“Thank you.”
Karen hit END and looked at her rearview mirror, which was adjusted so that she could see Abby’s face.
“Daddy loves getting messages from us,” Abby said, smiling.
“He sure does, honey.”
Fifty miles south of Jackson, Will settled the Baron in at eight thousand feet. Below him lay a puffy white carpet of cumulus clouds, before him a sky as blue as an Arctic lake. Visibility was unlimited. As he bent his wrist to check his primary GPS unit, a burning current of pain shot up the radial nerve in his right arm. It was worse than he’d admitted to Karen, and she’d known it. She didn’t miss anything. The truth was, she didn’t want him flying anymore. A month ago, she’d threatened to tell the FAA that he was “cheating” to pass his flight physicals. He didn’t think she would, but he couldn’t be sure. If she thought Will’s arthritis put him-and thus the family-at risk while flying, she wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever she had to do to stop him.
If she did, Will wasn’t sure he could handle it. Even the thought of being grounded put him in a black mood. Flying was more than recreation for him. It was a physical expression of how far he had come in life, a symbol of all he had attained, and of the lifestyle he had created for his family. His father could never have dreamed of owning a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane. Tom Jennings had never even ridden in an airplane. His son had paid cash for one.
But for Will the money was not the important thing. It was what the money could buy. Security. He had learned that lesson a thousand times growing up: money was an insulator, like armor. It protected people who had it from the everyday problems that besieged and even destroyed others. And yet, it did not make you invulnerable. His arthritis had taught him that. Other lessons followed.
In 1986, he graduated from LSU medical school and began an obstetrics residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It was there that he met a surgical nurse with stunning green eyes, strawberry-blond hair, and a reputation for refusing dates with physicians or medical students. After three months of patience and charm, Will persuaded Karen to meet him for lunch, far from the hospital. There he discovered that the cause of her dating policy was simple: she’d seen too many nurses put medical students through school only to be cast aside later, and others caught in messy triangles with married doctors and their wives. In spite of her policy, she dated Will for the next two years-first secretly, then openly-and after a yearlong engagement, they married. Will entered private practice with a Jackson OB/GYN group the day after his honeymoon, and their adult life together began like a storybook.
But during the second year of his practice, he began experiencing pain in his hands, feet, and lower back. He tried to ignore it, but soon the pain was interfering with his work, and he went to see a friend in the rheumatology department. A week later he was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a severe, often crippling disease. Continuing as an obstetrician was impossible, so he began to investigate less physically rigorous fields like dermatology and radiology. His old college roommate suggested anesthesiology-his own specialty-a three-year program if the university would credit Will’s OB experience and let him skip the internship year. It did, and in 1993, he began his anesthesiology residency at UMC in Jackson.
The same month, Karen quit her nursing job and enrolled at nearby Millsaps College for twenty-two hours of basic sciences in the premed program. Karen had always felt she aimed too low with nursing-and Will agreed-but her decision stunned him. It meant they would have to put off having children for several more years, and it would also force them to take on more debt than Will felt comfortable with. But he wanted Karen to be happy. While he trained for his new speciality and learned to deal with the pain of his disease, she racked up four semesters of perfect grades and scored in the ninety-sixth percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test. Will was as proud as he was surprised, and Karen was luminous with happiness. It almost seemed as though Will’s disease had been a gift.
Then, during Karen’s freshman year of medical school-the third year of Will’s residency-she got pregnant. She had never been able to take the pill, and the less certain methods of birth control had finally failed. Will was surprised but happy; Karen was devastated. She believed that keeping the baby would mean the death of her dream of being a doctor. Will was forced to concede that she was probably right. For three agonizing weeks, she considered an abortion. The fact that she was thirty-three finally convinced her to keep the baby. She managed to complete her freshman year of med school, but after Abby was born, there was no question of continuing. She withdrew from the university the day Will completed his residency, and while Will joined the private anesthesiology group led by his old roommate, Karen went home to prepare for motherhood.
They made a commitment to go forward without regrets, but it didn’t work out that way. Will was phenomenally successful in his work, and Abby brightened their lives in ways he could never have imagined. But Karen’s premature exit from medical school haunted her. Over the next couple of years, her resentment began to permeate their marriage, from their dinner conversations to their sex life. Or more accurately, their lack of one. Will tried to discuss it with her, but his attempts only seemed to aggravate the situation. He responded by focusing on his work and on Abby, and whatever energy he had left he used to fight his slowly progressing arthritis.
He treated himself, which conventional wisdom declared folly, but he had studied his condition until he knew more about it than most rheumatologists. He had done the same with Abby’s juvenile diabetes. Being his own doctor allowed him to do things he otherwise might not have been allowed to, like flying. On good days the pain didn’t interfere with his control of the aircraft, and Will only flew on good days. Using this rationale, he had medicated himself to get through the flight physical, and the limited documentary records of his disease made it unlikely that his deception would ever be discovered. He only wished the problems in his marriage were as easy to solve.
A high-pitched beeping suddenly filled the Baron’s cockpit. Will cursed himself for letting his attention wander. Scanning the instrument panel for the source of the alarm, he felt a hot tingle of anxiety along his arms. He saw nothing out of order, which made him twice as anxious, certain that he was missing something right in front of his eyes. Then relief washed through him. He reached down to his waist, pulled the new SkyTel off his belt, and hit the retrieve button. The alphanumeric pager displayed a message in green backlit letters:
WE ALREADY MISS YOU. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT. LOVE, KAREN AND ABBY. WITH SUGAR AND KISSES ON TOP.
Will smiled and waggled the Baron’s wings against the cerulean sky.
Karen stopped the Expedition beside her mailbox and shook her head at the bronze biplane mounted atop it. She had always thought the decoration juvenile. Reaching into the box, she withdrew a thick handful of envelopes and magazines and skimmed through them. There were brokerage statements, party invitations, copies of Architectural Digest, Mississippi Magazine, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
“Did I get any letters?” Abby asked from the backseat.
“You sure did.” Karen passed a powder blue envelope over the front seat. “I think that’s for Seth’s birthday party.”
Abby opened the invitation as Karen climbed the long incline of the drive. “How long till my birthday?”
“Three more months. Sorry, Charlie.”
“I don’t like being five and a half. I want to be six.”
“Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You’ll be thirty-six before you know it.”
When the house came into sight, Karen felt the ambivalence that always suffused her at the sight of it. Her first emotion was pride. She and Will had designed the house, and she had handled all the contracting work herself. Despite the dire warnings of friends, she had enjoyed this, but when the family finally moved in, she had felt more anticlimax than accomplishment. She could not escape the feeling that she’d constructed her own prison, a gilded cage like all the others on Crooked Mile Road, each inhabited by its own Mississippi version of Martha Stewart, the new millennium’s Stepford wives.
Karen pulled into the garage bay nearest the laundry room entrance. Abby unhooked her own safety straps but waited for her mother to open her door.
“Let’s get some iced tea,” Karen said, setting Abby on the concrete. “How do you feel?”
“Good.”
“Did you tee-tee a lot this afternoon?”
“No. I need to go now, though.”
“All right. We’ll check your sugar after. Then we’ll get the tea. We’re going to have some fun today, kid. Just
