The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

"Shall I drive?" she said. Never had she liked my driving; it was too distracted for her, unwatchful.

"It doesn 't matter," I said. "I'm sitting in front of the steering-wheel, I might as well drive."

We rode together without speaking, forty miles through the night to the Phoenix airport. I parked the truck,

waited quietly with her to check her baggage, wishing for something to say that hadn't been said, walked with her toward the gate.

"Don't bother," she said. "I can take it from here. Thank you. We'll be friends, OK?"

"OK."

" 'Bye, Richard. Drive ..."... carefully, she would have said, drive carefully. Not now. Now I could drive any way I wanted. " 'Bye."

"Goodbye." I leaned to kiss her, but she turned her head.

My mind was a slow grey blur. I was doing something irrevocable, like diving out the door of a jump-plane two miles up.

Now I was in reach of her; I could touch her arm if I wanted.

She walked away.

Now it was too late.

A thoughtful person considers, makes a decision, acts on it. Never is it wise to go back and change. She had done that once with me, and she had been wrong. To do it again was not worth another word between us.

But Leslie, I thought, I know you too well for you to leave! I know you better than anyone in the world, and you know me. You are my best friend of this lifetime; how can you leave? Don't you know I love you? I've never loved anyone and I love you.

Why hadn 't I been able to say that to her? She was still walking away and she wasn 't looking back. Then she was through the gate, and she was gone.

There was that sound like wind once more in my ears,

a propeller turning slow, patient, waiting for me to climb back aboard and finish out my life.

I watched the gate for a long time, stood there and watched it as though she might suddenly come running back through it and say oh Richard how foolish we both are, what silly geese to do such a thing to each other!

She didn't, and I didn't run through the gate to catch her.

The fact is that we are alone on this planet, I thought, each of us is totally alone and the sooner we accept that, the better it is for us.

Lots of people live alone: married and single, searchers without finding, at last forgetting they ever had searched. That had been my way before, and so it will be again. But never, Richard, never let anyone come so close to you as that one came.

I walked out of the airport, no hurry, to the truck, drove no hurry away from the terminal.

There, a DC-8 lifting off westward, was she aboard?

A Boeing 727 followed, then another. Deck-angles tilting high as they took off, so high; wheels coming up, flaps coming up, turning on course. That was my sky she was flying, this moment, how can she leave me on the ground?

Out of your mind with it. Put it out of your mind, think of it later. Later.

My launch-time next day put me the eighteenth sailplane in line for takeoff. Full water-ballast in the wings, survival kit aboard, canopy marked and turn-point cameras checked.

How empty the trailer had been all the sleepless night, how completely still!

Is it true she's gone? Somehow I can't believe . . .

I lay back in the contoured pilot's seat, checked the flight controls, nodded OK to the crew outside, didn 't even know his name, rocked the rudder-pedals left-right-left: Let's go, towplane, let's go.

Like an aircraft-carrier catapult-launch, in slow motion. A great thrashing and roaring from the towplane out ahead on its rope, we creep forward for a few feet, then faster, faster. Speed gives power to the ailerons, to the rudder, to the elevators, and now we lift a foot off the ground and wait, runway blurring below, while the towplane finishes its takeoff and begins to climb.