The Magical Stranger Read Free Page A

asked for a divorce a few weeks after I returned, believing Dad’s transient life and early death had ingrained in me a restlessness and sadness that would not be eased by babies and backyard cookouts. I assumed she was right, shouldering the blame for our joint failure.
    The story didn’t exactly open up a dialogue within my immediate family. We went to an Outback Steakhouse shortly after its publication, but the conversation was slow. Finally, Mom spoke.
    â€œI liked the story very much.”
    My older sister scowled.
    â€œI can’t believe you described me as stoic.”
    We then ordered a Bloomin’ Onion. That was the end of the conversation.
    S o I put Dad back into a cardboard box full of photos I kept in a room I rarely used. Newly single, I split my time between Brooklyn and Los Angeles, moving back and forth between LAX and JFK eight to ten times a year as if someone or something was chasing me. Dad was dropped from my itinerary until Commander Breining’s invitation. I vacillated for weeks, staring at the ornate lettering of the official invitation. In the end, my new girlfriend Alix’s curiosity about my past pushed me to buy two airline tickets just a week prior to the ceremony.
    I immediately began to regret it. We flew from New York to Seattle on a July afternoon. An hour after landing, we pulled onto the Mukilteo ferry, an idyllic twenty-minute voyage from suburban Seattle to the southern tip of Whidbey Island. It was a trip I’d made dozens of times as a child. The afternoon was a “blue-sky day,” a Navy term for endless visibility, just like the day of Dad’s accident. Alix dozed while I squinted through the glare and thought of Dad losing perspective between sea and sky—one of the many theories for his crash.
    I spotted a woman struggling with two small children in the car ahead of us. Her Subaru station wagon had a Fly Navy bumper sticker and was packed with toys and luggage. I guessed she was returning home after visiting relatives while the children’s father floated on a different ocean.
    The woman looked to be about Mom’s age when she became a widow. Barbara Rodrick was thirty-seven and still beautiful when Dad’s plane crashed sixty-three miles southeast of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. She has been on zero dates since the mishap, as the Navy likes to call plane crashes. I felt this was heroic when I was younger, her terminal fidelity a fitting coda to my father’s own bravery. As an adult, I began to think it was beyond sad.
    We approached the island. The ferry’s loudspeakers instructed drivers to return to their cars. Up ahead, the woman expertly wrangled her hyperactive son into his car seat as he kicked and thrashed.
    The boy jarred something in my memory. When I was five, Dad was studying for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. One day, my sister and I were riding in the back of our blue Chevrolet station wagon as Mom ran errands. This was in the time before mandatory seat belts, much less car seats. I tried to crank down the window with my tiny fingers but pulled the wrong handle. The door opened and I tumbled onto the asphalt.
    Somehow, Mom didn’t notice. My sister and I were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. We fought constantly. Now, watching her tormenter tumble out the door, Terry saw her opportunity. She kept quiet.
    Luckily, I landed on the curb side of the road. The passing cars looked like motorized dinosaurs from the ground. A block or two away, Mom looked in the rear window and screamed at Terry.
    â€œWhere’s your brother?”
    â€œHe fell out back at the light.”
    Mom turned the station wagon around, squealing rubber. She pulled up in front of me and jumped out of the car. Her hands were shaking but her bouffant hairdo was still perfect. She dusted me off, looked around to see if anyone she knew was watching, and