dinner doesn’t go so well. Mandy’s older sister Laura is protective and doesn’t think she should be hanging around with men these days, much less strangers from the airport. She doesn’t say as much but Alfred can tell she’s also thinking, Much less this particular stranger. It’s the first time he’s felt something come between him and Mandy, and it does a number on his nerves.
A few weeks later they go to his house for dinner and it doesn’t go any better. His mother seems embarrassed and hardly says a word. His dad seems to think that he can cure deafness if only he yells loudly enough.
Alfred and Mandy stick to the airport for a while.
Months pass. The doctors and specialists and therapists say that Alfred is making much better progress but still hasn’t eased back into the real world. The ear doctors in Los Angeles restore 10 percent of the hearing in Mandy’s right ear but she still can’t hear Alfred talking. Which is okay, because Alfred is nearly fluent in sign language by now.
After a while Alfred and Mandy start spending time together outside the airport. Laura comes to accept Alfred and sometimes they have movie nights at the apartment and Alfred sleeps on their couch. They go to Sea Fair and watch the Blue Angels. Alfred doesn’t tell Mandy about the big house where he watched the Blue Angels and he doesn’t tell her about the girl he barely remembers. They go to a Mariners game and to the museum and the library. After a while Mandy says Alfred can sleep in her bed with her. Alfred can tell that Laura, who otherwise seems to actually like him these days, really doesn’t like that idea. Mandy tells her to butt out and, to Laura’s credit, she does. Nothing happens between them in bed except they talk and sometimes cuddle before they fall asleep. Alfred discovers Mandy’s bed is the safest place he’s ever been. It’s the only place where the accident and settlement don’t linger at the edges of his thoughts. One night in Mandy’s bed he dreams in French, and when they wake up the next morning he says, Salut, jolie fille.
Then one day Alfred sees Mandy at the airport and he knows something is wrong. They’ve gotten close and neither of them can keep a secret from the other. She walks up to him and throws her arms around him. She doesn’t sign but says, Laura and I are moving to Los Angeles. She got a job that pays double what she makes now and I can see the doctors twice a week instead of twice a month.
Alfred doesn’t understand why Mandy starts crying. He feels her tears soak through the shoulder of his shirt. After all, LA isn’t so far. He tells her he can probably do the same job at LAX he’s been doing at Sea-Tac. He’s got loads of experience at this point. Most importantly, if it will make her hearing coming back faster he’s all for it. Instead of comforting her it only makes her cry harder.
She says Laura is waiting outside and she has to go. She kisses him on the cheek and tells him they’ll have him to dinner before they leave.
At dinner that weekend Mandy cries again and even Laura says how much she’ll miss him. He tells them not to worry, he’ll get a job at LAX and they can see each other all the time. After dinner they both hug him and tell him they’ll write and call. He reminds them he’ll be working at LAX soon.
Standing on the little walkway in front of Laura and Mandy’s apartment Mandy tells Alfred she loves him. He says he loves her, too. He realizes they’ve never told each other that. He says, Canit enim vobis cor meum, which means, My heart sings for you.
It’s the first time Mandy kisses Alfred on the lips. It’s a real kiss, too. He kisses her back and when he closes his eyes he feels like he’s back in her bed, in the safest place in the world. His mind explodes with thoughts in Latin, French, Italian, and languages he still doesn’t recognize. Then she hugs him and is gone.
In the car his dad asks him if he’s okay.
Alfred says, Mi recorderó tutto per lei. I will remember everything for her.
It’s harder to get a job at LAX than Alfred thought it would be. Besides, the doctors and specialists and therapists say he’s still easing back into the real world here in Seattle and moving to another city is out of the question, at least for now. It’s best for him to stay at home until the easing in is finished. He feels a little frustrated but he tells himself he’ll work even harder.
He does, and pretty soon he gets another job at the airport, one that comes with a paycheck and a timecard. He works on the grounds crew. He rides around with other employees in a white pickup with a bright orange light and a huge orange-and-white checkered flag in the back so taxiing planes are sure to see them. They look for objects on the taxiways and runways that could get sucked into a jet engine. He knows it’s not the most glamorous job but it has the best perk he can imagine: he’s getting paid to be driven around an active international airport and make sure the planes are safe. It’s a part-time job and the rest of the time he still does his old job in the terminal.
He gets letters from Mandy every two weeks and sometimes she calls. She has a special phone that lets her hear pretty well, but the conversations aren’t like the ones they had at the airport. Alfred can almost feel the miles between them. She says she’s going to visit. He’s got three shoeboxes under his bed now, two filled with his earnings and one slowly filling with Mandy’s letters. It’s like keeping a little bit of their friendship for the future. With his languages coming back a little more and a little faster each day he knows it won’t be long before he can write back to her.
He still has his Coca-Cola’s at the airport shop, and the people who work there are as good to him as ever. He has his lunches at Red Robin, and sometimes he stays longer than his hour lunch break because there are so many people to talk to. His language is really coming back and people love to hear him speak in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Latin. One day a Chinese couple come in and he amazes them by repeating their greeting, Ni hao ma? with flawless inflection, and by the time they hurry to their flight to Shanghai he’s learned two dozen words in Mandarin. He even starts to learn to sign in his other languages and sometimes the airport managers ask him to help out. Every day he goes home with a few dollars in his pocket. He figures by the time he’s eased back into the real world he’ll have enough to go to LA. Maybe even enough to buy a house down there like the big one he had in Seattle.
In the terminal sometimes he sees a girl who looks like Mandy and he’ll leap up. It’s funny, he knows she’s in Los Angeles, his memory is good enough these days that he can retain that fact, but a girl who looks like her makes him forget everything for a moment. But it’s a nice kind of forgetting because the next second he remembers she’s getting her ears back and that’s what matters. He doesn’t care if it takes one year or a hundred. They’ll fix her ears one day and one day he’ll ease back into the real world.
In the meantime the airport needs him, and he needs it.
A Jumbo Jet’s Soul
When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the
splinters of the thunderbolt.
—Robinson Jeffers, The Beaks of Eagles
From the old pool chair in the backyard grass Daisy watches a jumbo jet lumber across the Los Angeles sky. It’s early autumn and the air is impossibly blue, she thinks, then giggles when she hears Dorothea scold, You can do better than that tired old cliché.
As always she’d be right. Dorothea was Daisy’s English teacher in her senior year at John Adams High School in Bakersfield. She was the one who convinced Daisy at the tender age of seventeen that she was destined to be a great literary writer. She was also Daisy’s first true love.
After high school Daisy went to
