Flying Too Close to the Sun, George Jehn [freda ebook reader txt] 📗

“Yes.”

As she took Erik in her arms and hugged him tightly Carol got a reality jolt. This was the only man she’d ever loved and they must find a way to resolve his problem.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Throughout the seemingly endless night Christina Shepard felt like her leaden body was sewn to the mattress. With loneliness, depression and desperation now working twenty-four, seven she felt more akin to a person languishing in prison. Finally dragging herself out of bed, she peered through sandy eyes at the fuzzy numbers on the clock for the umpteenth time, desperate for light. She squinted through the filthy windowpanes, while gloomy shadows still engulfed the streets. Looking in the mirror, her normally dazzling blue eyes more resembled dim roads traveled only by sorrow. David’s spot in the bed was empty, like the now-bare spaces in the living room for the TV and stereo. She’d heard him enter one night but didn’t have the energy to confront him as he no doubt carted them off.

The official start of autumn might still be a few weeks away, but Mother Nature was in charge and had no regard for the Roman calendar. It was as though she had her fill of summer and wanted autumn to begin. The gray dawn finally developed, a dreary day that presaged the early arrival of damp weather. Gazing into the mirror again, only exhaustion stared back with scraggly hair, falling out in clumps, thanks to her current anti-seizure medication more suited a witch on a broom than a jet captain. Aside from not preventing her seizures, the Gigotor had other side effects, like diminished hearing and inability to concentrate. She couldn’t wait to get off it.

The dull morning light finally bled through the soiled curtains, but the streets remained a ghost town. She watched a man scurrying about, attempting to keep out the unrelenting dampness, his breath leaving a long vapor trail like a 727. Out of habit she began to brew a pot of coffee, but stopped. Angry at the world, she flung the empty cup emblazoned with the blue and silver Shuttle Air insignia against the wall where it shattered into a thousand pieces, exactly what she was trying to prevent happening to her life. She had heard crew scheduling leaving numerous voice mail messages inquiring if she was well enough to fly. She didn’t answer because unless the promising new medication called Keppra worked as advertised, her career was over. The many years of schooling, flight training, tributes from her instructors, television interviews, sixty-hour workweeks, all meant nothing unless something stopped the seizures. She held out hope because her neurologist mentioned his other patients whose EEG’s indicated irregular left temporal lobe activity like hers had experienced no seizures or other side effects while taking the Keppra. He was also happy to hear his fictitious patient, Megan Bauer, was staying with a close friend in Kew Gardens, Queens, when she had asked him to mail the Keppra to a Miss Christina Sheppard, with two P’s. But for now, garbled and unintelligible speech remained a real threat. Her partial complex seizures were very frustrating because although she knew what she wanted to say, the words wouldn’t flow. Hopefully, she wouldn’t experience any more until the new medicine arrived later that day or the next. Even if the Keppra worked as promised, she couldn’t tell the airline or the FAA because she would still be automatically grounded. David was the only one at the airline who knew and he’d better keep his mouth shut or she would threaten to expose his rip-off scheme. The threat of going to jail would make him think twice.

It had been only a short time since the robbery, her salvation, had gone awry, but it felt like eons ago. Gazing into the mirror made her appreciate how fragile youth was and how fleeting it now seemed. She decided to call David at the number he had given as his parents’ home to deliver her warning, but a youthful female voice answered instead.

“Please, put David on the line.”

“Hello.”

“Hi. It’s me. Who answered?”

“That’s none of your fucking business.” A moment of awkward silence followed. “How much did you get?”

“I told you, I never got anything. Not a penny.”

“Yeah. Sure. Bye, Christina.” There was a dull click on the line and it went dead.

“Don’t you hang up on me, you son of a—”

Although her logic wasn’t fully functional, she still wondered if an accomplice of David’s had made off with their money. If so, he would take up with someone younger because he didn’t need her any more, but at least he was now out of her life. She would pass his name on to Juni the next time she saw him and let him handle the situation.

She next dialed her former husband, Michael in Florida. Was it was sunny and warm there? She still had Jimmy and desperately wanted to speak with him, try to explain why there would be no birthday presents. He answered on the second ring. “Mike, please let me speak with Jimmy.”

“You know the cops called here,” a nasty intonation in his voice.

“Look. I wanna speak with Jimmy.”

There was a long moment of silence until a groggy-sounding teenage voice came on the line.

“Hi, Mom, why are you callin’ so early?”

“I had trouble sleeping and figured the sound of your voice would cheer me up.” She forced a grin, as if he could see her from a thousand miles away.

Jimmy moaned, “When’re you going to get me the new computer and printer you’ve been promising? It’s been a while, and—”

She hesitated. “I’ll eventually get to it.”

“C’mon, Mom. I really need it for school. You’ve been promising me—”

“I know. But things haven’t been going too smoothly here.”

“I gotta go. I have school today and need to get some more shuteye. Can you call back another time?”

“Sure.” Standing on the edge of this warm sea of memories, but unable to plunge in, she quietly uttered