FIC: The Land of Missing Persons (1/3)
Title: The Land of Missing Persons, 1/3 ( part two, part three)
Summary: Two years after leaving the island, Frank discovers the starting life over isn't always easy.
Characters: Frank/Danielle, Alex. (Canon through 4x08.)
Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: No money/ownership of Lost here.
Beta: The incomparable and patient elliotsmelliot. Any remaining errors are my own.
Author's note: Can be read as a sequel to Cowrie Shells.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.**
There are some things it's easy for Frank to take for granted again in his life. The way the front steps creak under his feet, or the fact that he can run back to the grocery store and pick up anything he's forgotten. Seeing neighbours on every trip to and from town, even if the house is a pretty out of the way by most standards. Hell, living in a house, period, one that's come to seem comfortably ramshackle to him and maybe a little bit so to Alex, despite the two years living in a tent on the beach. It's still about as much luxury as Danielle can tolerate.
He smiles at the sound of a plane overhead, a big passenger or cargo plane by the sound of it. It's probably a fly-around on a missed approach or a holding pattern: the house isn't on any of the flight paths. Even out of the cockpit for life, Frank still thinks like a pilot, still considers himself one. He would've paid a premium for a house on the flight path if he had to - not that he would have; that knocks seventy percent off the value of real estate - but that would have had them near the heart of downtown, too closed in for Danielle or Alex.
He does what he can to reconcile himself to the lack of honest-to-God flying in his day-to-day life, alternating between appreciating and resenting the banality of it all. There are joint-therapy sessions with Danielle because her need for it is more important than Frank's distaste for psychobabble; his A.A. meetings; long swims; throwing himself into upgrading and instructing on flight simulators because no matter what how he thinks of himself, the truth is that he's not a pilot anymore.
His A.A. sponsor always reminds him to accentuate the positive: tromping through the woods or down the beach in complete safety with Danielle and with Alex, although she hasn't been up for it lately. Going grocery shopping with them, and not being able to hold in the tears because he was so damned proud and sad and angry the first time each of them managed to get the groceries by herself. He hasn't gotten to the point of taking either of them for granted, anyway. He still uses Rousseau instead of Danielle sometimes, out of habit. She likes the sound of her first name better, so Frank at makes the effort. He'll make her happy if he has to clean the roof with a toothbrush to do it. The novelty of all that doesn't wear off, apparently.
He isn't used to thinking of Danielle as my wife, although it's what she's been for most of the two-and-change years they've been off the island.
The first two weeks back on terra firma were spent in the hospital. They got whisked to the military hospital the instant they landed in Honlulu and then poked, prodded, and tested to make sure nothing deadly or exotic had stowed away in their bloodstreams. Danielle was in for four weeks, Alex for months of controlled exposure to every pathogen she should've encountered years ago. Frank dealt with the government agencies and did what he could with the paperwork.
He couldn't visit Alex in the hospital: family only. All he knew was what Danielle told him in her rare moments away from Alex's side: vaccines that weren't around in the eighties; colds that were longer or shorter than usual; Alex was sicker than expected, had Frank taken her away from the island to make her suffer like this, or, in one horrible moment, to kill her? He let her Danielle do what she needed - rage at him, hold on like a vise, claw his arms - and manned up to break the promise he'd made himself years ago and take another trip down the aisle. Third time was the charm, or at least he was fucked if it wasn't.
There hadn't been much discussion. When he looked back, Frank couldn't even remember if he'd asked Rousseau anything, although he must have. He just filled out the forms and slipped one of the maintenance people a hundred bucks to have the outdoor smoking area cleared once Alex's medical release came through. When that happened, he found himself owing a few more thanks and paybacks to the dozen or so staff who managed to slip off duty. They must have pitched in to get the dresses Danielle and Alex were wearing - nothing fancy, to Frank's eye, but nice; he hadn't thought about that beyond making himself presentable - and a little cake with flowers. They rounded up the chaplain on duty, who managed a radical abbreviation of whatever service was in his prayer book. Sunshine, everyone alive, women dabbing their eyes: Frank had a lightheaded feeling and a sudden desire to confess some reason why he might not be united in marriage with this woman lawfully and in accordance with God's word.
He didn't, though. Without a drop of liquor in his system he found himself promising to have Danielle to be his wife and provide her comfort and love, of which she deserved even more than she needed, which was saying something, in sickness and in health. He'd started falling for her in the first place, he thought, while he helped drain the infection from the gunshot wound in her side. Danielle had been there when Frank got through the ugly round of tropical diseases she'd survived years earlier.
They brought a glass for him to step on, although Frank hadn't mentioned anything. Maybe someone was up on their last names. He didn't have the heart to protest that his most recent religious observance consisted of showing up piss drunk to his son's bar mitzvah. He'd barely seen Joshua in the nine years since.
Danielle didn't paying much attention to the chaplain even when he read her part. Instead, in something close to the way Frank had gotten used to seeing, she looked at Alex, who was wan and bony after the last months but standing in one piece. Frank couldn't read the expression on Alex's face. Danielle only turned to him on forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both live, and he was surprised to see her tearing up. “I will love you as much as I can,” she whispered. Frank hoped the chaplain didn't mind his putting an early kiss on Danielle's forehead before he told her that was more than he had any right to hope for.
There's a note from Rousseau on the counter, Frank sees. She doesn't tend to rely on cell phones unless she's feeling anxious. Frank picks the paper up: Everything was fine at the appointment, but Alex is tired now. Will get blankets after the lab. That shopping trip will probably be a bit of an ordeal for her. Frank sets about getting the kitchen straightened up, even though it's pretty much in order already. She might as well come home to a well-kept house.
There's something wonderful, even if Frank doesn't always remember it, to the domestic pattern they fell into almost immediately: Alex doing whatever chores needed the limberness of youth, Frank cleaning, Danielle cooking. She's still not used to the concept of a civilized meal that doesn't involve wine. Frank knows she used to try to teach Alex a proper appreciation of the stuff during his visits to the mainland. Whenever the guests come to him, they can't resist pointing out that he runs the house like an airplane. Everything has to be cross-checked, functional, where it should be. He can't help it, though; it's the way his mind works.
A couple of CD cases that have wound up near the sink somehow, and Frank goes to put them back in place. They must be the last people on Oahu who still use hard copies; discs are a concession that Frank's nostalgia for vinyl, which Danielle shares, is impractical. He's forever reconsidering the best way to categorize them - genre, who listens to them, subgroup, just name? - but he never winds up changing anything. Based purely on height, his own collection is at the top: Amen Corner through Neil Young, with the embarrassing Fleetwood Mac stash strewn out of order. Danielle's jazz, Adderly through Williams, and chansons Aubert to Willer are next, the thinnest sections. Having music available is still a marvel to her, and at any time there are a handful of records she plays in heavy rotation. Frank puts the current few at the top. Under them is Alex's music, the taste for which she seemed to have acquired either wholesale or piecemeal from Juliet Burke: the more upbeat of the sixties girl groups, followed by everyone who's ever worked with Brian Eno. Frank puts the Talking Heads in easy reach and wonders if he can hide the Coldplay.
That compulsion satisfied, he puts the flowers he's bought into a vase of water and debates where they should go. There are some heavy sprigs of Arabian jasmine - pikake; the lei industry has gotten to him - whose scent might be too much for Alex. That settles it for putting the bunch on Danielle's bedside table, alongside the cluster of seashells she's kept close at hand for years now. They were first thing Alex ever brought her. Danielle might have known that that was at Frank's instigation, but it didn't matter.
He sets the vase on a coaster to prevent a watermark, for his own sense of order; Danielle wouldn't care either way. He notices that she's changed the sheets - that explains what he hears on the washer's rinse cycle. The set she's put on is the first one they had on moving in. Frank's never been too superstitious, but he thinks of them as lucky.
He outfitted the whole house while Alex was still in the hospital. There was no chance of persuading Danielle to leave her to come look at houses or choose furniture. Instead, Frank brought her realtors' specs and survey maps, then had every security measure imaginable installed on the place Danielle liked enough to buy. The guy who came to put in the systems was a little perplexed. “My gal's peace of mind,” Frank said as lightly as he could. “She sounds kind of high-strung,” the guy said, and Frank snapped that he wasn't paying him for the conversation.
Accumulated years spent inside of planes and airports had given Frank a keen eye for interior design, at least when he was sober enough to care. It happened to most pilots, who almost uniformly wound up aesthetically minded minimalists. Frank was no exception. He looked for practical rattan and bamboo furniture and simple colour schemes and bemusedly imagined the cracks Sawyer would make about his sexual orientation. He and Rousseau had never had a bed to share; the promise of waking up next to each other was too good to realize on sheets that looked like economy-cabin issue if Frank could help it. Eventually he found a set of light yellow - “Rich Butter” - ones with a trim pattern that he only realized once he'd put them on the bed looked more than a little like the old Oceanic logo. It didn't take much psychoanalysis to figure out how his unconscious mind worked, Frank guessed, but he'd never been much of a Freudian.
Danielle didn't pay much attention to any of that. Without changing out of her dress - her wedding dress; Frank couldn't wrap his mind around it - she poked around the house getting a sense of the place. She trekked and traced over the whole area until Alex was too tired to stay on her feet. Danielle tucked her into the new, non-hospital bed that Alex had assured Frank she liked, only returning to the living room when Alex started snoring. “It will be strange,” she said, “not being right next to her.”
Frank had known that it would be; Danielle had shared a tent with Alex for two years and slept on a cot in the hospital. “Her room's ten feet away any time you need to check in.”
“I know. I will.”
Frank let her meditate on that for a minute or two before he asked, “So what do you think of the place?”
Danielle tilted her head in thought for another minute. “I like it.”
He couldn't help grinning like an idiot. “Good. That's great.” Apparently he couldn't help talking like an idiot either. He shifted from his chair to the sofa. “There's room for two here,” he offered.
Danielle nestled alongside him and pressed one of his hands between hers, displacing the Star-Bulletin he hadn't really been reading, and kissed his cheek. For a few minutes they just sat there curled up next to each other, Danielle resting her head on him and not saying anything. He shrugged her off, with an apology, when his shoulder started falling asleep. “This is a good couch,” Danielle whispered. “But there is a better place with room for two.”
Frank let her pull him to his feet and lead him into the bedroom. He gave her a real kiss once he'd shut the door. This is my wife. That made him want to pass out, made him want to reach for a bottomless pitcher and forget the reality of everything, but he made himself stay on his feet. He let her kiss him back, helped her tumble the two of them onto the bed to make love like a young couple whose baby is finally sleeping.
Josh came to visit a couple of months after Alex got out of the hospital, once they were all settled in and after some communication back and forth. Josh was on the path to looking like a grown man in his pictures, and Frank tried not to think about the snapshots he used to get in holiday cards. He couldn't even think of a reason Josh would want to see him, but apparently he did. Frank met him at the airport and took him to a park for lunch. He did it automatically and only realized halfway through that that was something they'd always do when Josh was a kid - little, back when the custody arrangement existed on more than paper. He wondered if Josh was enjoying it now, if he remembered the old days. He wished he could ask.
Instead, he spent a few minutes watching a pickup soccer game that was going on and then asked how Leslie was doing. “Mom's fine,” Josh said. “She says hi.”
“She's a smart lady. I'm guessing she said I could go fuck myself.”
“She's gotten past that. She and Dave are both doing great.”
“Good.” Frank cleared his throat. “So what's going on in your life?”
Joshua shrugged. “Not much.”
“Not much? You'll be done with college in a few months.”
“Yeah. I'm thinking about flight school, actually.”
Frank damn near choked on his soda - he wished it were a beer - on that one. “Flight school? Jesus, are you out of your mind?”
“I've always been interested.”
“Why?”
Josh snorted. “Why do you think?”
“Fair enough.” Frank took another swig of his drink, hoping it would help. “You do know that maybe three percent of pilots ever get those six-figure salaries you hear about and you'll be broke the first decade?”
“I've looked into it.”
Not that it would matter, Frank supposed, with him sending along a portion of every payout from the Widmore settlement. “You also know the industry's a mess, the schedule's hell, and autopilot is pretty much an urban legend?”
“I figured that out a long time ago.”
Of course he did. “And you know it's dangerous?”
“You did okay.”
“I did great. I was a hell of a pilot until the last time I screwed up the Employee Assistance Program.”
“But you're clean and sober now?” There was a touch of sarcasm in Josh's voice. Frank had promised the same thing to him more times than he could count.
Frank didn't let himself close his eyes when he said, “I've been in and out of A.A. four times, kiddo. This is the first one I've been serious about.” It had been three years, two months, a week, and five days since his last drink. Not that he was counting. He hoped Josh wouldn't ask why his new family was enough motivation for him to stay on track when being a father never had been.
To his relief, Josh changed the subject. “So when are you bringing me home to meet everybody?”
“As soon as I make sure the guy with those kids isn't some pervert.”
“He's probably their father.”
“It never hurts to check.” Before Frank could go over, though, the kids started jumping around and squealing “Daddy!” with enough enthusiasm to allay his suspicion. Maybe Danielle was rubbing off on him. “We're all the way out where the streets dead end at the watershed preserve, but the drive's not too bad,” he said. The highway could actually be pretty hellish sometimes, but Frank decided to take his chances on a weekday afternoon.
“So the house is right by the... jungle, or whatever?”
“Tropical forest. It's not luxurious, but it's nicer than what we're used to.”
“I bet it is,” Josh said quietly.
Frank cleared his throat. Josh had never asked him about the island, and Frank didn't want to tell him. “I turn out to treat houses like giant flight decks.”
“Flight decks on which planes?” Josh asked. Tell me about the planes you fly, Daddy.
“Nothing like those fancy get-ups on the new MD-90s or anything.”
“More like a 737? Tried and true?”
“I'd say a 300-line Airbus. Nice and solid.”
“But pretty dated?”
“A little dated,” Frank confirmed. He thought about switching on the radio. Before he could, though, Josh said, “So tell me about the Rousseaus.”
“I've told you about them in the e-mails.”
“Tell me more.”
“Danielle's doing okay. Review of Geophysics is publishing her findings from the island.”
“Should that mean something to me?”
“It's one of the big journals.”
“Can you follow what it's about?”
“Not all the way. I majored in physics, but some of it's pretty far over my head.”
“She's blinding you with science?”
“Exactly.” They had bonded chatting about physics, back in the early days, but it was clear from the outset that Danielle's brain was just on a different order of magnitude. “The university's giving her some kind of research affiliation.”
“She's not going to be regular staff?”
“She's not in any kind of shape for that.”
“Is she...”
“She's sane.” All Frank had mentioned in the e-mails were some vague allusions to post-traumatic stress, which was at least honest to the diagnosis. “She's been through a lot that shouldn't have happened and spent too much time alone. She knows what's what, though.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Don't get me wrong. She's a long way from normal.”
“Right.” There was a long, tense silence in which Frank wondered whether to mention that Danielle was usually armed. He decided not to; Josh had always gotten on great with his step-family and half-siblings. He should be able to manage this just fine.
Their exit was coming up, but Frank said, “Let me take you on a roundabout, show you the scenery.”
“Sounds fine.”
Frank hoped Josh wouldn't guess that he was trying to delay the introduction. He cut through the campus and confused Kalele Road and Koali Road, the way he always did, and cursed under his breath. “Hawaiian has eight goddamn consonants. Eight. I don't know how anybody communicated in it.”
“It's okay,” Josh said. His tone was a little too much like the one he'd used when he thought Daddy had had enough beers. Frank took a deep breath and righted his course in a couple of minutes. “How about Alexandra?” Josh asked.
“Alex. Everyone calls her Alex.”
“How's Alex?”
“Pretty overwhelmed here, but she's getting by. She just got back her scores for whatever they're calling the high school equivalence test these days.”
“Still the GED, I think.”
Frank managed to turn onto University Avenue in the correct direction and find the right vowel-heavy side street. Their house was at the limit of where roads gave way to the watershed preserve and forest. “That's the one. She got her mom's brains.”
“So she's off to MIT?” Josh said, grinning.
“Community college to start with. She's got a lot to adjust to.”
“Makes sense. I bet she'll knock their socks off.”
“I bet she will too.”
“Does she have a whole string of boyfriends for you to give dire warnings to?”
Frank grimaced. “You might be better off not mentioning any of that.”
Alex didn't knock anyone's socks off.
She studied oceanography at the community college, and she had the brains to do fairly well without putting any real effort into it. Frank had enough sense to know that advice from him wouldn't be welcome, and that it wouldn't occur to Danielle to offer any. Alex could have been failing all her classes and covering her whole body with tattoos and piercings - which she wasn't, fortunately - and Danielle would look on it all with nothing but elation at seeing Alex alive to do it. So Frank bit his tongue and ignored the mediocre studying, consoling himself that she could probably still get into the university with a little special pleading. She might do well to take a couple of years off before she tried that, though, to get more of the world under her belt and maybe improve her chances. She could do what she wanted; Frank just didn't want her to waste her talent. Pot and kettle there, old man. But at some point, regardless of her leoline share of the Widmore conglomerate's former assets, she'd need a job just for the sake of her own mental health, a job she liked. Frank wanted her to have the best chance she could at it.
She'd had lessons growing up, Frank knew, and on the island he'd seen how bright she was, how eager to learn, and he realized how stupid he'd been to assume it would carry over easily. On the worst days, when Alex was confused and miserable and sick with another new-to-her ailment that was as unpleasant as not potentially fatal could manage, Frank would wondered if she would've been happier if she'd never left the island. The pain there, at least, was what she was used to. She probably would have been perfectly content to rough it at the beach camp for the rest of her life, provided that circumstances stayed as they were during the good times.
That wouldn't have happened, though. Eventually a food shortage would have gotten acute, or the people Danielle called the Others would have been back in a position to make trouble for them. He had reminded Alex of that as he coaxed her into the propeller plane that had outlived its original passengers, his hands locked around her arms to make the point stick. He'd reminded himself of it during the hospital stay and couldn't let himself forget after that. Whatever else went wrong, nobody was trying to kill Alex, and she had enough food. Frank's whole generation had grown up on firsthand stories of the Depression and the War and of getting out of Eurasia's hot spots just in time, or failing to. Now he wondered from time to time why he and everyone else assumed that considerations of survival would never apply to them.
If nothing else, anyway, Alex met some other eighteen- to twenty-year-olds at the college. That was a shock to her: in all her life she'd had exactly one age peer. Frank got a feeling of how strange it was for her to interact with equals for the first time in her life, and with other girls to boot. They were all past the age of the bitchery that sold books and movies - Alex could have dealt with that, he didn't doubt, but she probably would've dealt more severely than the situation actually warranted. He wouldn't have blamed her.
Her little circle of friends mostly consisted of kids whose backgrounds came as close as possible to being as alienating or as fucked up as hers, which wasn't all that close. Hawaii's immigrant population was a less traumatized demographic than it had been when Frank was stationed there as a low-ranking Coast Guard flier - not as good as the Air Force for aspiring pilots, but Vietnam was barely over and Frank wasn't interested in bombing anything - but some things hadn't changed. Alex fell in with the culture-shocked daughters of parents from all the absurdistans and banana republics of the Pacific Rim. There was another diverse handful of kamaaina, lifelong Hawaiians - Hawai'ians, of course - whose families, from what Frank could make of them, no one would have missed if they'd had unlikely swimming accidents. Alex was enthusiastic their company, even if she found it strange - mostly on the bases of age and sex, as far as Frank could tell. The whole state was its own self-conscious ethnic mix, but Alex never seemed conscious, among her friends or in general, of being haole, an outlander and a white one to boot. It was strange to realize that none of that really registered with her.
At any rate, a gaggle of her friends would show up sometimes to study or to go hiking or, occasionally, to hash over in hushed tones the whole bevy of profoundly shitty things their lives had thrown at them. It was the closest Alex had to therapy. Frank had begged her to talk to someone, but the few sessions she'd tried had ended with her storming out in tears and saying that they all sounded like someone called Harper, or like Ben. In the end Frank had apologized and given up. Later on he'd think he probably should've kept insisting. Maybe that would have backfired, though. Hell, maybe he should've just gotten her a puppy.
Danielle didn't mind it any more than Frank did when Alex's friends showed up at the house. Frank wasn't always sure it was healthy for Rousseau to try and make up for what she should have had in the ways that she did, but there wasn't much he could do about it. In the end, he just helped her run birthday parties that, but for different entertainment, might have been for a kid ten years younger, and he took the sweet with the bitter.
There were moments when Frank liked to think he could glimpse Danielle as she might have been years ago or maybe, more darkly, the woman she could have become. It started slowly, as she got to the point of relative ease with some of her colleagues, who were all either pretty damned eccentric themselves or used to dealing with major eccentricities day-to-day. They probably liked to think of her as a stronger permutation of the norm. She didn't volunteer much information about her time on the island, Frank knew, and even the most socially inept of her fellows figured out not to ask.
Frank persuaded her to go to their dinner parties, with him in tow, and he stuck with it despite the awkwardness. There came a time, eventually, when Danielle seemed able to enjoy doting on whatever children were around, even though it was a long way from painless for her; to enjoy watching Alex dote on them with a certain innate enthusiasm despite the clumsiness of inexperience. Eventually Danielle was willing to invite people over to their place. Between the social graces she remembered and the ones Frank had ever possessed, they just about managed. Other times, the aviation crowd or Frank's buddies from A.A. would stop by for something that wasn't a beer. All Frank could hope was that one day he'd be used to it.
Art museums wouldn't have occurred to Frank as Rousseau's kind of thing. But when the off-peak crowds were at their sparsest, the places were easy for her to deal with: controlled environments, and ones with good sight lines. The three of them would pore over Polynesian artifacts and Hawaiian crafts and botanic illustrations, and eventually over things that spoke to Danielle. Honolulu couldn't compete with Paris for museums, but they had paintings by a few artists and sculptors whose names were famous enough for Frank to recognize, and more who Danielle knew about. She moved her eyes between Alex and the paintings and launched into what Frank realized were translations of school lessons and history points that had been the salt and bread of her own education. Ivory miniatures were popular until the fourteenth century, mostly religious scenes like the one here. All the continental portraits from the sixteen hundreds have rich women in these horrible clothes. There are better paintings by all these Impressionists in France, but often you can only see the tourists in front of them.
It was almost as new to Frank as it was to Alex. He had flown with a decent number of people who spent every waking moment of the longer layovers trying to cram in cultural enrichment. They were the ones who could tell passengers about itineraries and discounts, people who would run to museums and monuments still wearing their uniforms if they had to. Maybe Danielle had seen them, growing up, but Frank had never been one of their number. His European sightseeing itinerary had mostly consisted of low-class bars and downmarket wine shops, with one sidebar on staying out of job trouble and another on getting rebounding and undersexed flight attendants into bed. With a bottle on the nightstand to add to the romance, naturally. Museums and monuments he skipped.
So he found himself getting caught up. Frank learned that without people called Whistler and Sargent the portrait might be dead, that Honolulu had scored a coup getting some unusual John the Baptist by a Renaissance Italian whose name he promptly forgot, that glassware could be remarkably sturdy. The point wasn't for him to learn anything, of course. The point was for Danielle to show it to Alex. Frank just made it his job to finish the house decorating by finding good prints and sculpture replicas of what Danielle liked best, and to steer her away from canvases that she could've handled but that Frank didn't want to watch her see: A saccharine Victorian mother doting on a toddler Frank could only assume wasn't meant to look as profoundly deformed as it did, Cain and Abel, visions in red. The half-abstract, distorted female portraits from the 1890s on; colonial prints of savage natives: ones that Danielle might not have minded but that discomfited him.
Danielle comes home carrying a stack of little notebooks but without any blankets. “There were so many of them,” she explains, once she's confirmed that Alex is there but napping, “and so many people in the store.”
“Maybe we can go and look on Monday,” Frank suggests, although he'll probably end up just doing the errand on his own. “How was the lab?”
“Difficult. The telluric variations are more abnormal than we thought, and the software cannot model them.”
“So it's back to paper and pencil.”
“Yes. We are getting above thirty hertz. It is impossible.”
“That just means you haven't figured out how it works yet.”
“Or that I have made a mistake.”
“One way or the other.” Frank kisses her. “Let me help you get dinner ready.”
“I have salade Niçoise in order. I need time - to clear my mind, I suppose.”
“You want a foot rub to help with that?”
She smiles. “Of course.” She takes a long scent of the flowers before she lies down on the bed. “They are beautiful.”
“I can throw in a speech on how they're not half as good-looking as you.”
“As long as I can have the foot rub too.”
Frank grins and starts taking off her shoes. “Who says romance is dead?”
Alex started up with her first boyfriend sooner than Frank would have expected, running before she could walk. Not her first boyfriend, he kept having to correct himself: the first boyfriend he'd seen her with. The first back in what he thought of as the real world but Alex definitely did not. The guy's name was either Matthew or Michael, like half the boys in his birth cohort; he was a fit, baby-faced computer student. Frank couldn't much to like or dislike about him, and he would've bet that Michael, or Matthew, was just the first non-repulsive guy who'd asked Alex out.
She didn't know the first thing about dating, really, and nothing at all about quasi-normal relationships. Most of the conversations she'd had on the subjects were intensely private ones, with her mother, about Karl and about Robert, or else with the friends who had issues of their own. Frank realized, belatedly, that she'd gone through adolescence without pseudo-dating and girl chats and stupid magazines to parallel the locker room talk and illicit Playboys he'd taken for granted in his own development.
It was a bullet Frank had thought he'd dodged, with Josh being a boy and the second marriage falling apart before his stepkids hit puberty. But he found himself clearing his throat for some awkward monologues with Alex about respect and precautions and the fact that all men, basically, were scum-sucking pieces of shit who needed nothing so much as a well-placed kick in the nuts. Or as much of it as he could tell her, anyway. He knew more than he wanted to about her history of dating advice from paternal types, and on the hard stuff he hedged like anything. He compromised by buying books about relationships and leaving them by her bedside without comment. “I just want you to be happy,” he told her finally. “That's why I'm giving you all the lectures.”
Alex only nodded and carried on with a steady string of failed romances. She had a definite type: fit but not absurdly brawny guys who had blunt features and didn't get bossy with her. Some of them she met at college and others, inevitably, were military, what with three quarters U.S. Pacific command based at Honolulu. She didn't have a particular thing for military guys, as far as Frank could tell. They were just the ones in the available pool, and she had after all spent her childhood among people who were frequently armed and a lot more dangerous. Even so, he doubted she wanted to discuss anything like combat operations with any of them, although he was usually at a loss to imagine other topics of conversation.
Alex jumped into things headlong and heart-short. For a couple of months the same number would show up on the caller ID, the same car in the driveway, and it would be the same address away where Alex spent the biggest part of her time away from home. And then, as quickly as it had begun, it would be over: Alex needed too much and gave too little, or else the guy did. Frank didn't get the sense that the communication factor, never his own strong suit, was even really operative. He worried about heartbreak and bad men and didn't breathe a word of it to Alex because he knew he'd come off sounding like a hated enemy he'd never even met.
Instead, he crossed his fingers and wished for a beer. He kept a tally in his mind: Timothy, the Air Force cadet from Idaho who wasn't so bad; he and Frank could talk flying and rib each other's respective services. Sam, from the college, who had a knack for carpentry and was a grade-A schmuck. Alan, a South Carolina marine at the end of his enlistment who Frank correctly pegged as questioning his sexuality and finding out that Alex wasn't the answer. Alex veered between distraught and detached when the caravan of baggage she refused to talk about, or else what Frank could only call her lack of competence at the whole thing, drove each one away in turn.
The last guy's name was Bryce, specifically Private Bryce Tanner, first class. Frank couldn't get much of a sense of him from Alex, just the information that he was from Missouri and liked football. His second-hand impression wasn't one of intellectual brilliance or an especially magnetic personality. Bryce confirmed that impression the first time Alex brought him home: he didn't have much in the way of brains or charm. What he did have was rust-red hair with a hint of curl despite the crew cut. That and milk-pale skin replete with freckles; it was all Frank could do to say Good to meet you instead of Now I understand.
The looks were the only reason Frank could see for Alex to stay with the guy. Bryce wasn't as overt as Sam, who Alex had actually given the boot, but once you got to spending time with him it came through. It wasn't that he complained too much - not so rare a vice among twenty-year-olds, who mostly outgrew it - so much as that things were never his fault, or beyond that, that he didn't have a good word to say for anyone. Maybe Alex was using him to vent the anger she was sick of holding in for the sake of getting on with her life, or maybe only to pretend for however long it lasted that she was medicating something that would never heal.
There was a lot less subtlety in what Bryce was using her for. For longer than Frank would have wanted, though, he had to endure Bryce's stopping by to visit or Alex's going out with him. It was long enough for Frank to conclude that Bryce's family had probably pushed him into enlisting to get him in line, and that he'd been accepted because recruiting was abysmal. A highly skilled killing machine the kid was not; on a good day, Frank thought, he might be able to tell you the difference between a grenade and an ammo clip, although putting money on it wouldn't be a smart bet.
Word came eventually that Bryce's unit was getting to transferred to someplace in Japan. He gave all the signs of being grateful for an excuse to get away, probably with a plan to break up with Alex by e-mail once he got there. Frank was just glad he'd be getting out of her life sooner rather than later, even though Alex was in some denial, clinging to him like a leech and making plans to visit. Even so, he hadn't expected to come home to an energetic argument that was audible even before he had the door open. He could only pick out scattered words, the same ones you'd hear in any break-up argument: ...lied to me, Were you trying, Did you think? What caught his attention was the sound of a fist brought down on a tabletop, a rattling noise, something he'd done any number of times but that now shoved him into the pilot's emergency-command mode he'd first learned in the Coast Guard. “What's going on here?”
Bryce gave him a half-defiant look that was quick to wither, and Alex said, “It's okay, Frank.”
“It didn't sound that way to me.”
“It's nothing. Please,” Alex said with a quiver, and Bryce spat at her, “You call that nothing?”
“Go back to the base and polish your boots,” Frank told him.
“You bet I'll go back - ”
“Get out of here before her mother's home to break your fucking face.” The words slipped out of Frank's mouth, and Bryce didn't contradict them. He just shot Alex an ugly, I'd-say-more kind of look and said, “Whatever, man. I'm fuckin' done.”
As soon as he was gone, Alex said, “What are you doing, Frank?”
“You can't let people treat you like that.”
“That's up to you to decide now?”
“I'm not going to pretend I didn't hear things.” The ideal long-distance breakup had just moved in Frank's mind from the Tokyo red-light district to a restaurant that didn't prepare its fugu carefully.
Alex stifled a little sob. “I'm going for a walk,” she said angrily.
Frank didn't try to stop her. She went for a lot of walks in the days after that, when she wasn't attending her final set of classes. The usual post-breakup talks with Danielle and commiserations with her friends didn't interest her. When she was tired of walking and didn't want to go out, she holed herself up in her room. The music she played didn't hide the fact that she was crying.
“There will be something good from all of this,” Danielle reassured her one evening, over the fancy fish and green beans that Alex could barely seem to tolerate on her plate. “One day there will be something that makes you happy about it.” Alex bit her lip and nodded, eyes dutifully closed. Frank was expecting another crying jag, or for Alex to pick at her dinner in silence.
At first he was too surprised by her unforced little smile to process that she'd said, “I'm pregnant.”
( part two)
**Excessive piloting information from Aluwings, anonymous partner and anonymous wife, FlyGuy, Joe Podcaster, Brian Risley, Jason Schappert, and Patrick Smith; graphics by princesaskater (2x), schnullybaby ,
leire_pj , morlockicons , grarpirates , lumenartemis, wicked_signs , and alinassoul ; title by the Talking Heads
Summary: Two years after leaving the island, Frank discovers the starting life over isn't always easy.
Characters: Frank/Danielle, Alex. (Canon through 4x08.)
Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: No money/ownership of Lost here.
Beta: The incomparable and patient elliotsmelliot. Any remaining errors are my own.
Author's note: Can be read as a sequel to Cowrie Shells.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.**
There are some things it's easy for Frank to take for granted again in his life. The way the front steps creak under his feet, or the fact that he can run back to the grocery store and pick up anything he's forgotten. Seeing neighbours on every trip to and from town, even if the house is a pretty out of the way by most standards. Hell, living in a house, period, one that's come to seem comfortably ramshackle to him and maybe a little bit so to Alex, despite the two years living in a tent on the beach. It's still about as much luxury as Danielle can tolerate.
He smiles at the sound of a plane overhead, a big passenger or cargo plane by the sound of it. It's probably a fly-around on a missed approach or a holding pattern: the house isn't on any of the flight paths. Even out of the cockpit for life, Frank still thinks like a pilot, still considers himself one. He would've paid a premium for a house on the flight path if he had to - not that he would have; that knocks seventy percent off the value of real estate - but that would have had them near the heart of downtown, too closed in for Danielle or Alex.
He does what he can to reconcile himself to the lack of honest-to-God flying in his day-to-day life, alternating between appreciating and resenting the banality of it all. There are joint-therapy sessions with Danielle because her need for it is more important than Frank's distaste for psychobabble; his A.A. meetings; long swims; throwing himself into upgrading and instructing on flight simulators because no matter what how he thinks of himself, the truth is that he's not a pilot anymore.
His A.A. sponsor always reminds him to accentuate the positive: tromping through the woods or down the beach in complete safety with Danielle and with Alex, although she hasn't been up for it lately. Going grocery shopping with them, and not being able to hold in the tears because he was so damned proud and sad and angry the first time each of them managed to get the groceries by herself. He hasn't gotten to the point of taking either of them for granted, anyway. He still uses Rousseau instead of Danielle sometimes, out of habit. She likes the sound of her first name better, so Frank at makes the effort. He'll make her happy if he has to clean the roof with a toothbrush to do it. The novelty of all that doesn't wear off, apparently.
He isn't used to thinking of Danielle as my wife, although it's what she's been for most of the two-and-change years they've been off the island.
The first two weeks back on terra firma were spent in the hospital. They got whisked to the military hospital the instant they landed in Honlulu and then poked, prodded, and tested to make sure nothing deadly or exotic had stowed away in their bloodstreams. Danielle was in for four weeks, Alex for months of controlled exposure to every pathogen she should've encountered years ago. Frank dealt with the government agencies and did what he could with the paperwork.
He couldn't visit Alex in the hospital: family only. All he knew was what Danielle told him in her rare moments away from Alex's side: vaccines that weren't around in the eighties; colds that were longer or shorter than usual; Alex was sicker than expected, had Frank taken her away from the island to make her suffer like this, or, in one horrible moment, to kill her? He let her Danielle do what she needed - rage at him, hold on like a vise, claw his arms - and manned up to break the promise he'd made himself years ago and take another trip down the aisle. Third time was the charm, or at least he was fucked if it wasn't.
There hadn't been much discussion. When he looked back, Frank couldn't even remember if he'd asked Rousseau anything, although he must have. He just filled out the forms and slipped one of the maintenance people a hundred bucks to have the outdoor smoking area cleared once Alex's medical release came through. When that happened, he found himself owing a few more thanks and paybacks to the dozen or so staff who managed to slip off duty. They must have pitched in to get the dresses Danielle and Alex were wearing - nothing fancy, to Frank's eye, but nice; he hadn't thought about that beyond making himself presentable - and a little cake with flowers. They rounded up the chaplain on duty, who managed a radical abbreviation of whatever service was in his prayer book. Sunshine, everyone alive, women dabbing their eyes: Frank had a lightheaded feeling and a sudden desire to confess some reason why he might not be united in marriage with this woman lawfully and in accordance with God's word.
He didn't, though. Without a drop of liquor in his system he found himself promising to have Danielle to be his wife and provide her comfort and love, of which she deserved even more than she needed, which was saying something, in sickness and in health. He'd started falling for her in the first place, he thought, while he helped drain the infection from the gunshot wound in her side. Danielle had been there when Frank got through the ugly round of tropical diseases she'd survived years earlier.
They brought a glass for him to step on, although Frank hadn't mentioned anything. Maybe someone was up on their last names. He didn't have the heart to protest that his most recent religious observance consisted of showing up piss drunk to his son's bar mitzvah. He'd barely seen Joshua in the nine years since.
Danielle didn't paying much attention to the chaplain even when he read her part. Instead, in something close to the way Frank had gotten used to seeing, she looked at Alex, who was wan and bony after the last months but standing in one piece. Frank couldn't read the expression on Alex's face. Danielle only turned to him on forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both live, and he was surprised to see her tearing up. “I will love you as much as I can,” she whispered. Frank hoped the chaplain didn't mind his putting an early kiss on Danielle's forehead before he told her that was more than he had any right to hope for.
There's a note from Rousseau on the counter, Frank sees. She doesn't tend to rely on cell phones unless she's feeling anxious. Frank picks the paper up: Everything was fine at the appointment, but Alex is tired now. Will get blankets after the lab. That shopping trip will probably be a bit of an ordeal for her. Frank sets about getting the kitchen straightened up, even though it's pretty much in order already. She might as well come home to a well-kept house.
There's something wonderful, even if Frank doesn't always remember it, to the domestic pattern they fell into almost immediately: Alex doing whatever chores needed the limberness of youth, Frank cleaning, Danielle cooking. She's still not used to the concept of a civilized meal that doesn't involve wine. Frank knows she used to try to teach Alex a proper appreciation of the stuff during his visits to the mainland. Whenever the guests come to him, they can't resist pointing out that he runs the house like an airplane. Everything has to be cross-checked, functional, where it should be. He can't help it, though; it's the way his mind works.
A couple of CD cases that have wound up near the sink somehow, and Frank goes to put them back in place. They must be the last people on Oahu who still use hard copies; discs are a concession that Frank's nostalgia for vinyl, which Danielle shares, is impractical. He's forever reconsidering the best way to categorize them - genre, who listens to them, subgroup, just name? - but he never winds up changing anything. Based purely on height, his own collection is at the top: Amen Corner through Neil Young, with the embarrassing Fleetwood Mac stash strewn out of order. Danielle's jazz, Adderly through Williams, and chansons Aubert to Willer are next, the thinnest sections. Having music available is still a marvel to her, and at any time there are a handful of records she plays in heavy rotation. Frank puts the current few at the top. Under them is Alex's music, the taste for which she seemed to have acquired either wholesale or piecemeal from Juliet Burke: the more upbeat of the sixties girl groups, followed by everyone who's ever worked with Brian Eno. Frank puts the Talking Heads in easy reach and wonders if he can hide the Coldplay.
That compulsion satisfied, he puts the flowers he's bought into a vase of water and debates where they should go. There are some heavy sprigs of Arabian jasmine - pikake; the lei industry has gotten to him - whose scent might be too much for Alex. That settles it for putting the bunch on Danielle's bedside table, alongside the cluster of seashells she's kept close at hand for years now. They were first thing Alex ever brought her. Danielle might have known that that was at Frank's instigation, but it didn't matter.
He sets the vase on a coaster to prevent a watermark, for his own sense of order; Danielle wouldn't care either way. He notices that she's changed the sheets - that explains what he hears on the washer's rinse cycle. The set she's put on is the first one they had on moving in. Frank's never been too superstitious, but he thinks of them as lucky.
He outfitted the whole house while Alex was still in the hospital. There was no chance of persuading Danielle to leave her to come look at houses or choose furniture. Instead, Frank brought her realtors' specs and survey maps, then had every security measure imaginable installed on the place Danielle liked enough to buy. The guy who came to put in the systems was a little perplexed. “My gal's peace of mind,” Frank said as lightly as he could. “She sounds kind of high-strung,” the guy said, and Frank snapped that he wasn't paying him for the conversation.
Accumulated years spent inside of planes and airports had given Frank a keen eye for interior design, at least when he was sober enough to care. It happened to most pilots, who almost uniformly wound up aesthetically minded minimalists. Frank was no exception. He looked for practical rattan and bamboo furniture and simple colour schemes and bemusedly imagined the cracks Sawyer would make about his sexual orientation. He and Rousseau had never had a bed to share; the promise of waking up next to each other was too good to realize on sheets that looked like economy-cabin issue if Frank could help it. Eventually he found a set of light yellow - “Rich Butter” - ones with a trim pattern that he only realized once he'd put them on the bed looked more than a little like the old Oceanic logo. It didn't take much psychoanalysis to figure out how his unconscious mind worked, Frank guessed, but he'd never been much of a Freudian.
Danielle didn't pay much attention to any of that. Without changing out of her dress - her wedding dress; Frank couldn't wrap his mind around it - she poked around the house getting a sense of the place. She trekked and traced over the whole area until Alex was too tired to stay on her feet. Danielle tucked her into the new, non-hospital bed that Alex had assured Frank she liked, only returning to the living room when Alex started snoring. “It will be strange,” she said, “not being right next to her.”
Frank had known that it would be; Danielle had shared a tent with Alex for two years and slept on a cot in the hospital. “Her room's ten feet away any time you need to check in.”
“I know. I will.”
Frank let her meditate on that for a minute or two before he asked, “So what do you think of the place?”
Danielle tilted her head in thought for another minute. “I like it.”
He couldn't help grinning like an idiot. “Good. That's great.” Apparently he couldn't help talking like an idiot either. He shifted from his chair to the sofa. “There's room for two here,” he offered.
Danielle nestled alongside him and pressed one of his hands between hers, displacing the Star-Bulletin he hadn't really been reading, and kissed his cheek. For a few minutes they just sat there curled up next to each other, Danielle resting her head on him and not saying anything. He shrugged her off, with an apology, when his shoulder started falling asleep. “This is a good couch,” Danielle whispered. “But there is a better place with room for two.”
Frank let her pull him to his feet and lead him into the bedroom. He gave her a real kiss once he'd shut the door. This is my wife. That made him want to pass out, made him want to reach for a bottomless pitcher and forget the reality of everything, but he made himself stay on his feet. He let her kiss him back, helped her tumble the two of them onto the bed to make love like a young couple whose baby is finally sleeping.
Josh came to visit a couple of months after Alex got out of the hospital, once they were all settled in and after some communication back and forth. Josh was on the path to looking like a grown man in his pictures, and Frank tried not to think about the snapshots he used to get in holiday cards. He couldn't even think of a reason Josh would want to see him, but apparently he did. Frank met him at the airport and took him to a park for lunch. He did it automatically and only realized halfway through that that was something they'd always do when Josh was a kid - little, back when the custody arrangement existed on more than paper. He wondered if Josh was enjoying it now, if he remembered the old days. He wished he could ask.
Instead, he spent a few minutes watching a pickup soccer game that was going on and then asked how Leslie was doing. “Mom's fine,” Josh said. “She says hi.”
“She's a smart lady. I'm guessing she said I could go fuck myself.”
“She's gotten past that. She and Dave are both doing great.”
“Good.” Frank cleared his throat. “So what's going on in your life?”
Joshua shrugged. “Not much.”
“Not much? You'll be done with college in a few months.”
“Yeah. I'm thinking about flight school, actually.”
Frank damn near choked on his soda - he wished it were a beer - on that one. “Flight school? Jesus, are you out of your mind?”
“I've always been interested.”
“Why?”
Josh snorted. “Why do you think?”
“Fair enough.” Frank took another swig of his drink, hoping it would help. “You do know that maybe three percent of pilots ever get those six-figure salaries you hear about and you'll be broke the first decade?”
“I've looked into it.”
Not that it would matter, Frank supposed, with him sending along a portion of every payout from the Widmore settlement. “You also know the industry's a mess, the schedule's hell, and autopilot is pretty much an urban legend?”
“I figured that out a long time ago.”
Of course he did. “And you know it's dangerous?”
“You did okay.”
“I did great. I was a hell of a pilot until the last time I screwed up the Employee Assistance Program.”
“But you're clean and sober now?” There was a touch of sarcasm in Josh's voice. Frank had promised the same thing to him more times than he could count.
Frank didn't let himself close his eyes when he said, “I've been in and out of A.A. four times, kiddo. This is the first one I've been serious about.” It had been three years, two months, a week, and five days since his last drink. Not that he was counting. He hoped Josh wouldn't ask why his new family was enough motivation for him to stay on track when being a father never had been.
To his relief, Josh changed the subject. “So when are you bringing me home to meet everybody?”
“As soon as I make sure the guy with those kids isn't some pervert.”
“He's probably their father.”
“It never hurts to check.” Before Frank could go over, though, the kids started jumping around and squealing “Daddy!” with enough enthusiasm to allay his suspicion. Maybe Danielle was rubbing off on him. “We're all the way out where the streets dead end at the watershed preserve, but the drive's not too bad,” he said. The highway could actually be pretty hellish sometimes, but Frank decided to take his chances on a weekday afternoon.
“So the house is right by the... jungle, or whatever?”
“Tropical forest. It's not luxurious, but it's nicer than what we're used to.”
“I bet it is,” Josh said quietly.
Frank cleared his throat. Josh had never asked him about the island, and Frank didn't want to tell him. “I turn out to treat houses like giant flight decks.”
“Flight decks on which planes?” Josh asked. Tell me about the planes you fly, Daddy.
“Nothing like those fancy get-ups on the new MD-90s or anything.”
“More like a 737? Tried and true?”
“I'd say a 300-line Airbus. Nice and solid.”
“But pretty dated?”
“A little dated,” Frank confirmed. He thought about switching on the radio. Before he could, though, Josh said, “So tell me about the Rousseaus.”
“I've told you about them in the e-mails.”
“Tell me more.”
“Danielle's doing okay. Review of Geophysics is publishing her findings from the island.”
“Should that mean something to me?”
“It's one of the big journals.”
“Can you follow what it's about?”
“Not all the way. I majored in physics, but some of it's pretty far over my head.”
“She's blinding you with science?”
“Exactly.” They had bonded chatting about physics, back in the early days, but it was clear from the outset that Danielle's brain was just on a different order of magnitude. “The university's giving her some kind of research affiliation.”
“She's not going to be regular staff?”
“She's not in any kind of shape for that.”
“Is she...”
“She's sane.” All Frank had mentioned in the e-mails were some vague allusions to post-traumatic stress, which was at least honest to the diagnosis. “She's been through a lot that shouldn't have happened and spent too much time alone. She knows what's what, though.”
“Okay. Good.”
“Don't get me wrong. She's a long way from normal.”
“Right.” There was a long, tense silence in which Frank wondered whether to mention that Danielle was usually armed. He decided not to; Josh had always gotten on great with his step-family and half-siblings. He should be able to manage this just fine.
Their exit was coming up, but Frank said, “Let me take you on a roundabout, show you the scenery.”
“Sounds fine.”
Frank hoped Josh wouldn't guess that he was trying to delay the introduction. He cut through the campus and confused Kalele Road and Koali Road, the way he always did, and cursed under his breath. “Hawaiian has eight goddamn consonants. Eight. I don't know how anybody communicated in it.”
“It's okay,” Josh said. His tone was a little too much like the one he'd used when he thought Daddy had had enough beers. Frank took a deep breath and righted his course in a couple of minutes. “How about Alexandra?” Josh asked.
“Alex. Everyone calls her Alex.”
“How's Alex?”
“Pretty overwhelmed here, but she's getting by. She just got back her scores for whatever they're calling the high school equivalence test these days.”
“Still the GED, I think.”
Frank managed to turn onto University Avenue in the correct direction and find the right vowel-heavy side street. Their house was at the limit of where roads gave way to the watershed preserve and forest. “That's the one. She got her mom's brains.”
“So she's off to MIT?” Josh said, grinning.
“Community college to start with. She's got a lot to adjust to.”
“Makes sense. I bet she'll knock their socks off.”
“I bet she will too.”
“Does she have a whole string of boyfriends for you to give dire warnings to?”
Frank grimaced. “You might be better off not mentioning any of that.”
Alex didn't knock anyone's socks off.
She studied oceanography at the community college, and she had the brains to do fairly well without putting any real effort into it. Frank had enough sense to know that advice from him wouldn't be welcome, and that it wouldn't occur to Danielle to offer any. Alex could have been failing all her classes and covering her whole body with tattoos and piercings - which she wasn't, fortunately - and Danielle would look on it all with nothing but elation at seeing Alex alive to do it. So Frank bit his tongue and ignored the mediocre studying, consoling himself that she could probably still get into the university with a little special pleading. She might do well to take a couple of years off before she tried that, though, to get more of the world under her belt and maybe improve her chances. She could do what she wanted; Frank just didn't want her to waste her talent. Pot and kettle there, old man. But at some point, regardless of her leoline share of the Widmore conglomerate's former assets, she'd need a job just for the sake of her own mental health, a job she liked. Frank wanted her to have the best chance she could at it.
She'd had lessons growing up, Frank knew, and on the island he'd seen how bright she was, how eager to learn, and he realized how stupid he'd been to assume it would carry over easily. On the worst days, when Alex was confused and miserable and sick with another new-to-her ailment that was as unpleasant as not potentially fatal could manage, Frank would wondered if she would've been happier if she'd never left the island. The pain there, at least, was what she was used to. She probably would have been perfectly content to rough it at the beach camp for the rest of her life, provided that circumstances stayed as they were during the good times.
That wouldn't have happened, though. Eventually a food shortage would have gotten acute, or the people Danielle called the Others would have been back in a position to make trouble for them. He had reminded Alex of that as he coaxed her into the propeller plane that had outlived its original passengers, his hands locked around her arms to make the point stick. He'd reminded himself of it during the hospital stay and couldn't let himself forget after that. Whatever else went wrong, nobody was trying to kill Alex, and she had enough food. Frank's whole generation had grown up on firsthand stories of the Depression and the War and of getting out of Eurasia's hot spots just in time, or failing to. Now he wondered from time to time why he and everyone else assumed that considerations of survival would never apply to them.
If nothing else, anyway, Alex met some other eighteen- to twenty-year-olds at the college. That was a shock to her: in all her life she'd had exactly one age peer. Frank got a feeling of how strange it was for her to interact with equals for the first time in her life, and with other girls to boot. They were all past the age of the bitchery that sold books and movies - Alex could have dealt with that, he didn't doubt, but she probably would've dealt more severely than the situation actually warranted. He wouldn't have blamed her.
Her little circle of friends mostly consisted of kids whose backgrounds came as close as possible to being as alienating or as fucked up as hers, which wasn't all that close. Hawaii's immigrant population was a less traumatized demographic than it had been when Frank was stationed there as a low-ranking Coast Guard flier - not as good as the Air Force for aspiring pilots, but Vietnam was barely over and Frank wasn't interested in bombing anything - but some things hadn't changed. Alex fell in with the culture-shocked daughters of parents from all the absurdistans and banana republics of the Pacific Rim. There was another diverse handful of kamaaina, lifelong Hawaiians - Hawai'ians, of course - whose families, from what Frank could make of them, no one would have missed if they'd had unlikely swimming accidents. Alex was enthusiastic their company, even if she found it strange - mostly on the bases of age and sex, as far as Frank could tell. The whole state was its own self-conscious ethnic mix, but Alex never seemed conscious, among her friends or in general, of being haole, an outlander and a white one to boot. It was strange to realize that none of that really registered with her.
At any rate, a gaggle of her friends would show up sometimes to study or to go hiking or, occasionally, to hash over in hushed tones the whole bevy of profoundly shitty things their lives had thrown at them. It was the closest Alex had to therapy. Frank had begged her to talk to someone, but the few sessions she'd tried had ended with her storming out in tears and saying that they all sounded like someone called Harper, or like Ben. In the end Frank had apologized and given up. Later on he'd think he probably should've kept insisting. Maybe that would have backfired, though. Hell, maybe he should've just gotten her a puppy.
Danielle didn't mind it any more than Frank did when Alex's friends showed up at the house. Frank wasn't always sure it was healthy for Rousseau to try and make up for what she should have had in the ways that she did, but there wasn't much he could do about it. In the end, he just helped her run birthday parties that, but for different entertainment, might have been for a kid ten years younger, and he took the sweet with the bitter.
There were moments when Frank liked to think he could glimpse Danielle as she might have been years ago or maybe, more darkly, the woman she could have become. It started slowly, as she got to the point of relative ease with some of her colleagues, who were all either pretty damned eccentric themselves or used to dealing with major eccentricities day-to-day. They probably liked to think of her as a stronger permutation of the norm. She didn't volunteer much information about her time on the island, Frank knew, and even the most socially inept of her fellows figured out not to ask.
Frank persuaded her to go to their dinner parties, with him in tow, and he stuck with it despite the awkwardness. There came a time, eventually, when Danielle seemed able to enjoy doting on whatever children were around, even though it was a long way from painless for her; to enjoy watching Alex dote on them with a certain innate enthusiasm despite the clumsiness of inexperience. Eventually Danielle was willing to invite people over to their place. Between the social graces she remembered and the ones Frank had ever possessed, they just about managed. Other times, the aviation crowd or Frank's buddies from A.A. would stop by for something that wasn't a beer. All Frank could hope was that one day he'd be used to it.
Art museums wouldn't have occurred to Frank as Rousseau's kind of thing. But when the off-peak crowds were at their sparsest, the places were easy for her to deal with: controlled environments, and ones with good sight lines. The three of them would pore over Polynesian artifacts and Hawaiian crafts and botanic illustrations, and eventually over things that spoke to Danielle. Honolulu couldn't compete with Paris for museums, but they had paintings by a few artists and sculptors whose names were famous enough for Frank to recognize, and more who Danielle knew about. She moved her eyes between Alex and the paintings and launched into what Frank realized were translations of school lessons and history points that had been the salt and bread of her own education. Ivory miniatures were popular until the fourteenth century, mostly religious scenes like the one here. All the continental portraits from the sixteen hundreds have rich women in these horrible clothes. There are better paintings by all these Impressionists in France, but often you can only see the tourists in front of them.
It was almost as new to Frank as it was to Alex. He had flown with a decent number of people who spent every waking moment of the longer layovers trying to cram in cultural enrichment. They were the ones who could tell passengers about itineraries and discounts, people who would run to museums and monuments still wearing their uniforms if they had to. Maybe Danielle had seen them, growing up, but Frank had never been one of their number. His European sightseeing itinerary had mostly consisted of low-class bars and downmarket wine shops, with one sidebar on staying out of job trouble and another on getting rebounding and undersexed flight attendants into bed. With a bottle on the nightstand to add to the romance, naturally. Museums and monuments he skipped.
So he found himself getting caught up. Frank learned that without people called Whistler and Sargent the portrait might be dead, that Honolulu had scored a coup getting some unusual John the Baptist by a Renaissance Italian whose name he promptly forgot, that glassware could be remarkably sturdy. The point wasn't for him to learn anything, of course. The point was for Danielle to show it to Alex. Frank just made it his job to finish the house decorating by finding good prints and sculpture replicas of what Danielle liked best, and to steer her away from canvases that she could've handled but that Frank didn't want to watch her see: A saccharine Victorian mother doting on a toddler Frank could only assume wasn't meant to look as profoundly deformed as it did, Cain and Abel, visions in red. The half-abstract, distorted female portraits from the 1890s on; colonial prints of savage natives: ones that Danielle might not have minded but that discomfited him.
Danielle comes home carrying a stack of little notebooks but without any blankets. “There were so many of them,” she explains, once she's confirmed that Alex is there but napping, “and so many people in the store.”
“Maybe we can go and look on Monday,” Frank suggests, although he'll probably end up just doing the errand on his own. “How was the lab?”
“Difficult. The telluric variations are more abnormal than we thought, and the software cannot model them.”
“So it's back to paper and pencil.”
“Yes. We are getting above thirty hertz. It is impossible.”
“That just means you haven't figured out how it works yet.”
“Or that I have made a mistake.”
“One way or the other.” Frank kisses her. “Let me help you get dinner ready.”
“I have salade Niçoise in order. I need time - to clear my mind, I suppose.”
“You want a foot rub to help with that?”
She smiles. “Of course.” She takes a long scent of the flowers before she lies down on the bed. “They are beautiful.”
“I can throw in a speech on how they're not half as good-looking as you.”
“As long as I can have the foot rub too.”
Frank grins and starts taking off her shoes. “Who says romance is dead?”
Alex started up with her first boyfriend sooner than Frank would have expected, running before she could walk. Not her first boyfriend, he kept having to correct himself: the first boyfriend he'd seen her with. The first back in what he thought of as the real world but Alex definitely did not. The guy's name was either Matthew or Michael, like half the boys in his birth cohort; he was a fit, baby-faced computer student. Frank couldn't much to like or dislike about him, and he would've bet that Michael, or Matthew, was just the first non-repulsive guy who'd asked Alex out.
She didn't know the first thing about dating, really, and nothing at all about quasi-normal relationships. Most of the conversations she'd had on the subjects were intensely private ones, with her mother, about Karl and about Robert, or else with the friends who had issues of their own. Frank realized, belatedly, that she'd gone through adolescence without pseudo-dating and girl chats and stupid magazines to parallel the locker room talk and illicit Playboys he'd taken for granted in his own development.
It was a bullet Frank had thought he'd dodged, with Josh being a boy and the second marriage falling apart before his stepkids hit puberty. But he found himself clearing his throat for some awkward monologues with Alex about respect and precautions and the fact that all men, basically, were scum-sucking pieces of shit who needed nothing so much as a well-placed kick in the nuts. Or as much of it as he could tell her, anyway. He knew more than he wanted to about her history of dating advice from paternal types, and on the hard stuff he hedged like anything. He compromised by buying books about relationships and leaving them by her bedside without comment. “I just want you to be happy,” he told her finally. “That's why I'm giving you all the lectures.”
Alex only nodded and carried on with a steady string of failed romances. She had a definite type: fit but not absurdly brawny guys who had blunt features and didn't get bossy with her. Some of them she met at college and others, inevitably, were military, what with three quarters U.S. Pacific command based at Honolulu. She didn't have a particular thing for military guys, as far as Frank could tell. They were just the ones in the available pool, and she had after all spent her childhood among people who were frequently armed and a lot more dangerous. Even so, he doubted she wanted to discuss anything like combat operations with any of them, although he was usually at a loss to imagine other topics of conversation.
Alex jumped into things headlong and heart-short. For a couple of months the same number would show up on the caller ID, the same car in the driveway, and it would be the same address away where Alex spent the biggest part of her time away from home. And then, as quickly as it had begun, it would be over: Alex needed too much and gave too little, or else the guy did. Frank didn't get the sense that the communication factor, never his own strong suit, was even really operative. He worried about heartbreak and bad men and didn't breathe a word of it to Alex because he knew he'd come off sounding like a hated enemy he'd never even met.
Instead, he crossed his fingers and wished for a beer. He kept a tally in his mind: Timothy, the Air Force cadet from Idaho who wasn't so bad; he and Frank could talk flying and rib each other's respective services. Sam, from the college, who had a knack for carpentry and was a grade-A schmuck. Alan, a South Carolina marine at the end of his enlistment who Frank correctly pegged as questioning his sexuality and finding out that Alex wasn't the answer. Alex veered between distraught and detached when the caravan of baggage she refused to talk about, or else what Frank could only call her lack of competence at the whole thing, drove each one away in turn.
The last guy's name was Bryce, specifically Private Bryce Tanner, first class. Frank couldn't get much of a sense of him from Alex, just the information that he was from Missouri and liked football. His second-hand impression wasn't one of intellectual brilliance or an especially magnetic personality. Bryce confirmed that impression the first time Alex brought him home: he didn't have much in the way of brains or charm. What he did have was rust-red hair with a hint of curl despite the crew cut. That and milk-pale skin replete with freckles; it was all Frank could do to say Good to meet you instead of Now I understand.
The looks were the only reason Frank could see for Alex to stay with the guy. Bryce wasn't as overt as Sam, who Alex had actually given the boot, but once you got to spending time with him it came through. It wasn't that he complained too much - not so rare a vice among twenty-year-olds, who mostly outgrew it - so much as that things were never his fault, or beyond that, that he didn't have a good word to say for anyone. Maybe Alex was using him to vent the anger she was sick of holding in for the sake of getting on with her life, or maybe only to pretend for however long it lasted that she was medicating something that would never heal.
There was a lot less subtlety in what Bryce was using her for. For longer than Frank would have wanted, though, he had to endure Bryce's stopping by to visit or Alex's going out with him. It was long enough for Frank to conclude that Bryce's family had probably pushed him into enlisting to get him in line, and that he'd been accepted because recruiting was abysmal. A highly skilled killing machine the kid was not; on a good day, Frank thought, he might be able to tell you the difference between a grenade and an ammo clip, although putting money on it wouldn't be a smart bet.
Word came eventually that Bryce's unit was getting to transferred to someplace in Japan. He gave all the signs of being grateful for an excuse to get away, probably with a plan to break up with Alex by e-mail once he got there. Frank was just glad he'd be getting out of her life sooner rather than later, even though Alex was in some denial, clinging to him like a leech and making plans to visit. Even so, he hadn't expected to come home to an energetic argument that was audible even before he had the door open. He could only pick out scattered words, the same ones you'd hear in any break-up argument: ...lied to me, Were you trying, Did you think? What caught his attention was the sound of a fist brought down on a tabletop, a rattling noise, something he'd done any number of times but that now shoved him into the pilot's emergency-command mode he'd first learned in the Coast Guard. “What's going on here?”
Bryce gave him a half-defiant look that was quick to wither, and Alex said, “It's okay, Frank.”
“It didn't sound that way to me.”
“It's nothing. Please,” Alex said with a quiver, and Bryce spat at her, “You call that nothing?”
“Go back to the base and polish your boots,” Frank told him.
“You bet I'll go back - ”
“Get out of here before her mother's home to break your fucking face.” The words slipped out of Frank's mouth, and Bryce didn't contradict them. He just shot Alex an ugly, I'd-say-more kind of look and said, “Whatever, man. I'm fuckin' done.”
As soon as he was gone, Alex said, “What are you doing, Frank?”
“You can't let people treat you like that.”
“That's up to you to decide now?”
“I'm not going to pretend I didn't hear things.” The ideal long-distance breakup had just moved in Frank's mind from the Tokyo red-light district to a restaurant that didn't prepare its fugu carefully.
Alex stifled a little sob. “I'm going for a walk,” she said angrily.
Frank didn't try to stop her. She went for a lot of walks in the days after that, when she wasn't attending her final set of classes. The usual post-breakup talks with Danielle and commiserations with her friends didn't interest her. When she was tired of walking and didn't want to go out, she holed herself up in her room. The music she played didn't hide the fact that she was crying.
“There will be something good from all of this,” Danielle reassured her one evening, over the fancy fish and green beans that Alex could barely seem to tolerate on her plate. “One day there will be something that makes you happy about it.” Alex bit her lip and nodded, eyes dutifully closed. Frank was expecting another crying jag, or for Alex to pick at her dinner in silence.
At first he was too surprised by her unforced little smile to process that she'd said, “I'm pregnant.”
( part two)
**Excessive piloting information from Aluwings, anonymous partner and anonymous wife, FlyGuy, Joe Podcaster, Brian Risley, Jason Schappert, and Patrick Smith; graphics by princesaskater (2x), schnullybaby ,
leire_pj , morlockicons , grarpirates , lumenartemis, wicked_signs , and alinassoul ; title by the Talking Heads