Safeword: Mayday by Candace Blevins
Chapter 17
Friday evening, Marcus was waiting at the airport when Heather returned with her passengers. She helped her clients disembark, and then welcomed Marcus in through the hangar lobby while she waited for the airport staff to refuel the ’copter. The two had decided to go to Marcus’s cabin near the Smokies, since Kyle would go home and crash after a day packed with surgeries, and he had to be back at the hospital early the next morning for rounds.
Marcus had assured Heather there was a field big enough to land, and the pictures he emailed looked as if it was. She’d pulled up satellite images online as well, and the dimensions seemed more than adequate. Someone had mowed the area that morning, so she’d have a good view of it before landing, and just in case she wasn’t comfortable with it, she’d made alternate plans to land at a tiny little airport about twenty miles away.
Once they were seated, she double-checked to be sure he was buckled in correctly, gave him some brief instructions, and they were off.
He was quiet for the first ten minutes of the flight, and she didn’t say anything to pull him out of whatever he was experiencing. Everyone takes in their first helicopter ride differently, and he’d enjoyed hang-gliding, so she was certain he was okay. However, she pointed out the Ocoee River when they neared it.
“How do you know where to go? It’s hard to see landmarks from up here.”
“GPS isn’t just for cars. How are you doing? Any motion sickness?”
“Taking off was a new experience, and it took a while for my stomach to catch up with my body, but it wasn’t bad. I love this — it isn’t as thrilling as hang-gliding, but it’s a lot different than an airplane.”
“I’ll take you up in a small plane someday. They are different, but you’re comparing this with a commercial plane, and I’d like you to compare it with the cockpit of a smaller plane.”
“I thought you only had a helicopter?”
“I have access to rent a few planes out of the Collegedale Airport. Right now, renting them makes the most financial sense, but I may need to look at purchasing one eventually.” But only if she could find and hire a trusted pilot who could handle charter flights, because it didn’t make financial sense to buy one and have it sit unused.
“I’m not sure Kyle will ever be able to handle this.”
She wasn’t inclined to argue, but she’d never tell Kyle she didn’t believe he could do it. “I know the basics of what triggered things — he saw a small plane crash when he was camping with his family when he was eleven, and he snuck away from camp and climbed a tree about twenty yards away from the crash. No one knew a child watched as the victims, horribly broken, were taken out of what was left of the plane. No survivors, and I imagine the recovery spotlights showed him every last detail of what a crash does to the human body.”
Marcus didn’t correct her or add anything, so she went to the next traumatic event. “And then at fourteen, he and a friend went over the fence onto the old TNT property, and he fell into a deep hole. His friend went to get help, but then couldn’t lead them right back, and Kyle was in the hole seventeen hours before they found him again. So, fear of flying and claustrophobia. He hasn’t explained the fear of heights thing, but I assume it’s a side effect of seeing the plane crash.”
“He’s told you why he went into plastic surgery?”
She nodded. “He realized he couldn’t deal emotionally with people who were sick. Also, he never wanted to have to tell someone they were going to die. This way he gets to practice medicine and rarely has to deal with illness. I’ve wondered if it doesn’t have something to do with seeing the shape those bodies were likely in after the crash, but I’m not a shrink so I’ve kept that to myself.”
“You seem to know the most important stuff. I can’t tell you anything — everything has to come from him. Also, I won’t talk about him in this context when he isn’t around, but I wanted to make sure you knew the original triggers.”
Heather respected that, so she didn’t argue. “I have an idea — something that may help — but I’ve never mentioned it to him.”
“What is it?”
“Even with the doors on, the helicopter is open, with windows at the front and sides, so it isn’t like you’re in a hole. You can see all around you. You’re stuck here until it lands, but a person wearing a parachute could leave anytime they wanted. I take the doors off when I’m taking jumpers up, but even with them on, you can open one and jump.”
She didn’t look at Marcus, but she had good peripheral vision and she saw him considering it.
Marcus rubbed his hands on his thighs while he thought, as if feeling the texture of the fabric with his fingers. “If you had someone else flying, and you were in a parachute as well, so you could go down with him if he chose to jump, it might work. I think it’d need to be an up and almost right back down trip the first time, immediately followed by a five-minute flight, and if he handles it okay, a ten-minute flight.”
“I think I’d rather pilot him, and have someone I trust handy to jump with him. They could be outfitted for a tandem jump, so he won’t need any training. Is my logic good? It would give him an escape, so if there were problems with the helicopter he had a plan B — another option. And if he felt claustrophobic, he’d have a way out.”
“It just might work.”
And now for the question she hadn’t expected to find an opportunity to ask, but the conversation had worked around to give her an opening, so she’d take it.
“I’ve wondered — is it possible Kyle’s fascination with me has to do with the fact I’m involved in search and rescue? That I’m one of the people who sometimes pull people out of small plane crashes? I mean, this was such a pivotal point in making him who he is, and he’s found someone to love who could have been one of the people who....” She stopped talking. She couldn’t completely vocalize the thought.
“Were you in uniform when he met you at the hospital that first time?”
“Yes. We’d just brought someone else to the hospital, and I went to check on someone we’d rescued a few days earlier out of a wilderness area. She’d fallen from a cliff and broken her leg, and I went in with a ’copter, dropped someone down to her, and pulled them up. She was a real trooper on the flight back, and I wanted to check in on her. They had to do surgery to set the bone with pins; it was a nasty break.”
“And Kyle had sewn her face up while they fixed her leg, so he was there checking on his handiwork at the same time you were checking on yours.”
“He put thirty-two stitches in her face and she doesn’t have a single scar to show it. He’s really good. Do you think he’s attracted to me because I sometimes do the search and rescue thing?” She wasn’t going to let Marcus change the subject without giving his opinion.
“I think it’s possible it may have gotten his attention at first, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the relationship you formed later. The two of you have chemistry — anyone who’s around you sees it. Even before you started officially dating, we all saw it.”
“And you all wondered why I kept him at arm’s length. Now you know.”
“You were afraid you’d lose his friendship if the sex thing didn’t work, and since it hadn’t worked with anyone else, you were determined not to let it go past friends. Now that you know your libido works just fine, are you going to need to experiment around with other people before settling down?”
“I love Kyle, and you’re growing on me. I can’t see myself…” She shook her head. “I know I brought it up, but do me a favor and wait to shrink me when I’m not in the pilot seat. I can talk about other people and fly, not so sure I want to talk about my own issues while flying.”
Marcus laughed. “Fair enough. Tell me about the controls. Show me what you’re doing and why?”