Gordon Kent - Top Hook

“Oh, yeah.” He sounded as if she had ruined his evening. “Thanks for calling.” She could hear papers moving, an insect sound. He had her file next to the phone! “Your orders have been changed.”

It made no sense to her. Then it made only trivial sense—the reporting date had been changed, or the time. Or she should go to a different office. But a warning voice was murmuring, Just like Alan, just like Alan—

“Your orders have been changed from Houston,” he said. He was going slowly, but she said, her voice steely now, “Give it to me.”

“The Houston orders were changed, I don’t have the reason here—now don’t shoot the messenger, okay, Commander—”

“Cut the crap. What are you trying to tell me?”

She heard a sigh, then words spoken to somebody on his end, something like I’ll be there in a minute. Then he said, “The orders to the space program have been canceled. You have a new set of orders to a command in West Virginia. The, uh—Inter-Service Word Processing Training Center. As XO. Look, I had nothing to do with this; I just got a priority message—”

She stopped listening.

Her life stopped.

She wasn’t going to astronaut training .

But why?

They had loved her in Houston. Her fitreps were great. Her physicals were perfect—the doctor’s own word, “perfect,” “You’re a perfect type for space.” She was perfect for space from the Navy’s PR viewpoint, too—combat experience, a mother, attractive.

The detailer was asking her a question. Fax—did she have a fax?

“No. No, they don’t have a fax here.” Her voice surprised her with its steadiness.

“Well, get a fax number there someplace so I can send you the orders. The reporting date’s been put back, so you’ve got a couple of weeks to, you know, adjust things.”

Adjust things? That did it!

“Like my household goods, which are all on the way to Houston?” She was angry now—her one great failing. Was that it, they’d washed her out because she got angry? “I just bought a fucking house in Houston, and my household goods are going there, and I’ve got two kids and a dog and nowhere to live!”

“Look, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this isn’t my doing—!”

“Well, who the fuck’s doing is it?”

“I don’t know. This came from CNO’s office.”

What the hell did the Chief of Naval Operations care about her astronaut training? Jesus Christ! Just like Alan, and they didn’t explain to him, either—

“This isn’t fair. I want to appeal. This isn’t the way the Navy does things! Goddamit, I’ve followed the rules; I believe in the system; they can’t just—just—They’ve ruined my fucking career!”

He spent a minute or two talking her down, and the anger ebbed, turned into that steely calm again. Her mind was racing on, however, leapfrogging over anger and fear and hatred of the Navy, already seeking explanations, because there had to be an explanation, and when she found what it was, blood was going to flow.

“Okay,” she said. “Don’t jerk me around. I want answers.”

“Absolutely.” He wasn’t a bad guy. He knew that something, somebody, had decided to destroy her.

She turned the phone off, then back on, and tried to call Alan at the BOQ at Aviano, but he wasn’t there. Already on his way to Trieste, she thought, kicking ass as he went. Just as well—he had enough problems already.

She put the phone away and slammed the tailgate and stood there. It was so dark now that she hardly noticed her father at the corner of the car. How long had he been there?

“Rosie—what’re they trying to do to you? I’ll kill ’em, no kidding.”

She laughed. “Oh, Dad—” Then she threw herself on him and wept.

The corridors of the hospice smelled of potpourri and soap, with the scents of the dying only vagrant hints, an occasional whiff of antiseptic or bleach. The bowels loosen before death, but the system that transported air through the building was brilliant and powerful, and the grosser reminders were sucked away. It was an expensive place.

Heartbreak Hotel , he thought. He was even humming it to himself, not the Elvis version but Willie Nelson’s: I get so lonely, baby/ I get so lonely I could die.

Heartbreak Hotel with a dedicated staff. George Shreed was a tough man, utterly unsentimental, but he knew when he had fallen among saints. If what they gave her was not love, it was such a counterfeit of love that it was, he thought, worth any price.

Shreed used two metal canes to walk. He heaved himself along on powerful shoulders and arms so ropy with muscles he might have been an iron-pumper. Thirty years before, he had crashed a jet in Vietnam, and he would have died there if his wingman hadn’t stayed overhead, calling in the medevacs and taking AA fire and keeping the Cong off him. Now, planting his canes and pushing himself up on them and dragging his legs along, he thought grimly of that day when he thought he was going to die, and of that wingman of long ago—Alan Craik’s father. Now Mick Craik was dead and he was still alive, and his wife, who was ten years younger than he and whom he loved to distraction, was almost dead.

“Oh, Janey,” he muttered with a sigh. There he went, saying it aloud again.

“Hi, Mister Shreed!” The night nurse smiled, truly smiled, not a plastic smile but a real one. The smile slowly cooled, and she said, “You may want to stay with her tonight.”

“Is it—? Is she—?” Is she going to die tonight? he meant. These people knew when death was waiting.

“You maybe just want to be there with her.”

Janey lay on sheets from her own house, wearing a nightgown she had bought at the old Woodie’s. The room had a real chair and a decent imitation of a Georgian chest of drawers, and one of her own paintings hung on a wall. Der Rosenkavalier was playing on her portable CD—the music she said she wanted to die to. It was on a lot.

No tubes and no heroics, she had said. She had a morphine drip in one arm and a Heparin lock in the other; she was dying of hunger now as much as of cancer.

She looked like a baby bird. Janey Gorman, who had been the prettiest girl at Radford College, had a beak for a nose and a scrawny neck and curled hands like claws. Shreed rested his canes against the chest of drawers and pushed the armchair over to the bedside, leaning on it for support, and he took one of her hands, and her eyelids fluttered and for a moment there was a sliver of reflection between the still-long lashes.

“Janey, it’s George.” He kissed her, feeling the waxy, faintly warm skin, then squeezed her tiny, bony hand. “Here again.” The unsentimental man felt constriction in his throat, heat in his eyes. “Janey?” Der Rosenkavalier swelled up, that incredible final duet. Once, she had played it as they had made love, whispering Wait and Wait , and then as it rose toward its final too-sweet fulfillment, she had laughed aloud as they all reached it together. He listened now, let the music die, let silence come.

“Janey, I have to tell you something.” He could see a pulse beating in the skinny neck, nothing more. “Before—you know.” He stroked her hand. “I want to tell you something about myself. You never knew all about me. You didn’t want to; we agreed on that right at the beginning. But it’s not—not what I did for a living.” The word living stuck a little in his throat, in that place. And, anyway, he hadn’t done it for a living; he’d done it for a passion. “Janey—listen. Janey, a couple of years ago, you came into my study and you saw that there was—” He sighed. “Some pornography on my computer screen. You turned around and walked out and we never talked about it.” Her cancer hadn’t been identified then, but aging had made sex difficult for her despite the hormones that helped to kill her, so sex was not an easy subject between them. “You see, the truth, Janey, was worse than what you thought. And—” He sat.