Flying Home

“Oh, Gage, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.

Then he shifted, slowly moving away from the window and toward her, and relief surged through her again. But as he turned his head in her direction, the air almost drove out of her chest. There was blood, so much blood, all over the left side of his face. Blood matted his hair. Blood on the window. Blood dripping on his jaw, soaking his jacket collar, staining the whiteness of his shirt underneath.

* * *

FOR ONE INSANE MOMENT, Gage was twelve years old again, sneaking up to the “lake” in the middle of the night, climbing straight up the rocky face still damp from the earlier rain. Without warning, the world fell out under him. His hands were gripping the shale outcropping, and Adam was right with him, both of them screaming into the night.

Then everything he was thinking was gone and all he could feel was the pain. And the pain was real, very real, and someone was calling out to him, over and over again. He tried to move, to get his eyes to open, but all he could do was let out a low groan. That voice, calling to him, trying to reach through the misery in his head, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate, not any more than his eyes would. His hand fell, and the voice got louder. He tried to think beyond the pain, and then it came to him—the crash, the gut wrenching pain, and Merry. She was talking to him, urging him to wake up, and he wanted to see the world, and to see Merry.

A touch on his chin and yes, Merry was speaking very close to him. “Just open your eyes, please, just open your eyes.”

Gage fought to obey her. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to pry his eyes open. All he could see were shadows at first and then...

Merry.

“Yes,” she said on a choked sob, “Thank you, thank you.”

“What for?” he actually managed to get past his lips.

The dim light outlined her sweet face. But he didn’t miss the tears that were trickling down her cheek. She touched him, her hand connecting with his jawline. “For...” She swallowed hard. “For getting us down,” she said, then added quickly, “and for not dying. Thank you.”

He got his hand to cover hers, feeling her shake, but she didn’t move from the contact. “I hadn’t planned on dying,” he rasped.

With his free hand he felt along the side of his face, there was dampness there, but not from Merry’s tears. One touch and he knew before he even saw his fingers stained with red, that he was bleeding. He groaned and gingerly felt his cheek again.

“No, don’t,” she said quickly. “It’s...you’re cut just under your hairline, and it’s bleeding so much.”

He drew back, exhaled and grabbed the edge of his seat to get into a better position. A cut...not important. But what was important was him checking the plane, to make sure there were no fuel leaks, although he couldn’t find any chemical odor as he tested the air in the cabin. But he had to be sure, and he had to find out how badly the aircraft was damaged.

But just the simple exertion of sitting up a bit, stopped him dead. His chest raged with pain, and he closed his eyes for a moment. He caught his breath and opened his eyes to Merry. “Sorry, a bit light-headed,” he fudged.

“How can I help?”

“First aid. Backseat, underneath,” he said thickly.

He watched her move back, shifting to one side, getting over the console, then she was gone. “Got it,” she finally said. She reappeared up front with a large white tin with a red cross on its lid.

She looked at him again, barely suppressing a flinch, but he saw the expression on her face. “It’s just a cut,” he said softly.

That brought on a rush of nervous chatter from her as she awkwardly perched herself half on the console and half on her seat. She kept her eyes down on the contents of the tin once she snapped the metal fasteners open. “Yep, it’s first aid, all right, and I can do this,” she went on. “I’ve patched up a lot of kids after they’ve done something silly, and they lived to tell about it, so this should be a breeze...”

His head throbbed, and her rapid speech was grating, but he understood that in some way, this rambling was a coping method for Merry. Without warning, she stopped, and the silence amidst the sound of wind and driven snow, was almost deafening. Slowly, she looked up from the tin, and even in the low light he could see more tears shining in her eyes. He grimaced at the thought of her despair and him having no way to help her.

“I...thought for a moment that you were...that you were hurt worse than a cut.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “You aren’t, are you? You’re okay, right? Just the cut? Not any broken bones or anything else?”

He knew his ribs weren’t right, but he guessed that was from the restraints. And his head, well he’d been told often enough how hard headed he was, so he guessed it was a simple cut. “I’m okay,” he told her.

The exhaled breath said it all. “Good, good,” she murmured and looked back down into the tin.

“What about you?” he asked.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No blood or lacerations, so I’m fine,” she said. “Just grateful that you knew what to do to get us down.”

“I made a mess of it,” he said flatly. “But any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”

The rapid-fire speech started up again as the wind moaned and drove snow against the plane. “Bandages, antibiotics, wipes, cotton pads, tape. bandages...four, no, five of them.” She pushed aside the perfectly packed supplies. “They even have gum and energy bars, pain pills and lollipops, of all things.”

“We’re covered,” he said, shifting in the seat and feeling a stab of pain on his left side.

She took some things out, laid the tin behind her on her seat, then turned to Gage. “We...we just need to stop the blood, and get a bandage on it.” She reached toward him, the tips of her fingers brushing at his hair, and a frown spread across her face. “You might need stitches.”

“Whoa, you don’t do stitches, do you?”

She drew back. “No, but I think when we get to Wolf Lake you should see your doctor.”

“Good suggestion, when we get there.” He wasn’t going to say anything about “if” they got there. Now wasn’t the time to give her a rundown on what most likely was going to happen.

She tore open a package that held a cotton pad. “I’m going to have to put pressure on the wound, so it might hurt.”

“Go for it,” he said, feeling a trickle of blood on his cheek. “It sure can’t hurt as much as the results of one of Adam’s dares that went wrong.”

She eased the cotton gently onto his wound, her free hand brushing at his hair to clear it from the mess. He winced before he could stop himself. Lots of exposed nerve endings, he thought as he closed his eyes and let her do what she had to do. When she sat back with a sigh, he opened his eyes again. The blood on her hands startled him. She reached for a wipe and started to make the deep red disappear.

“Thanks,” he said gratefully.

“What did Adam dare you to do?” she asked as she finished cleaning her hands, ripped open another package and tore off short strips of adhesive tape.

As she put on the bandage, he told her about his wild, but fun childhood. “The midnight run to the lake, and the cliff we almost fell off of,” he murmured as she wiped at his jaw and neck with a cool cleansing pad. “Adam dared me to do that.”

“I can’t believe you accepted those dares.”

“Sure did. And lived to regret them,” he confessed as she gently fastened the adhesive strips to the cotton pad and his skin.

She moved back a bit and studied him. “You need clean clothes.” She waved vaguely at his jacket and shirt that he knew were ruined. “They’re really...” She crinkled her perfectly straight nose. “Really messy.”

“I wish I had a change of clothes, but...” He shrugged. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

Unexpectedly, his offhanded quote brought the touch of a smile to her lips. “And I’d need to learn to ride if wishes were horses.”

His own smile nudged at him, despite the pain that seemed to be clamping around his head. “I’d teach you,” he murmured, intrigued by the softening in her face, and how she turned from him as he spoke.

She drew away, maneuvered back to her seat, miraculously getting the tin with the first-aid supplies back on the console before she dropped down in her seat with a whoosh. Finally, Merry glanced over at him. “Just tell me what happened to make us...land,” she said, obviously avoiding the word crash. “And what has to be done to get this thing going again.”

He blinked, hoping against hope she was joking. She wasn’t, so he answered her first question. “My best guess is, besides the storm, there was a problem with the electric and the motor was stalling, they couldn’t get in sync again.” He didn’t sugarcoat his next words. “And thankfully it doesn’t smell like there’s any break in the fuel lines, or it could have been a whole lot worse.”

He was going to continue to answer her, but was stricken with a sharp jolt of pain. He stayed very still. He had no choice. His ribs had chosen right then to feel like a hot vise around his chest. He kept that to himself. A broken rib was manageable if there weren’t any other symptoms that developed.

“I wonder how we look from outside,” he said, hating the unsteadiness in his own voice.