PILOT LIGHTS - Chapter 1

Four Years and Two days ago: Carol watched as her baby boy climbed into the racecar. He had that look in his eyes, the look he had had since he was a small child. His eyes would glass over and all he could see was the stars or the challenge – the race. Carol was of course proud of her baby boy, he was going to be a famous racecar driver, but she was always sensible too. What if, what if he was in a wreck, what if something terrible happened to him, what if she lost her baby boy? That last one was the one that bothered her the most, what if she lost her baby boy like she had lost her husband? What would she do?

Everyday when Carol would look in her son’s eyes, she felt a pain deep down inside. That twinkle in his eyes was the same look his father would get. That look that took her husband away from her, that wanderlust, the need for the race, the need for the adventure, the need for the challenge. Carol’s husband was a fighter pilot. He was an amazing pilot, the envy of his squad. His friends would joke that he wanted to die, it wasn’t however true. He had no fear, when he was in the air, he was alive, and he could never fear being alive, he feared landing, he feared the day when they would no longer let him fly. He would come home at night and just stare at the stars. Carol would wake up at three or four in the morning and see him standing at the window, staring at the stars. The first year or two she would ask him what he was doing, and he would never have an answer, as if she had awoken him sleep walking. It was his love of the night sky that took them away from the city and out to the country was the stars could be seen so clearly.

That look in Carol’s son’s eyes was that look that her husband had when he would stare at the night sky. She would consider herself lucky from time to time that her son loved the racecars and not the flying, but they were both very dangerous and she knew that the racecar would take her son away just as the flying had taken her husband. Sometimes late at night when Carol was alone in her bed and couldn’t sleep, she would look up into the stars too. She was trying to find what it was that held such sway over the men in her life. Sometimes very late at night she would talk to those stars. Occasionally her star crossed conversations where her way of talking to her lost husband, her way of talking to her son who was always so far away. Her son was always somewhere else when she talked to him and her husband was just somewhere else. Once or twice a year she would have a drink when she couldn’t sleep, and then another. On one balmy September night two years ago her neighbors even had to call the police on her. She was yelling at the stars. She was screaming profanities that would make sailors blush. If someone were listing very closely though, through all the twist in turns of her rants they would find that she was furious at those stars, that took her husband from her and where well on their way to taking her only son to.

After four years of Carol’s son racing motorcars, Carol received the phone call she had feared, the call that her baby boy was not coming home ever again. Much like his father before him, the stars took called another one of her boys away to a place beyond the clouds. She discovered unfortunately what it was she would do if she lost her only child. Carol moved back to the big city, she found an apartment in the brightest part of town, a place so bright that no one ever saw the stars at night. And on the rare occasion that a streetlight had burned out Carol was the first to call the city works. She spent the rest of her days never looking at the stars again, she never figured out what it was in those stars that her men so longed for and she spent the rest of her life hoping that she never would.