Chapter Text
“Double whiskey and soda.”
The words are clipped and low. Helena Wells is not surprised by that drink order, for the person issuing it is a pilot. That the whiskey-and-soda pilot is in this case a woman is slightly unusual, but most people, Helena has noted in her relatively short career thus far as a bartender, do drink according to position, not gender. She places an ice cube in a tumbler, fills the tumbler with the bar’s well bourbon, adds a brief spray of soda, and places it in front of the pilot, whose eyes have followed Helena as she assembled the drink. Her gaze now meets Helena’s in cool appraisal.
Helena has not seen this pilot before. She’s seen this look, however; all pilots seem to know it and use it. Flight attendants do not. Flight attendants deploy smiles that do not reach their eyes.
Helena is becoming familiar with the looks proffered by flight attendants and pilots because the establishment whose bar she began to tend not long ago is located near both an airport and a hotel where flight crews are customarily housed. The hotel does not have a bar of its own, a fact for which Helena is grateful: she is also becoming familiar with the fact that people who travel for a living tend to tip well.
This pilot bears out that tendency: she finishes her drink, drops a ten and two fives on the bar. The ice cube remains, largely unmelted, in the glass. She says, “Thanks.” Then she stands and walks away, away and out, nodding to a flight attendant as she leaves.
She’s tall, this pilot.
“The pilot,” Helena says to the flight attendant when he comes to the bar, after a bit, to place an order, “who was here earlier.”
He smiles. It’s genuine. “Captain Bering,” he says.
“How did you know who I meant?” Helena asks.
“The way you said ‘the pilot.’”
And somehow Helena knows precisely what he means.
Three weeks later, the tall pilot—Captain Bering—returns. Just as before, she sits at the bar; just as before, she orders a double whiskey and soda. But this time, she smiles at Helena. She says, “I remember you.”
Helena says, “Thank you.” She is struck by what a strange thing this is to have said, but—
“You’re welcome,” says the pilot. She downs her drink, drops two bills—tens—on the bar. “I’ll remember you next time, too.”
“Then I’ll thank you again,” Helena says. That earns her a smile—but one still tinged with appraisal.
Helena has never bothered to distinguish among the uniforms worn by crews of various airlines. But she now finds herself looking for a particular configuration of dark blue fabric striped at the sleeve with gold braid…
Two weeks pass. Then: “Hi,” says the pilot. “Told you I’d remember.”
“And I told you I would thank you again. Which I do.”
“You’re welcome again.”
Helena places a double whiskey and soda—made this time with bourbon from a bottle that lives on a high shelf—in front of the pilot and notes, “You’re not the only one with a memory.” After a second’s consideration, she adds, “Captain Bering.”
The pilot laughs. “I guess I do wear a nametag,” she says, and Helena does not correct the misapprehension. The pilot sips her drink. Then she smiles widely, and the corners of her eyes move. “But it’s Myka.” Now she’s the one who seems to consider briefly. “Going to quid pro quo me?”
“Helena.”
Myka drinks two whiskey-and-sodas that night. She says, as she leaves the bar, “I hope I’ll see you next time, Helena.”
The next time, as Myka sips at her drink, made once again with pricey whiskey, she tells Helena, “I’ve been in a lot of bars. You aren’t a typical bartender.”
“I’m a relatively inexperienced bartender,” Helena says, and her next words slip out before she can stop them. “I wouldn’t have chosen it.”
“So why did you?”
“I’m a convicted felon.”
“Pardon?” Myka asks, but her eyes do not widen. Instead, she tilts her head, as if Helena has said something odd about the weather.
“Yes. I like to be honest. I am a convicted felon, and this is the job I managed to be hired to do.”
“You’re a convicted felon in this country?”
“Yes. People generally don’t, or I suppose wouldn’t, guess. So I am up-front. So there are no surprises.” Not that it matters what this pilot thinks of her… but in any case, this is what she says. To people. Who generally don’t or wouldn’t guess. And in any case, she usually goes on, as she does now, “I would say there were extenuating circumstances, but doesn’t everyone believe that their actions are in some way excusable? So in fact I make no excuses for my actions. And I have paid my debt to society.” She did not need to volunteer the information to Myka. But she for some reason does not want to have to offer a belated confession—or damning revelation—to this upright, uniformed woman. She tries not to interrogate why she imagines she might find herself needing to confess to this upright, uniformed woman at a later time.
Nothing changes between them, nothing but the subject—they move on to, of all things, a discussion of Myka’s hat and the range of documents she stores inside it: it sits upside down on the bar, and it looks strangely like a round, disorganized filing cabinet. “Everybody does it,” Myka defends herself against Helena’s disbelief at the idea that pilots consistently use their hats as adjunct attaché cases. Myka sighs and asks the bar at large, “Who’s got a schedule or a chart in their cap?” Helena is astonished by the number of hands that rise; Myka asks, smugly, for another drink.
Nothing changes… Helena supposes there was and is, to be honest, nothing of true substance between them to change. They talk in a bar. At irregular intervals. That is what they do. And indeed, in two weeks, their conversation resumes, post-pleasantries, as if they had only briefly paused.
Myka says, “That’s why you live here. Because of the women’s correctional facility.”
“I’m surprised you know it.”
“The flight crew has to be informed when someone’s being escorted. To.”
“Prison. You can say it.”
“Prison. Can you leave? Town, I mean.”
“I suppose I could. But I have a daughter.” Helena notes that this news does make Myka’s eyes react. “And a friend was kind enough to move himself here, with my daughter, when my incarceration began.”
“That seems like a big deal. For a friend.”
“It was a big deal. For a friend. For anyone, it would have been, and it continues to be one. I owe him more than could be repaid. And while I was incarcerated, he built a life—built a life for himself and for her. I wouldn’t ask them to leave those lives, not simply to… get away.”
“So you tend bar.”
“So I do.”
Myka finishes her drink. She says, “I have to go. Crew rest.” But she leans across the bar and briefly touches Helena’s upper arm. Helena has been conditioned by prison to find uninvited contact threatening… and she has not been out nearly long enough to have overcome that conditioning. Yet she does not flinch away.
****
“So I tend bar,” Helena says two weeks later. She is holding a drink-filled tumbler, which she has not yet set in front of Myka. “What about you?”
Myka holds out her hand for the glass. Helena moves it slightly higher and back: away from her. Myka shrugs. “I’m a pilot. You must have met tons of pilots.” She reaches for the drink again.
Helena shakes her head. “Quid pro quo, Captain Bering.”
“That’s fair, but… that’s all.” To Helena’s skeptical eyebrow, she responds, “I swear.”
Helena considers. “Where do you live?” she asks.
“SLC. With my husband. In theory.”
“Theory?” Helena finds, suddenly, that the tease is no longer amusing. Or perhaps the glass is too heavy, or too slippery, to keep in her hand. She sets it down.
“He’s a pilot too. Our schedules… plus we fly for different airlines.”
“I see.”
Myka sips. Then she says, “I was in the military. Before.” This is volunteered as if it is a real revelation.
“Were you.”
“I flew fighters. Mostly F-22s.”
“Did you enjoy that?”
“More than anything in life.”
Myka’s voice is still low and controlled—Helena suspects that “controlled” might really be Myka’s middle name—but her vehemence is unmistakable. “Then why did you leave the military?” Helena asks, hoping this is the right question.
Myka sets the glass in front of her and stares at it. She drums the fingers of both hands against its slightly sweaty surface. The action creates a spray of tiny water droplets. “You think you know who you are. What you want.”
“But?”
Myka shrugs, and Helena nods. Then she says, to make Myka smile, “And yet you chose another profession requiring a uniform.”
Myka smiles.
The next time, Myka asks, “How old is your daughter?”
“Eight. Do you—you and your husband—have children?”
“No. That wouldn’t work.”
“Given the theoretical nature of—”
“Right. We can’t even have a dog.”
“Do you want a dog?”
“No.” It’s more a dismissive laugh than a word.
“Does he?”
“I don’t know.” Myka lifts her drink and swirls it; she drinks the final bit of alcohol the glass contains. Then she sets it back down, and she and Helena both watch the ice melt.
In three weeks’ time—Myka usually presents herself on a Friday or Saturday night, either every other week or every third, and Helena continues to forget, when confronted with Myka’s actual presence, to ask in detail about piloting schedules and how they are determined—Helena looks up from a credit-card receipt to find that Myka has somehow snuck in: she is sitting at the bar, smiling a smile that widens as Helena meets her eyes. Helena fumbles the receipt into the register, and to cover her surprise, she grabs the first glass that comes to hand and begins to fill it… she is using only the soda hose, she soon realizes, as Myka says, “I hope that one’s not for me.”
“Don’t you ever want to try a different drink?” Helena asks, only half in fun.
“No. But I like to watch you make them.”
A chilly fizz against the fingers of Helena’s left hand, wrapped around the glass, draws her attention to the fact that she has overfilled it.
“You can’t have liked seeing that,” Helena says. But she does have to acknowledge that Myka’s… visits? is that how she should characterize them? have run in parallel with her own progress as a bartender. Her instinct for measurements has been good since the beginning, as have her inclinations regarding what to mix with what to satisfy vague requests—something fruity but not too fruity; something strong but not too strong; something different but not too different. But she moves more smoothly now; her muscles remember the customary spot of each implement below the bar, each bottle behind and above it.
“What’s new?” Myka asks, once she has her proper drink.
“With regard to what? Drinks you don’t want me to make for you?”
“Sure. Tell me that.”
“Craft tequilas. Strangely, traditional whiskey drinks made with craft tequilas.”
“I do not want a double tequila and soda.”
“Tequila Manhattan?” Myka’s response to this query: a face of disgust that makes Helena laugh and say, “I can’t imagine you’d like a Manhattan of any variety.”
“Vermouth.” Myka makes the face again and throws in an exaggerated shudder.
“I will never offer you a martini,” Helena vows.
Naturally, someone steps up to the bar to request just that.
Myka maintains an exaggeratedly revolted expression throughout the mixological process, but her eyes do follow the movement of Helena’s hands. Helena’s own aspect—she can feel it not just on her face, but in the warmth throughout her body—is one of self-consciousness. But it is a self-consciousness that threatens to transmute itself into delight.
****
“What did you do?” Myka asks.
Helena stiffens; despite her desire to be up-front, she does not like, has never liked, will never like answering this question. But after months of intermittent conversations, Myka does have some right to ask it. So Helena answers it. “I assaulted a police officer.”
“Oh. No, I meant before you became a bartender.”
Inexplicably annoyed by Myka’s phlegmatic “oh” and also, equally inexplicably, by her nonspecific clarification, Helena says, “I worked in the correctional facility’s data entry department.”
Myka’s eyes soften. “And before that?”
“I was a materials engineer.” As a concession, to make up for her brief descent into snappish self-pity, Helena offers, “And you’ll laugh at this.”
“I will?”
“My area: composite materials. Specifically, for the control surfaces of aircraft wings.”
“I do find that a little ironic.” Myka laughs a very gentle, non-pilot laugh.
“I thought you might.”
****
“So did you do it?” Myka asks.
“Do what?”
“Assault a police officer.”
Oh. So, now. “I told you, I offer no excuses.”
“That’s what you told me.” She pauses. “But that’s not what I asked.”
“To answer what you asked: I did. Yes, I did. But I…” Helena tries to be honest with herself, and since being released from prison—for prison is no place for honesty or the honest—she has tried to be as truthful as possible with the world at large. Myka is part of the world at large. So that has to be the reason she continues speaking. “The police officer—a police detective, more specifically—took an interest in me.” Myka waits. “And I had no interest in him.” Myka waits some more. “I thought that would be the end of it.”
“But it wasn’t.”
Helena shakes her head. “Over time, the situation escalated.”
Myka says, “Escalated. To assault?” Helena hesitates, then nods. “Escalated to assault committed by you?” Helena nods again. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“How do you know what sounds like me?” Helena asks. But she should not be defensive: Myka has listened to her. With attention.
“I’ve lost count of the whiskey and sodas you’ve made for me.”
“I wonder if the plural might be whiskeys and soda. As in attorneys general.” She mixes Myka a second drink. “Two tonight, to add to whatever number neither of us has counted. I did commit the assault.”
“But?”
“But nothing. I committed aggravated assault. I was offered a plea deal that included, all things considered, a relatively short incarceration.” She laughs without humor. “I behaved well.”
“That doesn’t sound like you either. What ‘all things’ were considered?”
“All the things said by the police officer I assaulted.”
“Were they true?”
“I’d prefer not to lie to you,” Helena says.
“I withdraw the question.”
Helena believes that she means it. But she has begun, and lies by omission are still lies. Truth is whole truth. “He threatened my daughter. He said that if I would not… he threatened my daughter. So instead of sleeping with him, I tried to kill him.” Myka’s gaze remains steady. Helena shrugs. “It wasn’t a very good try. Heat of the moment. Unpremeditated. And obviously unsuccessful.” Helena has been unable to keep herself from wishing that otherwise. Despite the consequences for her… because at least, then, the greatest of consequences for him, too. “Of course once I had done it, what could I say? My reason was at best irrelevant. And he made sure, in any case, that I would not think of airing that reason, certainly not in a public trial, and not even behind closed official doors. He made very sure.”
“You went to prison to protect your daughter,” Myka surmises immediately.
“I went to prison because I pleaded guilty to the charge of aggravated assault.”
“You went to prison to protect your daughter.”
“I went to prison because I was sentenced to serve two years in a state correctional facility.”
“You went to prison to protect your daughter.”
Helena can’t think of anything else truthful to say.
“I notice you haven’t denied it,” Myka says.
“I went to prison.” She picks up Myka’s whiskey and soda and takes a swallow. It isn’t her favorite drink, but it will do to stop her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I pushed. I shouldn’t have.” Myka puts her hand over Helena’s, on the bar.
Helena lets the warm hand stay, even flexes slightly into the pressure. “Well. It’s true that I am the bartender in this relationship,” she weak-jokes. “I should be your confessor, not the other way around.”
“What do you want to know?”
Helena discards the question that leaps immediately to her tongue. Instead she asks, “Why are you still here?”
“What?”
“It’s late. Later than usual. I don’t want to have been responsible for your violating regulations.”
“Oh,” Myka says. She looks down at their hands, resting together. “I guess it is late.”
It is so late that very few people are in the bar; only one of the servers remains, and she sits at a table, reading a magazine. An awareness clicks in Helena’s head: she and Myka have never been alone.
“I’ll have to close soon,” she says. She would slide her hand away unobtrusively, if she could, but she can find no way to make her movement seem like anything less than a retreat.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Now, Helena does not speak the single word that she wants to blurt—“don’t”—but instead she watches Myka collect her coat and hat from the bar stool next to her. She listens to Myka say, in a mutter to herself, “I guess I should call home, too.”
After she is gone, Helena finds herself both relieved and frustrated at having failed to ask the question that had come to her so abruptly and unexpectedly: Why are you married?
Helena has always been inclined to hold her emotions very close, and prison exacerbated that tendency. She had not before, and she has not since, felt connected to anyone but her friend, Steve, to whom she owes everything, and her daughter, Christina, to whom she owes everything else.
And Myka is married. “My husband”: these are words she has so often said. Helena has let herself pretend, pretend but also believe, that that figure stood between them, that Myka could not have been coming nearer and nearer, of course not. Could not have been moving her hand nearer and nearer, could not have been prying loose that close hold, finding an open space in Helena’s thoughts. Her thoughts. Her thoughts that are so inappropriate that she for so long refused to admit that she had them.
Servers at the bar have their liaisons with flight crew members. Helena watches this happen; she has become accustomed to watching this happen. And she has tried not to admit to herself, certainly not to her waking self, that she thinks about that, about how, when Myka walks into the bar—every time she walks into the bar, every time she spends the night in this small city—they might exchange a look, some quiet words of greeting, just as they do now; but then Myka might, after a time, murmur a number into Helena’s ear. Helena might, after closing, go to the hotel across the street and knock softly on the door of a room bearing that number.
She knows this is the stuff of fantasy—not just lurid physical fantasy, but also storybook tale-spinnings: if not happily ever after, then some sort of contented stretching into a gauzy future. She sees an everyday life of child, friend, and work, a quite acceptable everyday life, but one that might erupt into episodes of brief, breathless transcendence.
When thoughts of Myka visit her, during that everyday life that features no transcendence, she tries not to react. But she cannot always keep herself from pursuing those ideas…
During one such chase, Steve asks her, “Are you thinking about prison?”
“No,” Helena says.
But some time later, she revises her statement to: “Not as such.”
Steve nods. “Let me know if you need help.”
Being with Christina is easiest, nearly objectively easy, because Christina can’t help but demand to be put uppermost in Helena’s mind. Can’t help but demand “uppermost” as her rightful place in Helena’s mind. How wrong is it to be glad of one’s child because she is a distraction? (But then, she had used thoughts of Christina in precisely this manner, to winch her way through her incarceration: what is Christina doing at this precise moment in her day? What is Christina reading tonight? What is the homework over which she is furrowing her small brow? What slight variation on macaroni and cheese will she have requested for her supper?) Uppermost.
But Helena tries to be honest with herself. So she feels she must admit—must in fact truly admit, in the sense of allow in, allow fully in, into her head and particularly her heart—that she is in love with a married woman. A married woman whom she sees twice a month if she is lucky, once a month if she is not.
And she has to admit, too, what her unbidden question—Why are you married?—really means. It is a wail, an it’s-not-fair wail, one that begs, Why must it be true that you are married?
TBC
original tumblr tags (slightly edited): this is what I was trying to do, and it did not work, as a lot of things are systemically not working, (or working all too well), Nov. 8 being only the latest example, anyway, what you will find as we proceed, is that Steve is undeveloped, Christina is undeveloped, and while Myka and Helena were always meant to reveal themselves through conversation, they too are missing several salient pieces, I will always look on this failure with regret, but testaments are necessary too, and once this is over, I will try to get back to some healthier programming