In the car his dad asks him if he’s okay.
Alfred says, Mi recorderó tutto per lei. I will remember everything for her.
It’s harder to get a job at LAX than Alfred thought it would be. Besides, the doctors and specialists and therapists say he’s still easing back into the real world here in Seattle and moving to another city is out of the question, at least for now. It’s best for him to stay at home until the easing in is finished. He feels a little frustrated but he tells himself he’ll work even harder.
He does, and pretty soon he gets another job at the airport, one that comes with a paycheck and a timecard. He works on the grounds crew. He rides around with other employees in a white pickup with a bright orange light and a huge orange-and-white checkered flag in the back so taxiing planes are sure to see them. They look for objects on the taxiways and runways that could get sucked into a jet engine. He knows it’s not the most glamorous job but it has the best perk he can imagine: he’s getting paid to be driven around an active international airport and make sure the planes are safe. It’s a part-time job and the rest of the time he still does his old job in the terminal.
He gets letters from Mandy every two weeks and sometimes she calls. She has a special phone that lets her hear pretty well, but the conversations aren’t like the ones they had at the airport. Alfred can almost feel the miles between them. She says she’s going to visit. He’s got three shoeboxes under his bed now, two filled with his earnings and one slowly filling with Mandy’s letters. It’s like keeping a little bit of their friendship for the future. With his languages coming back a little more and a little faster each day he knows it won’t be long before he can write back to her.
He still has his Coca-Cola’s at the airport shop, and the people who work there are as good to him as ever. He has his lunches at Red Robin, and sometimes he stays longer than his hour lunch break because there are so many people to talk to. His language is really coming back and people love to hear him speak in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Latin. One day a Chinese couple come in and he amazes them by repeating their greeting, Ni hao ma? with flawless inflection, and by the time they hurry to their flight to Shanghai he’s learned two dozen words in Mandarin. He even starts to learn to sign in his other languages and sometimes the airport managers ask him to help out. Every day he goes home with a few dollars in his pocket. He figures by the time he’s eased back into the real world he’ll have enough to go to LA. Maybe even enough to buy a house down there like the big one he had in Seattle.
In the terminal sometimes he sees a girl who looks like Mandy and he’ll leap up. It’s funny, he knows she’s in Los Angeles, his memory is good enough these days that he can retain that fact, but a girl who looks like her makes him forget everything for a moment. But it’s a nice kind of forgetting because the next second he remembers she’s getting her ears back and that’s what matters. He doesn’t care if it takes one year or a hundred. They’ll fix her ears one day and one day he’ll ease back into the real world.
In the meantime the airport needs him, and he needs it.
A Jumbo Jet’s Soul
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the
splinters of the thunderbolt.
—Robinson Jeffers, The Beaks of Eagles
From the old pool chair in the backyard grass Daisy watches a jumbo jet lumber across the Los Angeles sky. It’s early autumn and the air is impossibly blue, she thinks, then giggles when she hears Dorothea scold, You can do better than that tired old cliché.
As always she’d be right. Dorothea was Daisy’s English teacher in her senior year at John Adams High School in Bakersfield. She was the one who convinced Daisy at the tender age of seventeen that she was destined to be a great literary writer. She was also Daisy’s first true love.
After high school Daisy went to UC Davis, where it happened Dorothea was getting an MFA in creative writing. A few weeks into Daisy’s sophomore year her favorite band played a concert down at the Sacramento Valley Amphitheater. The Jane’s Addiction Show was the first of many road trips Daisy took with her roommate Eliza and two other girlfriends, and that night was also the first time any of them tried hallucinogens. As Daisy’s mushroom trip peaked in an explosion of colors and Roman candles above the stage where the band was belting out the psychedelic “Three Days,” she twirled straight into Dorothea’s—at that moment they were still Ms. Creasy’s—arms. Something other than the shrooms, something cosmic and beautifully inexplicable fueled by music and autumn sunset, inspired her to kiss her former teacher full on the lips. Ms. Creasy reciprocated tentatively at first before cupping Daisy’s cheeks and kissing her more passionately than anyone ever had, boy or girl. By the end of the song Ms. Creasy was Dorothea. By the end of the concert Dorothea was Tia.
Tia kept Daisy sane through the mind-numbing modern college experience, and as much out of desperation to be finished and get on with life as aptitude for her studies Daisy graduated in three years. They moved to Los Angeles and rented a three-bedroom ranch-style house in Mar Vista, an up-and-coming section of the westside that, before yuppies started moving, in was called that sketchy area between Venice and Culver City. They rescued a Jack Russell Terrier mix and named him Davey, after the Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro. Tia helped Daisy swap Craptastic Sam, the fifteen-year-old Honda Civic her parents bought her in high school, for a slightly used Subaru Outback. The three of them went camping nearly every weekend in the spring and summer. The eastern Sierras, Owens Valley, Sana Ynez, even as far north as the Trinity Alps. Daisy had never seen so much of her home state before Tia. For two years she was as happy as she had been in her life. They proposed to each other an even dozen times, each time getting a little more serious about it.
Then Daisy’s writing career took off and Tia’s didn’t. Daisy got a job with LA Weekly and Tia drifted. Daisy’s fiction was published in literary journals and she started working on her first novel. Tia worked part-time at the local indie bookstore and started drinking. Daisy started doing yoga and became a vegan. Tia stopped exercising altogether and became an alcoholic. By their fourth year together Daisy’s best friend, teacher, and lover was slipping away from her. Daisy didn’t know whether the alcohol was changing Tia or if the woman she loved was a different person than she’d thought. They spent the last two years of their life together in a sort of living purgatory in which Daisy’s happiness was inversely proportionate to the amount of booze Tia had consumed on any given day. When it came, the agonizing decision was a relief.
Their last night together they made love, agreeing without saying that maybe just maybe it would produce one last spark of the old magic. In the beginning they’d been able to turn each other on with a sideways glance across a crowded room. They’d read each other’s minds and bodies to a degree that was downright uncanny, like the night at Manny’s party in WeHo when they made eye contact in the living room and ninety seconds later were in the car, windows down, on their way to Dan Tana’s for martinis and steak. Once they were out of earshot of anyone lingering in Manny’s manicured front yard they shouted simultaneously, Dan Tana’s steaks, nightcap at Formosa, home to fuck! They laughed halfway to the restaurant and Daisy never felt more in love. The last night, as she slid her hands along the familiar curve of Tia’s hips she’d thought, if not the magic, at least a soft-sweet last memory. An hour later Tia smashed their coffee pot on the floor, snatched her bottle of Stoli from the freezer (spilling three bags of Whole Foods frozen peas on the kitchen floor, the remnants of which Daisy was still discovering months later and breaking down every time) and peeled out of the driveway of the place that suddenly wasn’t home anymore. Five hours later, at two in the morning, two cops knocked on the door. They told Daisy that Tia had downed the bottle and gone off the road on Mulholland Drive a half mile south of Coldwater, which was about the worst stretch of the worst road she could have picked for that particular wrong turn. Her green Honda CR-V plunged 150 feet into a ravine and all the airbags in Detroit wouldn’t have saved Dorothea Creasy. Daisy didn’t attend the funeral in Tia’s hometown of Braintree, Massachusetts because Tia had never told her family she was a lesbian.
Now Daisy watches the plane, studies it. She