6. Conrad
Conrad
"How long have you known?"
I could have said something evasive, blew off her question and went on with my hollow life. But I felt different since she rolled into town. Changed. I felt myself deciding to be honest with her, damn the cost.
"Two years," I said.
She didn't move, and I could see her doing the math.
"Since you got here…You took the job knowing —"
"I took the job suspecting. Knowing came later."
I had not said any of this out loud to anyone.
I had not said it to Diaz, who had eyes.
I had not said it to the bartender at The Foundry, who had ears.
I had not said it to my own mother on the phone the four times a year she remembered to call me.
I was saying it now, in a small office to the daughter of the man whose company I had been suspecting of it, and my mouth was working without my permission, and I could not have stopped it if I'd wanted to.
"I worked another garage before this one," I said.
"Different state. Different fleet. Different reasons.
I saw things there I didn't have words for at the time.
By the time I had the words I — " I stopped.
The shape of it came up the back of my throat, and I waited for it to settle.
"By the time I had the words, anyone who cared to hear them was gone. "
"Gone."
"There was an accident. A bad one. Most of the men I worked with left the industry. I came out here because your father's people offered me a job and I needed one and I was — I was tired. Of looking. Of fighting. Of feeling it all.”
"And then?”
"And then you got here. And I started seeing it again. In a different shape."
She was quiet. I thought of the people who died in that mudslide, the way good men just stopped practicing medicine after the disaster. All the deaths. All of it potentially preventable … but certainly not properly examined.
And I thought of this seemingly vapid heiress with the body of a pinup model, who could have sat here playing computer games but decided to go digging and figured out in an evening what had taken me years to understand.
I watched her hand come up between us, seeking my body, and I should have stepped back. But then her palm met the side of my face and those fingers fit along my jaw like a custom part fabricated just for me.
Her hand was cool. The calluses on the pad of her thumb caught on the stubble I had not shaved off this morning because I was in that much of a rush to get here and see her again.
I closed my eyes.
I knew if I kept looking at her I was going to do something I could not undo, and the work of two years of not letting myself want anything was going to come apart in a heartbeat, and there was going to be no version of either of us that came out of that room the same.
She let her thumb move along my jaw. Soft.
I opened my eyes.
Her mouth was closer than it had been. Or mine was. I couldn't tell which of us had moved. I leaned forward, just to the place where my forehead met hers, and I stopped there, because the next inch would have been the line between now and perdition.
"Lili."
"Conrad."
Her breath was on my mouth. My hands were at my sides and they were closed into fists I had not formed on purpose.
Her hand was still on my face. The other one had come up too, somewhere in there, and was at my chest, palm flat, not pushing, not pulling, just there, the way a person rests a hand on a horse to keep it still.
Everything inside me wanted to claim this woman with my body, make her mine. But there was a truth stronger than the primal need coursing through me. I pulled back.
"Not while you work for them."
She didn't move.
"Conrad —"
"Lili. Not while you work for them."
She closed her eyes.
I felt her nod against my forehead. Small. The lashes of one eye brushed my temple. She did not lift her hand from my face. I did not lift mine from where it had migrated to her hip without my noticing.
For one second, two, three, we stood like that in her office with her father's incriminating evidence on the desk behind her.
Then somebody came down the hallway at a run.
It was Diaz, and he was hollering before he got to the door.
"Holt! Holt, where the hell — Holt. Conference room. Now."
I stepped back from Lili the way a man steps back from a hot stove.
I am not proud of what I felt in that second. Relief that the spell had been broken. Resentment, too. A surge of professional adrenaline that I welcomed because it gave my body somewhere else to put what it had been about to do.
"Holt — oh. Ms. Ashford. Sorry. A storm cell just got upgraded. We got three birds in the air and the front's coming in faster than the morning forecast had it. All-hands in the conference room in two minutes."
He was breathing hard. He'd come from the hangar at a sprint.
"Pilots?" I said. My voice calm and professional—the total opposite of the chaos in my veins.
“Hartwell’s coming down the Pinedale corridor. Ortiz is south of the Wind Rivers on the lift job. The third bird — Daley — is doing the medical transfer to Cheyenne."
"Wind speeds?"
"Forty at altitude and climbing. Front's moving at twenty-five."
"Get the conference room. I'll be there."
Diaz was already gone. I heard him hit the side door at the end of the hall.
I looked at Lili.
She was still where I had left her. The hand that had been on my face was at her throat. The hand that had been on my chest was at her side. She was looking past me, at the window, at the sky.
"Lili."
"I know." She turned. She crossed back behind her desk. She was moving fast now, back in crisis mode of a different variety. "I'm coming."
"You don't have to be in the briefing for an active weather call. Sharon can —"
"I'm coming, Conrad."
Her eyes flashed in defiance and I realized I just told a superior what to do in her own company.
I went down the hall ahead of her. I did it on purpose, to put distance between us before we hit the conference room, to give my body the thirty seconds it needed to remember its business. I heard her boots behind me. The hardware-store boots. Boots she would walk into a storm in.
The conference room was already full. Diaz at the front by the whiteboard, marker in hand, the corkboard map of the regional airspace pinned with three red flags where our machines and our staff were located.
Two of the off-duty mechanics had come in from the parking lot — they'd been about to leave for the day and Diaz had grabbed them.
The pilot from the morning briefing, the woman with the ponytail, was on her phone in the corner saying yeah, I'm here, what's the call.
I walked to the whiteboard. Lili came in behind me and went to the head of the table without sitting down. She put her legal pad in front of her and folded her hands on top of it and waited.
"All right," I said, to the room. "Diaz."
Diaz reviewed the pilots and their service experience. The front was a fast-moving cold-air mass coming down off the Wyoming-Colorado line with a leading edge of wind shear and a back end of heavy precipitation.
I did the math in my head about the predicted storm’s arrival. The math the men in the air were also doing.
"Ortiz can be on the ground in twenty-two minutes," I said. "He's done the Wind River lift four hundred times. He's fine. Hartwell’s the question. If he turns now he can be on his pad in twenty-eight. If he finishes the run he's at — Diaz?"
"Forty-one."
"Forty-one minutes. Front gets there in thirty-two."
The room did the math with me.
"Pull Hartwell,” I said. "Recall now. Ortiz comes down on his current trajectory, no change. Daley's east of the front line, he stays Cheyenne-bound and the medical bird overnights there if he can't make the return window."
Diaz turned to write it on the whiteboard.
Lili said, "Pull all three."
I stopped.
I turned around.
She was standing at the head of the table with her hands still folded on her legal pad and her face composed in a way I had not seen before. She was making decisions like it was her business to do so and, I realized, it was indeed her business. And she was wrong.
The conference room got quiet.
"Ms. Ashford," I said.
"Pull all three. Recall everybody. Ground the fleet."
"Ortiz is twenty-two minutes from his pad on his current path. Pulling him doesn't gain us anything. Daley is the wrong side of the front to recall. The medical bird —"
"Has a patient on board. I know."
"Then —"
"That's a stable cardiac case. That can wait twenty-four hours. The hospital will not love it. But the patient is not going to die because we waited a day. Pull Daley. Recall everyone."
I looked at her.
“I know this weather pattern,” she said.
“With respect, ma’am,” I interjected. “You do not.”
Her eyes flashed in anger and her arms crossed over her chest. “Mr. Holt.” Her voice was sharp.
Pointed. “Do not presume to know what conditions I’ve studied or flown in personally.
I do not like the look of that wind-shear signature, I do not like the status of the parts on those helicopters, and I do not want my pilots in the air one second longer than necessary. Pull them all.”
The room rang with silence. I looked at her for one beat too long.
I saw Sharon, by the door, see me looking.
I exhaled and nodded. “Ground Ortiz and Hartwell. Daley stays Cheyenne-bound and overnights. I'll write the call."
“Mr. Holt!”
"Ms. Ashford. I'm not telling Daley to scrub a medical transport on a possible front pivot when he's already east of it. He'll lose his certification if it turns out we were wrong and he could have made Cheyenne."
"And if you're wrong?”
"Then I'll live with it. I’ve done it before.”
The conference room was very quiet.
Diaz stared at me. The female pilot in the corner had taken her phone away from her ear. Sharon was watching Lili. Lili was watching me.
"Holt," Lili said. "Pull him."
She picked up her legal pad. She walked out of the conference room. She did not look at me as she passed.
I heard her boots in the hallway.
I heard her office door close.
I turned back to the whiteboard, and I wrote up the call, and I gave the order to Diaz, and I did not, for the next several hours, allow myself to think about that woman.
I ground my teeth, thinking of all the work that went into moving that patient, all the money lost in an emergency landing and ground transport in the high country. I worked furiously, straining under the effort of tasks I should have left for another shift.
Alone in the hangar, I almost didn’t hear the radio static as dispatch reported Daley landed amidst a swirling updraft as the storm front pivoted fast, just as Lili said it would.
I dropped a wrench on the ground, seeing a fatal crash from another time, another man’s decision to surge forward to try and save the lives on board.
That time did not end well. This one still might.
My hands shook as I walked to her office. The door was closed but I saw the lights on inside.
I knocked.
She said, "Come in."
She was at her desk with her hair down out of its knot for the first time since I'd met her, and she did not stand up, and she did not look up.
"Daley's on the ground,” I said. "Patient's stable. The storm came in even faster than predicted."
"I know." She flicked a hand at the radio on the shelf behind her.
"You were right."
"I know."
She still wasn't looking at me.
The storm was coming to us, now. The first heavy gust hit the office window behind her hard enough that I felt it through the floor.
I stood in her doorway and I tried to think of what to say to a woman I had almost kissed and overruled and came up with was nothing.
The rain hit the window and I choked back a sob, not sure how to continue. “Lili.” Her name was the only thing I felt capable of saying.
She looked up then, maybe heard the desperate need in my voice. I watched her face melt from outrage to empathy. “Conrad.” She stood from her chair and began to walk toward me.