Mary Margaret Kelly, Maggie, had lived on four military bases by the time she was eight years old. It was the only life she knew, and she liked it. Her father, Kevin, was an Air Force test pilot, and had been decorated for the missions he flew in Vietnam. Her paternal grandfather had been a Navy pilot in World War II.
Maggie worshipped her father. He was handsome and tall and funny. She loved watching him fly planes, although she knew it scared her mother. Nothing scared her father. He was very brave, and he always told Maggie to be brave too. She tried to be. Her brother, Tommy, also tried to be. He said he was going to be a pilot one day like their dad. Maggie was five years older than Tommy, and she helped her mom take care of him when she was busy. Emma was a nurse before Maggie was born, but she stayed home with the kids now, and she always had a lot to do. The Air Force gave them a good life. Her father was a squadron leader and flew training missions. They moved to a new base in Nevada when Maggie turned nine. Her mom didn’t like it. It was hot most of the time, except at night, and she said that their dad’s missions were going to be more dangerous now, but she didn’t say why. Maggie heard them arguing about it sometimes. But her dad loved what he did. His eyes and his whole face lit up whenever he talked about flying. He loved everything about planes.
They’d only been there for three months when Maggie’s dad went out on a routine training mission. He kissed Maggie in her bed early that morning before he left. He kissed Tommy, who was sound asleep. Emma got up and watched him from the kitchen window while he drove away. By the time Tommy and Maggie were having breakfast, two men in uniform knocked on the door, came in, and sat in the living room with their mother. Emma didn’t make a sound. She just sat there, sobbing quietly, so her children couldn’t hear her. After a while the men left.
She told Maggie and Tommy afterwards that their dad had died. She said his plane had malfunctioned and spun out of control. The officers told Emma that if Kevin Kelly hadn’t been able to stop it, no one could have.
Three days later, Maggie and Tommy went to their father’s funeral. Years later, Maggie could still remember how terrible she had felt, and how impossible it was to believe that her dad would never come home again. The men in his squadron had folded the flag on his casket and handed it to her mother, who had clutched it to her chest with her eyes closed. Maggie had thought she would faint, but she didn’t. Maggie kept telling herself to be brave the way her father had told her to be. And she was, braver than she ever thought she could be. She took care of Tommy when her mother stayed in bed and cried all the time after that. Emma hardly ever got up, and Maggie cooked dinner for them.
They went to stay with Emma’s parents in Oklahoma for a while, then they came back and moved off the base to Las Vegas. It was the first time Maggie had lived among civilians and gone to a local school. Emma got a job as a cashier in a casino. She didn’t want to go back to nursing, she said it had been too long. They stayed in Las Vegas for six months, living on her salary and their dad’s pension. After that, they moved to three different states, and finally made their way to Miami, where Emma got a better job at a resort hotel, working as a manicurist in the spa. She lived a quiet life, and never went out on dates, until she met Harry Sherman.
Maggie was fourteen and her father had been dead for five years when Emma met Harry at the resort in Miami where they both worked. He was the catering manager. He wasn’t handsome like Maggie’s father. He wasn’t exciting. He wasn’t a hero and didn’t fly planes, but Maggie’s mother told her that wasn’t important. What they needed was a man who wasn’t going to risk his life every day when he went to work. She told Maggie that if her father hadn’t been in love with the thrill of flying planes, he’d be alive today. He could have been anything. A carpenter, a plumber, a teacher, a contractor, but instead he loved danger. Every time Tommy said he wanted to fly planes too when he grew up, Emma told him, in a harsh voice, that he’d better think of something else to do if he didn’t want to kill himself. They learned not to talk about their father, or flying.
Harry was a decent man. He was quiet, serious, he didn’t laugh or tell funny stories like their dad, and he didn’t talk to her or Tommy much. But their mom said he had a good job. They moved into an apartment together a year after they met. Their mom told them that she and Harry were engaged. They got married a month later.
Maggie was fifteen when they got married at city hall. The four of them had lunch at a restaurant afterwards. Harry went to work as usual that night, there was a big convention in town. He was nice enough to them, and Maggie didn’t mind him. He had no children of his own, and he tried to be a father to them, but he always worked until late at night, running the catering side of the conventions at the hotel. Emma seemed happy with him, but her eyes never lit up the way they had when she heard Kevin drive up or when he walked into the room. Her life with Harry was different. They both worked hard, and Maggie and Tommy were home alone a lot of the time until their mom came home from work. Sometimes Maggie had cooked dinner for herself and Tommy by then. They weren’t a family the way they had been when their father was alive. They didn’t do things together or have fun, they just lived in the same house. And they knew Harry would come home from work every night. Nothing he did was dangerous, and in time, the look of panic left her mother’s eyes. Harry wasn’t glamorous or exciting, but he was reliable.
Harry sat in front of the TV when he came home at night and drank a few beers. He stayed up late, and was still asleep when they left for school in the morning. He never had anything to say to them anyway. He told Emma he wasn’t used to kids. Once a week, he would give Maggie a crisp twenty-dollar bill, and tell her to go to a movie with her friends, or buy something. He bought Tommy a football once, but didn’t have time to play with him. The weekly twenty-dollar bill was the only real contact Maggie had with him. Her mother seemed like a different person now, as though something inside her had died when their father did.
When Maggie was sixteen and Tommy eleven, a year after Emma and Harry got married, Harry was transferred to a bigger hotel in Chicago that was part of the same chain. It was a better job, with more money and more responsibility. Emma wasn’t happy about it. She said they’d never see him. He’d be working all the time. They moved anyway, and got a nicer apartment than the one they’d had in Miami. Maggie missed Florida and her friends every day. The school she went to in Chicago was much bigger than her high school in Miami. Tommy went to a different school, a few blocks from hers, and he didn’t like it either.
Emma wanted to move to the suburbs, but Harry said he needed to live close to work. They had offered her a job in the hotel gift shop, and sometimes she snuck downstairs to visit Harry. They had been together for two years by then, and Maggie thought they seemed like strangers with each other. She tried to ask her mother about it sometimes, and Emma said she liked their life because it was safe. She said that was all she wanted now. She had put away all the pictures of Kevin, but Maggie had kept two of them in a drawer in her desk, where she could see them anytime, and she’d given Tommy one of their father in his flight uniform.
Harry looked like a fat little old man compared to their father. Kevin had been tall and lean, with a smile that wouldn’t quit. Emma was thirty-two years old when he died, thirty-seven when she met Harry, and thirty-nine now. Maggie had friends with mothers that age and older, and they still seemed young and full of life. Emma looked like an old woman. Harry had just turned fifty and seemed even older. Maggie had thought her father was so glamorous, and her mother had been pretty when he was alive, but she wasn’t anymore. She didn’t seem to care, and Harry didn’t either. He was a devoted husband, responsible, and accepted her as she was. She talked about going back to nursing sometimes but it had been too many years and the hours were too long, so she took menial jobs instead.
Maggie dreamed of going back to Florida when she finished high school. She missed the warm weather and the friends she’d made there. Moving to another town as a civilian wasn’t like moving to another base in the Air Force. In the military there were always people to welcome you and make you feel at home. In civilian life, no one made it easier for you. You had to figure it out on your own, and meet new friends in a new school. And most of the girls were mean.
When Maggie turned seventeen after they moved to Chicago and started her senior year in high school, she ate lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. She hadn’t made it into the clique of popular girls, and didn’t want to. None of the boys noticed her. She didn’t care about them either. Her grades were okay, but she didn’t like her new school. She hardly knew her teachers. They’d never tried to get to know her. She was planning to go to a state college when she graduated, and didn’t know what she wanted to study yet. Her mother had gotten her a summer job as a waitress at the hotel. She hated it, but she had no idea what else to do. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go to college, but her mother said that her father would have expected it of her, so she felt she had no choice.
Maggie was leaving school one day, when someone flashed past her. She could feel the wind rush by her face. He would have knocked her down if he’d come any closer, but he was careful not to. She wasn’t even sure who or what it was. When she turned around and looked, it was a boy on a skateboard, moving at full speed. He glanced back and waved at her. She hadn’t seen a smile as dazzling as that since her father. He was tall like Kevin too, with sandy blond hair, and she thought he had blue eyes when he looked back at her. He was wearing a knit cap pulled down in the chilly autumn breeze. She was going to yell at him to watch out when he flew past her, but she didn’t have time to. He was still smiling as he went around the corner and disappeared. He had frightened her for a minute, and then she went to meet Tommy at their bus stop to go home, and she forgot about the boy on the skateboard. She saw him again a few days later, on his way to school. He got off the board and carried it the last block to school, and came up alongside her.
“You’re not supposed to skate on the sidewalk,” she scolded him.
“I don’t. I was just saying hi to you,” he said with that enormous smile that started in his eyes and transformed his whole face. He had bright blue eyes and an aura of boyish innocence.
“You almost knocked me down.” She frowned. She didn’t know what else to say to him. She hadn’t dated any boys yet. The girls in her class were much cooler than she was. She was an innocent compared to them. At seventeen she’d only kissed a boy once. He’d been drunk at a school dance and she’d run away from him. He scared her.
“I didn’t almost knock you down,” the boy said clearly. “I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been watching you. Are you new at school?” He was curious about her and seemed more confident than she was. Her palms were sweating while she talked to him and tried to look indifferent.
“I was, last year. We moved here in April, from Miami.”
He whistled. “Wow. Big change. The weather, if nothing else.”
“The school too,” she admitted. He had noticed her keeping to herself, away from the other girls. It was a big school, and not easy to make friends.
“Why Chicago?” he asked her.
“My stepfather got a job here, so we had to move.”
“My parents are divorced too,” he commiserated. “It sucks sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“My father died eight years ago. My mom remarried when I was fifteen,” she said in a soft voice.
“I’m sorry. That’s tough. Cancer?” he asked cautiously.
“He was a test pilot in the Air Force,” she said proudly. “And a fighter pilot in Vietnam. His plane malfunctioned, and it crashed. It was fun when he was alive. We moved around a lot. It’s different in civilian life, and not so fun.” She looked into his eyes as he held the door open for her and they walked into school together. He had said he was a senior too. There were a thousand kids in their class, which made it even harder to meet people, and she was shy. She’d gone to a lot of different schools until they moved to Miami, but she still hadn’t gotten used to it. Being the new girl was hard. She thought civilian kids were much snootier than military kids, especially the girls. In the military, your status depended on your father’s rank. Here, it was about a lot of other things: where you lived, what you wore, what kind of car your father drove, your parents’ jobs. She didn’t have any of the obvious status symbols the other girls did, which might have impressed them, so she didn’t try.
“Your father sounds cool. I want to learn to hang glide when I finish school,” he said with a grin.
“Do you want to be a pilot?” Her eyes lit up when she asked him. It was familiar ground for her. Finally.
“I want to be a lot of things. I want to race motorcycles. I’ve got a friend who lets me ride his on weekends.”
“That’s dangerous,” she commented.
“So is everything worth doing. I want to jump out of an airplane and see what that feels like,” he said, smiling at her, and then looked at her regretfully. “I have a class in five minutes. Econ. I suck at it.”
“Me too,” she admitted with a grin. “I like history, and Spanish.”
“I hate school,” he said, and lately she wondered if she did too. Her school in Miami had been smaller and easier to navigate, and she’d learned Spanish from her Hispanic classmates. No one spoke Spanish here. “Well, see ya,” he said, and stopped at his locker to put his skateboard away. She walked past him to her locker at the far end of another hallway. It had been nice talking to him for a few minutes.
She didn’t see him again for several days, and then he caught up to her leaving school on a Friday. She was hurrying, afraid to be late to meet Tommy at the bus stop.
“Want to see me race tomorrow?” he asked her. “My friend let me enter his motorcycle in a race. I just turned eighteen, so I have a license.” She thought about it and decided she did want to see him race. It sounded exciting. She didn’t know what her mother would say. She probably wouldn’t like it, but Maggie wasn’t going to ask her. Her mom didn’t have to know everything she did. She’d have to find someone to leave Tommy with. She watched him for her mom on Saturdays, while her mother worked at the hotel gift shop. They had promoted her to manager.
“I babysit my brother. If I can find someone to keep him, I’ll come. Where is it?” He told her. It was on an old track, a long bus ride from where she lived, but she was intrigued by him now. She realized she still didn’t know his name.
“Bring your brother with you. How old is he?”
“He’s twelve. He’d probably tell my mother, but he’d love to see the race too.”
“Well, bring him if you want.”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
He shook his head. “Nope. My parents got divorced when I was two. They fight whenever they see each other. I live with my mom. My father works on boats, all over the place. I don’t see him much.” She nodded. They each had their own heartbreaks to deal with. “What’s your name?” he asked her then.
“Maggie Kelly.”
“Paul Gilmore,” he said, and they smiled at each other.
“I’ll try to make it to your race,” she promised, not sure if she could do it, and then ran to meet her brother before it got any later.
She was lucky. As soon as she met Tommy at the bus stop, he told her that he’d been invited to a friend’s house the next day to hang out, stay for a barbecue, and then spend the night. He had made friends more easily than she had. But he was only twelve, and boys were less complicated than girls her age. Most of the girls had boyfriends, or they moved in a pack. She didn’t have a pack mentality, didn’t want to show off, and she didn’t know how to play the games that attracted boys her age. Paul liked that about her. She seemed like a nice person, and she was easy to talk to. She was pretty too, in a totally natural way. She had shining dark hair, green eyes, and didn’t wear makeup. She was tall and thin and had a good body. He had the feeling that she didn’t know she was beautiful.
After she dropped Tommy off at his friend’s the next day, she took the bus to where the track was. It was a bitter cold day. She had to walk the last few blocks and her face and hands were frozen when she arrived. There was a small crowd of mostly men sitting in bleachers, watching the track. She got there just in time to see Paul race. He came in third out of a dozen boys and men older than he was. They were riding mostly rebuilt motorcycles. The bike slid after he crossed the finish line, and he had a nasty gash on one arm and had grazed the side of his face. He was bleeding when she got to him, and she helped him clean the arm. He didn’t seem to care that he was hurt. He was glowing with the excitement of having come in third. All the others in the race pounded him on the back and one of them handed him a beer. He didn’t even feel the graze on his face in the emotion of the moment. He offered her a ride on the back of his motorbike to where he lived, which he said wasn’t far away.
When they got there, she was shocked to see the seedy part of town he lived in, and the ramshackle house where he left his friend’s motorbike in the garage. Then they walked back to his house, which was barely more than a cottage. It smelled of sour cooking and looked gray and dingy when they walked inside. He watched her face for her reaction, but she didn’t seem to care. She was more interested in him than where he lived. She was the only girl he’d ever brought there.
“How does your face feel?” she asked him.
“Great!” He looked a mess and had dirt all over his jacket and had torn a sleeve when he cut his arm. “It’s the best time I’ve had yet.”
“Are you serious about racing motorcycles when you finish school?” He nodded enthusiastically and had a light in his eyes that reminded her of how her father looked when he talked about flying planes.
“I am. I want to be the best at something when I’m older. Some kind of racing. I love motorcycles.” She could see that he did. He poured her a soda from the nearly empty fridge, and they sat down on a sagging, beat-up couch and talked for a while, and then she said she had to go. She had a long ride home, and she wanted to be there when her mother came in from work. She didn’t like to have to tell her where she’d been. “Do you want to go to the movies tomorrow?” he asked her, and she nodded with a slow, shy smile.
“Yes, I’d love to.”
He walked her to the bus stop, and she thought about him all the way home, and that night. She didn’t say anything to her mother. She met Paul at a movie complex downtown the next day. She was surprised to see that he was driving the motorcycle, and she rode on it with him after the movie, then let him take her to within a few blocks of her house. Her mother would have killed her if she had seen it. Motorcycles or anything high risk were strictly forbidden. Emma was afraid that she or Tommy would turn out to be like their father. She didn’t even want Tommy to play sports, and all he wanted to do was play football when he got to high school in two years. He had the build for it, and his father’s strength and agility.
Maggie liked being on the back of Paul’s bike. It was exciting. She told him her mother would have a fit if she knew.
“She wants us to be safe, and not do anything dangerous. Ever since my dad died, she’s been crazy on the subject.”
“She’s not going to like me then, is she?”
“Just don’t bring the bike if you ever come to visit.”
She didn’t tell her mother about him until after Christmas, and then she mentioned him casually and said he was just a friend from school. She invited him to dinner and he came in jeans and an old leather jacket and sneakers. He was a good-looking boy, with his blond hair and blue eyes, and very polite, but Emma watched him with suspicion. There was a kind of self-confidence about him that was all too familiar to her, and that she never wanted to see again, certainly not around her children. He had a maturity which frightened her, and a self-assurance that came from the hard life he’d had. The apartment where Maggie lived was much nicer than the shabby cottage where he lived with windows that didn’t close properly and the wind whistling through it.
“I’m going to have money someday,” he told Maggie one day as they walked around the lake.
She smiled at what he said. “How are you going to do that? Rob a bank?”
“I don’t know. But I know I will. And I’ll buy my mom a decent house,” he said, his eyes full of dreams, and the way he said it touched her.
“I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up,” she said. “My mom says all that matters is having a stable life and being safe. She says it all the time.” Maggie was sick of hearing it.
“I don’t care about that,” Paul said. “I want to do something exciting. Climb mountains, race motorcycles, parachuting.” His eyes were ablaze, as though he could see himself doing it.
“Roller coasters scare me. I’d rather die than jump out of a plane or go skydiving,” Maggie said, making a face.
“I’d give anything to do that,” he said.
Their romance lasted until spring. He had been Maggie’s first serious crush, until her mother put her foot down. He said something once when he came to visit, about racing motorcycles after he graduated, and Emma came to her daughter’s room afterwards with a doomsday expression.
“You’re playing with fire,” her mother said with steel in her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re doing. He loves danger, Maggie. He’s a wild one. It’s written all over him. Danger is like a drug for guys like him. He’s like your father. And all that will ever do for you is break your heart. Sooner or later they die, and you’re a widow. I want you to stop seeing him.” It sounded like a death knell to Maggie. He was her only friend.
“I’m not marrying him, Mom. We’re kids.”
“He’s not a kid. He’s a young man, and he’s dangerous. You could die with him if you’re foolish enough to get on the back of his motorcycle. I’m not going through that again. We lost your dad. I’m not going to lose you or Tommy. Paul is a death wish waiting to happen. His eyes light up whenever he talks about racing.”
“He’s a boy. He’ll outgrow it.” Maggie was fighting for her right to see him. She didn’t want to give him up.
“Boys like that stay boys forever. They don’t outgrow it. They care more about risking their lives than he ever will about you. The last time he was here he said he wanted to climb Everest one day. Maggie, stay away from him.” Emma had tears in her eyes when she said it. Tommy overheard her from the next room and asked Maggie about it afterwards.
“Are you going to break up with him?”
“None of your business,” she said, and from then on, Maggie stopped talking about him. They met in secret. She almost slept with him several times, but she was afraid to get pregnant, and she didn’t feel ready. He tried to convince her otherwise, but she managed to hang on to her virginity until graduation. She had a lot to think about. She’d gotten into all the colleges she applied to, and had decided to go to Ohio State. Paul was taking a semester off before he thought about college. He was heading for Southern California to race, and see his father if he came into port while he was there. But his main goal was racing. He was leaving two weeks after graduation, while Maggie had another summer job at the hotel, until she left for Ohio in August.
Paul wanted to stay in California once he got there. He was going to go to city college somewhere eventually, wherever he was living. It was inevitable that their paths would go in different directions now. They knew it would happen. She was in love with him, but more than that, he had become her best friend. She could tell him anything. He knew everything about her, her hopes and fears, and how much she missed her father. It was like a tidal wave that washed over her sometimes. She didn’t know how her mother could love Harry after someone like her father. But Emma was so frightened now, terrified of everything. Harry was exhausted when he came home at night, and she didn’t want to go out anyway. It was hard to believe she was only forty. She seemed more like eighty to Maggie. She and Harry both did. All they ever did was watch TV and drink beer at night. They weren’t drunks, but she could tell her mother was depressed and had been for years. Maggie wasn’t even sure her mother loved Harry. He was the dullest man who had ever lived. But he was safe, which was all she wanted.
“When am I going to see you again?” Maggie asked Paul as the days slipped away. He was leaving soon. She was glad that she hadn’t slept with him. She could see now that he couldn’t be tamed. He would probably be a wild card all his life. Her mother might be right about that.
“I don’t know, Mag,” he said sadly. “I’m going to miss you.” She believed he would, but not enough to stick around or come back. He was hungry for the world now, and all the risks he could take and wonders he would discover. None of that appealed to Maggie. She didn’t have the thirst for risk that he did.
“Be careful,” she said, and she almost let him talk her into having sex with him that night, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to lose her virginity to a boy she might never see again. She was more sensible than that.
Their last night together was bittersweet for both of them. She had told her mother she was staying with a friend, but they’d stayed at a motel, and each paid half of it. When the sun came up, Paul took off on his borrowed motorcycle. He turned to smile at her, with the sun shining golden on his fair hair, then he waved and disappeared around a corner. She walked home, feeling her heart ache, wondering where he would go now, what challenges he would conquer, what mountains he would climb.
He bought a motorcycle that day with money he had saved, and left for California. He’d called her the day before he took off, but he didn’t come by to see her again. They both knew that their paths weren’t likely to cross again. She knew she would never forget him. He would always be the first boy she’d ever loved.