Better That Way

Chapter 3 - Delaney

We stayed for all three flights, counting the one that had already flattened me.

He had to cut this exact grass in three hours and neither one of us said a word about it.

Somewhere between the second and the third I stopped pretending I was there for the planes. He told me his father had been in Ohio six years. They talked twice a year — his birthday, and Christmas if the man got around to it. He said it the way you’d report the mileage on a truck. I told him about the folder. I told him about the four-year plan and heard exactly how it sounded out loud in a wet field at half past midnight, and I waited for him to laugh at me, and he didn’t.

“That’s not a plan,” he said. “That’s a schedule.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A plan’s got you in it.”

I was still turning that over when the headlights swung across the grass.

One vehicle, with nothing lit on it but the headlights. No siren. It came down that service road at about ten miles an hour, which was somehow worse than a siren would have been. Wes was on his feet before I’d fully registered what I was looking at. He put a hand back toward me — not grabbing, just there, low, the way you’d steady something on a shelf.

“Don’t run,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to run.”

“People do.” His voice had changed. It had gone flat and careful, and I understood in the two seconds before that car stopped in front of us that Wes Cutler had done this before and I had not. “Just … when he asks, let me talk first.”

He put both his hands out where they could be seen and left them there. I did not know why until later, and then I did.

Then the bar on the roof came on and the whole field started flashing red and blue. It went out across all that open grass and came back off the hangar wall behind us, and there was nowhere to stand that it wasn’t.

A door opened. Gravel under boots. Somebody’s radio saying numbers to nobody.

I stood there in the middle of a county airfield at one in the morning with grass in my hair and my heart thrashing like a bird in a box.

And I thought, with a clarity that frightened me:

I have never been this awake in my entire life.