Chapter Four
Then
“So what do you do when you’re not being the honorary lieutenant governor of Tennessee?” Susa asks. “Doctor? Lawyer? Roller coaster operator at Dollywood? Session player with an up-and-coming rockabilly band? Or are you more a bluegrass kind of guy? Please don’t tell me you play the banjo.”
I would smile, except with nearly three weeks’ worth of beard on myface she probably couldn’t see it anyway. Plus, combined with my sunburn, it hurts too damn much to smile. “Hey, don’t knock rockabilly. Or bluegrass. Although I am more an indie rock kind of guy. Promise not to tell my voters that, though. Man, there’stwothings you have over me now.”
“What’s that?”
“That I prefer indie rock to country, and that I’m a raging atheist.”
She snorts. At leastshe’s still talking, lucid.
I dread the time she isn’t and I can no longer do anything to help her.
I also don’t think I have the heart to watch her suffer once she crosses that point. Letting her lie there and die over and hours and hours isn’t something I can bear. I’d rather help her go and later lie to her men, if I survive and ever meet them face to face, and tell them she slipped awayquickly without admitting I helped her die.
If Ellen were still alive and in this position, I’d want someone to do that for her, if she were suffering.
“I’m an attorney,” I admit.
She holds her hand up, fingers curled, and I realize that’s her weak attempt to fist-bump with me. I gently touch mine to hers.
“Welcome to the club,” she says.
“Club?”
“Big G,” she says. “Well, I’m lieutenant-G,and wanted to be big G.”
I sigh. We’ve gone through this countless times already, but just like I ask her questions I’ve already covered, it beats the sound of waves and wind and the disquieting lack of other human-made noises.
Helps me not remember the scream of the wind through the fuselage.
“You’re still going to make it, Susa,” I tell her. “We both are.”
She waves her hand as if humoringme. Maybe she is humoring me. Maybe I’m the delusional one, thinking any of us will survive this.
“I’m not sure I’m governor,” I add. “He might have survived.”
Except I know I probably am legally the governor of Tennessee now. Not that anyone outside this tiny spit of land even knows I’m still alive. Ed Willis couldn’t swim, has a heart condition he’s successfully kept quiet from the public,and is—or was—seventy-two years old.
And not a healthy seventy-two, either. The kind of seventy-two who makes you worry he’ll keel over if he coughs too hard.
Because he probably will.
Well,wouldhave.
I’m nearly certain he didn’t make it out of the airplane. I feel vaguely guilty about that, that I didn’t fight harder to get them out of the plane, but considering I’d just lost my wife Itry to keep it in perspective. Compartmentalize it.
Fuck.
I think about Ellen’s rings, her necklace. I know it was stupid, but I couldn’t leave them on her. She was gone, and I wasn’t going to sit there and drown. I took them off her before making my escape from the sinking plane and into the life raft that bore me, Susa, and four others safely to this slightly dry spit of dirt in the middleof the fucking ocean.
I want to give Aussie her rings, one day. If she wants them.
At the very least, I want them forme.
She was my good girl. She wore her rings and her day collar faithfully.
