Flight Behavior Read Online Free Page A

rising. It looked like the inside
of joy, if a person could see that. A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had
to mean something.
    She could save herself. Herself and her children
with their soft cheeks and milky breath who believed in what they had, even if
their whole goodness and mercy was a mother distracted out of her mind. It was
not too late to undo this mess. Walk down the mountain, pick up those kids. The
burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d
ever known, and still she felt sure of it. She had no use for superstition, had
walked unlucky roads until she’d just as soon walk under any ladder as go around
it, and considered herself unexceptional. By no means was she important enough
for God to conjure signs and wonders on her account. What had set her apart,
briefly, was an outsize and hellish obsession. To stop a thing like that would
require a burning bush, a fighting of fire with fire.
    Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like
a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot. She failed to heed it,
understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and
safety. She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning
away. It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either
of those elements alone. The impossible.
    T he
roof of her house when she saw it again still harbored its dark patches of
damaged shingles, and there sat her car in the drive where she’d parked it. With
her mind aflame and her heels unsteady from what she’d seen, she tried to look
at the vinyl-sided ranch house in some born-again way. Whatever had gained
purchase on her vision up there felt violent, like a flood, strong enough to
buckle the dark roof and square white corners of home and safety. But no, it was
all still there. The life she had recently left for dead was still waiting. The
sheep remained at their posts, huddled in twos and threes. The neighbors’ peach
orchard still rotted in place on its perfect grid, exposing another family’s
bled-out luck. Not a thing on God’s green earth had changed, only everything
had. Or she was dreaming. She’d come down the mountain in less than half the
time it took to climb, and that was long enough for her to doubt the whole of
this day: what she’d planned to do, what she had seen, and what she’d left
undone. Each of these was enormous. If they added up to nothing, then what? A
life measured in half dollars and clipped coupons and culled hopes flattened
between uninsulated walls. She’d gone for loss and wreckage as the alternative,
but there might be others. A lake of fire had brought her back here to
something.
    To what? A yard strewn with weathered plastic toys
and straggling grass, devoid of topsoil, thanks to her father-in-law’s hasty job
of bulldozing the pad for the house. One neglected rosebush by the porch, a
Mother’s Day present from Cub, who’d forgotten roses made her sad. The silver
Taurus wagon in the drive, crookedly parked in haste, the keys in the ignition
where she always left them, as if anybody around here would drive it away. The
faint metal sound like a pipe dropped on its end when she put the car into gear.
It could not be more tedious or familiar, any of it. Sadness filled her like
water as she turned out onto the highway and clicked on the radio. Kenny Chesney
was waiting there to pounce, crooning in his molasses voice that he wanted to
know what forever felt like, urging her to gallop away. She clicked Kenny right
off. She turned up the drive to her in-laws’ place and their old farmhouse came
into view with its two uncurtained windows upstairs that made her think of eye
sockets in a skull. Hester’s flower beds had melted under the summer’s endless
rain, and so had the garden. They’d finished tomato canning almost before they
started. Hester’s prized rose beds were reduced to thorny outposts clotted with
fists of mildew. It was