For a while, she imagined the feel of a ride. She flew a split S, barrel rolls, more than a few chandelles. She wished she were at Red Flag, the sky all hers except for one opponent. She wanted to box in the sky. The pilot who trained her, a Gulf War veteran, he’d have said she wanted a knife fight in a booth.

Frank was still unconscious. Landstuhl had put him on a flight to Walter Reed that afternoon. Clara’s e-mail said there was nothing to do but wait. Mary remembered the nurse saying so much depended on the next twenty-four hours. It was now the fifteenth hour of the second twenty-four.

She imagined pulling the stick back, the great sick of gravity. The first time her 110-pound body weighed a thousand pounds, she wanted more. Come here, she called to it, see what you can do. She’d been told it pulled the blood from your head. But you really couldn’t imagine it until it happened. Only a few things were like nothing else at all. The slamming force of Gs was one of them. Frank, gone but not gone, was another.

She wasn’t past praying. She was no churchgoer, yet difficulty often brought a holy time. The plea came easy. Bring him back to me. She could have said it everywhere she went, to everyone she knew, for the rest of her natural life. She suspected it would be the background track of most days coming.

She looked at the first envelope. The glue to seal it had dried out. It was closed but pulling open. She pushed her finger under the flap. Inside were a standard sheet of letter paper and a glossy clipping, folded up tight, maybe from a magazine. She put that on her lap.

For Extra
Dec 4, 2001

Your hard to talk to. Did anyone ever tell you that? Well its true. Drive me crazy 9 times out of 10. But you’re my flight lead. The day I got told it was a woman, won’t ever forget it. I said what are the chances? And why me? I realized it was like I’d gotten cancer. Because that’s what people ask themselves. (I know from what happened to a friend of mine.) And that got me to thinking.

There’s got to be a reason I got you. Maybe a way to teach me something about my usual pastime which since this is for posterity I’ll call skirt-chasing. I do have a daughter now and that’s caused some changes in my way of life. (Though to be honest not that many.)