Ronnie
Midnight, Friday, and the ship hums like a fridge that knows something about me.
Everybody's asleep. Boyd, Tess and Hazel are zipped into their bags along the curve of the cabin, floating a few inches off the wall like three very bad caravans. Otis is at the hatch end with his arms round his knees. The pump ticks. I'm in the big chair with the doorbell under its little lid, and my left ear is full of a woman not saying something.
"You there?"
"I'm here." Della. She sounds like she's sitting up. "Ronnie, I need to tell you a thing. I need you not to do anything with your face."
"It's dark. My face is private."
"Tess Aldana is Rafe Aldana's daughter."
Nothing happens. The fans keep fanning. I hear it in the wrong order, like everything. Tess going quiet in the middle of the Recovery story. That's not what you told my mom. Her eyes dropping to my wrist.
"Rafe," says Della. "From the story. The twin watch went to his family. To her. I found her mother on the internet. There's a picture of her at ten in a dress that doesn't fit."
"She looked at it."
"I know. You told me."
"I've been wearing her dad's watch's brother for four days."
"It's Mack's watch. It's not hers. Don't give it to her, don't take it off, don't say a word about it." A breath. The engine's running behind her, I can hear it. "I'm going to say the next part carefully, and you're going to hate how it sounds. She's not the enemy. She's twenty-six and she's up there with a man pretending to be the man who told her mother a story. Be kind."
"I'm always kind."
"You're always funny. It's different."
I look at the sleeping bags. Three humps in a row. I whisper it, because it's the only thing that comes. "Everybody on this ship is somebody's daughter."
A pause. "Boyd's not somebody's daughter."
"You'd be amazed. His mother had a lot of hope."
She laughs. Through the nose first, then the whole thing, small and cracked, a car starting on a cold morning. It's the best sound I've heard since Ruby and her pencil. Then she says, "Go to sleep, Commander," and I say I will, and neither of us means it.
Then, because I'm me and my mouth's got no brakes: "Also Boyd has a radio."
"A what?"
"Little black one. In his sleeve. He talks to it at night, in a different voice. Northern. He says Copy, not yet."
"Of course he does," says Della. "Of course he does. Put it on the list."
At one o'clock Tess comes over.
She's not asleep. She never was. She's got the camera arm folded back against the wall and the red light dead, and she floats up beside my seat without a word, with one hand on the headrest, and she looks at the panel instead of at me. This is new. Tess looks at everything. She's like a cat on a shelf.
I do what Della told me. I keep my mouth shut and my face private.
"Can I ask you something?" says Tess. "And you don't do the voice."
"I'm very bad at that."
"Did he ever talk about my dad? Not the story." She picks at the cable going into the panel, a little blue plastic thing, with one nail. "Him. A person. Did he ever say a thing about him that wasn't on the news?"
I haven't got an answer. I've got eleven years of Mack Tolliver doing the Recovery at a hundred dinners, and I've got a napkin, and I've got nothing to do with her father at all.
I hear myself say, in the voice, "He talked about Rafe every single day."
"No," says Tess. "He talked about the Recovery every day. It's different." She pushes off the headrest. "That's what I thought."
She floats back to her bag and zips it up to her chin, with her eyes open. I know they're open. I can feel them on my wrist. I can't tell if that was a test of Mack or a test of me.
At two in the morning Otis starts to go.
You can hear it before you see it. First a small noise, high in the throat, like a hinge. Then a prayer, but fast, the words all running into each other like kids out of school, and a sound of nylon scraping, and when I turn round he's got his back flat against the hatch and both arms hooked through the big round wheel, like a man hugging a tree in a flood. His eyes are squeezed shut.
I unclip. I float over. I take a handrail with one hand and Otis's wrist with the other.
"It's the walls," says Otis. "The walls, Commander, they keep moving in."
"They're not moving, Otis."
"I can feel them."
I've got the calm one ready. The one that worked on Wednesday, slow and low and no laugh in it. I put it on. "Otis. Look at me. We're pulled over. We're listening."
"I can't do the voice," says Otis, with his eyes shut. "I can't do the voice right now, Commander, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
And that's what's wrong with calm. It's a trick that needs a first time. I'm holding a man's wrist in the dark and my best card's been played and he's still going, Lord, Lord, so I do what I do when the room won't take the first thing. I try the second.
I let go of Mack.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" I say. Low, so I don't wake the bats. But bright, with the teeth in it, a game-show dentist. Johnny Jackpot, live from the hatch. "Welcome to the game that's sweeping the nation. It's the one, the only, Name That Bus Part!"
One eye opens. Otis looks at me out of it, a very wet eye, like something that's been fished out of a pond.
"Contestant number one, Mr Otis Mabry of Ocala, Florida! Otis, you know the rules. I describe a part, you name that part. And Otis, folks, I'm told he's never lost."
"I've lost," says Otis, in a small voice.
"Never. Question one. It's yellow, it's got a big red octagon on it, and it swings out on an arm when the children are crossing."
"Stop arm," says Otis. The other eye opens. "It's the stop arm."
"The stop arm! He's got it! Question two. It ticks under the dash, it ticks all day, it ticks when you signal, and when it dies, nobody knows why."
"Flasher relay." He's got one hand off the wheel. "It's the flasher, you tap it with a spoon."
"Tap it with a spoon, the man is a surgeon. Question three. Round, black, rubber, squeals every cold morning of your life."
"Serpentine belt."
"Serpentine belt!" I do the sting, the little game-show trumpet, with my mouth, softly, which is the closest a man can get to a trumpet at two in the morning in a spaceship. "Otis Mabry, you have won! Johnny, tell him what he's won!"
"A fabulous prize," says Otis. He's laughing. He's crying and laughing, which on Otis looks like a man being shaken by somebody he loves.
"A fabulous prize. Otis, it's my dessert. The Splashdown Sundae at the Countdown Diner, Titusville, Florida, biggest thing on the menu, three scoops, a sparkler, redeemable upon landing."
"Two spoons?"
"Two spoons. One for Ruby."
He lets go of the wheel. Both hands. He floats off the hatch and into my chest, and I get my arm round his back, a big man with a bus mechanic's shoulders and nine-year-old breath, and he says into my collar, "Promise."
"Cross my heart."
"I'm holding you to that. I got a witness."
"I'm the judge," says Hazel, from the dark. Her bag hasn't moved. One eye is open, a pair of glasses on the forehead. "I should like it recorded that I cannot verify that was a serpentine belt. But I am prepared to accept it."
"Thank you, Your Honour."
"Go to bed, Mr Tolliver."
I tow Otis to his bag. He zips himself in. He says, "Lord," once, in his normal voice, like a man turning off a light, and he's out in a minute. I hang there in the middle of the cabin for a while.
At three I call Della and tell her all about birthday parties. She lets me.
At four o'clock Royce does the update.
It comes in on the loop, both ears, with the bounce on the front of it. "Folks, a very quick note from Halyard. Constance and her crew are resting comfortably, and the commander is," and he stops, and takes a breath, "in great form." No floor in it this time. He holds the pitch right up to the end. A man with a great deal of practice at the stairwell.
I've got my eyes shut. I'm half in the dream where I'm doing a ribbon and the scissors turn into a fish. Then the cabin goes a different colour.
The screen in front of me has lit up. Not the amber of sleep. White, full, a page. I open my eyes and it's words, a lot of words, small and neat and level, in a font I know. The font of an airline. The same font as Sleep tight, Commander. Big day tomorrow.
I read it.
At the top, small: Halyard Aerospace. Statement prepared for release in the event of discovery. Beneath it: Author, Della Quint, crisis communications.
Then the body of it, which I read once with my lips moving, because that's how you read when somebody's put a hand on your chest.
Halyard Aerospace was deceived by a lone impostor who took the commander's seat without the company's knowledge. The company learned only today that the man aboard Constance is not Commander Mack Tolliver but a professional entertainer, Ronald Lark, who obtained the seat by misrepresentation. Halyard is shocked and deeply saddened. The company has cooperated, and will continue to cooperate, with every authority. Our thoughts are with the four passengers and their families.
Four. They've counted. They did the sums without me.
Nobody's called me Ronald since my mother and a broken lamp.
I read it again. I can hear it. That's the thing about me, the ear won't shut. It's her phone voice. The half step up, the edges all taken off, every sentence pressed flat as a shirt. Deceived. Misrepresentation. Deeply saddened. It's her, on the phone, to Royce.
Royce. The notes. Sleep tight, Commander. In an airline font.
She wrote it. She wrote it and it's got her name on it and it was sitting in a drawer somewhere while she told me to eat, and she told me my voice was the best thing she'd heard all week. In the dark. At three in the morning. With the channel open.
The screen holds it as long as it takes to read twice. I read it twice. Then it's gone, and the panel's back to the friendly green Practice banner, and the white cross, and the ring.
On the loop, in both ears, gravel, a beat behind: "Constance, Flight. You're quiet up there."
I don't say anything. The fans go. The pump ticks. I'm the commander of a ship full of sleeping people, and I'm holding my left wrist with my right hand, the old steel watch under my fingers, heavy as a stone.
"Ronnie?" Left ear. Small, awake, tired. She's been awake all night with the line open, and she's heard nothing from me but breathing. "You okay?"
I open my mouth.
I don't know what's going to come out. I've never not known. It's the first time in forty-one years I've opened my mouth without a bit in it. What comes out is her. I put the half step up. I iron it.
"Halyard Aerospace was deceived by a lone impostor who took the commander's seat without the company's knowledge."
It's perfect. It's the best I've ever done her. It's got every edge off it.
There's a silence on her end that I can hear all the way from Titusville. A second and a bit of nothing, and then another one on top.
"Say that again," says Della. Not in the phone voice. Not in the other one either. In something I haven't heard. "Ronnie. Where did you get that?"
I don't answer.
"Ronnie. Say something."
I don't switch the channel off. I'm not that kind of person. I put both my hands in my lap, under the little lid and the dead screen, and I listen to her say my name again, low, Atlanta all the way through, and I let it run.