He caught a ride from Heathrow on a GullWing charter, landing in New York at three p.m. on Sunday August 23. It had been six months since Emma broke up with him, since she told him to stop calling her, stop going by her place and trying to get on her flights. She was scheduled to do a milk run to Martha’s Vineyard and back, and Charlie had it in his head that if he could just get a few minutes alone with her he could make her understand. How much he loved her. How much he needed her. And how sorry he was about what had happened. Everything, basically. The way he’d treated her. The things he’d said. If he could just explain. If she could only see that deep down he wasn’t a bad guy. Not really. He was just someone who’d been faking his way through the world for so long, he had become consumed by the fear of being found out. And all of it, the cockiness, the jealousy, the pettiness, was a by-product of that. You try pretending to be someone you’re not for twenty years, see how it changes you. But my God, he didn’t want to be afraid anymore. Not with Emma. He wanted her to see him. The real him. To know him. Because didn’t he deserve that for once in his life? To be loved for who he was, not who he pretended to be?
He thought about London, seeing Emma again, like a snakebite, poison spreading through his veins, and how his instinct when he felt out of his depth was to attack, close the distance between himself and his—what? Opponent? Prey? He didn’t know. It was just a feeling, a kind of panicked advance, that had him put on airs, had him hike up his pants and slip on his best cowboy swagger. The only thing you can do, he had long ago decided, when you care too much, is to act like you could give two shits—about school, about work, about love.
It had worked often enough that the behavior had calcified inside of him, and so when he saw Emma, when his heart jumped into his throat and he felt vulnerable and exposed, this is what he did. Turned up his nose. Insulted her weight. Then spent the rest of the night following her around like a puppy.
Peter Gaston had been happy to give Charlie the Vineyard flight, get a couple more days of R&R in London. They’d bonded Friday night, drinking until dawn in Soho, bouncing from bar to nightclub—vodka, rum, ecstasy, a little coke. Their next scheduled drug test wasn’t for two weeks, and Peter knew a guy who could get them clean piss. So they threw caution to the wind. Charlie was trying to get his courage up. Every time he looked at Emma, he felt like his heart was splitting in two. She was so beautiful. So sweet. And he’d fucked it up so royally. Why had he said that to her before, about putting on a few pounds? Why did he have to be such an asshole all the time? When she came out of the bathroom in a towel, all he’d wanted to do was hold her, to kiss her eyelids the way she used to kiss his, to feel the pulse of her against him, to breathe her in. But instead he made some bullshit wisecrack.
He thought about the look on her face that night when he put his hands around her throat and squeezed. How the initial thrill of sexual experimentation turned first to shock, then horror. Did he really think she would like it? That she was that kind of girl? He had met them before, the tattooed kamikazes who liked to be punished for who they were, who liked the scrapes and bruises of reckless animal collision. But Emma wasn’t like that. You could see it in her eyes, the way she carried herself. She was normal, a civilian, unblemished by the trench warfare of a fucked-up childhood. Which was what made her such a good choice for him, such a healthy move. She was the Madonna. Not the whore. A woman he could marry. A woman who could save him. So why had he done it? Why had he choked her? Except maybe to bring her down to his level. To let her know that the world she lived in wasn’t the safe, gilded theme park she thought it was.
He’d had some dark times after that night, after she left him and stopped answering his calls. Days he lay in bed from sunrise to sundown, filled with dread and loathing. He kept it together at work, riding the second chair through takeoffs and landings. Years of covering his weaknesses had taught him to pass, no matter how he felt inside. But there was an animal attraction inside him on those flights, a live wire sparking in his heart that wanted him to push the yoke nose-down, to roll the plane into oblivion. Sometimes it got so bad he had to fake a shit and hide out in the washroom, breathing through the blackness.
Emma. Like a unicorn, the mythic key to happiness.