Chapter 9

Two years later:

Meghan sat in seat 40A, a window seat on the left side of the aircraft, just aft of the 757's wing and the large Pratt & Whitney jet engine mounted to it. Her seat was in the upright position and her seatbelt was securely fastened around her waist. Her heart was currently kicking along at around one hundred and twenty beats per minute and a few beads of sweat had sprung up on her forehead. Though Meghan had spent more than 2500 hours of her life aloft in aircraft, making her one of the most seasoned flyers among the passengers currently onboard, she was arguably one of the most nervous people on the aircraft at this moment in time.

She was not exactly phobic about flying itself. It was true she no longer enjoyed it as she had back in her Air Force days and she did avoid it when she was able, but she still utilized it as the travel method of choice when she wanted or needed to get somewhere more than two hundred miles from home. She was not bothered by the takeoffs, the climbs, the turns, or even the most violent of clear-air turbulence. The final stage of a flight, however, particularly the last minute before touchdown, was where the irrational fear kicked in. It was that fear, fostered by the near-catastrophe she'd been a part of that night at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida in 1998, that had Meghan in its grip now.

She was looking out the window as they descended toward Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The slats and the flaps were fully deployed and they were moving relatively slowly about three thousand feet above the ground. She could see the open fields and industrial areas northwest of the city. She still felt safe right now, as they were safely in the air with room to recover from any weather related problem. But she was anticipating the moment of landing when she knew she would feel the helpless terror take over her mind.

The plane banked gently to the right and Meghan's view of the ground was replaced by a view of blue sky and a few wispy November clouds. Turning to final approach, she thought, feeling the fear ramp up a few notches. Less than three minutes to go.

The plane banked slowly back to center. She could now see the familiar skyline of Cincinnati off in the distance. The sound of the engines decreased a little and their descent steepened correspondingly. There was a whine of machinery from beneath her feet as the landing gear deployed.

Here we go, Meghan thought, her hands gripping her seat a little harder. Even though there was no reported thunderstorm activity anywhere in the Midwest (she had checked), even though it was not even the right time of year for such a thing, her mind insisted on replaying that horrifying moment in Florida when, from her cubbyhole in the tail of the KC-10, she'd heard the sudden roar of the wind shear washing over them and felt the entire plane shudder and violently bank left just seconds before touchdown. She remembered how slowly everything had happened. It had seemed an eternity passed as she felt Ken and Rick fighting to compensate for the unexpected push down and left. She remembered coming to the realization that they weren't going to be able to compensate, that they were, in fact, going to come down hard on the left side. She remembered the jarring impact when the left wing gear slammed down on the runway, the brief glimmer of hope when Ken managed to put the other wheels on the ground before they started cartwheeling, and then the sheer terror when the landing strut collapsed and the plane tilted left again. There had been a horrible screeching sound and she had seen debris from their plane—pieces of wingtip, shredded rubber from the tires, broken pieces of the landing strut itself—go flying past her and tumbling down the runway in their wake. She remembered most of all the absolute certainty that she was about to die, that she was experiencing the last few seconds of her life.

It was the memory of that moment of terror, of that certainty of death, that had haunted her in nightmares for years after and that haunted her still whenever a plane she was flying on started its final approach. The fact that the odds against having such a thing happen to her twice in a lifetime were on the order of a billion to one mattered little to her. Nor did the fact that experiencing wind shear in November in Cincinnati was pretty much patently impossible. She had almost died once when a plane was just about to land and now, whenever her brain processed the sights, sounds, and sensations of an aircraft about to touchdown, it automatically triggered a fight or flight response. It was something her rational mind was simply unable to override.

She stared out her window and clenched her hands on the armrest as the ground came closer and closer. They passed over the Ohio River and the rush hour traffic on Interstate 275. They passed over the airport perimeter fence and then a crowded parking lot. They were low enough now that she could see a security guard patrolling the aisles in the parking lot, could tell that he was a male with dark hair and light skin. The fear reached its peak as she felt the plane flare for landing and saw the actual runway passing beneath them. She held her breath from this point on, until she felt the soft, perfectly normal thump of the landing gear meeting the asphalt of Runway 18L.

Once she heard the roar of the engines providing reverse thrust, once she felt the press of the seatbelt around her middle as they slowed, the spell was broken and the fear evaporated into blessed relief. She started to breathe again, allowing her body to resume the mechanics of respiration. She knew she wasn't technically safe yet. There were still half a dozen things that could conceivably cause fatal destruction to a 757 moving ninety miles an hour down a runway. The runway was, in fact, where most fatal plane collisions occurred. But that didn't matter to her brain. She felt safe now and that was what was important to her state of mind.

By the time the aircraft parked at the terminal and Meghan began to work her way toward the jetway, her carry-on bag in hand, the fear and adrenaline had completely faded away, leaving only a small, lingering dread of facing the two landings on her return flight. She could now go back to thinking about the reason she had hastily flown to her hometown in the first place: her mother.

The phone call had come just before eight o'clock the previous evening, as she'd been at work behind her desk putting together the latest edition of the Register's Metro section. It was Ken who had called her. He had just received a phone call from Hope, Meghan's oldest sibling. Her mother had had a massive heart attack while doing the dinner dishes. She had been rushed to Good Samaritan Hospital by ambulance and was in the cardiac intensive care unit. Meghan called Hope and was told that things looked pretty bad for Mom.

"I think you should get here as quick as you can," Hope said, her voice choked with emotion. "You know? So you can ... can say goodbye to her."

Ken had gone to work on his computer and booked her on the first available flight but, unfortunately, that flight didn't leave until early this morning and there was no such thing as a direct flight from Sacramento to Cincinnati. She had left Sacramento International at 6:10 AM and flown to Salt Lake City for a two hour layover before climbing on another plane for the three and half hour flight to Cincinnati. And now, here she was at 4:45 PM local time, exhausted from lack of sleep and two periods of landing terror, her mind troubled and stressed from the thought of losing a parent.

The first thing she did upon leaving the jetway and walking into the crowded terminal building was pull out her cell phone. She had talked to Hope before boarding her flight in Salt Lake City and had been told that Mom was still hanging in there—just barely. Almost four hours had passed since then. Was Mom still hanging in there? Would she continue to hang in there long enough for Meghan to rent a car and drive to the hospital? Meghan prayed that she would. Her mother was overbearing, exasperating, and a borderline religious fanatic but she was still her mother, the woman who had given birth to her and raised her. She loved her mother as a daughter should and if she was about to die, Meghan certainly wanted to hug her and tell her goodbye before she went.

She accessed the contacts list in her phone, found Hope's cell phone number, and ordered it dialed. Eight or ten seconds went by while the system located Hope's phone. It then connected. Hope was one of those people who thought it was cute to have music play in a caller's ear instead of a ringing noise. The selection she was offering today was Amy Grant singing My Jesus, I Love Thee. Meghan gritted her teeth and endured it until it was cut off and replaced by Hope's voice saying hello.

"Hi, Hope," she said. "I just landed at the airport. How's Mom?"

"She's very tired but she's still with us," Hope said, her voice so soft that Meghan could barely hear it. "I told her that you were coming to see her, that you would be here this evening. That seemed to give her strength."

Meghan felt a mixture of relief and guilt as she heard this, relief that her mother was still alive, guilt because it had been more than five years since she'd been home to see her. "Okay," she told Hope. "I'm going to pick up my checked luggage and then see what I can scrounge up for a rental car. I'll be there as soon as I can."

"Try to make it quick," Hope said. "Visiting hours end at seven and they said we all have to leave then."

"Visiting hours?" Meghan said. "Surely that doesn't apply when someone is ... uh ... when people are coming to say goodbye."

"They told us there were no exceptions," Hope said. "It's just awful. And this ... this is a Catholic hospital and we're Catholic! Can you imagine? I have half a mind to have Father O'Rourke call the Bishop and have him call the Cardinal."

"Uh ... yeah," Meghan said. "I'll get there as quickly as I can. I should be able to be there by six or so as long as I don't hit any snags."

"Okay, Meggy," Hope said. "We'll be waiting."

Meghan walked over to the baggage claim section, searching for and finally locating the carousel assigned to her flight number. There was a crowd of people gathered but no bags had come down the ramp as of yet. While she waited, she opened her phone again and called Ken, who was just getting ready to leave for work.

"Hey, babe," he said. "Safely on the ground?"

"Yeah," she said. "I just got in a few minutes ago."

"How was it?" he asked, meaning, of course, the landings, which he knew terrified her.

"The usual," she said. "Actually, a little worse than usual. It's the first time I've flown without you since I went to Grandpa's funeral five years ago. I missed you holding my hand."

"I'm sorry I couldn't be with you," he said. "I still think I should've taken this week off and flown with you."

"Don't be ridiculous," Meghan said. "You can't stand my family and they can't stand you. You're the Godless pagan who led me astray of my upbringing and introduced me to Satan's ways, remember?"

"Oh yeah," Ken said without humor. "I forgot I did all that."

"Besides," she said, "there's no sense in you losing a week's worth of pay when we don't really even know anything. Maybe things aren't as bad as Hope is making them out to be."

"I honestly hope that's the case, hon," he told her.

"Me too," Meghan said. Up on the ramp a few suitcases appeared and slid down onto the carousel. None of them were hers. "Listen, sweetie, the bags are starting to come down so I need to watch for mine. I'll call you when I know anything."

"Okay," Ken said. "And by the way, Jo called me a few hours ago."

"She did?" Meghan said, feeling a little pit of warmth in her tummy at the mention of Jo. She had been hired by UPS as an A-300 pilot seven months before and had left Sacramento for her new assignment in Columbia, South Carolina. Since then, she had been on an erratic, busy schedule full of training assignments and then flying as a reserve FO when anyone on any of the fifty-six Columbia air hub lines was sick or on vacation. During this time she had not made it back to Sacramento to visit even once. Two weeks ago, however, she was finally assigned a line of her own and given regular days off. She had been promising to deadhead her way across the country for a reunion as soon as she could make the arrangements.

"She did," Ken said. "She was going to try to make it out this week but ... well ... you know, your mom getting sick kind of put that on hold."

"Yeah, that's really too bad," Meghan said, feeling a strong tinge of sexual desire at the very thought of Jo visiting. "Was she mad?"

"Of course not," Ken said. "Why would she be mad because you had to visit your mom when she's sick? She said she'll make the arrangements whenever you get home and things settle down. She really wants to visit us."

"I bet she does," Meghan said, smiling for the first time since receiving Ken's phone call the previous night. "Hopefully this will all be over, one way or the other, in a few days."

"I suppose," Ken said. "She said for you to give her a call either tonight or tomorrow night when you can. She's off for the next three."

"I'll do that," Meghan said, watching as a few more bags came sliding down. "I really need to watch the carousel, hon."

"Okay," he told her. "Do you have your confirmation number for the hotel?"

"Right in my pocket," she confirmed.

They said their goodbyes and gave each other their love. She then closed her phone and put it back in her purse. A minute later her bag came down and she retrieved it. Twenty minutes after that, she had the keys for a Toyota Camry in her possession. Ten minutes after that, she was on the freeway and heading for Clifton Heights where the Good Samaritan Hospital stood.

Later that same night, some three hundred and fifty miles to the southeast, Josephine was sitting in her antique rocker in the living room of the rented house she currently resided in. In her hands was a first-edition copy of Gone With The Wind she had found a week before while browsing through a sleazy little antique store in downtown Columbia. Granted, the book was not in the best of shape and it did not have its original book jacket, but it was a genuine first edition and she had paid the clueless proprietor of the shop only twelve dollars for it (he himself, she came to learn, had only paid four dollars for it himself, buying it from a collection of books at an estate sale). The book would eventually end up among her most prized possessions—those things, like her rocker, her antique radio, and her couch, that she carted with her from place to place, identity to identity—but for now she was just enjoying using the book for what it had originally been intended: She was reading it. It had been many years since she had last read Gone With The Wind and she was quite enraptured with the timeless story.

She reached the end of a chapter and, after carefully marking her place with a bookmarker (one simply did not dog-ear the pages of a first edition Gone With The Wind), she set the book down in her lap and looked at the grandfather clock behind her. It was 10:30 PM and she was quite hungry, hungry enough that she could smell her own pheromones wafting into the air around her. She knew she needed to go out and have a bite soon. On a weekday night in Columbia, South Carolina—not the most vibrant and alive city on Earth—it was sometimes difficult to find a place to feed herself after eleven o'clock. True, there was always a Denny's or an IHOP or even the truck stop on Interstate 26 that was open 24/7, but the cuisine found in such places was not usually to her liking.

Still, she decided to wait at least another twenty minutes or so before heading out. Ken had told her earlier that he would tell Meghan to give her a call if she got a chance. She was very anxious to talk to Meghan so she could tell her the idea she'd come up with about ten minutes after talking to Ken. It was an idea that would put her and Meghan in the same place without any effort on Meghan's part. If the news about Meghan's mom turned out to be bad (and Ken had told her that rumor had it that would be the case), she could be there to help comfort her in her time of need. And if the news about Meghan's mom turned out to be not-so-bad, well ... they could spend a few days reacquainting themselves with each other's naked bodies in a Cincinnati hotel room.

Needless to say, it was the second possibility that Jo was hoping and praying for. It had been six months and twenty-nine days since she had last touched Ken or Meghan in passion (or in any other physical form). In her humble opinion, that was about six months and twenty-five days too long.

After that first, wonderful night when she'd made love with Ken and Meghan, first on their living room couch and then in their very marital bed, the three of them went on to enjoy an intense, passionate, and, most of all, loving sexual and emotional affair that had continued right up to the day she tearfully left Sacramento for her new job with UPS. It turned out that her mother had been quite on the mark when she'd declared that the three of them were a correct destiny triple. Jo knew that no matter how long she remained a sentient being on this Earth, no matter how many identities she assumed and places she lived in, those seventeen months would always be marked as the best time of her life.

Of course, the fact that she was cognate and they were human—and therefore on the other side of the subterfuge—had put a little bit of a kink in the relationship and had kept it from being everything that it could have been. Jo, for instance, could never spend more than a single twenty-four hour period with them because of this basic difference. Most of the times they had been together, she had made a point to head home first thing in the morning, or even before sunrise if she could gracefully do so.

And then there was the secrecy Jo was forced to employ to protect the subterfuge. Though Ken and Meghan had shared pretty much every intimate detail of their lives with her at some point, she was unable to reciprocate. It wasn't that she didn't want to, she simply couldn't. There was no way they could possibly be told what her actual upbringing and early history had been like without either thinking her mad or, even worse, thinking her truthful. And so, in exchange for their heartfelt trust in her, she had given them a tangled web of lies and half-truths in return. She was a methodical, intricate and careful liar—a cognate had to be—and she didn't think she'd ever tripped herself up, but the fact she had to lie to two people she loved, even though the reasons were very good ones, weighed heavy on her soul at times.

Other than that, however, the only dark spot in the relationship between the three of them had been the knowledge that it couldn't last forever, at least not in the form they enjoyed during that seventeen months in time. Ken and Meghan both knew from the start that eventually Jo was going to have to move on and make the relationship more of a long-distance affair. Because of this knowledge, they'd made a point to enjoy each other as often and as well as they could. At least twice a week during those seventeen months, they had gotten together, usually at Ken and Meghan's house, and, more often than not, ended up in bed together.

They had wild sex and they had tender sex and they had kinky sex and sometimes they had all three on the same night. They enjoyed every possible act that two women and a man could enjoy together. She and Meghan had licked and sucked each other's breasts and vaginas until they were raw and abraded at times. They had both fucked and sucked Ken, individually and together, until he was sometimes a quivering, nonsensical mass of sweaty skin, dripping with saliva and vaginal secretions. Jo had taken Ken's penis up her anus while Meghan licked her clitoris. Meghan had licked Jo's anus while Ken's penis was in her vagina. Jo had done the same act to Meghan. On one occasion, Jo had fucked Meghan's vagina with a strap-on dildo while Meghan fellated Ken and Ken pinched her nipples.

About the only thing that had not been done during this most sensual of times was Ken and Jo getting together privately, without Meghan's presence. Jo and Meghan had gotten together by themselves on a few nights when Ken was flying, and Ken had no problem with that. Ken and Jo had also fucked each other without Meghan's physical involvement on many occasions. But there had always been an agreement, unspoken but very real and concrete, that Meghan be in the room at all times when Jo and Ken were touching each other sexually.

It wasn't exactly jealousy or possessiveness that forged this agreement, nor was it Meghan that it seemed to stem from. It was more a mutual sense that such a pairing would be awkward in a way. It was recognized that Meghan was the central figure in the relationship, the member around whom everything else revolved. Jo and Ken loved each other as friends and sexual partners, but both of them loved Meghan more than each other and both knew that Meghan loved them equally, though in different ways and for different reasons. They did not feel they were in competition with each other, but that they complimented each other, that they were each a piece of what made Meghan whole.

But alas, the seventeen months of bliss finally came to an end, as they had all known it would. The three of them continued to talk to each other on the phone and in email (and once, Ken and Meghan had fucked each other in their computer desk chair in front of a web cam while she watched from her own computer and masturbated), but Jo had not been able to break away from her new job to visit them in person. She was desperate to do so as much as possible, not just because she missed them and wanted to be with them, but because she knew that even that aspect of the relationship would have to come to an eventual end as well. It was now twenty-eight months since the three of them had first met. After another thirty-two months—not even three years!—she would have to relocate and reassign her life, completely wiping away all traces of this one. Ken and Meghan and every other human who knew her on more than an extremely casual level, would be told she was dead. There would even be a funeral service for her. It was the price a cognate had to pay when associating on anything more than a superficial level with humans. And it was a hammer poised over the relationship she shared with Ken and Meghan, a hammer she could see but they could not and would not until it came slamming down upon them.

Her cell phone started to ring. It was sitting on the end table next to her and she picked it up without having to rise from her chair. She looked at the display and saw the familiar 916 area code followed by Meghan's cell phone number. She smiled, feeling a wave of love and desire sweep over her just from that. She pushed the TALK button and put the phone to her ear.

"Hi, Meg," she said.

"Hey, Miss Jo," Meghan returned, her voice sounding a bit tired but not devastated. "Did I wake you?"

"You know better than that," Jo said. "I'm a creature of the night. I don't close my eyes while the sun's on the other side of the world."

"That's right," Meghan said. "Miss Josephine the vampire." She giggled a little. "Or maybe succubus would be a better term?"

Jo returned the giggle. "I don't know," she said with a hint of teasing. "What do you think?"

"I think I wish you were here right now," Meghan said. "It's been a hell of a day, I'm telling you. I've had a couple glasses of wine here in my hotel room. Maybe you could whisper naughty things in my ear while I play with myself."

"Mmmm," Jo said, thinking that it was going to be the truck stop or the IHOP after all. "You always were the idea girl, Meg."

"It's a gift I have."

"I'm assuming that if you want me to talk dirty to you that things ... uh ... aren't as bad as you feared they would be?"

Meghan barked out a disgusted laugh. "No," she said bitterly. "Things are not quite as bad as I was led to believe. I should've friggin' known better. My sister is such a goddamn drama queen. My whole fucking family is a goddamn drama queen. Even the men!"

"So ... your mother is not dying?"

"Probably not," Meghan sighed. "Not that I'm upset about that, I'm actually quite glad, it's just that I flew halfway across the freakin country for this shit. Come and say goodbye to Mom? Jesus fucking Christ! I drove like a bat out of hell to Good Samaritan Hospital from the airport so I could get there before seven and see my mother one last time. I park in an area where I'm not supposed to park and rush upstairs to the ICU, hoping that I'm not too late and she hasn't slipped away. When I get up there, I found the whole freaking clan that is my family has taken over the ICU's waiting room. There are fat women and bald men crying and praying in every chair. All my brothers and sisters are there with their kids. My dad is there, although he's so far gone with the Alzheimer's that he doesn't even know what's happening—which doesn't stop him from crying like everyone else, I might add. My Aunt Elizabeth is there along with three of my cousins—one of them was Catherine by the way and it looks like she's had some gastric bypass surgery."

"Oh yeah?" Jo said. Catherine, of course, was the girl Meghan had had the first sexual contact of her life with, the girl who had grown up to be an overweight anti-gay activist.

"Yeah," Meghan said, "she's down to around one-eighty-five or so and doesn't look half bad. She still has trouble looking me in the eye. Anyway, she's there with her husband and one of their kids. They're crying even harder than Hope or Charity just because they like to cry during shit like this.

"So, anyway, I get hugged and pinched and squeezed and blessed about a dozen times before I finally get someone to let me in to see Mom. I go in there, expecting to see her on a ventilator with a priest giving Last Rites and do you know what I found instead?"

"What?" Jo asked.

"I found her sitting up in bed eating from a goddamn dinner tray and drinking a glass of grape juice while she watched a rerun of Little House on the goddamn Prairie on the TV!"

"So it wasn't a heart attack?" Jo asked.

"It was a heart attack," Meghan said. "Only it wasn't quite as massive as Hope had led us to believe. I finally convinced one of the nurses that I wasn't as whacked as everyone else in the family and she told me what the score was. She called it a 'mild anterior myocardial infarction'. She said it gave my mother chest pain and shortness of breath that was not severe but was noticeable enough that she called 911 right away. Since she got to the hospital less than ninety minutes after the onset of symptoms, they were able to detect the heart attack and get her to the cardiac catheterization lab in time to open the vessel back up and prevent any damage to her heart."

"There was no damage to her heart?" Jo said.

"No damage at all," Meghan confirmed. "They did discover some significant coronary artery disease while they were looking around in there, however. She's going to have a four-way bypass operation in two days and spend a week or so in the hospital after that. Now the family has stopped fretting and crying over her imminent demise and has shifted to fretting and crying over the upcoming surgery." She sighed. "God, what a day. Did I do something wrong in a previous life to get assigned to this family? I must have."

"Well I'm glad you're mother is going to be okay," Jo told her. "I was worried for you ever since I talked to Ken."

"Yeah, I'm glad too," Meghan said. "I'm just pissed at the melodrama."

"So how long are you going to stay in Cincinnati?" Jo asked. "Are you going to head back right away?"

"No," Meghan said, "I'm going to stay until Mom has the bypass operation and I know she's recovering well."

"So a week or so?" Jo asked, smiling, her hand rubbing the nipple of her left breast, which had suddenly become erect.

"Something like that," Meghan said. "Ken told me you were trying to make it out to Sacramento this week. I'm sorry that all of this got in the way." Another sigh. "God, you can't imagine how sorry."

"Actually I can imagine," Jo told her. "But maybe all is not lost. I had an idea after I talked to Ken."

"An idea?"

"Yeah," Jo said. "I told you that the main hub for UPS air operations is in Louisville, haven't I?"

"You have," Meghan said, her voice becoming immediately interested. "That's where all of your planes from the outlying hubs fly to."

"That's right," Jo said. Meghan had grown up in Cincinnati. She did not have to be told that Louisville, Kentucky was only ninety minutes away by car. "I have four nights off, starting tonight. I also have jump seat privileges on any UPS aircraft as long as someone with higher seniority doesn't want it first. I can be there tomorrow night ... if you want."

"Oh, Jo," Meghan said, her voice excited now, "you know I want."