Seven
“GUESS HE HAD something else—urgent—to do?” Carlos said, as we stared at the vacant doorway.
But then, through the A/C vent, we heard Hutch’s voice next door, leaving an angry message in a straight-to-voicemail situation.
His words were as loud and clear as if he had never left the room.
“I just walked in to start filming,” Hutch began, his voice tense, “and found out you sent someone else. Do you have any idea how many hoops I had to jump through to make this happen? The paperwork? The letters of petition? The logistics? I just about killed myself—and then I worked out the timing just right so you could be here on October fourth so we could all be together for the first time in over a year, for Rue’s sake, if nothing else—and all you had to do was show up … And that’s too much for you? Even that? It did occur to me that this might happen. That you might actually keep holding this grudge forever. If that’s really who you want to be, then I guess I can’t stop you. But what about Rue? What about everything she gave up for you? There’s only one thing she’s ever asked of us, and it was to be together on one specific day. You’re going to miss it—again?”
Carlos and I glanced at each other, then kept watching the vent.
Hutch went on with his message. “I recovered a body yesterday. A twenty-year-old guy who got caught in a rip current. His whole family waited on the beach while we searched.” Another sigh. “Do you have any idea how short life is? Even long lives are too short. Why are you wasting time? I keep trying—but nothing from you. I want so badly right now to say that I give up. But I can’t do that, Cole! Because as much as you hate it, and as much as I hate it right now, too—you’re the only brother I’ll ever have.”
The vent went quiet.
Wow. For a guy who was not a talker… I guess he had some things to say.
Then Hutch appeared in the hallway, his frown tight, practicing what looked like controlled breathing. He took several deliberate steps until he had joined us again.
Carlos proceeded as if nothing was weird. “AST One Tom Hutcheson, may I present documentary filmmaker Katie Vaughn.”
I was really more of a mid-level employee with potential. But documentary filmmaker worked, too.
“Hello,” I said, holding out my hand.
Hutch took it, looked up—and recognized me at last.
Delayed reaction.
Me: no longer butt-up leaning over a patio table in a polka-dot one-piece, but in normal clothes with all my gear—my personal dignity a little shaky, but present and accounted for.
“You’re—” he started.
My haunch stung at the recognition. “Katie,” I said. “I’m staying with Rue. In one of her cottages. Cole set it up.”
“I see,” Hutch said, nodding. “Cole set it up when he decided to send you instead of himself.”
I mean, yeah . I shrugged.
“Does Rue know? That you’re here to take his place?”
I shook my head. “He swore me to secrecy.”
Hutch pushed out a sigh. “Until when?”
“Until it was too late for her to make him change the plan?”
“So you knew?” he asked, like we’d been in cahoots.
Knew? Knew what? That this was an offer I couldn’t refuse? I’d have to be fully unconscious not to know that. “I knew,” I began, standing straighter, “that Cole was not available for this project and needed a replacement. And that his aunt Rue might not be happy about it.”
Hutch gave a nod, like Noted .
I waited out the pause that followed.
Next, Hutch stretched around to get a gander at my haunch. “How’s your—”
“It’s fine,” I cut him off, in a tone like We’re done with that topic forever .
Hutch brought his eyes back up to my all-business face. Then, in a one-final-question tone, he asked, “And you didn’t introduce yourself the other day at the pool because—?”
I thought about trying to come up with some convoluted explanation for him. But the only thing that came to me was the truth. So I didn’t fight it.
Instead, I just said: “I was too busy drowning in humiliation.”
IT’S FAIR TO say that I really didn’t know this guy Hutch very well—so my ability to read his emotional state might not have been perfect. But, as he led me off for the scheduled air station tour, there wasn’t too much doubt about his vibe.
I think the technical term is pissed off .
The kind of pissed off that’s so pissed off it seems weirdly calm.
Eye-of-the-storm pissed off.
Even though Hutch was clearly endeavoring to be professional, and even though he was polite the whole time, I could just tell. It was clear from the poker face, the one-word responses, the nostril flares, and the way he walked—no, strode —two feet in front of me at all times.
This, honestly, was the nonverbal Hutch I’d been led to expect.
But I had a job to do, so I just did it: asked questions, and took notes, and snapped photos. But this guy definitely didn’t want me there.
It’s a weird feeling: being unwelcome . I tried to compensate with enthusiasm, panic-talking with ridiculous commentary, like “Those helicopters are so orange!”
I guess the US Coast Guard didn’t suffer from chromophobia.
Needless to say, my goofy cheeriness didn’t help.
Hutch kept up a robotic pace, showing me the remaining offices, the presentation room, the break room, the preflight meeting room, and the hangar—the site of my infamous “so orange” comment, yes, but also several other idiotic statements, like, “Look how shiny they are!” and “The floor is so clean!” and “Those rotors are enormous !”
Yeah. Pretty bad.
But can I say something about all those dumb things I said? They were true .
The helicopters really were shiny—and so much bigger than when you see them motoring across the sky in the distance. The hangar really was spotlessly clean. And the rotors really were enormous—almost prehistoric in scale. I felt an actual, honest-to-god feeling of awe as I beheld them in that hangar.
It was unexpectedly moving.
It felt like a shrine to all the best parts of humanity.
Which was something I would’ve said to Hutch, if he’d been receptive at all. I might even have thanked him.
Instead, I was trapped. Anxiety-babbling about décor.
Finally, for the grand finale, he took me outside, pausing to don a pair of aviators, where a helicopter was about to take flight for a training mission. The crew was already on board, and the blades were spinning up top—and there is no possible way to explain how loud it was. For the first time, I understood the term choppers . Those blades really do chop the air—and you can feel the vibrations from one side of your body to the other.
“This chopper is really loud!” I called to Hutch once I’d caught up, continuing my streak of inane commentary.
Hutch turned back. “They’re only called choppers in the movies.”
“You guys don’t call them choppers ?”
“We call them birds .”
Birds. Huh. “Why hasn’t that bird taken off yet?” I called next, trying it out.
He looked at me long enough for me to decide that he was at least 10 percent cooler and more intimidating with those aviators on.
Then he answered, “Procedures and checks.”
I watched it, thinking I’d see it lift up into the sky any minute. But I guess those procedures and checks were pretty thorough. Time lumbered along, and many minutes later, still standing there, side by side, surrounded by the vibrating air, I squinted toward Hutch in the sunlight and heard myself call, “Did you know that the word helicopter comes from Greek?”
Hutch looked over.
“People assume it breaks down into heli and copter ,” I went on, “but that’s not right. It’s actually helico and pter .”
No response.
Come on! This was the most interesting thing I’d learned all weekend!
“ Helico ,” I pushed on, still at top volume, “means ‘to spin,’ and pter means ‘to fly.’ You know: pter as in ‘pterodactyl.’ And of course dactyl means ‘fingers.’ So pterodactyl means ‘flies with fingers.’ Which is true, if you look at their wings. They’re just fingers with skin stretched between.”
Had I gone off the rails at flies with fingers ? Possibly.
But this information was objectively fascinating.
I waited for Hutch to become fascinated.
But he refused.
So I went ahead and asked, “Are you angry right now or something?”
He tilted his head, like that was the most ridiculous question ever. “No.”
“You look kind of cranky.”
“No.”
I put a hand on my hip. “You seemed a lot nicer the other day.”
“You hadn’t taken my brother’s job the other day.”
There it was. At least now we could talk about it. “I didn’t take it! He gave it to me!”
“This”—Hutch gestured around at everything we were doing—“was supposed to be happening with him.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“You could have said no.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you can’t even swim!”
“Shh!” I said, looking around as if the helicopter noise wasn’t swallowing every sound we made. “You could get me fired.”
“Maybe I should get you fired. You lied to get this job.”
“I didn’t lie ,” I said. “I just didn’t volunteer the truth .”
“Also known as lying.”
“Look,” I called over the noise, “this is how my industry works. You say yes, and then you figure it out.”
“Unless you drown first.”
That went dark fast. “I’m not going to drown.”
“No?”
“No! Because you’re going to teach me how to swim.”
“Maybe I should just report you.”
“Reporting me won’t get you Cole. He’ll send every underling there is before he comes here. And the next one you won’t be able to blackmail.”
Hutch looked away.
“Look,” I said, “I know you didn’t want to do this. I googled you. You refused every Puppy Love interview request! You refused 60 Minutes ! And NPR! And Jimmy Fallon! You’re not looking for cheap fame. You just want to do your job in peace.”
Hutch let out a slow breath.
“And I’m gonna be honest,” I went on. “I overheard everything you said in that voicemail message for Cole. It came right through the A/C vent like a loudspeaker. So I know this is only happening right now because the higher-ups wanted it to. And I know you’re trying to make the best of things—and that’s how our little rinky-dink, Dallas–Fort Worth metro area video company got this gig. And I know you’re trying to heal some deep rift with your brother. And you’re mad that I’m here and he isn’t. But, honestly…” I paused for dramatic effect. “I think you should get over it.”
Hutch dropped his shoulders. “You do, huh?”
“I do. Because I may not be what you wanted—but I’m definitely the next best thing. I’m good at my job. And I’m a nice person. And I genuinely respect who you are and what you do. And guess what? We can help each other.”
Hutch flared his nostrils, like How?
“If you”—I pointed at him—“don’t get me fired, then I”—I touched my collarbone—“will help you reconnect with your brother.”
“How exactly would you do that?”
I made it up on the fly: “Well, he’s my producer, so we’re in pretty frequent contact. I take it from earlier that he’s not too keen on taking your calls.”
Hutch looked away.
“Who knows if he’ll even listen to that voicemail?” I went on. “He might just delete it. Or never even notice it. I talk to him. I can put in a good word for you.” But that didn’t sound strong enough. “I can put in lots of good words for you! Help him come around. Convey your talking points.”
I was just brainstorming at this point.
But Hutch was considering it.
I kept going. “I can advocate for you. However you need me to. We can get creative.”
When Hutch looked up, his body language had shifted. The sun had shifted, too, and started to cast its famous late-afternoon golden rays. It was lighting up the ends of his burr haircut like dandelion fluff, and backlighting his flight suit, too.
Which I suddenly realized was a strangely sexy garment. Maybe it was the suggestiveness of what that drab green was camouflaging. Or maybe it was the badassery of the arm patches. Or the dependability of those black utility boots. Or the official gold lettering on his name tag that read TOM HUTCHESON—AST USCG .
Or maybe it was the fact that the obscenely noisy helicopter we’d been standing next to this whole time had taken off while we were shout-talking, and I hadn’t even noticed. Now it was just a distant buzz on the horizon. Now I could hear the wind shhh ing around us—and see long, tufted grass waving at the edges of the runway, making this moment seem bright, and alive, and tinged with possibility.
“You’d do that?” Hutch asked.
But now I’d lost my train of thought. Thanks a lot, military-wear. “Do what?” I asked.
Hutch shifted his weight. “Advocate for me. With Cole.”
“Of course. We can form an allegiance.”
“Alliance,” Hutch corrected.
I shrugged, like That’s what I said . “You help me. I’ll help you. Everybody wins. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Everybody winning?”
“No,” Hutch agreed. “That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“So we’re allies?” I asked, to confirm.
Hutch eyed me. “I suppose so. On a trial basis.”
“Great,” I said. Then I added, “Because Cole never cleared Rue’s car to drive on the base. So do you mind if we carpool to work?”
AND SO, WITH that… we went inside to do our first official interview.
Disastrous timing. If there’s not an old saying “Never interview a subject on the very first day,” there should be.
By the time we got back to the hangar, the lighting and sound guy from Miami was there. He’d been escorted in by Carlos and had already finished setting up. He had a rat ponytail and wore a T-shirt that featured a clip-art video camera and the words I SHOOT PEOPLE… FOR A LIVING .
He’d arranged a chair in front of one of those big, orange, shiny birds I’d been admiring earlier, using his own camera on his own tripod, and when I checked the framing, it was perfect—a wide angle with a depth of field set just right to blur and soften the background a little while still keeping it bright and imposing and impressive.
I studied it for a minute, and then I said, “We should lose the chair.”
“You don’t want him sitting?”
Most interviewees sat: more conversational.
But I shook my head. “I want him standing.”
Standing like an alpha. With his feet shoulder-distance apart and his helmet under one arm. Shot from an underside angle to make him look even taller and emphasize the heroism.
But the lighting guy didn’t need all those details.
He took the chair away.
I positioned Hutch in an at-ease stance on a mark taped to the floor at a two-thirds split in the frame. Then I checked everything in the monitor.
Perfect. Except something was missing. Hutch had taken off his aviators when we came inside.
I walked back over to Hutch. “Give me your sunglasses,” I said.
“What? Why?”
“I want to try something.”
Hutch took the case out of a zipper pocket and handed it to me.
I took the glasses out, opened them up, and then stepped close to position them on his face. Wow, did all military men radiate this kind of buzzing electricity? Or was it just Hutch?
It distracted me a little. For a second, I kept my hands up on either side of his face, trying to focus and decide if the glasses were a go or a no-go .
“What are you doing?” Hutch said.
I stepped back. “Seeing if you look cooler with your aviators on.”
“I don’t,” Hutch said.
I wrinkled my nose. “I think every woman in America might disagree with you.”
“We are inside ,” Hutch said then. “There is no sun here.”
“Details,” I said, waving it off.
“You don’t wear sunglasses inside a hangar.”
“Nobody knows that.”
“ I know that.”
“They make you look cool,” I said, like Why are you fighting me?
“I don’t need to look cool,” Hutch said—implying, but not actually saying, I am cool .
“Real life and video are not the same thing,” I said.
“But,” Hutch argued, “if you put on sunglasses when there is no sun , then you’re just wearing them for show. Which amounts to trying to look cool. And I don’t know if you know this—but if you have to try to look cool, you’re not. By definition.”
Fortunately for the shot, he looked cool either way.
I flared my nostrils, stepped close again—feeling that same electrical force field of his body—and reached up to take them back off.
But just as my fingers touched his temples, Hutch said, “Did you know you have a little pie piece of brown in one of your eyes?”
I held still. “Yes.”
“Not really a pie piece, even, because the edges are blurry, like it was airbrushed.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that before.
“Does it have a name?” Hutch asked then.
“Does what have a name?”
“When part of your iris is a different color like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably?”
Hutch kept staring straight at my eyes. My finger pads were still touching the sides of his glasses. “Well,” Hutch said, like he was summing everything up. “It’s cool.”
“Cool?” I asked.
“Your pie piece,” he said. “It’s cool.”
“And I didn’t even have to try,” I said.
I was supposed to be taking off his aviators. So I did.
“Exactly,” Hutch said. “You’re a fast learner.” Then, before I turned away, Hutch had another question. He lifted the sunglasses and said, “Why didn’t you just ask me to put these on myself?”
Huh. I thought for a second. Why hadn’t I done that? “I guess I’m just used to handling the props.”
“These aren’t props. These are my actual glasses.”
Bit of an overly fine point. “Now that you’re in a video,” I said, “they’re kind of both.”
TIME TO GET started. I checked the frame again and sent a silent prayer of thanks to the heavens that Hutch looked even better on camera than he did in real life. There are people in this world you just can’t help but want to stare at, and Hutch was definitely one of them. Frown and all.
Good for him.
But also good for my career.
Plus, he turned out to be appealing. As a person. Pilots and flight mechanics kept walking by, catcalling him and teasing him with “Work it, baby!”—and he’d duck his head in the most irresistible aw-shucks way and smile at that spotless concrete floor. He clearly disliked being the center of attention—but he was also a really good sport about it.
Not to mention the moment when—and I swear this has never, ever happened before—I caught my foot in one of the lighting cables and knocked over one of the big lights—and myself. The lighting guy caught the light just in time, and Hutch, out of nowhere, caught me .
“Got ya,” Hutch said. Before I even registered that I was in his arms , he had me back on my feet and was picking up his helmet and returning to his mark.
As if rescuing people was as no-big-deal as breathing.
Which I guess maybe it was—for him.
“Thank you!” I called, brushing myself off. Then adding, “That never happens, by the way.” Right? I knew my way around a set. I didn’t just go around from job to job, tripping on lighting cables like a loony bird.
I blamed the weirdness of this weird day. And Hutch. And his aviators.
I got back to work and checked the monitor one more time—noting that drab green and Coast Guard orange were complementary colors.
Sometimes you just know when you’ve got a project in the bag. Hutch looked so good on-screen, I’d have watched that interview with the sound off. This video was going to rock, I thought. I had no option but to crush it. This guy was born to be interviewed.
Until the interview actually started.
Let’s just say that Hutch turned out to be… not exactly a natural.
The not-a-big-talker version of Hutch showed up just when I needed him to be the opposite.
The camera—even after I’d messed around for twenty more minutes—did not disappear from his mind. He stayed aware of it constantly, the way you might stay aware of a hungry wolf just outside the light of your campfire.
To seem natural when there’s a camera lens trained on you takes a certain amount of pretending for anyone: pretending it’s not there, or that you don’t care, or that it doesn’t bother you. But Hutch, it turned out, was not great at pretending.
By not great , I mean abysmal .
Probably a good thing in real life. But on video? Disaster.
I tried everything I could think of to help him to relax. Jokes, flirting, making crazy noises, laughing too loud at everything he said. I was like a dog photographer with a squeaky toy, I swear.
But Hutch remained painfully monosyllabic.
I won’t suck out your soul with the details of the first hour-plus. It was basically me just asking questions like, “Can you introduce yourself?”
And Hutch robotically saying, “I’m Tom Hutcheson. I’m an aviation survival technician—an AST—for the United States Coast Guard, commonly referred to as a rescue swimmer. I have eight years of service.”
Tone of voice? Body language? Vibes?
All totally unusable.
We’d have to record intros again later.
“Tell me about being in the Coast Guard,” I said.
“There’s not much to tell.”
Okay, that was clearly false. “Something,” I prompted. “Anything.”
So Hutch answered, “There are twenty-six Coast Guard air stations in the United States—including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico—scattered about three hundred miles apart along the coast.”
Oh, god. We were doomed.
He was beautiful but useless.
Honestly. Where was the guy who had mocked me for using the word chopper ? Where was the guy who had just explained to me how coolness worked ?
I wanted to interview that guy.
“Tell us about that chopper behind you,” I teased, hoping to provoke him.
But Hutch just replied: “Some air stations run the MH-65 Dolphin and others run the MH-60 Jayhawk. We also deploy fixed-wing aircraft.”
“What’s the most interesting thing you do in your job?” I asked, hoping he might tell a story of a death-defying rescue, or wax rhapsodic about how fun it is to fly in helicopters, or even explain what I’d just learned from the internet: that all swimmers were experts at sewing and they repaired their own gear.
But Hutch just shrugged and said, “Saving lives.”
Most interviews last between two and five hours. After an hour and a half , and a snack break, he finally loosened up—a little. I hadn’t wanted to waste any of my good questions on him early, when he was still so stiff, because I knew none of it would be usable later. He could announce a UFO with that body language—or cure cancer, or declare he’d seen a mermaid—and it wouldn’t matter, because the way he was saying it was dull as hell.
It wasn’t until I ran out of starter questions that things shifted.
Maybe he wasn’t not-a-talker . Maybe he just wasn’t a small-talker.
Maybe he wasn’t a starter-questions kind of guy.
Or maybe the novelty wore off, or maybe he got used to the camera, or maybe I was just finally asking him something real… but after a hundred minutes, at last, I finally started catching glimpses of the real Hutch.
“I watched a movie about the Coast Guard—” I started.
Hutch crooked an eyebrow. “I know that movie.”
The eyebrow felt encouraging. I went on, “And in this movie, a rescue swimmer yells at a man for panicking in the water. Is that a common thing in the real Coast Guard? Do you yell at the people you rescue?”
Hutch gave me a look.
Was that the worst question ever? Maybe.
But it sure got him talking.
“No,” Hutch said. “That’s not common—and no, we don’t yell at the people we rescue. People panic in the water all the time. Desperation makes people do crazy things. They’ll fight you—or try to climb on top of you—even when you’re the only hope they’ve got. Not to mention that hypothermia can make people lose their minds. They can get so cold they take their clothes off.”
“They can get so cold they take their clothes off? ”
Hutch nodded. “It’s called paradoxical undressing. The muscles keeping the blood close to your core become exhausted, and then it all rushes to the extremities—which makes people feel like they’re burning up.”
Hypothermia suddenly seemed scary in a new way.
“But you probably don’t see a lot of hypothermia in warmer climates, though, right?”
“You can get hypothermic in any water that’s lower than your body temperature,” Hutch said. “It just takes longer.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “What are the biggest hazards rescue swimmers have to face in the water?”
“Wildlife and boaters,” Hutch said, not even pausing to think.
“Wildlife, like—?”
“Jellyfish, crocodiles, and sharks.”
“There are sharks here?”
“There are sharks everywhere .”
“Everywhere?”
“One time in Puerto Rico, I got hoisted at the last second, just as a dorsal fin was coming right at me.”
Now I felt aghast. “So you go to work every day knowing you could get eaten by a shark?”
“I try not to think about it.”
I shook my head at Hutch, like What the hell?
But Hutch just said, “Sharks don’t really think of humans as prey. Your odds of getting killed by a shark are one in 3.75 million.”
“Says the man who almost got eaten.”
Hutch shrugged. “You can’t be scared of everything.”
“Sure you can.”
“You’re more likely to be killed by stray fireworks than a shark.”
I let that stand. Then I said, “Tell me about AST school.”
Hutch met my eyes. “What do you want to know?”
“I read that only fifteen percent of people who start AST school actually make it through. One year, out of a thousand who started the process… only three graduated.”
“That sounds right. There are some graduating class photos with only instructors. No students at all.”
“So what’s that about?”
I braced for a list of techniques.
But instead, Hutch lifted his handsome, symmetrical, film-worthy face, and I could see in his eyes that now, at last, he’d finally forgotten the camera.
At last, he was just talking to me.
Then he said, in a voice that suddenly felt as real and human as I’d heard all day, “It’s about being there for people on the worst day of their lives.”
I felt the truth of that like a twinge in my chest.
“AST school is tough,” Hutch went on. “It’s competitive. It’s dangerous. It’s grueling. It pushes you beyond your limits and then some. They make it that way on purpose. They force you to find out for your self just exactly how much you can take… and then go beyond it. Because when you go out on a search-and-rescue mission, and when you deploy into the ocean— not going is not an option. And then it’s just you all alone out there. You, and your stamina, and your determination—in an environment that wants to kill you. It’s you against everything , and you have to win. Because you are the last thing standing between your victim and the sea.”
Hutch looked down for a second, like those words were not just words to him, and then he looked back up. “So that’s all there is. Swimmer school taught us about one thing, and one thing only. Survival.”