Chapter 5 - The Stories We Don't Tell
The afternoon heat softened into the long, amber glow of a lowcountry twilight.
Inside the cottage, the air had cooled as the onshore breeze picked up, rustling the white linen curtains in the living room and carrying the sound of the breakers through the open windows. Maya had eaten two sandwiches, drank a glass of chocolate milk, and was now sprawled across a braided rug in the center of the floor, using a box of crayons Colonel Evans had produced from his glove compartment to draw an elaborate picture of an airplane flying over three very lopsided sea turtles.
On the back porch, overlooking the dunes, three wooden rocking chairs sat in a row facing the water.
Colonel Evans had left an hour earlier, called back to the base to handle an operational briefing for a C-17 squadron deploying to Rota in the morning. That left Reed and me, sitting with two bottles of cold Carolina lager resting on the wide railing between us.
The mahogany box sat on the small wicker table between our chairs.
"She had dark hair," Reed said, his eyes fixed on the horizon where a shrimp boat was dragging its nets against the falling sun, its outriggers looking like the delicate legs of a water strider against the orange light. "Like Maya’s?"
"Thicker," I said, a faint smile touching my lips for the first time all day. "Curly. It took her twenty minutes every morning just to get it into a clip. When she got sick, that was the hardest part for her. Not the nausea. Not the weakness. It was the morning she woke up and found half of it on her pillow."
I took a slow sip of the beer. The cold liquid cut through the dryness that had lived in my throat since Charlotte.
"She didn't cry in front of Maya," I continued. "She bought three different wigs—one blond, one red, and one that looked like an old movie star with purple streaks. She told Maya she was an undercover spy and had to change her identity every three days so the doctors wouldn't catch her."
Reed smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "Sounds like a paratrooper’s wife."
"She was tougher than any paratrooper I ever served with," I said. "She worked as an accountant for a lumber yard in Concord. She could look at an eighty-page manifest and tell you within three cents where a driver had stolen two bags of cement. When I came home from Walter Reed without the leg, I was thirty-four years old and convinced my life was over. I wouldn't leave the bedroom. I wouldn't let my mother visit. I just sat in the dark and looked at the wall."
"What did she do?"
"She walked into the room on a Tuesday morning," I said, remembering the sound of her bare feet on the hardwood floor, "carrying a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush. She threw the brush at my chest, dumped the bucket on the rug, and told me that if I was going to be useless, I could at least be clean while I did it. Then she walked out and left me to clean the floor with one leg."
Reed let out a deep, genuine laugh that startled a gull perched on the porch railing. "God bless her."
"I hated her for about twelve hours," I confessed. "Then I crawled out of that bed, got on my hands and knees, and scrubbed the rug until it was dry. By the time she came home from work, I had dinner on the table. We never talked about the leg again. It was just another thing to work around, like a leaky gutter or a car with a bad starter."
The screen door creaked.
Maya stepped onto the porch, carrying her drawing paper. She walked directly to Reed’s chair, climbed onto the bottom rung of the rocker, and held the sheet up to his face.
"Look," she commanded.
Reed took the paper with both hands, holding it as if it were a rare, illuminated manuscript.
The drawing showed a large, blue airplane with four engines. In the front window sat a man with gray hair and four yellow stripes on his shoulders. In the back sat a little girl with a sea turtle and an older woman with an enormous halo of bright purple hair, holding hands while looking out at an ocean filled with smiling fish.
At the bottom, written in wobbly, phonetic seven-year-old cursive, were four words:
MOM LIKES HER SEAT.
Reed looked at the drawing for a long time. His fingers tightened on the edges of the paper, his jaw muscles clenching until the tendons stood out like cords against his neck.
"Maya," he said, his voice thick and wavering. "This is the finest piece of flight art I have ever seen."
"You can keep it," she told him generously. "Because you let me have the window."
"Thank you, sweetheart," Reed whispered. He folded the paper with immense care, once, then twice, and slipped it into the breast pocket of his white pilot’s shirt, right beneath his gold wings. "I will keep it in my flight kit on every trip I take."
"Every one?"
"Every single one."
Maya looked pleased with herself. She turned to me, her eyelids already drooping with the heavy, narcotic exhaustion that sea air brings to small children. "Daddy, my legs feel like sand."
I set my beer down, reached over, and lifted her onto my lap. She curled her small body against my ribs, her head tucking under my chin, her breath slowing into the deep, rhythmic cadence of sleep before I could even pull the wool blanket over her shoulders.
The sun dipped below the tree line behind the cottage, casting the dunes into a long, violet twilight.
Reed turned his chair slightly, looking at the mahogany box on the wicker table.
"Marcus," he said softly. "Tomorrow morning?"
"At dawn," I told him. "Before the wind picks up. The tide turns at six-fifteen."
"Do you want me there?"
May you like
I looked at the old captain. I saw the empty space beside him—the nineteen-year-old corporal who had never made it back to these dunes, whose memory had lived in a father's heart like an open wound for nearly three thousand days.
"Captain," I said, my hand resting on Maya’s sleeping back. "You’re part of this flight now. You don't leave the crew behind."
