Red, White & Dead. Laura Caldwell
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schools in the Detroit area that provided helicopter instruction. There was only one. I picked up the phone and dialed.
The woman who answered the phone said they were about to close, but when I mentioned flight lessons, she launched into a sales pitch to get me signed up.
“I’m in Chicago,” I finally said. “I really can’t take flight lessons there, but I have a question about someone who did about twenty years ago.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Well, the owner has been around for thirty years.”
“Is he available?”
“Might have left for the day. One sec.”
I was put on hold. I stared out the window at my neighbor’s side yard, watching a young dad pull a blond toddler on a wagon. Was it even possible that my dad was alive? What would he look like now? Would he still have the messy, curly brown hair that looked so much like Charlie’s? Would he still wear the copper wire glasses over eyes that always looked as if they were laughing, or would he have contacts now, or maybe he’d gotten eye surgery? I thought about the man last night. The only time I’d seen him in the light was outside of Gibsons, and his face had been down, his hair covered by the baseball cap. I’d turned so quickly, run so fast that no other details had registered.
I looked at my watch. I’d been on hold for about five minutes and was considering hanging up when I heard a jovial, “Bob Bates, how can I help you?”
I gave him my name, asked if he was the owner and when he gave me a friendly You bet, I forged ahead, saying I was looking for information about a flight instructor who used to teach there almost twenty-two years ago. “I believe his first name was R.J., but I don’t know the last.”
“R.J. Hmm. Sometimes these guys come and go, but that doesn’t sound too familiar. I could be forgetting someone, though.”
“I’m sure it’s hard to remember.” I tried not to let my disappointment creep into my voice.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, my father used to take lessons from your company.”
“Who’s that?”
“Christopher McNeil.”
“Ah, Jesus. You’re McNeil’s kid? Now, there’s a name I won’t forget. That’s something you never get used to in this business, losing a pilot.”
“Do you remember now who his instructor was?”
“Well, yeah, I do remember the guy. He wasn’t one of mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was government. Came in just to train guys when the government needed him to.”
I blinked a few times, didn’t know what to think about that. “Which government exactly?” I told him my dad had worked for the Detroit police as a profiler. “Was the instructor someone from the county? Someone with the police?”
“No, the instructor was with the Feds. That’s all I knew. They paid me up front for the flight time, runways, hangar fees, tie-downs. I leased them the choppers, same way I do to the news stations. Couldn’t believe it when he went down over Lake Erie. It’s awful when it’s on your watch.”
“Do you remember the name of the instructor?”
“Hold on, I’ll see if I still have any records.” He put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back. “Yeah, I found it. R. J. Ohman. O-H-M-A-N.”
6
My Internet search for R. J. Ohman revealed nothing.
For the moment, I gave up on finding him and went to the closet in my office, removing boxes of winter stuff—the scarves and gloves that were so prevalent during the winter and seemed like foreign, faraway objects now. Chicagoans are seasonal amnesiacs. In the summer, we literally forget what the winters are like, the warm winds sloughing away our hard-edged memories of January.
At the back of the closet, I found what I was looking for.
For months after my dad died, my mother left his belongings exactly as they were. His ratty blue-and-maroon robe still hung on a brass hook on the back of their bedroom door in Michigan. His shoes—the tan boat shoes he wore so often—were right inside the garage door, as if he might step into them, and back into life, at any moment. His books were still in the office he’d made for himself in a corner of the basement, makeshift shelves lined with psychology texts, but also the mystery novels he loved to read.
When we moved to Chicago from Michigan, my mother got rid of most of those things. She kept some of his books, divided up others between Charlie and me. The clothes she gave to the Salvation Army store. My brother and I used to love to play in that store, trying on goofy hats and ridiculous shoes that someone’s grandmother had left behind. But later it filled me with a queer sickness to think of some other kid trying on my dad’s ratty bathrobe, laughing at his scuffed boat shoes.
From my closet now, I extracted a cardboard box, reading my mother’s handwriting on the side—Isabel/Christopher. Seeing my name next to my father’s like that always gave me a chill.
Inside the box, I sifted through whatever my hands came across—cards, scraps of notes, a dinged-up metal glasses case my father used to carry with him. I put some items aside, studied others. I thought about the last time I’d seen my father, the night before he died when he put me to bed and he read to me. I searched through the box for the book—Poems & Prayers for the Very Young. I remembered the illustration of the boy and girl on the cover; they were looking out the window into a starry night. My father would point to that picture and say, That’s you, Izzy. And that’s Charlie, and I would gaze at him in awe and think that my father must have been the most spectacular man since he could get a drawing of his children on the cover of a book.
I reached to the bottom of the box, and although there were a few more cards there, I realized that I didn’t have the book. I only had the memory of it, one that was sharp and vivid. I had other memories, too—of his soft voice reading to me, of the way he sometimes repeated phrases he loved or wanted to make sure I’d heard.
I sifted through the stuff in the box some more. I found a birthday card he’d given me for my eighth birthday, just a few weeks before he’d died.
The card was one that you might give an adult woman, not a child. On the front it had crimson cursive writing rimmed with gold that spelled out Happy Birthday on ivory linen paper.
In a few weeks, I would be thirty. If he were alive, my father would have been fifty-seven. If he were alive. If …
I read the words he’d printed inside the card.
Happy birthday, Boo.
I am so lucky that God chose me to be your father. You have been my little girl for 8 years, but I love you like it has been forever. Already you live life as if it is yours for the taking, with your big-eyed curiosity, your ability to embrace and overcome anything, and the unfailing kindness toward others that I know you got from your mom. You will be great, no matter what happens to me. Remember, you will always be in my heart.
I love you, Boo,
Dad
When I’d read the card as an eight-year-old, I knew they were nice words. I knew my dad loved me. I was secure in the way children are, sure that nothing will ever change, that happiness will always be at the forefront of life.
And so on that night of my birthday, the last birthday where I felt I was truly young, truly a child, I had put the card aside, moving on to the wrapped gifts that my mother and father had stacked on our kitchen table.
I didn’t pick the card up again until six months after his death, and that’s when I really read it, studying the words like an archeologist who finds a shard of an ancient urn in the dust.
No