Ken Grimwood (38 page)

The snowy treetops on the mountainside seemed to reach for them as they drew nearer and the angle of the slopes beneath them steepened. A lone deer chanced to look up and gave a startled shiver, then stood transfixed, staring at the great soundless birds not far above. Farther on, a quarter of the way around the mountain, Christopher pointed excitedly at a lumbering black bear, oblivious to the strange metal creatures sweeping low through his sky.

They found a bit of ridge lift, a swirling updraft of reflected wind, in front of and above the crest of a jutting cliff on the more rugged backside of the mountain. Jeff and Pamela glided along the ridge for several minutes, back and forth, looking at the silent, untouched snow that seemed so close they might have reached out to scoop up a powdery handful. Then Jeff spotted a thin wisp of cloud just forming against the blue sky slightly east of the mountain. He broke formation, headed for the newborn puff of condensation.

As he reached it, his right wing tip lifted slightly, and he immediately veered in that direction. When he did, the whole plane began to lift, and he slowed into a tight, controlled turn. The sailplane rose dramatically, kept on rising.

Below him, it was clear that Pamela saw what he had found. She turned abruptly away from the gentle up-currents off the cliff, headed in his direction. Her glider seemed to diminish in size with every second as Jeff and Christopher rode the lifting mass of air higher and higher, locked into a steeply banked turn to stay within the narrow confines of the thermal's center.

Pamela flew in looping circles downwind of his position, searching. At last she caught the nebulous warm updraft, and the distance between them closed as her plane lifted swiftly and silently toward his … until, wing tip to wing tip, they soared together in the crisp, clean skies above Mount Shasta's ageless and enigmatic peak.

Kimberly had stopped crying, was outside picking a bunch of September wild flowers to take with her on the trip east. Christopher was being a man about it. He was fifteen, after all, and had long since begun to emulate Jeff's attitudes of acceptance in the face of adversity and unrestrained joy where joy—as it so frequently had these past few years—became appropriate.

"My hiking boots won't fit in the suitcase, Mom."

"You won't really need them in New Rochelle, honey," Pamela said.

"I guess not. Except maybe if Dad takes us up camping in the Berkshires, like he said he would, I could wear them then."

"How about if I send them to you?"

"Well … You don't have to do that. It's O.K. We'll be back before Christmas, anyway, and I'd just have to mail them back here again."

Pamela nodded, turned her head away so her son wouldn't see her eyes.

"I know you'd like to have them with you," Jeff put in. "Why don't we go ahead and send them along, and we'll … get you another pair to keep here. We can do that with all your stuff, if J you'd like."

"Hey, that'd be great!" Christopher exclaimed with a grin.

"It makes sense," Jeff said.

"Sure, if I'm gonna be spending half the year with Dad and the other half here with you and Mom … You sure that'd be O.K.? Mom, is that all right with you?"

"It sounds like a very good idea," Pamela said, forcing a smile. "Why don't you go make a list of all the things you'd like us to send?"

"O.K.," Christopher said, heading toward the two-bedroom annex Jeff had built on to the cabin for the boy and his sister. Then he stopped and turned. "Can I tell Kimberly? I bet there's a lot of things she'd like to have back east, too."

"Of course," Pamela told him, "but don't you two take too long about it. We have to leave for Redding in an hour, or you'll miss your flight."

"We'll hurry, Mom," he said, running outside to fetch his sister.

Pamela turned to Jeff, let flow the tears she'd been holding back. "I don't want them to go. It's still another month before … before … "

He embraced her, smoothed her hair. "We've been through all this before," he told her gently. "It's best for them to have a few weeks to adjust to being with their father again, to make new friends … That may help them absorb the shock a little."

"Jeff," she said, sobbing, "I'm scared! I don't want to die! Not …
die
forever, and—"

He hugged her tightly, rocked her in his arms and felt his own tears trickle down his face. "Just think of how we've lived. Think of all we've done, and let's try to be grateful for that."

"But we could have done so much more. We could have—"

"Hush," he whispered. "We did all we could. More than either of us ever dreamed when we were first starting out."

She leaned back, searched his eyes as if seeing them for the first time, or the last. "I know," she sighed. "It's just … I got so used to the endless possibilities, the
time …
never being bound by our mistakes, always knowing we could go back and change things, make them better. But we didn't, did we? We only made things different."

A voice droned on interminably in the dim background of Jeff's consciousness. It didn't matter who the voice belonged to, or what it might be saying.

Pamela was dead, never to return. The realization washed over him like seawater against an open wound, filled his mind with an all-encompassing grief he had not felt since the loss of his daughter Gretchen. He clenched his fists, lowered his head beneath the weight of the undeniable, the intolerable … and still the voice babbled forth its senseless litany:

" … see if Charlie can get react from Mayor Koch on Reagan's Bitburg trip. Looks like this one could really whip up into a firestorm; we've got the American Legion coming down on him about it, and Congress is starting to buzz. That's—Jeff? You O.K.?"

"Yeah." He glanced up briefly. "I'm fine. Go ahead."

He was in the conference room of WFYI in New York, the all-news radio station where he'd been news director when first he died. He was seated at one end of a long oval table; the morning and midday editors were on either side of him, and the reporters occupied the other chairs. He hadn't seen these people for decades, but Jeff recognized the place, the situation, instantly. He'd had this same meeting every weekday morning for years: the daily assignment conference, where the structure of the day's news coverage was planned as best it could be in advance. Gene Collins, the ongoing midday editor, was frowning at him with j concern.

"You sure you're feeling all right? We could cut this short; there's not much else to discuss."

"Just go ahead, Gene. I'll be fine."

"Well … O.K. Anyway, that's about it for metro stories and; local angles. On the national front, we've got the shuttle going! up this morning, and—"

"Which one?" Jeff rasped out.

"What?" Gene asked, puzzled.

"Which shuttle?"

"
Discovery.
You know, the one with the senator on board."

Thank God for that at least; so immediately after Pamela's final death, Jeff wasn't sure he could have handled a repeat of the chaos and depression in the newsroom on the day of the
Challenger
disaster. He should have known better, anyway, if he'd been thinking clearly; Reagan had gone to Bitburg in the spring off 1985. That would make this sometime around April of that year, nine or ten months before the shuttle would explode.

Everyone at the table was looking at him strangely, wondering why he seemed so distraught, so disoriented. To hell with it. Let them think whatever they wanted.

"Let's wrap it up, all right, Gene?"

The editor nodded, began gathering the scattered papers he had brought to the meeting. "Only other good story developing is this rape-recant thing in Illinois. Dotson's going back to prison today while his lawyer prepares an appeal. That's it. Questions, anybody?"

"The school-board meeting looks like it might run long today," one of the reporters said. "I don't know if I'll be able to make this 2:00 P.M. Fire Department awards thing. You want me to dump out of the school board early, or would you rather put somebody else on the awards?"

"Jeff?" Collins asked, deferring to him. "I don't care. You decide."

Gene frowned again, started to say something but didn't. He turned back to the reporters, who had begun to mumble among themselves. "Bill, stick with the school board as long as you need to. Charlie, you hit the Fire Department ceremony after you talk to the mayor. Give us a live shot on Koch and Bitburg at one. Then you can hold off filing until after the awards are over. Oh, and Jim, Mobile Four is in the shop; you'll be taking Mobile Seven."

The meeting broke up quietly, with none of the usual wisecracks and raucous laughter. The reporters and the offgoing early-morning editor filed out of the conference room, casting quick, covert glances at Jeff. Gene Collins hung behind, stacking and restacking his sheaf of papers.

"You want to talk about it?" he finally said.

Jeff shook his head. "Nothing to talk about. I told you, I'll be all right."

"Look, if it's problems with Linda … I mean, I understand. You know what a rough go of it Carol and I had a couple of years back. You helped me through a lot of that—God knows I bent your ear enough—so anytime you want to sit down over a beer, just let me know."

"Thanks, Gene. I appreciate your concern, I really do. But it's something I have to work out for myself."

Collins shrugged, stood from the table. "That's up to you," he said. "But if you ever do feel like unloading your problems, feel free to dump a few in my direction. I owe you."

Jeff nodded briefly, then Collins left the room, and he was alone again.

TWENTY

Jeff quit work, made enough bets and short-term-yield investments to enable Linda to get by on her own for the next three years. There was no time to build a major inheritance for her; he increased his life-insurance coverage tenfold and let it go at that.

He moved into a small apartment on the Upper West Side, spent his days and evenings wandering the streets of Manhattan, taking in all the sights and smells and sounds of humanity from which he had so long isolated himself. The old people fascinated him most, their eyes full of distant memories and lost hope, their bodies slumped in anticipation of the end of time.

Now that Pamela was gone, the fears and regrets she had expressed came back to trouble him as deeply as they'd disturbed her toward the end. He'd done what he could to reassure her, to ease the grief and terror of her final days, but she'd been right: For all that they had struggled, all they'd once achieved, the end result was null. Even the happiness they had managed to find together had been frustratingly brief; a few years stolen here and there, transient moments of love and contentment like vanishing specks of foam in a sea of lonely, needless separation.

It had seemed as if they would have forever, an infinity of choices and second chances. They had squandered far too much of the priceless time that had been granted them, wasted it on bitterness and guilt and futile quests for nonexistent answers—when they themselves, their love for each other, had been all the answer either of them should have ever needed. Now even the opportunity to tell her that, to hold her in his arms and let her know how much he had revered and cherished her, was eternally denied him.

Pamela was dead, and in three years' time Jeff, too, would die, never knowing why he'd lived.

He roamed his city streets, watching, listening: tough-eyed bands of punks, furious at the world … men and women in corporate attire, hurrying to accomplish whatever goals they had established for themselves … giggling swarms of children, exuberant at the newness of their lives. Jeff envied them all, coveted their innocence, their ignorance, their expectations.

Several weeks after he'd quit his job at WFYI, he got a call from one of the news writers who worked there, a woman—girl, really—named Lydia Randall. Everyone at the station was concerned about him, she said, had been shocked when he'd resigned, and worried further when they'd heard his marriage had broken up. Jeff told her, as he had told Gene Collins, that he was all right. But she pressed the issue, insisted that he meet her for a drink so she could talk to him in person.

They met the next afternoon at the Sign of the Dove on Third Avenue at Sixty-fifth, took a table by one of the windows that was open to a gloriously sunny New York June. Lydia was wearing a shoulder-baring white cotton dress and a matching wide-brimmed hat from which a pink satin ribbon trailed. She was an exceptionally pretty young woman, with a mass of wavy blond hair and wide, liquid-green eyes.

Jeff recited the story he'd concocted to explain his sudden retirement, a standard tale of journalist's burn-out combined with some half-truths about the recent "luck" he'd had with his investments. Lydia nodded understandingly, seemed to accept his explanations at face value. As far as his marriage went, he told her, it had effectively been over for a long time; no specific problems worth belaboring, just a case of two people who had gradually grown apart.

Lydia listened solicitously. She had another drink, then began to talk about her own life. She was twenty-three, had come to New York right after she'd graduated from the University of Illinois, was living with the boyfriend she had met in college. He—his name was Matthew—was eager to get married, but she was no longer so sure. She felt "trapped," needed "space," wanted to meet new friends and have all the adventurous experiences she'd missed growing up in a small town in the Midwest. She and Matthew were no longer the same people they used to be, Lydia said; she felt she had outgrown him.

Jeff let her talk it out, all the commonplace woes and longings of youth that to her were freshly overwhelming and of unprecedented import in her life. She hadn't the perspective to recognize how utterly ordinary her story was, though perhaps she did have some glimmering of that awareness, since she had at least expressed her urgent desire to break free of the cliche her life had become.

He commiserated, talked with her for an hour or more about life and love and independence … told her she had to make her own decisions, said she had to learn to take risks, said all the obvious and necessary things that one must say to someone who is facing a universal human crisis for the first time in her life.