The Daughter-in-Law (2 page)

“So, let’s see”—Nicole calculated on her fingers—“four day weekends and one day for a late lunch. That sounds like a two-day workweek.”

“Like I said, as little as possible ...”

The plane banked into another turn, still climbing to altitude. It was laboring more in the thin air, its propellers working harder to get a grip.

“We’re at eight thousand now,” the pilot’s voice reported, “turning downwind over the drop area.”

Ben Tobin twisted in his seat and leaned into the door opening. The western New Jersey horse country was familiar to him, as was the distinctive bend in the Delaware River. He elbowed Jonathan and then the two of them pressed toward the doorway. Across the
aisle, one of the Navy men turned his face to the window, his nose to the glass. The other two leaned close to Jonathan and Ben so they could see out the door. Nicole was the only one who didn’t seem curious.

They climbed slowly out past the jump area. When they finally leveled off they were thirteen minutes from takeoff, just about what the pilot had predicted. The plane began a wide turn to the left, banking so that the open door gave a perfect view of the ground they were turning into.

“Okay,” the pilot announced. “I’ve told them we’re ready. Once you see the smoke you can go anytime.”

The smoke appeared instantly, a crimson cloud generated by a burning flare at the beginning of the runway they had used for takeoff. It rose straight up for a few hundred feet, and then began to tail off to the east with the prevailing wind. The plane leveled at the end of its turn, and headed straight for the smoke signal.

The three Navy men unbuckled, closed the dark visors over their faces, and gathered at the doorway for an exchange of high fives. Then they dove out into space on a quick count, right on one another’s heels. Jonathan and Ben unbuckled and pulled down their face masks. Ben went to the door. Jonathan waited for Nicole to get to her feet and let her step around him. Then he reached out and touched Ben’s shoulder. Instantly, Ben was out. Nicole went right behind him without a moment’s hesitation, and then Jonathan dove after her.

They were hit with the air blast, a cold slap delivered at better than one hundred miles an hour, and then spun in the turbulent wash of the propeller. Before they could orient themselves, they were already arcing down toward the earth, beginning their acceleration into the breath-stealing speed of free fall. Ben was the first to get his bearings, stretching out his body and then extending his arms like wings. From his head-down position, he pivoted until he was lying parallel to the ground, stretched across the wind that his fall was generating.

Jonathan found his position across the wind and then turned his head to find Nicole. She was just below and a bit to his right and she was in perfect position, a human airfoil generating lift by her extreme angle of attack to the rushing air. He checked his fall next to her and then steered over close enough to touch her. Blonde, he
announced to himself confirming his guess. There was a length of blond hair streaming from the back of her helmet.

They maneuvered by controlling the angle of attack, the presentation of their bodies to the wind stream generated by falling. Their bodies moved in the opposite direction of the wind. Lie flat, and the force of the air would slow their descent. Lean right, so that the air bounced off to the left, and they would turn right. Lower their heads and they would accelerate ahead. Raise their heads and they would drift backward. There was also the fabric that filled the space between their extended arms. It made them bigger airfoils and gave them that much more control.

By combining these movements, they could fly anywhere relative to one another. Away, widening their circle, or back together again where they could link up and hold hands. They could dive under one another, or fly circles around each other. They could cavort like swimmers in three dimensions. The only difference was that all the while they were falling at about a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour.

He touched her hand and she grabbed onto him eagerly. Ben glided up to them carefully and took hold of her other hand. It wasn’t smooth. The slightest movements of their bodies eased them in different directions, straining at their grips. They held together for a few seconds as they fell several hundred feet, but then exploded apart. Nicole was suddenly fifty feet above the two men who were soaring off in different directions. She watched Jonathan tuck like a platform diver and begin tumbling head over heels. Ben, with his arms extended, was spinning like a windmill. Far below, between her and the red smoke signal, were the Navy SEALs, flying like a formation of ducks. She was soaring above them all.

She could feel the adrenaline filling her with a wild euphoria. In part, it was the release from her natural fear of jumping and the wild abandon of plunging downward toward her own destruction. And there was the frantic intoxication of the moth banging against a lamp to get to the consuming fire. At this instant, flying through space, she was fully in touch with herself, trembling with the joy of simply being alive, and yet mesmerized by her flirtation with death. She was in total control of her own destiny, able to command changes in direction with a simple turn of her hand. She was risking her life in order to live it more completely.

She fell through five thousand feet, riding on the bubble of air that was compressed under her body. Far below, the SEALs had changed their formation and were soaring through the highest traces of the red marker. They would have to open their chutes soon. You could fall one thousand feet in just a few seconds and they were nearing the three thousand foot safety level.

Off to her left, Jonathan had turned back toward her, keeping himself a few hundred feet below. He would watch her chute open before he let out his own, just so that he wouldn’t be hopelessly hanging in the air if she needed help. Instructors did the same thing, staying ready to steer themselves to a student in trouble. Ben was coming in from the right at about the same altitude as Jonathan. Both of them seemed to feel that she might need help. But Nicole knew better. She was queen of the universe, flying with abandon that only expertise could justify. She glanced at her wrist altimeter: forty-two hundred feet, the digits blinking down too quickly to count.

She was in the tracking position, head down and arms by her sides, moving toward the smoke marker at more than half the rate that she was falling. Jonathan eased in to within fifty feet, adjusting his body angle to hold position on her. He was pointing at his wrist altimeter, reminding her to watch her height. She checked the flashing digits on her own wrist: four thousand feet. Time to pull the release on the small pilot chute that would drag the big, steerable wing out of her backpack. But Nicole didn’t want to end her free fall just yet. She still had plenty of time.

TWO

J
ONATHAN’S WRIST
alarm went off. He was at thirty-five hundred feet, which meant that the young woman he had just met was already past four thousand feet. And she was still flying, making no move to deploy her parachute. It was no problem for an experienced jumper. But the frightened novice who had gone out the door ahead of him shouldn’t be pushing her margins. She ought to start popping the chute.

Nicole laughed to herself. She didn’t need saving, but she welcomed his concern. Stay with me, she thought. Watch me fly like a goddess.

From below, she seemed to be in a trance. She wasn’t acknowledging his signals and still wasn’t reaching for her ripcord. Jonathan couldn’t see her face through her tinted face mask, but her body language said that she was either an expert or a novice locked in an adrenaline high, so thrilled with flying that she had forgotten she was falling. He gestured broadly, to the point where he threw himself out of balance and began to roll.

“Damn it,” he screamed uselessly into the deafening roar of the air, “do something. Pull the chute.” He checked his altimeter. He was at three thousand feet and the girl wasn’t far behind. He couldn’t stay below her more than another few seconds without putting himself in jeopardy.

Ben Tobin could see his friend’s signals and, glancing upward, he could tell that the girl was ignoring them. Either that or she had pushed over the edge where the euphoria blinded her to the danger. He changed his angle, adding air resistance so that he seemed to move up toward Nicole. He mimicked Jonathan’s gestures and signaled to his wrist altimeter. He noticed that he was at twenty-nine hundred feet, which meant that the woman was falling through three thousand with no apparent concern. Where had she set her AAD?

Jonathan watched her parachute bag, waiting for the pilot chute to pop free. She had set her automatic activation device for three thousand feet and the instruments had a very narrow margin of error. Another few seconds and he would know if the safety system had failed. And that would leave him only five seconds to get to her and pull her chute out. Even in her horizontal tracking position, she was falling at better than two hundred feet a second.

Nicole could see the ground rushing up to consume her. What had been nothing more than a patch quilt of earth colors was now a very detailed landscape. She had no trouble defining the roads, the trees and even the furrow lines in the fields. She could see the gravel landing strip and the trace of red smoke that was still rising from the dying marker flare. It was intriguing to watch more and more details coming into focus. She knew she had never flown so low before. Always, she had been riding safely in her wing-shaped parachute when the hard reality of the earth was this close. She knew she should pull the release.

He was out of time. He had five seconds to get to her, five seconds to deploy her chute, and five seconds for the chute to open and break her fall. Anything more than that and she would still be traveling at a deadly speed when she hit the ground. Jonathan canted his body, felt the wind angle off and struggled to control his direction. He seemed to move up to her even though he knew that she was really coming down to his level. He had simply slowed his own speed so that she was falling faster. The air, angling off his tilted body was pushing him to the right. He was moving at her too quickly, closing at a dangerous speed. But there was no time for precise adjustments. The seconds were rushing past.

He crashed into her with a jolt that would have knocked her down had they been standing, and grabbed her harness to keep her from bouncing away. His hand groped for the release on her parachute but he couldn’t see. The midair collision had turned them face-to-face, banging their visors together. He was pressed against her, reaching over her shoulder to find the end of the ripcord. How many seconds did he have left? There was no time for an error. Maybe he should hold on to her and deploy his own chute. It could easily carry them both down. But could he hold her when his chute opened and jerked him upward? Her momentum could tear her
completely out of his grasp. He had to decide, but there wasn’t a second left to waste.

Ben Tobin was steering at them from the other side but his aim was too high. He reached out to catch them as he fired past but only succeeded in banging his hand against the side of Nicole’s helmet. Then he was on the other side, moving away from them. He tried to stop, but he was out of time for maneuvering. They were past two thousand feet. He was only ten seconds from a grizzly death, maybe twelve seconds from a crippling landing. He pulled his release cord.

The small pilot chute popped out behind his head and filled. It began dragging the folded wing parachute out of its container, building resistance that jerked Ben out of his free fall and sent him flying upward, away from his friends. He could clearly see Nicole and Jonathan, still locked together, plunging away in their death spiral.

He saw a pilot chute pop free. A main chute began unraveling. Then the two bodies broke apart, one snatched away from the other by the tug of the white cloth wing as it filled. It must be the girl! Ben knew the bizarre colors of his friend’s parachute, but the wing that formed far below him was pure white. So where was Jonathan? He caught sight of the small black form tumbling in the air, seemingly out of control. “Pull it, damnit! Pull the fucking cord!” He knew he was screaming but he couldn’t hear his own words.

Jonathan knew he had popped her parachute. His fingers had found the release, and as soon as he pulled it he felt her being dragged out of his arms. He felt the container on her back collapse and then his hand was knocked away by one of the control stalks. He saw her fire up above him as if she had been shot from a cannon. His instincts told him to deploy his own chute, but there were already two chutes above him. If he suddenly stopped falling there was the risk that the parachutes could get tangled. He knew he should try to move out of the way.

He was already in his tracking position when he checked his altitude. He was passing through one thousand feet, only five or six seconds from death. But he was slowing, and at the same time moving out of the paths of the chutes above. Could he wait one more second to get clear?

His AAD snapped inside his parachute container. The pilot chute blew out and then the large wing began unfolding above him pulling
him to a vertical position. He looked up. The wing was unraveling, fluttering as it tried to fill. Five seconds, four, three . . . he was still falling at a deadly speed.

The parachute snapped like whip as it deployed across the wind. Jonathan recognized the tug on his harness. He reached up for the steering toggles, hoping to clear the row of trees that was clutching at him. But there wasn’t time. The parachute swung him through the top branches, turned him over, and dropped him unceremoniously on his belly. Then the wing dragged him for ten yards along the ground before it doused.

He got to his knees and pulled the D rings on his harness. The parachute rig came free and then the cloth, deprived of its resistance, settled gently into a patch of bushes. Jonathan pushed up his visor and looked up. The girl’s white parachute was settling easily into an open area of what seemed to be a newly plowed field. A hundred feet above her, Ben was flying down for a controlled landing.