“No, I don’t mind,” I said.
“As long as you’re careful, Lucy, that’s what matters to me.” Wesley and I boarded a prop plane that made too much noise for us to talk in the air. So he slept while I sat quietly with my eyes shut as sunlight filled the window and turned the inside of my eyelids red. I let my thoughts wander wherever they would, and many images came to me from corners I had forgotten. I saw my father and the white gold ring he wore on his left hand where a wedding band would have been, but he had lost his at the beach and could not afford another one. My father had never been to college, and I remembered his high school ring was set with a red stone that I wished were a ruby because we were so poor.
I thought we could sell it and have a better life, and I remembered my disappointment when my father finally told me that his ring wasn’t worth the gasoline it would take to drive to South Miami. There was something about the way he said this that made me know he had never really lost his wedding ring. He had sold it when he did not know what else to do, but to tell Mother was to destroy her. It had been many years since I had thought about this, and I supposed my mother still had his ring somewhere, unless she had buried it with him, and maybe she had. I could not recall, since I was only twelve when he had died. As I drifted in and out of places, I saw silent scenes of people who simply appeared without invitation. It was very odd. I did not know why it mattered, for example, that Sister Martha, my third-grade teacher, was suddenly writing with chalk on the board or a girl named Jennifer was walking out a door as hail bounced on the churchyard like a million small white marbles. These people from my past slipped in and vanished as I almost slept, and a sorrow welled up that made me aware of Wesley’s arm. We were touching slightly. When I focused on the exact point of contact between us, I could smell the wool of his jacket warming in the sun and imagine long fingers of elegant hands that brought to mind pianos and fountain pens and brandy snifters by the fire.
I think it was precisely then I knew I was in love with Benton Wesley. Because I had lost every man I had loved before him, I did not open my eyes until the flight attendant asked us to put our seats in the upright position because we were about to land.
“Is someone meeting us?” I asked him as if this were all that had been on my mind during our hour in the air.
He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were the color of bottled beer when light hit them a certain way. Then the shadow of deep preoccupations returned them to hazel flecked with gold, and when his thoughts were more than even he could bear, he simply looked away.
“I suppose we’re returning to the Travel-Eze,” I next asked as he collected his briefcase and unbuckled his seat belt before we had been signaled that we could. The flight attendant pretended not to notice, because Wesley sent out his own signals that made most people slightly afraid.
“You talked to Lucy a long time in Charlotte,” he said.
“Yes.” We rolled past a wind sock having a deflated day.
“Well?” His eyes filled with light again as he turned toward the sun.
“Well, she thinks she knows who’s behind what’s happened to her.”
“What do you mean, who’s behind it?” He frowned.
“I think the meaning’s apparent,” I said.
“It’s not apparent only if you assume nobody is behind anything because Lucy is guilty.”
“Her thumb was scanned at three in the morning, Kay.”
“That much is clear.”
“And what is also clear is that her thumb couldn’t have been scanned without her thumb being physically present, without her hand, arm, and the rest of her being physically present at the time the computer says she was.”