Ronnie
Wednesday, three in the afternoon, Pacific time, and the first thing that comes through the hatch is the smell of diesel.
Then salt, and then a man in a wetsuit with a mask pushed up on his forehead, upside down in the round of the hatch, grinning at us like a dentist.
"Afternoon, folks," he says. "Who's first?"
Nobody moves. Eight days in a tin can and nobody wants to go first. The capsule rocks up, over and down, and Otis has been sick twice since we hit the water and has apologised to it both times.
"Hazel," I say. "Ladies first."
"I am seventy-four, Mr Lark. I shall go when the floor stops."
So Otis goes. Then Tess, with the card zipped in her pocket, and then Hazel, holding the swimmer's arm like it's a banister in a stately home. Then Boyd, who stops in the hatch with his big hand on the rim and looks back at the five seats for a while, and doesn't say anything.
Then me.
The ship's a grey wall with a crane on it, and they swing us up in a basket. My legs don't work. Eight days of not using them and they've forgotten the job, so two sailors hold me up by the elbows and walk me onto the deck like a drunk at a wedding.
And there's a crowd.
Sailors in lines, cameras on a gantry, a man with a long microphone on a pole. Somebody's made a banner out of a bedsheet, and it says Welcome Home, and under it, in smaller letters and different paint, there's a name. Mine. Spelt right. Somebody looked it up.
Then a voice from the back of the crowd, big and happy, a sailor with his hands round his mouth.
"Do the wave!"
And the rest of them take it up. Do the wave, do the wave, clapping on it, how a crowd does when it wants a thing.
I know the wave. I've done it for eleven years: arm all the way up, the elbow loose, the grin coming after, a half-beat late, so it looks like it surprised him. The walk-out wave, the Publix wave. I did it at the foot of the tower eight days ago in front of the whole country.
I can feel it in my shoulder. It wants to go.
I don't.
I put my hands in my pockets. The flight suit's got pockets on the thighs and they're full of nothing. The crowd goes a bit quiet, and that's a bad sound. I know it from birthday parties. It's the sound before a kid cries.
"Folks," I say. My legs are shaking and my voice is too. "I'd love to. Swear to God. But that one's two hundred an hour."
A laugh. A small one, near the front.
"Two-fifty with the jumpsuit," I say. I look down at myself. "And this is the jumpsuit."
And they go, the whole deck, a big laugh out over the water, sailors bent over, a man on the gantry nearly dropping his camera. I stand there with my hands in my pockets and let it go over me like rain.
A sailor comes up afterwards, while they're putting a blanket on me. He's about nineteen, with a pen and the back of a mess-hall menu.
"Sir. Could I get an autograph?" He looks over at the cameras, then back at me. "From the other guy. The real one. No offence."
I look over at the cameras. Boyd's talking to a woman with a microphone, using his whole arm. She's asking if he's still buying what's left of Halyard, and he's telling her to ask him in January, and she's asking again.
"Him?"
"No, sir." He goes red. "You."
So I take the pen and I write it on the back of the menu, under the soup.
Ronnie Lark. Like the bird.
Della isn't at the dock in San Diego. Her lawyer says bail doesn't let her leave Florida.
Two weeks later I'm in a room in Orlando with a speaker on a table.
It's a federal building with carpet tiles and a plant that's given up. There are two investigators, a woman from the FAA with reading glasses on her head and a man from the Justice Department with a lot of folders. They've been very polite. They've asked me the same nine questions four different ways, and I've given them the same answers.
"We'd like you to hear something," says the woman. "You don't have to."
"Is it the cabin?"
"It's the recorder. Before your flight."
She presses a key on a laptop.
The speaker hisses. A fan, and a pump ticking. I know that room. I'd know it anywhere.
Then a man humming.
He's humming something with no tune, with pages turning and a pen clicking. It's somebody alone in a room who thinks nobody's listening.
"Twenty-six," says the man. "Hour twenty-six. Commander's segment. Ninety seconds. Okay, Royce." A breath out, through his nose. "That's where mine goes, then."
More pages.
"Huh."
A long stretch of nothing. The pump, and the pen, not clicking now.
"That's not right," says Mack.
It isn't warm and it isn't slow, and there's no laugh starting underneath it. It's a tired man of sixty-four on a Sunday afternoon who's found a mistake in his paperwork. It's flat and a little hoarse, and it doesn't finish the end of the word.
"I'll get Sully," says Mack. "He'll know."
The woman stops it.
I sit there. I could do it. I could do it right now, that exact voice, the hoarse bit and the dropped end. I've had him in my ear for eleven years without ever hearing this, and give me ten minutes and I'd have it.
I don't.
"Is that Commander Tolliver?" says the man with the folders.
"That's him."
The toxicology came back the week after we landed. Sully Kessel is charged with Mack's murder and five counts of attempted murder. Royce is charged with fraud, and Della with conspiracy and false statements. Nobody has charged me with anything yet, and the woman from the FAA says yet every time, like a woman underlining. My four hundred thousand dollars is in a frozen account belonging to a company that's in receivership.
I rang Bette from San Diego, because she'd told me to. She said, "You forgot the bins," and then neither of us said anything for a while.
I wrote to Rosalind Aldana. Tess gave me the address, and I wrote it four times, and sent the fourth. She hasn't written back.
The cardboard Mack's gone from the door of the Countdown.
There's a pale rectangle on the wall where he stood, nine years of sun round the edge of him. The owner's behind the counter, and he doesn't look up.
"Ronnie."
"Hey."
"The Thursday slot," he says, to the till. "I can't. You know I can't. Nobody wants a Mack in here. Not now."
"I know."
"The cereal people came and took him. The cardboard. They said it was theirs." He looks up at last. "Booth six is yours, though. Lifetime. I said that once and I'm keeping it."
I go to booth six. Somebody's already in it.
Otis is in it, in a clean shirt, with his hair wet down like it's Sunday. And on his lap, with both elbows on the plastic dashboard, there's a very small, very serious girl with braids and a gap in her teeth.
"Mr Lark," says Ruby Mabry.
"Miss Mabry."
"Daddy won a sundae off you." She says it like a lawyer. "In Name That Bus Part. The Splashdown Sundae."
"He did."
"It's his." She thinks about it. "It's mine now."
Otis shrugs at me over her head, helpless and proud, a man who's lost an argument to somebody nine years old and would do it again.
So I order it: three scoops, a sparkler, two spoons. I pay for it out of my wallet, from the zip pocket over my knee. The napkin's still behind the stamp card, folded in four, and I see the corner of it, the little rocket. I leave it where it is.
The sundae comes with the sparkler going. Ruby takes both spoons.
"How did you know when to stop?" she says. "The burn. Daddy said the clock floated off."
"I sang."
She thinks about that, with a spoon in each fist. "But how did you know the song was right, though?"
Otis looks at me. I look at the sparkler.
"I didn't," I say. "It was two seconds long."
Ruby nods, as if that's the first sensible thing a grown-up's said to her all year, and eats.
My elbow lands on the big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and I wait for it. T minus ten, in a voice that's mine and isn't.
Nothing happens.
Somebody's unplugged it. There's a wire hanging under the table with a bit of tape on the end.
"It's broken," says Ruby, through ice cream.
"It's okay," I say. "It was very old."
Outside it's cold for Florida, which means a jacket. The neon rocket's not on yet. It's four o'clock, and the sky's going pink over the Waffle House, and there's a truck in its lot with nobody in it.
There's a grey car at the far end of the lot. A Nissan, with a dent in the passenger door.
She's standing by it with a coffee in each hand. She's sunburnt down one arm, the driver's arm, from a lot of driving with the window down. She's in a blazer. It's dry.
I stop. She doesn't move.
We've done eight days in each other's ears. I know how she breathes before she lies, and what she sounds like eating crackers in a car at three in the morning. I don't know what to do with her face. She's looking at mine like she doesn't know either.
There's twenty yards of car park between us. A truck goes by on the highway behind the fence.
She lifts the coffees a little, both of them, like she brought two and doesn't know why.
I take my hand out of my pocket.
I put it up. Not high. Not the arm all the way up, not the elbow, not the grin coming after. Just my hand, open, at about the height of my shoulder, in a car park in Titusville, in the cold.
She looks at it for a long time.
I leave it there.