Lost (43 page)

“Some sort of powerful tranquilizer,” Shane theorizes, sawing at the ropes. “We need to move her limbs, stimulate her circulation. You do Kelly, I’ll work on him.”

He means Seth, who, although cut free, remains as still as death, one arm and part of his face strangely swollen. Shane starts to pump on the young man’s inert chest.

“I’ll get to you in a moment,” he says to Edwin Manning, who is struggling and failing to speak.

Manning’s tear-filled eyes blink rapidly. We both know he’d want his son saved first.

Kelly’s eyes become frantic. Has she figured out that Seth is dead or dying? Or is it something else? She seems to be trying to look behind me. Wanting me to look, too.

I’m about to turn when a pair of huge, bloodied hands grab Shane by the throat.

Before I can fully react, or understand what’s happening, a muddy foot connects with the side of my head, knocking me into the water.

There’s nothing quite so stimulating as falling into water very recently occupied by a twelve-foot alligator. I’m out of there like a scalded cat, but even so by the time I crawl back onto the shore, Shane and Ricky Lang are rolling on the ground, hands locked around each other’s necks.

Neither man speaks. Except for a few wheezing grunts, the battle is conducted in total silence. Shane is taller, but pound for pound his opponent is more muscular, and has the uncanny strength of the insane.

Shane’s face is getting blue and his eyes are bugging out.

Find the knife, I’m thinking frantically, find the knife! But there’s no time for that because the mud-covered madman is pounding Shane’s head into the dirt.

Shane struggles, kicks at him, pumping his knees up into Lang’s midsection to no avail.

I look around for something to use as a weapon. A rock, a two-by-four. In the movies there’s always something handy. But out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere there’s nothing but floppy palm fronds.

No weapons available, so I do what any hundred-and-twenty-five-pound woman would do in similar circumstances—I leap on his back and try to gouge out his eyes.

Bad idea.

With a roar that made the startled alligator sound timid, Ricky Lang instantly leaps to his feet, whirls around and throws me into the bushes. The whole move takes less than a heartbeat and I land flat on my back with a force that knocks the wind out of me and cracks a few ribs.

I can’t breathe and my ears are ringing, muffling the world in silence, but my eyes are still functioning. I can see what happens next.

Shane on his knees, drooling blood.

Ricky Lang methodically kicking away the palm fronds and recovering a knife. Not Shane’s knife, something bigger and uglier.

Then my ears pop and I can hear again. Birds chirping, bugs buzzing, peepers peeping, and my heart banging against my broken ribs.

Ricky Lang looks at me with eyes from another world. He looks at Shane on his knees. He says, “Gator needs blood,” and he strides toward Kelly, knife raised.

Shane lunges, grabs his ankles.

Lang grunts with irritation and is about to plunge the big knife in Shane’s back when he changes his mind and slowly sits down on the damp and bloody ground.

It’s like watching a sturdy building collapse. His huge shoulders slump. He sighs deeply, the big knife falling from his open hand.

He looks around, as if searching for someone.

“Kids?” he says, his throat gurgling.

Lang smiles and tries to lift his arms, as if to embrace an
invisible someone, and seems satisfied, relieved of a great burden. The air leaves him. His dark eyes stare up at the bright vastness of the deep blue sky and then glass over, gone forever.

“Everybody okay?” asks Leo Fish, standing there in his little boat, lowering a smoking rifle.

I never even heard the shot.

“Sorry it took so long,” he says sheepishly. “I can’t run like you young folk.”

Six Months Later

T
he plane looks so small, the sky so big.

We’re all of us waiting at the airfield in Monticello, New York. Me and Fern and our new friend Seth Manning, who turns out to be a really neat kid—excuse me, young man. Shane had wanted to be here but he’s off on a case, searching for another missing child. He told me recently that the kids he recovered were for him like an extended family, he keeps in touch with all of them, as he does with both Seth and Kelly. It doesn’t make up for his loss, but it helps.

It was a near thing with Seth, a raging blood infection that put him in a coma for a while. God bless Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and all the folks who worked so hard to find the right combination of antibiotics, and who never gave up. Probably didn’t hurt that his father was pledging to build a new wing, but I’d like to think they saved him because saving people is what they do.

Not a bad mission in life, come to think, and one Kelly has lately been drawn to. Whether from her own experience or Seth’s, I can’t be sure. Maybe both. Anyhow, she’s been talking about a career in medicine. Maybe one that somehow
involves flying, which is just like a kid, wanting everything rolled into a nice, neat package.

If only life worked that way. But she’ll learn.

That’s her up in the ridiculously small airplane. All by herself at, Seth tells us, five thousand feet. Soaring over the rolling, snow-dusted Catskills on a brisk but sunny December day. I wanted her to wait until summer—anything to put this off—but she really, really wanted to solo by Christmas, please, Mom, please, and so here we all are, giving in to my willful daughter, even though the idea of her up in a plane all by herself is scaring us to death.

Okay, scaring me to death. Seth and Fern seem to be okay with the concept. Seth because he taught her, and Fern because she thinks Kelly can do anything she sets her mind to.

It isn’t setting her mind to it that worries me. It’s all the things that can go wrong. Engines stall or catch on fire. A bird could hit the windshield. Planes fall out of the sky. It happens, don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.

Fern, sensing my anxiety, goes, “Ya need a bag, lady?”

Making a joke of it. Amazingly enough, I haven’t hyperventilated or had a panic attack since Miami. Actually it was before Miami, come to think. Whatever, I still get anxious, but seem to have lost my need for those little white paper bags, as Fern well knows.

“Let me fret, okay?” I say irritably. “She’s seventeen and she’s flying a plane, for God’s sake! I get to fret—that’s my job.”

Seth shakes his handsome head and smiles. He knows me pretty well by now. “She’s doing great, Jane. See how steady she holds the wings? There, she’s starting her bank for the final approach.”

“Don’t call it the final approach. That sounds
terrible!
”

Fern gives me a squeeze to let me know it will be all right. Fern always thinks things will be all right, that’s one of the reasons we’ve been friends for all these years—because she’s so generous with her strength.

The wings of the little plane teeter slightly as it straightens out and begins to lose altitude.

“You go, girl!” Fern shouts up at the sky. “You come on home!”

Fern knows my secret, finally. I kept my promise to Randall Shane and told Kelly first and then him, and eventually all the important people in my life.

It’s simple, really. When I was a kid my parents used to vacation in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, for two weeks in August. It was cheap enough for a state trooper’s family in those days, and we always rented the same rinky-dinky cottage six blocks from the beach, teetering on the edge of the salt marsh. It was the highlight of the year because I got to roam the boardwalk by myself. Being pathologically shy with strangers, I never said a word to anyone, but used to bop along on my lonesome, secretly checking out the boys. Of course if one of them chanced to look back I’d instantly drop my eyes and hurry away. Boys were fascinating but also terrifying and I wasn’t ready, not for dating, not for kissing, not for anything.

Until, one moonless night, I was. Not just ready for dating or kissing, but for anything and everything. I’m sixteen and it’s summer and there’s a great local band at the old ballroom on the boardwalk, they do covers of all my favorite groups. My mother says fine, go, just be home by midnight. It’s a scene in there, all these sweaty teenagers strutting to the pumping music, shaking their fine little booties, hooking up
for quick summer flings. Some of them grinding against each other in ways that border on the obscene. In the dim corners, lots of face sucking, furtive feels, you get the picture—you’ve probably been there. That particular night the place had a wild, overtly sexual vibe that was fascinating to observe because that’s all I was there for, just to watch. Not to participate. If a boy mumbled a request to dance I’d quickly shake my head and avert my eyes. Do that a few times and most of the boys will leave you alone.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, all those mixed-up feelings blending into the incessant beat—why, oh why couldn’t I be like them?—and I fled that musky dance hall and had a little panic attack on the beach. Ashamed of myself, really. I was sixteen and I’d never been kissed! What was wrong with me! And so on. The usual adolescent mishmash of feelings, and hardly the first time I’d ended up alone on the beach, feeling sorry for myself.

What was different about that night was the absolute darkness. Black darkness. No moon, an overcast sky and therefore no stars. Lights peeping along the boardwalk, of course, but out on the beach, a hundred yards away, it was so dark I could barely see my hands. And that particular night the darkness made me feel different in some important, life-changing way. It freed me, made me feel not only invisible and anonymous, but invulnerable. Like whatever happened in the dark did not count. I could be someone else, a girl without a name. Anyone but plain Jane Garner the shy girl. All those mixed-up heady feelings from the dance hall—they weren’t something to be hidden or to be ashamed of, they were to be acted upon.

Who would know? It was dark, no one could see me.

You can guess the rest. How I found a boy on the beach,
a boy at least as shy as me. A boy who flinched at my touch, though not for long. A boy who wanted to know my name, but accepted my refusal when I made up some flippant nonsense about how I’d be the beach girl and he’d be the beach boy and that was all we needed, just the made-up names. Nattering on as I unbuttoned his pants.

Oh yes, I was definitely the aggressor. My nameless beach boy knew about as much about having sex as I did, but if you put two young bodies together, the bodies themselves figure it out. And when the deed was done, I was the one who got up and ran away. Running away as if it had never happened, as if it was some other girl doing it in the dark, not me.

Not only did I not know his name, I never even really saw his face, beyond the fact that he had a bump on his nose and a cleft in his chin. So when the time came there was not only no father to name, there was no one to look for.

What happened? What made me act so wild and out of character? Years later, I’m reasonably sure it was a hormonal surge. I was ovulating, obviously, and my body was telling me to fertilize that egg. Very dangerous for a sixteen-year-old who yearns to live in the moment and doesn’t want to consider the consequences.

Don’t take this as an endorsement of anonymous adolescent sex, but in my case it all worked out for the best, eventually. The best in this case being a perfectly amazing human being name Kelly Garner. Who, upon hearing my story, joked that she should change her name to Cleft, as in Montgomery Cleft. Or I could be Chin, she said, no wait that’s a Chinese name. Joking me out of my shame and telling me that if she ever really wanted to find her biological father she’d put an ad on the Internet, asking did you get lucky on such and such a date, at Hampton Beach, in the summer of love? and I said
the summer of love was way earlier and she said not for you it wasn’t, Mom. And Fern said, well he must have been good-looking, even in the dark, because look at Kelly. He was your flyboy, Jane, even without the plane.

All of which made me wish I’d fessed up years ago.

“Any second now,” Seth is saying. “She’s almost there.”

Excuse me, but I have to stop breathing until this is over. When the little plane is only a few feet from the ground, all of a sudden the wings flutter and the plane rocks back and forth.

“Ground effect,” Seth says soothingly. “A little extra lift under the wings. Perfectly normal.”

And then the plane is down, bouncing along the runway—is that too much bounce? Is she going to crash?—and then like a miracle everything is okay and the plane is under control and it slowly comes to a stop fifty yards from where we’re standing.

Fern holds me back. “Give her a moment,” she suggests. “She wants to savor. Plus, knowing Kelly, she wants to make an entrance.”

After a moment the cockpit door swings open and my baby girl climbs out and plants her two feet on the ground and raises both hands in the air and flashes a world-beating grin that’s as bright as all the snow in the Catskills, and then I’m running, running to my beautiful, my brilliant, my totally amazing daughter.

“It’s like this: if cutting off my hands
will make this man go away, and return
my son to my bleeding arms, I’d do
it. No hesitation. That’s the kind of
bargain I’m willing to make.”