I finished my lunch and dumped my own trash in the can. Instead of walking outside to my plane, though, I sat back down in my chair, a few feet from Grayson. I didn’t think he needed protecting, exactly. Nobody would come into this hangar to attack him, not even Mark, while his uncle kept him busy. And Alec was right: I shouldn’t wake Grayson. He would be angry that we hadn’t woken him. Alec and I would argue that if he was tired enough to need a nap in the middle of the day, he was too tired to fly until he caught up on sleep.
I should have left him sleeping and gone back to work. Something stopped me. His chest rose and fell more rapidly underneath his protective arms and his red T-shirt. His smooth brow wrinkled ever so slightly, like he’d had the briefest glimpse into something horrible.
A plane started not far outside the hangar, Alec’s Piper. The engine was quieter because he was only taxiing toward the end of the runway, not taking off. But he was so close that the noise vibrated the hangar, growling underneath the drone of the fans.
Grayson sat up in a rush, one hand gripping the sofa cushion and the other white-knuckling the back of the couch. He looked straight at me, mouth open, gray eyes wide. His sudden movement had stirred the dust in the couch. A cloud of it twinkled around him in a shaft of sunlight streaming through the hangar door.
He asked, “My dad, and Jake. Are they dead?”
My fingers turned icy in the warm hangar. I could only imagine what cruelty his subconscious had dealt him. A family lunch, with his dad and Jake gathered around the dusty couch instead of Alec and me. A family argument that he’d hated every second of but wished he could have back again now that he understood it had been their last.
I nodded.
He closed his eyes. “Where is Alec?” he asked quietly. The noise from Alec’s plane had faded as he taxied away on the tarmac, but Grayson’s voice was still barely audible above the fans.
I waved toward the runway. “Flying.”
Grayson winced. Swinging his legs off the couch to set his feet on the floor, he leaned over and cradled his face in his hands. “It’s not fair,” he murmured through his fingers.
I wanted to reach out to him. I didn’t think it was fair, either, and I wanted to put my arm around him and tell him so. He’d been cruel to me in the past three days, though. He’d made it clear what he thought of me. He didn’t want comfort from me.
He sobbed into his hands. Silently. I recognized the sob by the way his shoulders moved.
Just once.
In two steps I crossed the empty cement floor between us, sat next to him on the couch, and slid my arm around his back. I wasn’t tall enough to put it around his shoulders. As I sat, I stirred up more dust. The air around us filled with golden sparks.
Now that I was touching him, I could tell how fast he was breathing. He tried to control it, though, refusing to let go of more than that one sob. He breathed long and deep, then wiped both hands down his face. He turned to me, eyes red and wet. “Do not tell Alec.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He growled, “I will make your life hell.”
I heard my own gasp of surprise. I removed my arm from around him and shifted back to my original chair. “You don’t have to threaten me, Grayson. I said I wouldn’t tell him, and I won’t.”
He ran one hand across yesterday’s blond stubble that he hadn’t gotten a chance to shave. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He sniffed. “I don’t think I’m getting enough sleep at night.”
“I don’t think you are either,” I said haughtily, then stood. “I’m going up.”
“Leah, I’m really sorry,” he said again. His eyes pleaded with me.
I stopped thinking. Instinctively I stepped back across the divide between us and put my hand in his hair. His curls were surprisingly soft, unlike the wires on my own head. I weaved my fingers through them, down to his scalp.
This time he didn’t stiffen when I touched him. He leaned his head against me and let me comfort him for five seconds.
Then he pulled away and stood, towering over me. “I’ll be up too, as soon as I pull myself together.” He headed for the restroom.
Yeah, I knew that feeling. Thinking I had a handle on the grief. Being overwhelmed with it all of a sudden, where other people could see me. Running for the restroom and wishing I could wash it down the sink. Though he’d said he was sorry, he hadn’t acknowledged he was doing exactly what I’d done Monday morning, when he accused me of acting.
I tamped down that flash of anger. Nothing like that would make sense to Grayson right now. Nothing mattered as much as what he had lost.
Grayson was the one who suggested we go surfing that night. Alec and Molly thought this was a great idea. They guessed I didn’t have a surfboard, but Molly had one I could borrow. They guessed I couldn’t surf, but it was easy and they would teach me. This wasn’t going to happen. I was confident I could wiggle out of it somehow.
All in all, it sounded like a terrific alternative to the last few nights. We would eat at Molly’s café. She would bring her boards over from her house, Alec would carry his from Mr. Hall’s condo, and we would go into the ocean at Grayson’s shack. With any luck, Alec and I wouldn’t get much time alone. Even his kiss good night at my trailer would follow the trend and get shorter still. We would all call it a night early, and Grayson could claim some sleep.
By the time we got to the beach, the sky was bright pink with violet clouds, and the warm ocean rolled dark blue underneath it. I couldn’t blame Molly and Alec for hitting the beach running with their surfboards. They slid right into the water and paddled for the horizon.
With them gone, I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. I settled the board Molly had loaned me into the sand and sat on it with my toes in the water. I didn’t mind the ocean touching my toes.
The surf was so loud that I didn’t notice Grayson until he was right behind me. He’d gone to pull his surfboard out of the shack. Setting it upright in the sand and leaning on it, he looked every inch a hard-bodied, sun-bleached surfer dude.
Only his words gave him away. Always plotting, he never relaxed, even at the beach. “Did they leave you?” He gazed out to the horizon. “Are you going to pout like you’re jealous? That’s good, but then you won’t get to go surfing. Come on, plan B. We’ll catch up with them.” He held out his hand to pull me up.
I didn’t take his hand. I said, “I can’t swim.”
His mouth dropped open. “You can’t swim!”
There wasn’t a good answer to this. He shouldn’t have countered my “I can’t swim” with “You can’t swim!” in a disbelieving tone, like he was asking me if I was sure I couldn’t swim?
I watched the waves and wished I could shove my whole body down beneath the sand, not just my feet.
He wouldn’t let it go. “You’re eighteen years old,” he insisted.
I huffed out an exasperated sigh.
He couldn’t hear my frustration over the ocean breeze. Or he didn’t care. “Why haven’t you ever learned to swim?”
Finally I looked up at him. I was surprised at how clearly I could see him in the dusk, his blond curls glowing in the sunset. I must have appeared just as clearly defined to him, and exposed.
“Who taught you to swim?” I asked.
He answered without thinking, “My da—Oh.”
I’d never had a father. “Oh,” I echoed Grayson in a dead tone.
I cringed as soon as I said it. Sarcasm was a weapon for children. I had used it a lot in grade school and middle school, and all it had gotten me was slapped in the girls’ bathroom. I used it too much now. Grayson would realize, She is reminding me she is pitiful! and he would try to apologize. Best to let it pass. The less said the better.
He dropped his surfboard on the beach and sat beside me on my board. “Hey.” His foot burrowed under the sand, the dry mound moving like a blanket, and his toes nudged my heel. “I’m sorry.”
“Hooray.” I gazed where Molly and Alec had disappeared, the sunse
t gone now, the black sky and the black ocean different from each other only because the ocean was striped with white waves. I wished I were viewing the scene from the air, where I had control.
“Next summer I’ll teach you to swim,” Grayson said. “This isn’t the time or place, in the waves and the dark, but in the summer we’ll go to the pool at my dad’s condo and I’ll teach you.”
I didn’t have anything to say to this. I just wanted him to get out all his guilt and shut up. I had no idea what I would be doing in the summer, except that it would not be frolicking with Grayson in the pool at his dead dad’s upscale condo on the swanky end of town. I could fantasize about it all I wanted, but it would never happen.
“You can’t just sit there and sulk about it, Leah,” he told me. “You have to do something about it. Same thing with not knowing how to drive. You can’t go on this way. Your world is very small.”
Wearing a pained expression I wasn’t able to control, I chopped my hand across my throat, telling him to shut up. I could see him dimly in the moonlight, and I knew he could see me.
He refused to shut up, though. “I’m not insulting you. I’m just saying that if someone offers you an opportunity to learn something new, do something different, get out of this town, you should take it. I even feel kind of bad about running you off Mr. Simon’s crop-dusting job.”
“You said Mark just wanted in my pants,” I growled.
“He did just want in your pants.” Grayson sounded outraged. “I’m not sorry about that part. I just think you would be the world’s best crop-duster pilot. You want that thrill, but outwardly you remain calm. You would never get yourself killed. Mark wants that thrill and he does not remain calm. He’s so busy looking back at how close to the barn he flew that he forgets to look ahead of him. One day soon he’s going to smack into a tree. I know this because I want that thrill too, and I don’t remain calm either. Lately I’ve learned better than to get myself into that situation. In the original Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Darth Vader, ‘If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.’”
I laughed at Grayson’s dead-on British accent. Again, I thought he looked British, with the long nose and fingers and body of a 1960s rock star.
“Sometimes I think that’s what happened to my dad,” he said.
You think he became one with the Force? I almost asked. But I couldn’t joke about his father. And I remembered what Alec had said about Grayson, that there was something wrong with him. I asked very carefully and nonjudgmentally, “What happened to your dad?”
“All he used to say to me was, ‘You’re going to die young. You’re going to get fired from every job you ever land. You don’t plan ahead. You don’t pay attention. You’re going to get yourself killed.’ And maybe, in the end, he decided that nothing would convince me short of dying himself.”
Oh, Grayson, I nearly gasped. I looked over at him, but all I could see was his profile outlined against the dark beach. He looked out at the ocean like he was talking to himself, not to me. I wondered if he had ever said this to anybody.
I said conversationally, not letting any of my alarm come through in my pilot voice, “Your dad died because he wasn’t taking care of himself and he refused to go to the doctor, and he had a heart attack.”
Grayson didn’t nod or shake his head no. Keeping eerily still, he asked, “Were you the last person to see him alive?”
I winced, but he was watching the ocean and couldn’t see. I said, “I’ve wondered about that. I did have a lesson with him the day before the Admiral found him. But sometimes after he left my lesson, he’d stop at a restaurant for dinner on the way back to his condo. Actually he went to Molly’s parents’ café quite a bit because it’s on this end of town. But I didn’t ask around. He was gone, and I guess I thought it was best to let him go.” That’s how I liked to think of him, hunching his coat around him, ducking into the airport office to tell me goodbye, and driving off through the winter night in his truck.
“What was the last thing he said to you?” Grayson persisted.
I thought back. “He had acted down during the lesson. As I was leaving, I asked him why lately he hadn’t sat on the airport office porch with the Admiral in the afternoon like he usually did when I got to work.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it had been too cold.”
“That sounds prophetic, like he was willing his death to happen.”
The surfboard was getting hard, and I squirmed on the slick surface, uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, in which Grayson was going to point the finger at himself any way he could. “Well, I think he’d given up,” I said. “The last time he had a girlfriend, I’d just started working at the airport. She moved to Florida to take care of her mom. He wouldn’t move with her because he wanted to stay close to you guys. So they broke up.”
“What?” Grayson exclaimed. “I never heard of… What was her name?”
“Sofie.”
He tried the name out. “Sofie.” Then his tone turned darker. “How old was she?”
“His age. Early fifties. Or, back then, late forties.”
“Did they see each other a lot?”
“She came to the airport all the time.”
He frowned at me, perplexed. “How come I never knew about her?”
“You weren’t around. Y’all had started telling your dad you didn’t want to come stay with him, even when it was his weekend.”
“That’s because I was playing basketball,” Grayson protested, “and Alec was wrestling. We had games and meets, and he wouldn’t come see us.”
“He thought you didn’t want him to.”
Grayson’s lips parted. “Did he tell you that?”
“Yes.” I wasn’t going to lie to Grayson. He’d been agonizing over the details of Mr. Hall’s death, and he was trying to puzzle it out. But I didn’t want him to dwell on the rift between them. “I don’t think it does any good to go back and second-guess this stuff. I’m just saying, different people see things different ways, and that’s how he saw it. After Sofie left, you could say he let himself go. He gained more weight, and that made him more likely to have a heart attack, yes. Then Jake died, and that was hard on him.
“But Grayson.” I reached out and put my hand on his knee. His skin was cool to the touch. “Your dad wasn’t so cruel that he would want to die as a message to you. And if that’s what you honestly believe… you need to find a better way to deal with this.” I rubbed his knee, just one pass, and drew my hand away.
“You know so much about him,” Grayson murmured. “You knew him better than I did.”
“I saw him almost every day,” I explained. “Last December, whenever y’all weren’t here, every waking moment I wasn’t at school or at work, he was training me in the tow plane. It’s funny but I think a lot of people spend less time with their own families, especially if they don’t all live together, and more time with complete strangers.”
It was certainly true of my own so-called family. I knew who my mother had been spending her time with last week: her boyfriend Roger. But that could have changed by now. It often did. I wondered who my dad spent time with. Could have been anyone. Anyone at all.
Grayson turned to face me, bracing himself with one hand on the surfboard and tucking his long legs beneath him in the sand. “You and I have never talked like this before. But my dad kept telling me what I’m finding out about you now.”
I smiled. “You mean the chip on my shoulder?”
Grayson shook his head. “No, nothing could be more obvious than the chip on your shoulder. But my dad liked to tell this story about you. He said you were fourteen and you’d been working at the airport a few weeks. He knew you by sight from the airport office. One day you stomped into his hangar and said you wanted a flying lesson, sort of demanded it, and threw the money for the lesson down on his desk in front of him, plus tax, in cash with exact change.”
I hadn’t st
omped. The rest was accurate. “I wanted a lesson,” I said, “and wanted to take away all his excuses not to give me one. If I paid him up front in cash, he couldn’t say no. Why did he tell you that story?”
“He said he knew from that moment that you had strong character and drive. You were everything I wasn’t. Whenever he got tired of comparing me with Jake or Alec, he would compare me with you.”
Wow, to be compared unfavorably with the strange loser girl? No wonder Grayson was bitter. “Did you believe him?”
“Believe what?” Grayson asked.
“That I have a strong character and drive?”
He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, I thought he was screwing you.”
fifteen
So much for our friendly conversation. I turned to face Grayson on the surfboard. “As long as we’re being honest, two Christmases ago, I walked into the hangar while you were telling Alec and Jake I was trading sex for flying lessons with your dad. You hurt my feelings, and I’ve thought less of you as a person since then.”
He stared at me for a moment, then opened his mouth to say something.
Before he could utter more bullshit, I went on, “Men always do that to women when they feel threatened. They tell everybody the woman must be giving out blow jobs because there’s no way she could be successful otherwise.”
Grayson had found his voice. “First of all,” he said loudly enough that he blinked when he heard himself. He looked over his shoulder to see if anyone was listening. The beach was empty. He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “I never felt threatened by you. He was my father.”
I looked down at my hands, tracing patterns in the sand, feeling ashamed all of a sudden. I’d been angry with Grayson about this for a year and four months. With good reason, I still thought. But yeah, my anger had come out as an insult to his relationship with his father, which I never intended.
“And second,” he said, “you walked in on us while we were talking. I didn’t know you were there, and I didn’t say it to insult you. I would have no reason to do that. I hardly knew you. I was making that assumption about you because of my dad’s end of the equation. My parents got divorced when he cheated on my mom. That girl was twenty-five. It was disgusting.”