From Out Of The Blue

“He sent me one letter.”

“What did it say?”

“I don’t know. I never opened it.”

“Weren’t you the least bit curious?”

“No.” Kate felt her stomach muscles tighten as she recalled getting that letter at mail call one month into a blue water ops and just two days before the ship’s doctor had informed her she was pregnant. She’d seen the name and return address scrawled in the upper left-hand corner and felt a jolt of shock when she realized who it was from. The letter had been forwarded twice, the initial posting having been made three weeks earlier. She had stared at it for a few breathless moments, her cheeks burning as she remembered her shameless behavior with a virtual stranger, then flung it off the flight deck unopened. “It’s not like we had a long-term relationship, Mom. It was just one night.”

“Still, I think you should look him up.”

“Just call him on the phone, ask him if he remembers me, then tell him he has a son?”

“He deserves to know. You also need to find out his medical history and that of his family. That will be important information for Hayden to have.”

“What if he turns out to be a jerk?”

“I’m your mother, Kate. I know you. If this guy won your heart for even one night, he must have been something else. I suspect that’s also why you ran away from him so fast and never told him about Hayden and never opened that letter. A relationship would’ve complicated your life and distracted you from your goals.”

Kate opened her mouth to reply, then shut it again. She hated it when her mother talked to her in that tone of voice, but arguing with her would only prolong the lecture. She hesitated, then tried another approach. “It’s been over four years. He could be dead, for all I know.”

“I doubt that. Kate, your father is sixty-four and I’m sixty-two,” her mother continued. “By the time Hayden graduates from high school, we’ll be soaking our dentures in whitening solution and using canes and walkers to get around. We may not live to see him graduate from college. Then he won’t have any family to cheer him on or to fall back on in tough times. He’ll be all alone. Of course, we’ll take care of him if, God forbid, anything ever happens to you, and we’ll love him and cherish him and protect him for as long as we can, but that might not be for all that long.”

Kate fought to control her emotions, but realized she’d failed when the road ahead blurred and her mother handed her a wad of tissues.

“You told me this man wasn’t a part of your life, but Kate, if he hadn’t cared about you, he wouldn’t have written that letter. You still have the opportunity to give Hayden the father he deserves. Just think about it.”

THEY SPENT the final night in a little roadside motel and ate an early supper of burgers and fries at the adjacent diner. After her mother and Hayden had fallen asleep, Kate left the room and walked beneath the overhang to where the soda machine hummed and moths dashed themselves to death against the bare lightbulb burning above. She fed coins into the machine and pushed the button for iced tea. There was a crashing thump as the can landed in the dispenser, but she left it there because iced tea wasn’t what she’d really come out here for.

She’d come to think about what her mother had said about Hayden deserving a father and Mitch deserving to know he had a son. Why did mothers always have to be right?

Mitchell McCray. For years she’d tried not to think about him, but as her son grew, that became increasingly impossible. Hayden looked way too much like his father. She tried to forget how she’d behaved that night because a part of her just couldn’t believe Mitch had so easily, so effortlessly, swept her off her feet.

She’d been at Midway for a week of gunnery training and was planning to refuel at Adak en route to Mirimar when the winds became so severe they actually toppled a construction crane on the base. After she’d made two unsuccessful attempts at landing with wind gusts topping one hundred knots, Adak tower told her the only chance of putting her Hornet down was at Eielson. All of Alaska was snowed in by the storm and the weather was so bad no tanker was available for her to refuel, but they told her the winds weren’t quite as severe in the interior.

Good luck, they’d said.

She knew she’d need it. Eielson Air Force Base was 1,358 miles from Adak. She programmed the identifier for Eielson into her inertial navigation system and turned on the autopilot, realizing that if she made it there, it would be a miracle. A far more likely scenario was that she’d run out of fuel, eject from the plane and freeze to death before hitting the ground in her chute. Meanwhile, until that happened, she’d keep pulling the power back and climbing for altitude until it was time to start her descent to Eielson. The only thing in her favor was the wind. She was riding a jet stream of 160 miles per hour and, as it turned out, it was enough of a boost to get her to her destination just before engine flameout.

The landing was bumpy, and for a few moments after she brought the plane to a stop, she could do nothing more than slump in her seat while her heart rate slowed and the adrenaline oozed out of her. A man emerged from the nearest hangar and wrestled a yellow ladder through six inches of snow, pushing for all he was worth while twisting his upper body away from the bite of the wicked gusts. As he approached, she stirred herself back to life, popped the canopy and was un-buckling her harness when he climbed up the ladder to help her out of the cockpit. In the rapidly waning daylight she could see his dark hair whipping across his forehead.

“Welcome to the North Pole!” he called over the shriek of the wind. “You must be one of those fancy naval aviators we’ve heard rumors about. What happened? You lose your boat in the storm?”

He knew, of course, the reason behind her emergency landing at Eielson. He was just being a wiseass. When she pulled off her helmet and he realized he was talking to a woman, he backed away to read the name painted on the side of her canopy. “Well, Lieutenant K. C. Jones, that was one hot shit landing you just made in hurricane-force winds with zero visibility and nothing but auxiliary power. I’m Major McCray, but you can call me Mitch. Climb on down and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I don’t have time for socializing, Major,” she said. “I’d like to get my plane checked out before leaving. That was a rough landing and I had multiple caution lights. How soon can you have it ready to go?” she asked once her feet touched solid ground.

“This runway’s closed. Hell, this air base is closed, as is every other airport in the state. Everyone’s holed up for the duration.”

“The duration of what? Are you telling me a little snow and wind shuts down an entire air force base? I have a schedule to keep.”

“Not anymore. Don’t you swabbies listen to the weather report? This Pacific howler’s expected to drop upwards of three feet. Your flight log just ended here, a few miles shy of the arctic circle.” When she didn’t react, he added, “Don’t worry—we’ll get your plane checked out in time for you to catch up on your California sunbathing. I’m pretty skilled with a sledgehammer and chain saw, and the good news is you’ll have time for a drink or two at the Mad Dog while you wait. I’ll even drive you over there myself and introduce you around to the polar bears. They’re kinda cute when they aren’t hungry.”

She followed him into the hangar, where several hissing and sputtering Coleman lanterns provided the only light. “Power’s out and the emergency generator won’t come on line, probably because this is a real emergency,” he explained, slamming the door on the storm. “The lights you saw on the runway were from the plow trucks. We like to provide a little guidance for you lost pilots. Skidder! We got us a pretty little Hornet parked outside that needs to be dragged in here before the drifts get much higher. Both engines flamed out in the final approach and she had a rough landing.”

A hulking giant of a man ambled across the hangar and stared at Kate with that slack-jawed look she’d grown accustomed to over the years. “This the pilot, Major?”

“Skidder, meet Lieutenant K. C. Jones.” Major Mitchell McCray gave her a brash, arrogant grin. “She wants the plane checked over and ready to go ASAP. For some reason, she prefers California sunshine to our Alaskan blizzards, but she hasn’t been to the Mad Dog yet.”

THAT HAD BEEN almost five years ago, but it felt like yesterday. She could still smell the jet fuel and the fresh paint scents of the hangar, feel the sting of the wind-driven snow when he escorted her out to the plow truck to ferry her the blustery mile to the Mad Dog for the promised drink. Only, as it turned out, the Mad Dog Saloon was closed due to the power outage. That didn’t faze Mitch. The saloon owner tossed him the keys on his way out the door along with a brusque, “Lock ’er up when you leave.”

Major McCray fixed her a drink by the soft glow of a kerosene lamp and they huddled near the woodstove in the center of the room for warmth, first sharing flying stories, the way all pilots do, then war stories the way combat pilots do. Then they had another drink and the combined effects of the alcohol, the heat from the stove and the lack of any solid food for the past twelve hours conspired against her. Kate was way beyond being seduced by an arrogant jet jock with a type A personality. She’d long since decided that men had been put on earth solely to hone an intelligent and motivated woman’s desire to prove her equality, and in many cases, her superiority. She’d spent years fighting for every toehold on that precarious Navy ladder, years proving that she was a whole lot better than most of the men who looked down on her, yet she’d nearly thrown it all away in one stormy night with an air force officer in a rustic saloon called the Mad Dog.

For the past four years, she’d tried to forget how easily Mitch had seduced her, but now, standing in the harsh light of the motel, she admitted to herself that, once again, her mother was right. He’d been something else. Five minutes in his company and she’d felt like she never wanted to leave his side. Even before she’d taken the first sip of that drink he’d mixed, she’d been captivated by those dark bedroom eyes, that handsome grin and the masculine strength of him. Years of rigid discipline and unwavering focus had melted away in the heat of that passionate night. While the blizzard piled the snows up outside the Mad Dog and blew drifts beneath the door, the lone kerosene lamp gradually burned itself out, engulfing them in a darkness neither noticed.

She’d spent years trying to forget how he’d made her feel, but the memories could still make her blush. Mitchell McCray had effortlessly threatened a lifetime of dreams and visions and left her scrambling to find solid footing again in a profession that she’d fought so hard to be a part of. She’d landed on her feet after that fall from grace, but only barely. That one night had resulted in a pregnancy that nearly destroyed her career, but the only person she could blame for her actions was herself.

Kate retrieved the cold can of iced tea from the dispenser and started back to the room, stopping abruptly as the world shifted beneath her feet and tipped her off balance. She reached out for a porch post, closed her eyes and leaned against it until the dizziness passed. The fatigue gnawed at her constantly, but the dizzy spells and intermittent stomach pains were something new. She hadn’t been able to swallow more than two small bites of her hamburger, in spite of her mother’s frequent glances across the Formica table in the little diner, while Hayden smeared his fries in ketchup and in a feeding frenzy shoved them into his hungry mouth. “Try to eat,” her mother had said. “You need to keep your strength up.”

This had been so hard on her mother, and it was only going to get worse. What had she been thinking of, agreeing to spend the next two months in Montana? The base doctor had urged her to stay near the Seattle hospital that had been treating her, but her parents had argued that being home would keep her happier and hopefully healthier until that miraculous bone marrow donor came along. But what about Hayden?

What about Hayden!

She straightened, drew a shaky breath and wondered what the letter had said, the one she’d so willfully destroyed. What a fool she’d been. What an arrogant, stubborn, prideful fool. Was Mitchell McCray married now? Did he have a family of his own? Did Hayden have brothers and sisters he’d never met? These were things she needed to find out, and quickly. The bone marrow registry might come through with a good match for her, but thus far the prospects remained bleak. Not many people volunteered to be tested for such a donation unless a friend or family member was stricken.

She needed to get her affairs in order—right away—just in case.

THE NEXT DAY, two hours into the morning’s journey and not a hundred miles from home, Kate finally found the nerve to say to her mother in a quiet voice, so Hayden couldn’t overhear, “Mom, I’ve been thinking about what you said and I’ve decided that you’re right. I need to talk to Mitch. I made some phone calls last night. It turns out he’s no longer in the air force but he’s still in Alaska, flying for an air charter service in a place called Pike’s Creek. Hayden and I have a flight out of Bozeman this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” her mother exclaimed. “Don’t you think you should go home and see your father first?”

She felt the twist of painful emotions and focused hard on road ahead. “I think the sooner I get this meeting over with, the better.”

“But what if they find a donor? How will we contact you?”

“I’ll give you my phone number so you can reach me, and I promise I’ll call you every night. But I’m not going to hold my breath on a donor coming through. It might not happen, and I could be running out of time.”

“Please don’t talk that way.”

“Mom…”

Her mother sat up straighter, preparing to deliver another maternal lecture. “You’re taking Hayden? How will you take care of him? You’ve been so sick, you’re still weak, and he’s such a handful…”

“I’m not weak. I feel lots better—really, I do. But don’t worry, I called Rosa last night from the pay phone in the diner. She’s meeting us at the Seattle airport this evening and she’s agreed to come and stay with Hayden until this is resolved one way or the other.”

Her mother slumped back in her seat with a look of bewilderment. “You decided all this last night?”

“While you were sleeping.” Kate heard the concern in her mother’s voice, but she was resolute. “Our flight leaves at 2:00 p.m. We should be in Bozeman with an hour to spare. You can take Wiggins to the ranch, turn him loose on the mice in the barn and I’ll be home in a week or two.”