Flight Risk
/Keith Blouin
She remembered scales. A tune taking flight as her hands curled around ivory. There were major scales, minor scales, whole tone, chromatic, their names now just names, their meanings running off into the far spaces of a room. Back then she had practiced and practiced. She graduated to the Solfeggio in C Minor, the Traumerei, the Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor. How she loved playing Schumann. Life an escape on the little black wings of eighth notes. Then came chords, a time for singalongs, the music weighted with her age. And even as she no longer made sense of sheet music her muscles kept the faith, her hands reached for keys, her fingers splayed, it hardly mattered where. When someone passing her in the corridor noticed, she heard a mindless, “Oh look. How cute. She’s playing the piano.”
And so they wheeled her to the far side of the common room, as if sitting before a tinny spinet in need of repair would connect her to the past, the present. She stared at them, at the instrument, and plunked a key that made a muffled sound.
“Fix it,” she demanded.
“Oh Mrs. Withers,” they replied as if she didn’t mean it. She was small, childlike in their view, glassy blue eyes searching theirs for a response. They left her by the piano, in a room with other slow-moving octogenarians poring over puzzles and having disjunctive conversations.
No one fixed anything. She sat before the keyboard and as she waited she cased the room. Doorways to the north and south into wide halls, men and women in armchairs and wheelchairs strewn about like boulders. Daylight casting shadows of window muntins like bars. She could feel an ache inside the cast on her ankle.
“Lady, lady, lady,” she heard from a man seated behind her. She turned to face him. He grinned at her, knowingly, porcine eyes squinting amid thick white hair. He remained in his chair but as he spoke he jerked his pink head repeatedly up and to the side, as if to say, How about you and me over there in the dark corner just like in high school.
She scowled at him. “The male species of eighty-five ought not to be allowed,” she trilled.
If he understood her, he didn’t let on but continued leering at her and jerking his head. She turned again toward the keyboard and slammed her hands into discordant notes. A man ought to be like—she glanced around the room again and her eyes settled on a lithe, muscled figure in uniform—like that, she said just under her breath. Electrician, perhaps? He was young and he moved with grace as he disappeared into the building’s lobby. Something about his shoulders plucked a string in her mind but she couldn’t place it.
She eased her chair around and propelled herself slowly toward the lobby. Her broken ankle sent occasional spikes of pain through her but she ignored them, pushed herself on. No one seemed to mind or even notice until she had come within a few feet of the front doors. She could see the electrician through the glass, loading up his van.
“There you are, Mrs. Withers,” she heard as an aide took hold of the back of her chair and began to spin her in the other direction. A voice like a bird. Amber, her badge read. “We need you in the office,” she chirped.
In the office and across a desk the size of a football field sat a middle aged man, smug, his face fat and creased, thinning black hair sprinkling his forehead, a phone up against an ear. He waved them in and jabbered on.
“I had a man,” she said to him, but only the aide heard her.
“Yes, Mrs. Withers,” Amber replied, “wasn’t that Pete, your husband? He ran the greenhouse. My mom used to buy her tomato plants there.”
“I don’t know Pete,” she said.
The man put down the phone and shuffled through files on his desk. “Mrs. Withers,” he said. “Welcome to our community. I apologize for not seeking you out when you first got here. I like to know all our guests. How are you settling in?”
Silence ensued. Three weeks since her fall, her surgery, her cast like a ball and chain. Amber patted the older woman’s shoulders and tittered, “Mrs. Withers has been giving us a concert this morning, haven’t you? But we think the piano needs tuning.”
Mrs. Withers bared her teeth.
The man picked up the phone again and dialed a number he found in the file. “Mrs. Withers,” he said, “Lucy. I’m calling your nephew Brian. He appears to be your closest relative. I need to give him an update. You remember Brian, don’t you?”
“I don’t know Pete,” she replied. “I don’t know Brian.”
“Now, now,” said the aide as she patted Lucy’s arm. “Of course you do.”
Lucy had seen that man before. It was on an airplane, wasn’t it? He was the pilot on a short trip to Durham, that was it. The time her father wanted her to get to Homecoming, to be with the boy he favored, the one who brought him cartons of Old Gold cigarettes. She recalled how badly his pilot’s uniform fit over his paunch, and she wondered as she boarded if he’d been drinking. But they landed safely, she got to the game, the boy gave her a corsage to wear on the lapel of her suit jacket.
“You drove that plane,” she told the man.
“Yes, some deterioration,” she heard the man saying into the phone. “I take it she was living alone before the accident. That can accelerate this sort of confusion.”
She could still smell the carnations the boy had pinned on her, baby pinks against the navy blue wool.
“What we’re concerned about today,” the man continued, “is her safety.”
The trip across the North Carolina piedmont had been her first in a plane. She had a window seat and could watch the fields glide by below, shadows of tree-covered hills creating patterns in the greens and browns. She hadn’t been afraid, even when the aircraft hit a bit of turbulence. No, it was more like a ride at the county carnival, thrilling. She’d been disappointed that Sunday when she had to drive back home with the boy in his car.
The man went on, “It’s just that she appears to have an agenda of some sort. That’s right. Agenda. Can’t say exactly what, but our people often find her waiting by the front door. Yes, I realize she’s in a wheel chair, I realize that, sir. No, she can’t walk yet. The doctors have assured us of that. We’re surprised she’s able to move herself in her chair. She’s stronger than she looks.”
Robert was the boy’s name. They rolled down all the car windows for the two-hour drive home, and she tossed her head back and laughed and let the wind tear through her carefully styled hair.
“What I’m trying to tell you, sir, is that we consider her a flight risk.”
*
Everything was right with Robert, and at the same time nothing was right.
Lucy could almost picture him now as she spied cardinals through the rain-dirtied windows of her room in the nursing home. How his square jaw and quick eyes impressed her father, who saw in Robert a sure future for his only daughter. Chemistry major at Duke, then on to medical school, maybe by way of the Naval Reserves. Then a nice practice and a big clapboard house on a street where Lucy could raise his grandchildren without the fears that had plagued him during the Depression. Not that her father had lost his job; he had thrived at the thread company, but he knew what a bad economy could do to folks. He wanted something else for Lucy, who aced advanced math, who dazzled with her Clair de Lune. Yes, she would finish college, he said, but that was to make her Robert’s equal, as if a man and a woman ever could be equals.
“Yoo hoo! Mrs. Withers!” she heard from behind her door. A knock, and Amber peered inside the room.
“You have company,” Amber announced. “Brian is downstairs!”
Lucy tried to say something but nothing came out as the aide approached and took charge of her wheelchair.
“Do you want me to freshen you up?” said Amber, pausing by the mirror at the dressing table. “I’ll just get these little stray ends,” she continued as deft fingers picked at Lucy’s white head. “Your hair is very fine. Oh that’s it. You look very nice today, Mrs. Withers.”
Lucy remembered suddenly how Robert used to run fingers through the blonde curls that covered her shoulders. He called her Goldilocks. He teased her about things having to be just right, even though she knew he was describing himself.
“I had my hair cut,” she told Amber as they headed toward the elevators. “I wanted to look like a boy.”
“It’s easier to keep that way,” Amber replied.
And then she thought of Pete and how he used to braid her hair after a swim when she sat between his thighs on the sun-warmed limestone by the stream. He had the most marvelous hands, calloused and bony. They were used to work, they could find every part of her that she wanted found. They could plait her hair in jig time and then it would dry in funny, sideways curls, the top of her head flattened at the part. Pete would crack up at the sight. When she cut it all off, pixie-style, he just winked and said, “I can still get my fingers in there.”
Robert would have pouted. Robert thought her hair belonged to him.
“It’s my hair,” she insisted to Amber.
Robert wanted everything in its place, but Lucy didn’t like the way he sorted by gender—boys do this, girls do that. And girls don’t look like boys, though she was petite and wiry and flat-chested and short hair became her. Robert didn’t want her to compete in the county math contest, he didn’t want her to study math in college. What would she do with it—count babies? he used to joke.
Brian stood when he spotted her. “Aunt Lucy!” he said with a wide grin. He was trim and smartly dressed, with closely cropped graying hair, a kind face. He handed Amber the vase of daisies he was carrying as he took Lucy’s hands in his and kissed her cheeks. “How are you doing? How’s the ankle?”
“Are you Pete?”
Amber leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “No, Mrs. Withers, this is Brian, your nephew, remember? Aren’t these flowers lovely!”
Lucy glanced from the daisies to the cast on her ankle. She burst into tears.
“Does it hurt?” Brian said. He squatted beside her chair and continued to hold her hands. “Do you need to see the doctor?”
Lucy said nothing, wiped her face.
“I think she’s glad to see you,” Amber suggested. “She’s been keeping to herself lately.”
Brian said, “It’s been more than a year, other than when she was in surgery and that hardly counts. My fault completely.”
Lucy wondered if they would continue to talk over her, when all she wanted was to go home. And that woman with the reddish hair and freckles wasn’t Amber—she was Mary Louise, the junior from down the hall who made it her business to tell all the freshmen in the dorm what to do. Mary Louise wanted Lucy to marry the doctor, even though Robert wasn’t a doctor yet.
“But he will be,” Mary Louise insisted. “And he’s handsome, and he’ll be rich. Doctors are rich, you know.”
“Aunt Lucy,” Brian began. “They tell me you want to get out of here.” He tilted his head slightly up to her. “Your ankle is going to take a little more time to heal. You have to stay here until then because they can get you your meals and help you walk again. I wish I could do that, but with my job and all I can’t right now. Plus, I couldn’t even get your wheelchair inside my house.”
Lucy studied his hazel eyes under their thin brows. “Robert wants to put me in a box,” she said.
Brian stood, crinkled his face. “Who?” he asked. Box, box, box, was she thinking of a coffin? He gave Amber a confused glance and stared at Lucy. “No one wants to put you in a box,” he replied.
Lucy was thinking of the times Robert took her to those parties where everyone had to dress up. Girdles and brassieres that scratched and squeezed and stockings and high heels and pencil skirts that made you feel like a Geisha tottering around on bound feet. The boys gave you liquor to drink and you had to hold it or else you’d get sloppy and say something you didn’t mean to say, or you’d let the boy touch you where he wasn’t supposed to touch you. Robert always complimented her on how she held herself together at frat parties. And Robert knew his limits when it came to necking. She never had to stop him, even if she’d wanted to. Such a gentleman, they said.
But one time she did get tipsy. Susie Lehann, in love with Robert, sidled up to Robert and told Lucy how often she’d admired the dress Lucy was wearing. Lucy rolled her eyes at Susie and wandered off. She didn’t care what either of them thought about her wardrobe. These gatherings bored her. The men and women talked nonstop about who was who, and how they were connected to those uninteresting persons who, by the way, belonged to the so-and-so sorority or the fraternity or the club, where they dined and gossiped about yet other uninteresting so-and-sos. She gulped down the highball and felt lighter, merrier, as Robert came after her and she and Robert flew from party to parked car. How amorous she felt and then how appalled he was at her willingness to shed her clothes for him.
“No, no,” he insisted as he moved away from her in the front seat, leaving her all hot and bothered, and slightly drunk. “Not like this.”
“I wanted to drive home but he wouldn’t let me,” Lucy said, interrupting the conversation between Brian and Amber. “He said I’d wreck the car.”
Brian paused. “No, you can’t drive with that ankle. We’ll just have to wait and see about driving.” He patted her hand.
“I see what you mean,” he told Amber.
What Lucy saw was Robert trying to hold her back. He was afraid of something inside her. He couldn’t let that thing out, whatever it was, it might overwhelm him. And her father hoped she would marry him, she knew, her father who taught her to fish and swim and ride a bike and throw a ball like a man. Her father who helped her with trigonometry. Who bought the piano and paid for the lessons and listened as she struggled through this key and that key and all those flats and sharps. And yet he did, and he welcomed Robert into his house long after Lucy found herself confounded by the two of them and unwittingly trying to escape the life they promised.
*
She ran into Pete at the Withers’ Nursery, just outside of town, where she went with her mother to pick out pansies for the pots on the front porch. It was May, she was home for a weekend before the final push for the end of the semester, papers and exams. “You’re pretty fancy,” he told her. She and her mother had been downtown shopping and she had on a skirt and blouse, a string of pearls. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt and had a tray of petunias in dirt-covered gloved hands. She could see the outline of a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket. His shoulders were bony and broad, and one lurched up at a funny angle as he shifted his load about.
She recognized him. They’d been in school together, though in different grades.
“I could outrun you by a mile,” she replied.
He grinned. It was true; they used to race and she always won, at least until she was eight.
“I heard you play piano last year at the auditorium,” he said. “Night concert. It was real nice. You played Beethoven.”
She smiled and nodded, surprised he attended and even more so he remembered her piece.
“I’m crazy for Beethoven,” he added.
She next saw him that summer in town as they waited in line at the movies.
“Hey, fancy girl,” he said with a wink. “Hey, Robert.”
Pete and Robert had played football together in high school. Robert called plays and Pete ran a lot and caught passes. Lucy didn’t care much for the game but had enjoyed watching the slender waists and big shoulders of the athletes as they moved up and down the field. She had a thing for men’s shoulders.
“That Pete was a decent halfback,” Robert told her later. He had noticed the familiar way Pete eyed her that night they saw him at the movies. “I’m surprised he wanted to carry on the family business. That’s a dead end. And I don’t know why he’d want to be stuck in this hick town. He should’ve gone to college.”
When Pete called her up on the phone a few days later, he said, “Are you and Robert engaged or something?”
Lucy stammered. “Um, sort of, no, not really. I don’t know.”
Pete laughed. “Either you are or you aren’t. You can tell me. I can keep a secret.”
“We’re not,” she decided. No one ever consulted her about anything.
“Then do you want to go out?” he asked. “I’d like to take you to a spot I know.”
She agreed to meet him one afternoon—seemed harmless enough and something she could explain away to Robert if necessary—and she let herself out of the house when no one was around. He picked her up at the street and began a slow drive around town.
“Do you like college?” Pete asked.
“Sure,” she replied. Except the rich girls and frat parties. “Do you like working at the nursery?”
“It’s all I know,” he said. “I’ve been doing it so long—since I could walk, it seems. They put me in charge of some zinnia seeds as soon as my fingers could thin out the little sprouts, maybe even before that. Before long I graduated to tomatoes.” His laugh invited her in. “I love to watch plants grow, even give them names, Fred, Dot, Jonathan, Matilda. I know, sounds crazy, right? What do you study?”
“Math,” she said. “But some of the names are foreign, like Pythagoras. And I don’t get to give them out.”
Pete whistled. He pulled the car into the drive by the high school. “Surprise,” he said.
“Nostalgia tour.”
They walked to the back of the building and down a few steps where he unlocked a basement door. He turned on some overhead lights, scattering a few bugs. The corridors seemed small, and they smelled of wax and dust and the stale air of enclosure. Their steps resounded as they passed the cafeteria and found the stairwell to the main level. She followed him into the auditorium and then up on the stage where he swung open the green velvet curtains and switched on a spotlight above the grand piano.
“I wanted to hear you play again,” he announced with a smile. “Do you mind?”
She ran her fingers over the dusty black wood and then opened the keyboard. The piano responded warmly to her touch. As she worked her way into “Für Elise” she forgot about breaking into the school, she forgot about sneaking out of the house with Pete when she was half spoken for by Robert. She let the music fly out of her, there was no controlling it. She fumbled some parts and didn’t care, just picked up where she could and pushed on. Pete didn’t seem to mind. She realized Robert never had asked her to play anything. But Pete clapped, and he asked for an encore, and then another, and another. She ran through everything she could remember, bits and pieces of Bach and Scarlatti and Chopin all strung together.
Pete asked if he could kiss her before she got out of the car that afternoon. He leaned over and slowly brushed her lips with his. A few times, for good measure, his eyes daring hers.
“Where’d you learn that?” she said with a giggle.
“Next time we take it up on the track,” he replied. “You and me in a footrace. To the victor go the spoils.”
She slid out of the car and waved. Turned and went into the house. As he drove off she could feel her delight all gummed up inside her confusion. She couldn’t quite admit to herself that she wanted him to call again. But then he didn’t.
*
If it had been all about reasoning she might have had an easier time. But life was baffling. You couldn’t solve emotions, they weren’t linear. They crescendoed, they crashed. You had to play them like an unfamiliar score.
Lucy wasn’t in love with Robert, though everyone wished it, herself included. Two hometown superstars, fates entwined for a fairy tale ending. She wrecked the story line, she hardly knew why. She took the bus home one weekend that fall when she could no longer stand Pete’s silence. She called him from the bus station and told him she wanted to work with him in the nursery that afternoon. He picked her up and gave her gloves and showed her how to set the stems in soil to propagate next year’s geraniums. She spent hours sorting the stems by color and then planting and watering. The sweat, the dirt, the monotony—nothing bothered her.
She asked Pete why he never called.
“I figured you were going to marry Robert,” he said. “I didn’t want to interfere.”
“I don’t know if I will,” she told him, archly. “Anyway I told you we weren’t engaged.”
“Yeah but people talk.”
She studied the green eyes and turned up nose in his thin face, the tiny white scar on one side of the chin. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
He shrugged.
“Heck I might marry you one day.”
And now here she was in this unwanted place, her years winding down, her body held captive by the stiff black Velcroed box enclosing her ankle, her thoughts osmotic. Brian was saying something about her ankle being almost good as new, but his words made no sense. She was old, not new. She recognized him in this moment as her older brother’s son—her older brother, friend of Robert’s, both of them long gone.
“I want to see Pete,” Lucy said.
Brian measured his words. “Uncle Pete got the lung cancer a while back. He’s buried out past the old greenhouse. You ran the nursery after he died, remember?”
Sometimes there was a shaft of clarity that allowed Lucy to recall her life with Pete. The nursery became their family and they named the plants each year for all the children they never could have. Some were difficult, some won prizes. Pete bought Lucy a baby grand and later they recorded her on a reel-to-reel. They ran speakers through the greenhouse to have music for the flowers and the vegetables. Chopin produced the best blooms.
When Robert had found out about her bus trip to the nursery he said, “I can’t believe you’d want to spend a day with your hands in the dirt like that. Like a servant or something. What is it with you? And Pete—he’s going nowhere. I can give you anything you could possibly want. You’ll never have to lift a finger.”
She’d felt like running away, but she tapped her foot to keep time to a rhythm in her head and she let him tell her off.
“It’s your funeral,” Robert said finally when he realized it was over between them.
She’d been nineteen then, mid first semester of her sophomore year. Sixty-eight years gone since, and she knew she was still nineteen inside. She still felt like running away, and so the morning after Brian’s visit she got up before daylight. Instead of waiting for someone to help her with the black boot she slipped on the sneakers she found in her closet. Took the walker, made her way slowly downstairs by way of the elevator, putting as little weight on her right foot as possible.
Walking revived her confidence. Yes, her ankle was good as new! Lucy could smell the coffee and bacon from the dining room as she crept past, hoping not to be noticed. Then on to the lobby where she waited for sunup near a window to one side of the glass doors. Oh for a young man in a uniform to enter, she thought, that electrician would do. The room felt close, and she realized that the air wasn’t working right. Before long she saw the arrival of a fleet of vans for some air conditioning company, a bevy of men staging boxes and tools. Someone propped open the front doors so the workers could bring in their equipment. It was her moment.
She had gained yardage by the time they noticed she was gone. They could see her limping slowly way down the sidewalk and a pair of aides screamed at one another and took off in pursuit. But Lucy was nineteen again and she was running as fast as she could, trying to catch up with Pete. They were racing on the high school field, where runners had beaten out a soft dirt track encircling the ball diamonds and the concrete amphitheater on the side of the hill, and it was no longer August, but a crisp Saturday in late October.
“Pete!” she called out.
The aides saw the car jump the curb. They were just in time to attend to the woman on the ground and call the paramedics. They were just in time to calm the driver. He was young and he’d only glanced down at his phone for a half a second to read a text from his girlfriend, who was breaking up with him.
Lucy had thrilled to the music in Pete’s voice, thrilled to the way he smiled at her, as the blow delivered her from lines, and boxes, and chronology.
Author’s Note: The story grew out of a conversation with a neighbor who was caring long-distance for an elderly aunt, confined to a nursing home and troublesome. The staff there worried she would run off, even though she was in a wheelchair. I was interested in the character of an independent woman growing up in that post-Depression era, and I wanted to play with the passage of time, and how as we age we know we are the same person inside as when we were young.
I grew up in Lexington, Virginia, and graduated from Hollins College, now University. I have written for business journals and as a freelancer and most recently taught Latin and mythology at a middle school in Tampa, Florida.
