28. Gavin
GAVIN
The London papers are on my knee, and I’ve read the same page over and over.
It’s the client’s list of complaints, and I know it by heart.
Crews showing up late, a plane sent out with a broken coffee maker to a man who noticed, pilots quitting because nobody over there could answer their questions without calling me first. Every item on it happened because I kept London in my own two hands and then left it sitting on the far side of an ocean.
Tomorrow night I’m going to sit across a dinner table from the family that owns the company and tell them it’s fixed.
Then I’m coming home on Sunday, in time for Henry’s bath, the way I told Allison I would.
The car’s warm and quiet. We’re over the bridge already, with the river black underneath us and New Jersey lit up ahead.
My driver has the radio on low, some old man complaining about the Knicks.
The plane’s fueled at Teterboro and the crew’s been waiting since dinner.
I called Allison before I left the apartment, and she told me it was cold up there and she and Luis were staying up with the boilers, and she told me to go.
I believed her. She doesn’t play things down anymore, or blow them up, and I’ve stopped playing London down to her.
My phone rings with her name on it. We hung up less than an hour ago, and my stomach drops before I’ve even picked it up.
“Allison.”
“The heat’s gone.” Her voice is flat and fast, the way it was the night of the storm, no warm-up at all.
“Both boilers in the main houses. Luis is down there trying to get one of them lit, and it keeps going out. It’s going to be in the teens by morning.
If we can’t keep the houses above freezing, we lose everything that’s in them. The whole spring.”
I can hear it behind her, a bell ringing on and on, and a man shouting something in Spanish from farther away.
“What do you need?”
She doesn’t answer right away. I can hear her breathing, and I can hear how much this is costing her.
“I need every pair of hands I can get,” she says. “I’ve called everybody I can wake up.” She stops, and then she says it plainly, like she’s putting it down on a table in front of me. “And I need you, Gavin. Can you come?”
In five years she’s asked me to be home for dinner, and to pick up the phone, and once, in our kitchen in April, not to get on a plane.
In November she asked me to come home for our son, and I gave a speech instead.
She’s never called me in the middle of the night and said I need you about the place she built.
“I’m coming,” I say.
“The plane?—“
“I’m coming. Tell Luis to keep trying.”
She makes a sound I can’t read, and then she’s gone, because there’s a bell ringing and a boiler going cold and she has no time to stand in her office and listen to me.
The green sign for the airport comes up in the headlights. My driver already has his blinker on. The exit’s right there, and past it is a hangar with my plane in it, the stairs down and the lights on and a crew that’s been ready for hours.
For a second I can see the whole other version.
I take the exit. I call her from the plane and tell her I’ve got a company sending heaters and a crew of guys with trucks, and I’m paying for all of it, and she says thank you in the voice she used to use for my assistant.
I land in the morning and sit through the dinner and save London, and the greenhouse is fine or it isn’t, and either way I send something expensive.
I spend years telling myself I did everything I could.
I’ve already been that man. He was giving a speech the night his son was born.
“Turn around,” I say.
My driver looks at me in the mirror. “Sir?”
“North Salem. Barrett Greenhouses. As fast as you can.”
He doesn’t ask me if I’m sure. He’s driven me for years.
He’s gotten me to that airport through ice storms and a blown tire and the night my father died, and he’s driven me up to Barrett every week this winter and waited in the yard with the engine running.
He kills the blinker and gets over two lanes at the next light, and the airport sign slides past on the right and falls away behind us.
That’s it. I don’t call my mother or my board, and I don’t call anybody to talk it over first. A year ago I’d have called Rebecca.
She’d have had a car waiting at the other end before we got back to the bridge, and she’d have made it sound so easy to go that I’d have gone.
Nobody’s telling me to stay tonight, and nobody’s telling me to go.
My wife asked me to come, and I’m going.
I stack the London papers and drop them on the floor.
Deb picks up on the first ring. It’s the middle of the night in England, and she’s been sitting up waiting for my text that the wheels are up.
“I’m not coming,” I tell her. “The heat’s gone at Barrett, it’s a hard freeze, and Allison asked me to come. I’m going.”
There’s a pause. “Is the baby okay?”
“He’s asleep at his grandmother’s. It’s Allison. She asked me.”
“She asked you,” Deb says slowly.
“She asked me. So London’s yours.”
“Tomorrow, you mean.”
“I mean London’s yours. Take the dinner.
Take the old man, and the crews, and all of it.
You should have been in those rooms from the start, and I kept you out of them because I didn’t want anybody else’s hands on it.
That’s on me.” I press my thumb into the space between my eyes.
“Whatever you decide, I’ll back it. You don’t need to call me first.”
“He’ll walk, Gavin. He said you in person.”
“I know. Go anyway. And tell the crews yourself, in the morning, before they read it anywhere.”
She’s quiet long enough that I check the screen to see if we’ve been cut off.
“You’ve never said that to anybody in your life,” she says.
“I’m saying it now.”
“Then why are you still on the phone with me?” she asks, and hangs up to go do the hardest part of my job.
I try money next, because I’m still who I am.
There’s an equipment rental place in Danbury that answers around the clock. The man who picks up sounds like he was asleep on a cot. I ask him for every propane heater he’s got, delivered to North Salem tonight, whatever it costs.
“Tonight?” He laughs, and he isn’t being mean about it. “Mister, it’s a hard freeze. Every farm and every construction site between here and Albany called me before supper. I can have a truck to you mid-morning. Maybe.”
“Mid-morning.”
“Earliest.”
I tell him to send them anyway, and I give him my card number, and I hang up and look out the window at the dark going by.
By mid-morning her crop is either alive or it’s dead, and the sun will have more to do with it than anything I can buy.
I’ve spent my whole adult life being able to make things arrive.
Tonight nothing I own can get up the parkway faster than this car.
What she needs is somebody to carry things, and I’ve got two hands.
“My father grew peaches in South Jersey,” my driver says after a while, without taking his eyes off the road. “Frost nights in April, he’d get us all out of bed. Me and my brothers, my mother, the dog. We’d run the smudge pots all night, and we’d walk the rows with him till the sun came up.”
“Did it work?”
“Some years.” He shrugs. “Most years, we saved most of it. You’re going to ruin those shoes.”
I look down at my shoes. They’re Italian and they cost more than his first car.
“I know,” I say.
The phone lights up on my knee. It’s the chairman of my board.
Then it’s a number in England I don’t know, and then the old man’s assistant in London, who must have the fastest ears in aviation.
Then it’s my mother. The screen goes bright and dark and bright again, over and over, all the way up the parkway.
I turn it face down on the seat. It buzzes against the leather the whole way north.
I think about the storm in November. She called me from a hospital hallway and asked me to come, and I stood in a hangar full of champagne and told myself there’d be time. I didn’t feel any of it in my body until I read the text on the tarmac, and by then it was over.
Tonight my hands are cold on my knees and my chest is so tight it hurts, and I’m nowhere near the plane.
My driver goes faster than he’s supposed to, and I don’t say a word about it.
The parkway gives way to the back roads, black and empty, with old snow frozen hard along the stone walls.
When we come around the last bend, Barrett’s lit up in the dark like a small town, every glass house glowing, and there are three pickups parked crooked in the loading yard with their doors still hanging open.
The gravel’s frozen into ridges, and the car bucks over them. I’m out before it stops. The cold hits me so hard it takes the breath right out of me, and my shoes skid on the ice.
The door to propagation three opens, and light spills out across the yard.
Allison’s standing in it in a barn coat that must have been her father’s, with a headlamp pushed up on her forehead and dirt to her elbows. Her breath goes up in a white cloud. She stares at me across the frozen yard like she’s not sure I’m real.