18. Gavin
GAVIN
At six weeks old, my son has opinions about my face. Every time I pick him up he studies me with a deep frown, like he’s deciding whether I can stay, and then he decides I’ll do and falls asleep on my tie. I’ve chosen to take that as a good review.
I’ve called first before every visit since that night in the loading yard.
I’ve driven up alone every time. I’ve learned the valve, the burp, the swaddle and the exact creak of the third stair that wakes him up.
This morning Allison let me give him his bath in the kitchen sink, and he peed on me, and she laughed before she could stop herself.
I drove back to the city with a wet shirt and felt like I’d won a prize.
Then I sat down at my desk, and for the first time since he was born, I went looking for what really happened that night.
My office is on the top floor of our building in Manhattan, with a window that looks north toward Teterboro if you squint.
I shut the door. I tell my assistant to hold everything.
Then I pull up Captain Ellis’s messages from the night of the opening, and my own phone records going back to April, and I read them myself.
Ever since that night, I’ve let Rebecca explain the storm warning to me.
It was a bad night. Every client we’d signed was in the hangar.
Ellis sent his message into a pile of other messages, and she was juggling the caterers and the press and the rest of it, and she thought operations had other routes.
I took her off my phone and my plane and my calendar that night, and I didn’t fire her, because the base had opened hours earlier and she was the one who knew where every piece of it was.
London needed her. I told myself that was a reason.
It’s taken me this long to open these files. I was drowning in bottles and the drive north and a base that calls me every night, and underneath all that, I didn’t want to know. That part’s on me.
I’d seen Ellis’s warning. I’d never seen her answer to it. It’s right under his message, the one with the last safe time to take off in plain words, and she sent it while I was shaking hands at the door.
Hold. Don’t pull him out before the speech. I’ll tell him.
She didn’t miss it. She read it and answered it.
I sit there gripping the arm of my chair and wait for my hand to stop shaking. It doesn’t, so I keep going.
The phone records are worse, because they’re about April, and April is where all of this started.
There are two calls from Allison on the night Rebecca told me it was nothing urgent.
The first one is short. That’s the one Rebecca answered while I was across the room with a client.
The second came right after it, and it rang until it went to voicemail, and she didn’t leave a message.
I pick up my phone and scroll back through the call history. The first call is there. The second one isn’t. Somebody deleted it before I got my phone back.
I called Allison myself that night, the minute I walked out of that meeting.
I asked her if there was anything I needed to know.
She said no. For months I’ve held on to that no as proof that she chose to shut me out.
Now I’m looking at the call she made right before it, the one I never saw, and I think about her hanging up on my voicemail with a pregnancy test in her hand.
There’s one more thing. I didn’t go looking for it.
It’s in an email about the new terminal at Teterboro, forwarded to me with a stack of year-end paperwork.
Barrett Greenhouses had the landscaping order.
In September, it was canceled. Next to the cancellation, someone in purchasing wrote a note: R.K. handled in person.
Rebecca doesn’t handle landscaping orders. Rebecca doesn’t drive an hour north to cancel ferns.
I call her extension. “Come up.”
She’s in New York for the year-end meetings. She comes in a few minutes later in a navy suit with her hair pulled back tight, carrying a tablet, like she’s here to talk about fuel costs. I shut the door behind her.
“Sit down.”
She stays standing. I turn my screen toward her.
She reads Ellis’s message and her own answer under it. Her face doesn’t change, but she sets the tablet down on the corner of my desk, very carefully, square with the edge.
“It was the opening, Gavin.”
“It was my son.”
“You didn’t know that yet.”
“You knew my wife was in labor. I told you in the office.” I pull up the phone records. “And this is April. Allison called twice. You answered the first one and told me it was nothing urgent. The second one’s gone off my phone.”
“I cleared an alert during a client meeting.”
“You deleted my wife’s call.”
“And you called her yourself as soon as the meeting ended.” Rebecca lifts her chin. “She could have told you then. She didn’t.”
I’ve been telling myself exactly that in the middle of the night ever since he was born. Hearing it in her voice makes me sick.
I slide the Teterboro email across the desk. She looks at the note from purchasing, and she lets out a slow breath through her nose, and I watch her decide not to lie about it.
“Yes,” she says. “I went up there.”
“You saw her.”
“Yes.”
“She was seven months pregnant.”
“She was twenty-eight weeks.”
It’s so exactly like her that I almost laugh. I’ve never felt less like laughing, and it comes out as a breath of air.
“You flew back to London,” I say, “and sat across a table from me all fall, and you never said a word.”
“If I’d told you, you’d have been on a plane that night.
” She says it flat. “Right before the opening. We had crews who’d moved their families to England for this.
We had pilots who’d turned down other jobs.
We had a year of work sitting on that hangar floor, and every client who’d signed was waiting to see if you’d actually show up.
You’d have walked out on all of them for a woman who was hiding your child from you. ”
“That was my choice to make.”
“You’d have made the wrong one.”
“I made the wrong one anyway,” I say. “You just made sure it was the one you wanted.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then her shoulders come down a little, and she stops being careful.
“I was there when this company was one leased plane and a hangar that leaked every time it rained. I slept on the floor of that hangar at Teterboro. I talked pilots into waiting on payroll. I talked you out of quitting twice. I built this with you.”
“You did.”
“She married the finished version of you and got angry that the work still needed you. She moved out the week you left. She hid your son from you for months. She had the whole summer to pick up the phone, and she didn’t, and now she makes you call before you can see your own child like you’re somebody dangerous.
” Rebecca looks at my wedding ring. “I stayed. I gave you every year I had. I thought when London was running, and the rest of this was over, you’d finally look up and see who was still standing next to you. ”
She’s telling me she loves me without using the word. It’s the same pass she made at me in my townhouse in London, dressed up as a business talk, and it makes my skin crawl.
“We were engaged for about five minutes, Rebecca. A long time ago. We figured out we were better at running a company than planning a wedding. You said that. You were the one who said it.”
“I was wrong.”
“Then you should have told me that, and let me say no to your face again. Instead you went after my wife.”
“I never touched your wife.”
“You deleted her call. You drove up there and looked at her and my son and then flew home and let me sleep. You sat on the one message that could have gotten me to that hospital.” My voice is climbing, and I let it.
“And you’d have been paid a fortune once London was up and running.
Don’t tell me that never crossed your mind. ”
She doesn’t deny it. She doesn’t even blink. That’s how I know it did.
“You’re firing me,” she says.
“Yes.”
“After fifteen years.”
“Then you knew exactly what you were risking.”
“London falls apart without me. You know it does. There isn’t anybody else who knows that base.”
“Then it falls apart.”
She hears that I mean it. For a second she looks at me like she doesn’t recognize me, and I’m not sure she’s wrong.
There are no tears. She unclips her ID badge from inside her jacket and lays it on my desk, face up, square with the edge, the way she lays down everything. It still hurts to watch. I’m grieving the woman who slept on that hangar floor, and I can feel it in my throat.
“Allison’s going to divorce you anyway,” she says.
She knows right where to put that. I let it go in under the ribs, and it stays there.
“She might,” I say.
Rebecca picks up her tablet and walks out. She doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t shut the door. I sit in my office until the light goes gray, with her badge on my desk and London’s numbers on my other screen, and I don’t look at them.
Then I print it all out. Ellis’s message and her answer. The April calls. The Teterboro note. I stack the printouts, and I text Allison from the elevator.
I found out what Rebecca did. All of it. Can I bring it up?
She answers before the doors open. Come.
For the whole drive north my hands are easy on the wheel, and I let myself believe it’ll be enough.
The news van’s long gone from across the road. Somebody’s hung wreaths by the retail-house doors, and the cold air smells like pine and wet soil. Through the glass I can see her at her desk with Henry asleep in the bassinet beside her. I walk in with the printouts under my arm.
Allison has a big envelope on the desk in front of her, and she’s holding it down with both hands.