison followed her. “You don’t understand, Addison. You think you do, but you don’t.”
“I understand more than you think,” he said as she started toward the hangar. “And one thing that is blatantly clear is that you have to overcome your guilt before you can overcome your fear. You have to put it behind you, Erin, and realize that the plane might have crashed whether you were in it or not!”
“How do you know?” she cried. “Maybe I could have thought more clearly than Mick. Maybe I could have kept him from making a mistake! He was used to flying with me! Maybe I could have pulled up when he panicked!”
She caught her breath at the last words and covered her mouth, but too late realized she could never negate the hateful thought. And Addison hadn’t missed it. He stopped mid-stride and stared at her.
“All this time,” he said in a neutral voice, “you fought me like a madwoman when I said it was Mick’s fault and that he panicked. All this time I’ve believed you were backed by your convictions. But that wasn’t it, was it, Erin? It wasn’t my conclusions you were fighting. It was your own. For a long time I wasn’t sure he’d made a mistake at all. But you were, weren’t you?”
“No!” she shouted. “That isn’t what I meant!”
“Yes, it is,” he said wearily. “And that guilt you’re feeling is more than either of us thought. You’re guilty for not being there, that’s obvious. But you’re also feeling guilty for blaming him, too. You’re as convinced as I am that it was pilot error, and you’re scared to death that if you fly again, you’ll make the same mistakes.”
“You have no right to analyze me!” she shouted. “No right! And you’re dead wrong!”