Chapter 17
At the Whistlestop River Air Ambulance base, the entire crew mucked in with cleaning Hilda between jobs. Today was a full clean and Hilda needed it. Maya took charge of cleaning the helicopter’s exterior with the special shampoo and although she didn’t always admit it, she quite enjoyed the polishing stage that followed, when Hilda began to take on a high sheen and show herself off.
As a little girl, Maya had been interested in aviation but her fascination soon turned to helicopters after she saw one land so close, she could feel the wind from the blades on her face. There’d been an accident near her primary school that day and the field was cleared to allow an air ambulance to land. Maya could remember watching from the open classroom window when her attention should’ve been on her spellings. She’d been in awe of the shiny red helicopter against the rich green of the grass, the pilot standing guard with his aircraft. She’d leaned out of the window, and the pilot had waved. Maya would never forget that moment, and even when the teacher ushered her away and closed the window as the crew brought a patient to the helicopter on a stretcher, Maya still sneaked a look from her place at her desk. She watched the aircraft take off, amazed that there wasn’t a runway and that it lifted into the air as if by magic.
Maya must have gone on and on about helicopters after that day because her birthday gift was a Meccano helicopter and the year after that, she got a model helicopter her dad helped her put together and paint in intricate detail. The year she turned ten, her dad had said that because she was in double figures, it meant a big birthday treat for her and that treat was a helicopter ride over the countryside that cemented her fascination and passion for aviation.
Sometimes she wondered how her dad had gone from embracing her hobby and her desire to fly to not wanting to hear anything about it.
Maya finished off buffing Hilda’s front windscreen and climbed down off the stepladder she’d had to use to reach the very top. She breathed in the fresh air outside, smiling at the beauty of the great outdoors. She loved the fact that it was still summer and when this shift came to an end and the other crew took over, there’d be hours of daylight still left before the sun even dared to drop in the sky.
Bess had headed inside after cleaning some of the interior and Noah was finishing up with the mopping of the helicopter’s floor using Stumpy, the name they’d given to the mop with the handle hacked off as it was too tall for the aircraft’s interior.
‘Hilda scrubs up pretty well,’ he beamed as he climbed out onto the tarmac and stood next to Maya.
‘She does. Great job all round.’
He might have smiled, but ever since the day of the hoax call, a light in his eyes had dulled, he didn’t have the same joviality or upbeat approach. Not that it had affected his work. They’d been out on four calls today, one of their busiest shifts in a while, with no fatalities which was always a win. But while Noah had been professional and focused during the job and joined in the chatter on the way back with her and Bess in the helicopter, Maya had noticed as he was cleaning that the chatter stopped, he went into his own head whenever he could, there was no joking about or teasing and laughing the way the crew usually did, which was probably why Bess had got her part finished and headed inside already.
Noah picked up the bucket of water, took it over to the grass area and tipped it out before coming back to retrieve the mop.
‘Is everything okay with you?’ Maya had picked up her cleaning gear and they were heading towards the hangar. She didn’t need to put Hilda away today; she’d stay on the helipad for the blue team who would finish their shift at around 2a.m. and put the helicopter to bed for the night.
‘All good,’ he assured her with another smile she sensed took some effort.
They put the cleaning equipment away and as Noah headed for the locker room, Maya washed out the rags and cloths. It was as she was hanging the last one up to dry that she picked up on a heated conversation coming from reception.
She went to find out what was going on and found Officer Ryan Tucker talking to Nadia, Noah on the periphery, asking questions. Ryan was a former colleague of Conrad’s before Conrad took a detective position and transferred to another station in the next town.
Maya acknowledged Ryan’s presence with a smile and a nod. He did the same in return but was soon back to business. He directed his address to Maya and Noah, although Maya sensed Noah had already heard the spiel.
‘As I’ve explained to Nadia, the likelihood of us finding the culprit for the prank call is very low. I appreciate how frustrating this is for you. It is for us too, but we don’t have anything to go on unfortunately.’
Noah wasn’t happy. ‘So they get away with it?’
‘Like I said, nothing more we can do at this stage.’ Officer Tucker was pragmatic in his approach. ‘If we find anything, we will let you know. Probably kids.’
Maya held the door open for him. ‘Thanks, Ryan.’
‘No worries. Good to see you, Maya, and please do send my regards to Conrad.’
‘Of course.’ And it was no surprise that Officer Tucker and probably the rest of the force assumed she was seeing Conrad on a regular basis. She wondered whether he’d told anyone about the divorce at all.
Before their shift came to an end, the crew got one more job ten minutes away but they returned in good spirits after a positive outcome for their young patient. Bess and Noah completed the patient report forms and updated the database. Maya had her own paperwork to do as she was responsible for keeping the technical log up to date with maintenance requests – none today – details of each flight and fuel calculations.
After shift, Maya went to get her things from her locker. She’d expected Noah to have left as she’d been waylaid chatting with Vik, the other pilot, as she handed over. But he was still in the locker room, as though this might be the best place for peace and quiet, even though it rarely was with the comings and goings of the team, the shrill alerts of the multiple phones when a job came in at the airbase.
She undid her locker and retrieved her bag. She couldn’t wait to get home and take a shower. Hilda was cleaner than she was right now.
Noah opened his own locker now he was no longer alone and got his things out before closing the steel door once again.
Maya couldn’t leave it. ‘Noah, I know I don’t know you all that well but if you need to talk…’
He turned to face her, his expression one she couldn’t read.
‘I mean it. We’re working together every shift and if there’s something bothering you, it might help to get it out in the open.’ She sensed he wasn’t one to usually do that. ‘It might not, but the offer is there…’ Maybe it was best if he didn’t let her in, if they didn’t get too close given she was starting to feel more than friendship towards him. She’d known it all the more the day Conrad had watched them outside the pharmacy. If it was totally platonic on her part, she would’ve dismissed Conrad’s comments and not thought about it since. But the fact was, she’d thought about Noah a lot more than she should have.
His voice stopped her as she turned to leave. ‘I can’t stand it, you know.’
She turned back. ‘Can’t stand what?’
‘Not knowing who made that prank call.’ He slumped down on the bench near the row of lockers. ‘It’s eating me up.’
She went over and sat down next to him, detecting a faint smell of the aftershave he usually brought with him at the start of shift. She was pretty sure any scent from her shampoo or shower gel hand long gone by now and it made her want to hold her arms down in case she smelt bad.
‘It’s horrible, it makes us all angry,’ she said. ‘But we can’t control the stupidity of some people. It’ll drive us insane if we try.’
He leaned forwards, forearms resting along his thighs. ‘Eva isn’t actually my daughter.’
‘I know, she’s your niece.’
He looked sideways at her briefly, eyes watery, forearms still laid against his thighs, palms pressed together. ‘Did Bess tell you anything else?’
‘She didn’t.’
He took a deep breath. ‘I have Eva because my sister Cassie died.’ He leaned back, shook his head as though he couldn’t really believe it.
‘I’m so sorry, Noah.’ Her heart sank in sympathy at what this man had been through. She couldn’t imagine his pain – if she were to lose Julie, it would crush her. ‘When did it happen?’
He looked at her briefly but then up at the strip light on the ceiling. ‘Five months ago.’
‘Noah, that’s barely any time at all.’
‘Some days, I wake up from a dream that she’s coming over to see Eva. Then I remember…’ His voice caught. ‘Cassie was a great mum. Eva was her whole world.’
‘May I ask what happened?’
He explained the weekend away, the horse falling, Cassie’s catastrophic injuries.
‘I’m not sure how you move on from that.’ She wanted to reach out and hug him, try to make him feel at least a little bit better if only for a moment. ‘She must’ve loved you to want Eva to grow up with you.’
‘We got on well as far as siblings go. But when I agreed to her wishes, I never thought…’
‘Nobody ever does.’
‘When my sister had the accident that day, emergency services were called but it was hard to get to the location by road ambulance and it took forever. An air ambulance would’ve been her best chance, but the air ambulance had already been dispatched on another call and by the time it was re-routed, it was too late.’
‘Oh, Noah…’
‘That’s not the worst of it.’ And now, piecing it together, she knew what was coming even before he said, ‘The call the crew were on when Cassie was lying there with life-threatening injuries was a prank call. Made by some rich kid for his kicks, an entitled teenager who thought the world revolved around him and stuff the consequences. He was sorry, of course he was, but that wasn’t going to bring Cassie back. Nothing was.’
She finally got it, why he was so angry about the hoax they’d been victim to.
‘That’s also why I said what I did when we first met,’ he told her.
She thought back to the words that scored her conscience that night at her father’s house, his reaction, her defensiveness.
‘Before Cassie died, I would’ve attended the job at your family home, I would’ve seen that our attention wasn’t needed, no big deal.’
‘I get it, Noah. You don’t need to explain.’
‘Doesn’t make it right.’
‘No, but it lets me understand you.’ It felt like an intimate thing to say and she wondered whether he was thinking the same thing. She’d never got involved with anyone in the workplace. She’d been with Conrad for so long and after that, she hadn’t been interested in anything other than forging her own path away from her ex-husband and making sure Isaac was happy.
‘Why can’t I get my shit together, Maya?’ The way he added her name to the end of his question indicated he saw her as a friend and for that she was grateful.
‘It’s only been five months. You’ll never get over losing your sister. But with time, the grief can get a little bit easier to manage day by day.’
‘You sound like you’re talking from experience.’
‘My mum died when I was eleven. And it took years to process it. I’m in my forties now and on some days, I’m still not sure I’ve fully come to terms with it.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘She fell at home, hit her head and we all thought she was fine. It was days later that she collapsed and died from a brain bleed nobody knew she had.’
‘And that’s why you were so quick to call when your sister was hurt.’ He shook his head, berating himself some more about his reaction and words that night at her father’s house.
‘I panicked, I made the call. You’d think I’d be more used to dealing with an emergency given the job I do. I think I’ll always wonder whether I could’ve done something different with Mum. Dad probably wonders it too. She had some dizziness after the fall, some confusion but she claimed it was tiredness. She mentioned a headache on and off, but knowing Mum, the pain was worse than she made out, the frequency more than she admitted. She never liked to make a fuss. She was always so strong.’
‘Like someone else I can think of,’ he said softly. His words and his tone gave her the same fluttery feeling in her tummy she got when he looked at her for longer than necessary. ‘Don’t you talk to your dad about it now?’
‘No. Dad and I don’t have much of a relationship these days. And we don’t see eye to eye about a lot of things. Especially when it comes to my job.’
‘I’d have thought he was proud of you.’
‘He never wants to know about it, and that’s been the case the whole time I’ve been flying helicopters.’
‘I’m sorry, Maya. That must be tough.’
‘Sometimes it really is.’ It was as though he saw parts of her she didn’t always reveal.
‘How is your sister now?’
She smiled. ‘Disgustingly happy with her new husband.’
Noah laughed despite the melancholy, despite the topics of conversation. ‘Good for her.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I should get going. My nanny needs her break given she’s coming back this evening. I think she feels sorry for me – she told me to head out for a run after work, grab some time for myself, so right now, at the end of shift, I mustn’t dilly-dally – her words, not mine.’
Maya picked up her bag. ‘I mustn’t dilly-dally either,’ she teased.
‘Exciting plans this evening?’
‘Not particularly. I said I’d drop in on Conrad, see how he’s doing.’
They left the locker room together and Noah asked, ‘How’s his recovery?’
‘Frustratingly slow.’ For him and for her.
Maya waved to Nadia, who was deep in conversation with pilot Vik. She thanked Noah for holding the front door to the airbase building open for her to go out first.
‘So he’s not up and about at all yet?’
‘He can walk okay but he says he’s unsteady on his feet,’ she said, noticing Noah had a weird look on his face. ‘That’s normal after his injuries, isn’t it? You’d know more than me.’
He pointed a remote to his car and it bleeped. ‘It can be. But every case is different.’
‘Well, hopefully he’ll be up and about before too long.’
‘I hope so too.’ There was a hesitancy before he added, ‘Does he have friends who can pitch in so it doesn’t all fall on your shoulders?’
It felt nice to have someone thinking of her, especially him. ‘Not really, but it’s fine.’ It wasn’t but she didn’t really want to air all her grievances. By the sounds of it, Noah had enough of his own.
‘You guys are divorced, right?’
‘Yes, although he tends to forget.’
‘Doesn’t that bug you?’ When he clocked her surprise at the question, he apologised. ‘I shouldn’t ask; we barely know one another.’
And yet she felt closer to him than any man in a long time. ‘I think we know more about each other than we did earlier,’ she smiled.
‘Well, that’s true. And about Cassie… thanks for listening.’
‘Any time.’
And the thought of any time with Noah had her smiling right up until she remembered she was still at Conrad’s beck and call. She crossed her fingers that there would be an end to it soon.