Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Pace was so deep in thought he almost missed seeing Melissa when she left the people-mover and entered the terminal. For one thing, he barely recognized her. She was half a head taller than the last time, her hair was several inches longer, and she was wearing makeup. Makeup! Dear, sweet Jesus, she’s just a baby. What on earth can her mother be thinking?

“Daddy!” She recognized him before his mind came to terms with the sight of her. She broke into a grin and ran toward him, her arms open, a funky denim purse trailing off her right shoulder and a large paper shopping bag—one of those with the twisted paper handles that usually tear out from the roots—dangling from her left hand, probably filled with gifts from La La Land.

Steve bent to embrace her and had to stand upright again, so much had she grown.

“Baby, hi,” he said. “It’s so good to have you here. Gosh, let me look at you.” He held her at arm’s length. “You look absolutely beautiful. What’s that stuff all over your eyes?”

She colored slightly and bent her head. “You don’t mind, do you? All the kids my age do it, and Mom said it was okay as long as I didn’t overdo it.”

“All the kids?”

“Yep.”

“Even the boys?”

She burst into giggles. “Oh, Daddy!” She giggled again. “Well, actually, now that you mention it—”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said, feigning horror. “I want to hear about you. You look great, or did I say that already?”

“You said that already. So do you. You don’t mind, do you? About the makeup?”

He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Let’s get your luggage and get out of this rat trap, whadda ya say? You’ve spent enough time in airports today.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Want me to carry the bag?”

“No, that’s okay, I got it.” She stopped in her tracks. “Dad, when we were landing, I think I saw the place where that plane crashed. It was all black and burned.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “In retrospect, for a lot of reasons, I wish now I’d had you come into National Airport downtown. But you would’ve had to change planes in Chicago, and that’s a bear.” He laughed. “So instead, you changed planes in Kansas City.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no. I’m glad it happened the way it did. First the engine explodes on my plane, then I see where another plane crashed. That’s excellent! When the kids back home hear about it, they’ll think it’s awesome.”

It’s awesome, all right, he thought, but not in the way the kids back home might think. To them—to Melissa—seeing a crash scene was no more or no less than looking at a fire-gutted home or a three-car pileup on the freeway. Awesome, but not real, not in the context of any of their personal experiences. How could a fourteen-year-old relate to the deaths of more than 300 people? There was no basis for comparison. Having an engine self-destruct in mid-flight, the sight of the crash scene—none of it had been trauma for Melissa at all. It stuck in her mind as something to dazzle her friends with when she took the memories home. Totally awesome. Far out, Dude. Boss.

As they walked through the terminal toward the escalators down to the baggage pickup area, Steve took the moments to drink her in. Her brown hair was so dark it looked almost black. Her darkish complexion—an inheritance from her mother—had been deepened by the Southern California sun. She must be five-feet-five already, maybe a shade more, and she was only fourteen.

She’ll probably wind up about five-ten. She has her mother’s long legs, and she’s beginning to fill out just right.

Am I supposed to be thinking about my own daughter this way?

I guess I’d better. If I’m noticing, what’s going through the heads of the hormone monsters she’s encountering at school? I’ve got to send her mother some money for baseball bats. Maybe a bodyguard.

“You dating any?” he asked without meaning to.

She looked up at him and smiled tentatively. “Oh, a little, after school. If I go to a dance or a movie with a guy, Mom always insists on driving us. It’s dumb sometimes, you know? There’s this one guy, Cody, he’s sixteen, and he’s got his driver’s license, and he’s real responsible, you know? And I like him a lot, and he likes me. But Mom won’t let us go out alone at night in his car. It’s a hummer-bummer, lemme tell you. She won’t let me go out with him unless she drives us or his dad does. It makes Cody feel like a little kid, and I’m afraid he’s not gonna keep asking me out if Mom insists on acting like she doesn’t trust us. I mean, we’re not gonna get into trouble. Cody hasn’t had an accident or even gotten one single ticket, and he’s been driving for five whole months.”

“That long, huh? An Indy candidate if ever there was one.”

“Yeah!” she exclaimed, apparently thinking he was on her side.

“Well, we’ll talk about it,” he said, stepping off the escalator and guiding her around to the proper baggage carousel.

It’s okay, Dad. She might look eighteen, but she still thinks like a kid. Be grateful for small favors.

Their conversations covered school and boys, her mother and boys, her future and boys, and had started into what she would like to do on her vacation when Pace swung his car onto the Beltway and headed around toward Maryland. Melissa caught it right away.

“Where’re we going?” she asked. “Did you move?”

“No, but since you’re in blue jeans and sneaks anyhow, and it’s a beautiful afternoon, I thought you’d like to swing out by Great Falls.”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“It’s getting kinda late, isn’t it?”

“It’s just 5:30. There’s plenty of daylight left.”

Melissa frowned slightly. She turned to her window and stared at the passing traffic.

Conversation ceased.

They walked along the old C&O Railroad tracks and the C&O Canal and over the woodsy trail to the overlook above the Great Falls of the Potomac River, a waterfall that long ago crumbled into a mile-long, grade-six rapid. Rapids didn’t come any wilder. This one didn’t burble over rocks and riffle over pebbles. It roared past house-sized boulders, pounding with furious force, breaking a wide, tranquil river into mountains of white froth, deadly eddies of hyperactive water plunging down inclines and climbing back over itself, and whirlpools that trapped everything floating by, spinning it in a mad vortex and either swallowing it or dashing it to bits. No kayaker of sound mind would consider tackling Great Falls in the spring; it was dangerous enough at low water in the fall. But even as Steve and Melissa watched, two boys who lived life believing in teen immortality climbed to the top of the largest of the rocks in the center of the rapids. Pace had no idea how they got there alive, no notion of how they would get back.

He and Sissy settled on two adjacent flat rocks, where the water spray couldn’t reach them unless it was borne on a breeze. They watched the river’s tumult in silence for several minutes. Steve was about to say something profound when Melissa got to the point.

“You want to talk to me about Kathy, don’t you?”

“How did you know?”

She shrugged. “Mom told me, I guess,” she said after a few seconds.

“Your mom?” Pace was surprised. “What does your mom know? We haven’t talked.”

“From your answering machine,” Melissa said. “The voice says Kathy McGovern and Steve Pace aren’t home right now. Mom heard it when she called you to reconfirm my flight time. She told me so I wouldn’t be surprised when I found you living together.”