Fragments of Rita’s memory were pulling together now, bits and pieces starting to form a picture.
I remember coming here last night, on Sunday the twenty-sixth. I came here to check on the auto surgeon.
“Dr. Wu.” Lisa leaned in close. Rita could smell her shampoo, or conditioner, or whatever it was; some kind of flower scent. “Are you okay?”
Rita tasted bile in the back of her throat and swallowed it back down.
“I’m fine.” No, she wasn’t. She was a pretty long way from fine. She glanced around, trying to gain a better feel for her situation, to process what exactly was going on. But her thoughts were fuzzy and insubstantial, like cotton candy. She felt—
(hungover she felt hungover but that was IMPOSSIBLE she couldn’t be hungover because she didn’t drink she hadn’t had a drink for over a year)
—like she was going to throw up.
How the hell to process all this? So many different things at once: surreal; crazy; humiliating. She didn’t know where to begin. A part of her (okay, most of her) wanted to run screaming from the room. Two nurses had just found her passed out on her own operating-room table, naked, and she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten here.
Situational awareness.
She needed situational awareness. That’s what her father would have called it.
Her father.
She reached up and touched her father’s dog tags, which dangled around her neck. He’d been a pilot, flying a P-3 Orion for the U.S. Navy all over the Pacific hunting Russian and Chinese subs. He’d talked about situational awareness a lot, especially with his pilot buddies, in her family’s backyard, where they’d swapped stories and grilled in the cool Southern California dusk, some still wearing their olive-green one-piece flight suits.
In her mind, she still smelled the grill smoke, drifting across their tiny backyard, heavy with hamburger juice and beer hops. Situational awareness. She’d heard her father and his buddies banter the term around so much that she’d finally looked it up one day in junior high, in one of the aviation textbooks in her dad’s study. Not too long before he’d died.
Situational awareness: the ability to calmly assess a dynamic, dangerous environment and determine appropriate responses to avert disaster.
She liked that. She hadn’t understood it, not at first, but she’d liked it so much that she wrote it down on a small piece of paper she carried around with her. She’d pull it out of her pocket every once in a while and read it to herself. In time, she memorized it, and thought she began to understand it, and applied it to lots of different things. Cross-country meets. Driving. Walking alone at night between her dorm and the college library.
And, eventually, to surgery.
The ability to calmly assess a dynamic, dangerous environment and determine appropriate responses to avert disaster.
In the OR, Rita thought of it as the delicate art of preventing big chunks of shit from colliding with big fans. She knew she was good at it. Very good. It was something she prided herself on, a skill that had guided her out of some tough scrapes in the OR over the years. She believed in it, heart and soul.
Still, when all was said and done, situational awareness hadn’t helped her father out much when his plane ran into that mountain.
What was going through his mind, seeing that mountainside fill the cockpit windshield an instant before oblivion? Had he had time to calmly assess the environment?
She hoped not. She preferred to think that he didn’t have time to see it coming, because that way he wouldn’t have had time to feel fear or to worry about the daughters he was about to leave behind.
And this situation, the one she was in now: Was it her mountain, filling the cockpit window?
She shivered again, but not from cold, and rubbed the goose bumps that were sprouting on her forearms despite the blankets.
Panic: It felt like some sinister vine unfurling up from her belly, moist tendrils thickening and tightening in all directions. She knew that, in a few seconds, if she didn’t do something to stop it, the spreading panic would choke off her capacity for reason, leaving her with only the urge to run screaming from the room.
She took another deep breath, closed her eyes, reached up with one hand, and grasped her father’s dog tags.
Don’t panic.
Not now.
Not ever.
Instinct told her, practically screamed into her face, that something huge was at stake here, that one false step now would leave her well and truly screwed, lovely Rita.
Leave it to weaker women (or men) to fold. Completely lose it. Start weeping, maybe, or slide into some catatonic state. Not her.
She was not weak, had never been weak.
No weakness.
She seized on that thought.
No weakness.
SPENCER
Spencer squinted into the gloaming ahead.
The car.
That’s what was wrong. It was still there.
That piece-of-crap white Ford Fiesta, parked squarely in front of Rita’s house. The one that had first shown up last week.