Page 85 of Air Force One
“Should I build another?” Andi nodded toward the hutch because she couldn’t mean the rabbit or the cherry tree as neither one required building.
“Why?”
“Are you going to start rescuing more rabbits?”
“If they need rescuing.”
Andi’s grip tightened about her waist in an encouraging way. “And fawns? And birds?”
“And abandoned fox cubs.”
“Lost ducklings.”
“Hurt elk.” A herd of Roosevelt elk often wandered across the property, which had required stout fences around each garden and orchard. Though she’d never noticed a hurt one.
“Injured raptors. The birds of prey, not the dinosaurs.”
“Right, because the latter are extinct. It would be illogical to try and rescue those.”
With each one they named, Miranda could see the property as if in double vision. One, her childhood home on Spieden Island and all the wild animals that had been left behind from its brief time as a hunter’s game park. The other, here, a home for animals that didn’t have a home or couldn’t survive in the wild.
“It’s as if all my years chasing air crashes were…” Miranda sighed. “I wish I was better at metaphors.”
“A side track?”
“Like a train that got on the wrong track and was stuck there? Yes, it was.”
“So what track do you want to be on?”
Miranda had to think hard about that one. The first thing outside her family that she’d enjoyed in a while had been helping the injured rabbit. “Enjoyed! Hey, I did enjoy that.” Emotions were so tricky.
“What was the last crash investigation you enjoyed?”
Miranda had to sit in the grass and stare at the sleeping rabbit for a long time while she sorted through them. There’d been hundreds in the twenty-two years since her first investigation. Yet…enjoyed? “Is one supposed to enjoy a plane crash?”
Andi lay down beside her and used a long piece of grass to tickle the back of one of Meg’s ears. “Well, maybe enjoy isn’t the right word. Fascinated by? Energized by?”
“I’m fascinated by whatever I’m working on at that moment. It’s part of being autistic. Energized by?” She again considered each of the crash investigations she’d worked on over the last twenty-two years. Andi understood and waited for her to review the entire catalog mentally. “I can’t think of one.”
She’d been more energized by their belated trip to Chincoteague Island to see the wild horses than by the crash of Air Force One that had occurred just fifteen kilometers out to sea from there. The fire chief on Assateague Island, who technically owned all the horses, had offered fascinating stories of the care of the ponies, the annual swim across the channel, and offered many insights into herd management and care.
“I was energized by helping our bunny.”
Meg twisted and managed to snatch the grass stalk from Andi’s grasp. As soon as she turned away, Andi plucked another.
“Would you be energized if we turned this property into a wildlife sanctuary?”
And her double vision of her childhood animal friends whom she’d studied so carefully and the lone bunny happily nibbling on his chard merged into a single vision on this property as if coming into focus for the first time.
Miranda managed a nod. She could imagine looking forward to each day tending those like her childhood friends. Autistics tended to have a strong affinity for animals and she could feel the joy of dealing with them daily. They weren’t like humans, always filled with a dozen conflicting emotions. Instead there was a purity of simply being what they were.
Except she wasn’t alone.
“How about you, Andi? What do you want?”
Andi lay in silence for as long a time as Miranda had before speaking. She didn’t even tease Meg’s ears. “I think Drake’s death was somehow one too many. I lost my copilot to a Russian grenade in Syria. I had lost teammates in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places before that. I’ve been crawling around wrecks with you for almost five years and we’ve seen a lot of dead people. I wouldn’t mind spending my time with things that are alive.”
“Animals die too, you know.”
