Chinook

Chapter 4

4

Miranda watched the night.

She’d always found it soothing. Everyone asleep. No demands on her attention. The shadows and the quiet dark the only thing in her life that moved slowly enough to not totally derail her from her own thoughts.

If Mother or Father had known about how many nights she’d spent here, they’d never said anything. Usually it was Tante Daniels who found her here in the mornings and shooed her back to her room with no one the wiser.

There had been a stillness about her that Miranda had appreciated while growing up, even if she hadn’t understood it.

And then, nineteen years ago, the world changed. Or, more accurately, her world changed.

Tante Daniels, Miranda couldn’t even remember her not living on the island, had brought her here to this same couch.

You’re about to turn eighteen, Miranda. There are things you need to know.

Yes, that her parents had died five years ago, and the world they’d left behind was not one iota less confusing than it had been before their deaths.

You’ve completed your bachelor’s degree.

And she’d be returning to the University of Washington the next week to start the dual masters program she'd chosen to prepare her for investigating plane crashes like the one that killed her parents.

And then Tante Daniels had dropped her bomb.

I’m not just your governess. I was your therapist for a decade before your parents died.

Now that she was an adult, Tante Tanya Daniels—Tante was “Aunt” in German, even though they weren’t related—said it wasn’t ethical for her to treat Miranda without her knowledge.

The truth had felt like a betrayal at first.

Not family, not governess, not friend—therapist.

Ever since she was twelve, Miranda had been only too aware of what was happening to her. She’d found all of the test results in her mother’s desk shortly before she died.

Moderate-functioning ASD—Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Subject requires extensive therapy if ever to be even a marginally functioning member of society.

Severe learning and sensory disadvantages.

The list had been long, and each one had been an overwhelming dagger in her heart.

It was Tante Daniels who had helped her turn the blade long before Miranda knew that’s why she was nearly fulltime on her parents’ island.

Prove them all wrong. I know we can do it together.

And they had—Miranda had, as Tante Daniels kept insisting she say. She’d finished high school by the time most of her contemporaries were entering it.

The pressure hadn’t eased since—ever?

She looked over at Jeremy, who had slipped lower on the couch.

In seventeen years of investigating crashes, starting with her own crash while en route to start at the NTSB, she’d always carried the burden alone.

Her teams had shifted over the years, and even on this one, each member was only skilled at certain aspects.

Holly understood the mechanical structure of aircraft and could project backward from the crash debris to estimate what forces had been applied to damage an aircraft.

Mike best understood the one thing she herself understood least: people.

Jon was…

…was her lover, asleep in her bed even now.

Major Jonathon Swift of the US Air Force Accident Investigation Board was a skilled investigator. But his skill was as much in managing a team of experts as it was in doing any aspect of the investigation himself. She’d tried to teach him, but he just didn’t see the clues even when they were spread so clearly across a debris field.

As well as understanding rotorcraft intimately, Andi Wu had proven herself observant in ways that Jon had proved himself incapable of. She also communicated the eccentricities of the American military in ways no one else on her team could manage. A pilot’s view, but useful nonetheless.

And then there was Jeremy.

She’d come to rely on him like no one since Tante Daniels.

If he said something was accurate, there was no need to question the result. She always checked everything he did. Not because she expected to find anything, but rather it was the only way she had to make his findings real in her own mental picture.

“Jeremy?”

He didn’t respond to her whisper. He must have fallen asleep.

If she could clone herself, it would be him.

If she dared to have a child—with a nine-fold increase in likelihood of an autistic parent having an autistic child, she didn’t—it would be a younger version of Jeremy.

She and Tante Daniels had found their way from therapist, through betrayal, to friendship.

“Will you be my friend, Jeremy?” she whispered into the darkness.

He didn’t answer, but she could always hope.

Miranda rose and draped Tante Daniels’ quilt over him. They’d designed and sewn it together. Lessons in planning and cooperation that, she now saw, had also included companionship.

Then she returned to bed, to lie awake beside Jon, listening to the so-full house until the dawn came and she could start the next day.