On Ross’s last pass, Frumba coached me to respond to his radio call for the ball by saying “Roger ball” in a kind of singsong cadence. When he pointed to me, I was to say at the last minute, “Wave off, wave off, foul deck,” at which point Frumba would “pickle” the red lights and Ross would shove up on the throttles to keep from touching down and roar off again. Things went pretty much exactly as planned, except that I got a huge adrenaline rush from watching the approaching plane and practicing my line in my head and I ended up practically screaming it. In the moment, it was weirdly exhilarating that something I said caused a reaction that big. I couldn’t help laughing in the shack and had to remind myself to shut my mouth when my big gaping smile started to ache. Later, another pilot in the pattern, a friend of ours, told me I scared the entire formation, who were used to concentrating on soothing voices that betrayed no emotion or urgency, except if you were seconds away from becoming a ball of fire.
When I thought about it later, there seemed a few obvious questions I could have asked Frumba in the spirit of rigorous inquiry, such as “Have you ever seen an accident?” or “Have you ever had to jump into the little emergency net on the boat?” The questions never even occurred to me. Being in fake reporter mode with my notebook and pencil was my best attempt at distancing myself from the stakes of what Ross was training for. There were still some things I didn’t want to know.
—
I started having dreams about planes more and more during this time. There was one recurring one: In it, I was allowed somehow to go visit Ross on the aircraft carrier. When I got there I found that every square inch was devoted to massive mechanical tasks involving things that could crush and kill me, and there was no room for me in the living quarters. I had to huddle near the towering edge of the boat, where the drop to the water was six stories, below me all churning wake and blackness.
Later in the dream the Navy allowed me to fly with Ross, only I didn’t get to be in the cockpit—I had to hang on to the nose and was secured there only by my grip on various inch-deep grooves. I faced Ross in the cockpit, like a bug crawling on his windshield, and between the space of his helmet and oxygen mask I could see only his eyes. He did a preflight check, scanning all the instruments with his focused gaze, which continually jumped back to meet mine. I could read concern there, clearly, but then the engines spooled up and men hooked the catapult shuttle to the plane and I started to understand that this would be way too fast—Why is anyone letting me do this? There’s no way I’ll be able to hang on.
And then suddenly there was a noise so loud I felt it in my chest, wind like a wall and pressure and pain all at once, and we were out over the water, shoving higher and higher, my grip changing, him pulling the stick back and climbing but then banking hard to one side, unbelievably hard, in one of those physics-bending moves that the Super Hornet does where it looks improbable and wrong even to people watching on the ground, and our eyes met again and I pleaded pleasepleasepleaseI’msoscared but my words were ripped out of my mouth before they could form and he knew, he got it, every bit of him got it and felt for me, but there it was: he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t make it stop until it was time to land, and even that might kill me if I made it until then. Hang on, his eyes said, please hang on.
—
Ross redeemed himself with an above-average second round of carrier quals. Added to the list of reasons to celebrate was the fact that he’d been picked up by a fleet squadron in Lemoore for his first sea tour, a three-year period in which I could keep working and finish out my MFA. The squadron he joined was just entering its cycle of three month-long “work-ups”—a month home, a month gone, another month home, another gone, and so on—in preparation for a six-month deployment. I was so grateful for the chance to remain in one place long enough to get something accomplished that I didn’t think too much about the future deployment. Instead, I turned my attention to meeting the other women in the squadron’s wives’ club, hoping to find a friend.
Stella, a knockout beauty with a glorious waterfall of long blond hair, was probably the last person I expected to stroll over and pluck one of the Mexican beers I’d brought to my first wives’ club meeting. Everyone else had brought tastefully arranged appetizers and cookies and arrayed them on the dining room table. I’d brought a six-pack.
“Where do you think we can find a bottle opener in this joint?”