After all this time, it still amazed me that it was actually him up there flying that thing. All the years of studying, practicing, rehearsing, and then this reality? I still felt like I was missing a step. That’s him? This is me? This is our life?
When I snapped out of it, I realized the Univision cameraman was only a few feet from me and was filming again. I flicked tears off my cheeks and looked around for someone to talk to but I recognized no one. I watched for jet 112, the one I’d been told was Ross’s, but it was near the end. Finally, 112 came around the bend and I could see his helmet there in the cockpit and him waving and I raised my hands and waved back, the little flag going with them, and my eyes tearing up again, seven years old and back at the gates at Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, my heart splitting wide open in front of everyone and nowhere to hide while it all poured out. Come back to me, come back to me, don’t leave me again. And then the Univision camera was there, right in my line of sight, and I didn’t want to ruin the guy’s shot, but I felt myself starting to scowl and crane my neck and mouth the word “motherfucker.”
Someone had decided that all the pilots would sit in their cockpits and wait until the last plane came around and parked, and then they would get out, gather up, form a big horizontal line, and walk toward us. This last little choreographed delay infuriated me, but I tried to keep it from my face. I didn’t want scenes from Top Gun, I didn’t want our every reaction documented for all time in soft focus and framed by the overbearing presence of the flag, and I didn’t want this pressure to re-create the sailor/nurse kiss from Life magazine, to keep eking out that Good War nostalgia from a time and circumstance where it didn’t fit. Most of all, I didn’t know how I was supposed to do this, how I was supposed to bring him back to me after this hole had opened up between us, and I didn’t want anyone watching while I tried. I just wanted him home. Ross. The guy who made up dirty lyrics to radio songs and left his shoes in the middle of the floor.
The whirring and clicking and beeping of cameras grew louder as the jets’ engines spooled down. When the squadron finally started its walk toward us, all lined up in their special matching black flight suits, the crowd surged forward and people waiting in the hangar broke into a run. Wives in heels tried to manage the run holding little kids’ hands. The camera crews ran too, dragging cables and backpedaling and trying to get planted for the big reunion kiss shot.
I walked. I couldn’t find him at first among all the identical flight suits. A mother clipped me as she ran past, and there was a lightning second where I wondered if this would be like musical chairs and the song would stop without me finding him and I’d be left alone out there on the windy tarmac. And then I saw him. He was farther apart at the very end of the line, laughing. He had seen me the whole way and he was walking too. We slowed down for a minute, even paused. More people ran between us.
When I got to him the collision was slow but I gripped him tighter and tighter and it was like everything else finally stopped for a minute—all the noise, all the people and cameras—and it was just a sunny day and he was home and I could cry and no one was watching. It was a long time before I realized I hadn’t even said anything to him yet. When I pulled back, he handed me a rose with a black and red bow on its stem—all the pilots had one—and what I noticed was, No thorns; someone cut off the thorns?
The beautiful reporter waited a polite interval before she came up and pointed a microphone at him, and he reacted with grace and poise, stitching together long, melodious Spanish sentences about how fantastic it was to see me again after such a long time. She asked him what he would say to other service members who were away from their families, and he advised patience and faith and said the reunion was better than anything and made everything that came before worth it. I think we were all a little stunned, the reporter, the cameraman, and me. She seemed genuinely dazzled and told him his Spanish was beautiful and that we’d be on at six.