The Night Shift Pilot

Dalton Jansen had been cleaning the crew lounge at Reno-Tahoe for eleven months now, and he had a system for the overnight shift that he could run almost without thinking, which was good, because at three in the morning he didn't want to think. The room sat at the far end of the concourse, past the closed shops and the dark concession stands, with a row of reclining seats along one wall and a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over an empty runway where the chalk lines from yesterday's snow were still visible under the edge lights. Most nights nobody used the lounge at all, or if they did it was a cargo crew from Anchorage who slept through his whole pass and never spoke to him, and that suited him fine. He was fifty-five years old, his knees ached when the weather turned, and he had learned in the last few years that quiet was not the same thing as empty, even if it took him a long time and a mop bucket to figure out the difference.

The floor near the window always needed extra attention because the deicing trucks dragged slush in on their boots during the winter months, and he was working that stretch with slow, careful strokes when he noticed the woman in the second reclining seat. She was in a pilot's uniform, the jacket folded over the armrest and the white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she was reading a paperback that had been read so many times the spine looked like an accordion. Her shoes were off and tucked under the seat, and the runway lights flickered in the glass behind her in a slow rhythm, on and off, on and off, the way they always did when the tower was running its overnight test.

He should have just mopped around her and moved on. That was the job, the entire arrangement, you worked around sleeping pilots and never said a word. But something about the way she sat, one knee drawn up and the book held close to her face like she was arguing with it, pulled at a thread in his memory that he had not touched in years, and he stood there with the rag dripping in his hand longer than any man with a wet floor ought to.

It was the gait he had noticed first, actually, before he even saw her face, because she had gotten up maybe twenty minutes ago to refill her coffee and he had watched her walk to the bar and back without thinking about it at all, and then his brain had finished the arithmetic while he was wringing out the mop. People walk the way they walk. He had watched that particular walk cross a hundred kitchens and about four hundred airports, a little roll in the shoulders, a slight favoring of the left leg from an old skiing thing she never got fixed, and he had thought, no, that is a coincidence, you are a fifty-five-year-old man mopping a floor at three in the morning and you are not going to decide that a stranger is your ex-wife because her leg is bad.

Then she turned her head to look out the window, and the edge lights caught the line of her jaw, and that was that.

He finished the strip of floor he was on, because stopping in the middle of a mopping is the kind of thing that gets noticed, and then he pushed the bucket along the wall until it ran out of wall, and then there was nothing left between him and her seat but a straight line of wet tile. He walked it. The rag was still in his hand and he wiped it absently across the handle of the bucket as he went, buying himself four extra seconds, which was ridiculous, because he had married this woman at twenty-eight and separated from her at fifty-one and no amount of extra seconds was going to make the sentence come out smooth.

He stopped at her seat, close enough that the smell of the floor cleaner mixed with her coffee, and he looked down at the top of her head, and he heard himself say her name like a question.

"Faye?"

She answered without looking up.

"Occupied," she said, turning a page. "Crew rest is technically for crew, but I suppose if you're holding a mop the rules get a little..."

She stopped. The page stayed half turned under her thumb. Then she looked up, and her eyes went from his face to his name tag and back to his face, and the book lowered slowly into her lap like she had forgotten she was holding it.

"Dalton Jansen," she said, and this time it was not a question at all.

"Hi," he said. "Faye Costa."

"Nobody's called me that out loud in years," she said. "Half the airline still calls me Jansen. The paperwork took forever." She looked at the mop, the bucket, the rag. "You're cleaning the crew lounge."

"Eleven months now," he said. "It's overnight, mostly. It's quiet."

"I would've picked quiet too," she said, and then she made a small sound that was almost a laugh and pressed her hand flat against her mouth. "God. I'm sorry, that came out..."

"No," he said, "it's true, that's kind of the whole reason I took it. Quiet."

She sat up in the seat and put her feet back into her shoes, which he understood was her way of deciding this was a real conversation and not a hallway one, and she gestured at the recliner beside hers with the paperback. "Sit down, Dalton. Before you fall over. You look..."

"Older," he said.

"I was gonna say tired," she said. "But yeah, both, and I'm sure I do too, so don't even start."

He sat. The bucket sat next to his knee like a chaperone, and he realized he was still holding the rag and put it over the bucket rim, and for a while neither of them said anything and the runway lights flickered on and off in the window and somewhere far off on the field a truck beeped its way backward.

"So," she said. "Santiago."

"That's a long leg," he said.

"Thirteen hours, give or take, and then a mechanical in Reno of all places, so they pulled the flight and put me on mandatory rest, and here I am, in a lounge at three in the morning, reading a book I've read maybe nine times." She held it up so he could see the cover. "You remember this one."

"The one you left on the nightstand for four years," he said. "Yes."

"I did not leave it," she said. "I was reading it."

"You were reading the same page for four years, Faye."

"That's reading," she said, and this time the laugh came all the way out of her, short and surprised, like it had gotten out before security cleared it. Then she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and shook her head. "Okay. How. How are you here, of all the lounges, in all the terminals, in the whole..."

"Reno," he said. "It was the closest job to the apartment when I moved out of the house. And then the apartment went too, and the job stayed, because it turned out I like the job, and I didn't want to start over again at fifty-four just because the geography was embarrassing."

"Is it embarrassing?" she asked.

"A little," he said. "A man my age pushing a mop at three in the morning, some days it feels like one thing and some days it feels like another."

"Which thing tonight?" she asked, and she asked it looking straight at him, the way she used to ask things, flat and level, no mercy in it and no cruelty either, just the question, all the way to the bottom of the question.

He looked at the window instead of at her, because the runway lights were easier, and he took his time with it, which she let him do.

"Tonight it feels like the right one," he said. "It's an honest job. You see a mess, you clean it up. Nobody thanks you but the room's better for it. That's more than I can say for the last ten years of my old one."

"And which of us is the mess," she said, not quite a question, and he didn't answer it, and she didn't push it, and they sat there for a minute in the flicker of the lights.

Then her pager went off on the seat beside her, a short sharp chirp, and she picked it up and read the little screen and groaned.

"Crew scheduling," she said. "They want to know my rest status. If I answer this they'll reroute me by morning and if I don't they'll call the lounge phone, and the lounge phone is..."

"Twenty feet away," he said. "I know. I clean around it."

She looked at the pager, and then at him, and then at the pager again, and her thumb hovered over the button like it was the paperback page, half turned, going nowhere.

She didn't answer the pager. She put it face down on the armrest like a thing that had lost the argument, and when Dalton raised his eyebrows at her she just shrugged, and the shrug said everything her mouth wasn't ready to say yet, that she'd spent twenty-six years answering pagers on schedule and tonight she was going to let one sit there and chirp itself out.

"They'll call the phone," he said.

"Then they'll call the phone," she said. "And I'll let it ring. There's a certain poetry in that, don't you think, the great Faye Jansen ignoring a lounge phone at three in the morning while a man with a bucket watches her do it."

"Faye Costa," he said, before he could stop himself.

She turned her head slowly, and he couldn't read her face at first, and then he could, and it was surprise, plain and unguarded, the kind she'd never been good at hiding even in a cockpit.

"You read my paperwork," she said.

"Your name was on the crew manifest taped up by the gate. I walk past it four nights a week." He turned the rag over in his hands. "Costa. I always figured you'd go back to it eventually. You talked about it enough, whenever your mother called."

"It took two years of forms and one very rude woman at the records office," she said. "And then I got my new license in the mail and it felt like getting a diploma I hadn't earned, which is a stupid thing to feel about your own name, but there it was anyway."

"It's not stupid."

"Well," she said, and she let it sit there, the way she did, and then she stood up and pressed her hand to her left hip the way she always did after sitting too long, the old skiing injury announcing itself, and she said, "I need the restroom, and I need to walk, and you're on the clock, so walk with me, Dalton Jansen, and tell me what you do at three in the morning when the airport is empty."

The hall to the restroom was narrow, meant for one person at a time, and his cart was parked in the middle of it because he'd left it there an hour ago when the night was simpler, and she got to it first and put both hands on the rail of it and shoved it sideways against the wall without breaking stride. Her hand came back and brushed his elbow on the follow-through, just the back of her knuckles against his sleeve, and neither of them apologized for it and neither of them mentioned it, and they kept walking like that was a normal thing that people did, that their bodies had a standing agreement their mouths had never signed.

"Careful," he said, "that cart has opinions."

"Everything has opinions," she said. "The cart, the pager, the runway. You learn to overrule them."

The restroom door swung shut behind her and he stood in the hall with his hands loose at his sides, looking at the chalk lines on the runway through the dark glass, thinking about her knuckles on his sleeve, and he was still standing there when she came back out and washed and dried her hands at the little sink in the hall, and she caught him in the mirror and didn't look away, which was its own kind of conversation.

"You didn't walk with me," she said.

"No," he said. "Felt like a line I shouldn't cross yet."

"Yet," she said, and dried her hands, and turned around. "I heard that."

"I know you did."

Then his radio crackled on his hip, the dispatcher's flat overnight voice filling the little hall, something about the AV cart in corridor C, the projector cable cart needed restocking before the morning briefings, and Dalton closed his eyes for one second, one whole second, before he keyed the mic and said he was on it.

"Corridor C," Faye said. "That's the one over, isn't it."

"Two doors down. Ten minutes, maybe less if the cable drawer is organized, which it never is."

"Go," she said. "I'm not going anywhere. Mandatory rest, remember. You have me until roughly dawn."

He went, pushing the cart ahead of him like a man who'd forgotten how to walk without one, and corridor C was exactly as bad as he'd expected, the cable drawer a nest of HDMI and VGA and adapters nobody had labeled since before he was hired, and he counted out cleaning supplies and spare trash bags and did the whole job in a kind of trance, and it took eleven minutes instead of ten, and when he pushed the cleaning cart back into the lounge she hadn't moved. Same recliner. Same angle. The paperback was closed on her knee and her hands were folded on top of it and the pager was still face down on the armrest, and the runway lights flickered twice while he stood in the doorway looking at her, like the tower was testing something and couldn't decide.

"You're still here," he said.

"I said I would be," she said. "You know, I used to count on you saying exactly what you meant and then doing it. It was one of the three things I liked best about you."

"What were the other two," he said, wheeling the bucket back to its spot by the window, and she smiled, a small one, and didn't answer right away, and he let the silence do its work because he'd learned that from her, twenty-three years of learning things from her.

"The way you drove at night," she said finally. "You never rushed it, never braked late, you just, the car moved like it already knew where it was going. And your hands. You have good hands, Dalton. Still do, I noticed, when you were wringing that rag." She unfolded them from the