Work Text:
London, 1895
Myka Bering, investigative reporter for the New York World, had formulated some ideas about what she would encounter upon arriving at the estate of the Wells family. She had been sent to look into sensational stories of an inventor—a woman inventor, the daughter of said Wells family—who claimed to be on the verge of a major breakthrough in flight. Specifically, balloon flight…. but balloons had been decorating the air in Europe and America for at least a century; everyone knew that. What could be done with them that had not already been done? Myka’s editors also had expressed their doubts about whether a woman, this Helena Wells, could truly be the source of such extravagant claims. Surely, they had said, some man is behind it. The woman is involved merely to attract attention. “To London you go!” Mr. Pulitzer himself had directed Myka. “Woman reporter debunks claims of woman inventor! That’s a story that’ll sell papers!” And however much Myka might have wished that could be merely “reporter” debunking “inventor,” she too had to acknowledge that Mr. Pulitzer’s formulation would be more likely to catch readers’ attention.
Which was the entire point of news reporting, in any event: to draw attention to stories of significance. An overarching story that Myka has attempted to tell, over the course of her nearly decade-long career, is that of her own skepticism. She has made her journalistic name by maintaining an attitude of doubt, by refusing to believe what she is told, by instead finding out for herself. Women are expected to believe whatever words people say to them, as if they had no mental faculties whatsoever, no ability to think, to consider. Well, Myka has considered many subjects in her time as a reporter: the plight of orphans in mismanaged facilities, the susceptibility of politicians to the temptations of bribery, the fraudulent claims of all manner of quacks seeking fame and fortune. She would of course subject Helena Wells to that same close scrutiny, and she had expected to find the words of this “inventor” full of similar attempts at deception. This woman would betray herself, Myka had been certain. She would betray her real purpose, or the purpose—and identity!—of whatever personage she served as sensationalist veneer.
And yet Myka’s first meeting with Helena Wells does not match her expectations. She expected calculated behavior; instead she finds that the woman, inventor or no, fizzes with a strange intensity, a near-mania that seems to Myka to be ruthlessly authentic. She is an eccentric specimen to boot, dressed in men’s trousers, her hair carelessly bound—but Myka registers these details only peripherally, as things to be written down later, when she will be describing her feature article’s central figure. Myka finds now that rather than focusing on such trivia, she is barely able to disengage her eyes from those of Helena Wells, even when Helena Wells makes such inappropriate comments as, “Come now, Miss Bering, own up to it. You are as much of an oddity as I myself am. A lady reporter sent to investigate the peculiarity of a lady tinker? Coincidence cannot have brought about your assignment to this curiosity.”
“I am a reporter seeking the truth, Miss Wells,” Myka says. No matter that Helena Wells has so rapidly pierced to the heart of Myka’s own apprehensions. At that thought, Myka does look away.
But she looks back in surprise when Helena Wells declares, “Well, here is the truth, then: through my efforts, humanity will soon have dominion over the skies!”
“I beg your pardon?” Myka asks. She tries to keep her voice mild, but… perhaps Helena Wells is authentic in a rather different way than Myka had first imagined? Perhaps she is authentically insane?
Her next words do not relieve Myka’s mind in any way: “I shall be the first to truly pilot the apparatus!”
“Pilot it. You mean… steer it? Steer a balloon?”
Myka’s subject nods, with a positive violence. “I believe that if one attaches the appropriate technology, actual navigation can be accomplished. And then, my dear Miss Bering, then we shall see a revolution such as has never been seen before! We mortals will be at the mercy of the wind no longer!”
Myka says, “I don’t feel like I’m much at the mercy of the wind now.”
“You are earthbound, Miss Bering. A lowly state indeed. Just imagine: control of movement through the sky…” Helena—for Myka has been exhorted to call her Helena, and “Miss Wells” does seem rather formal for someone who is so casual, so unladylike, as to shove her hands into trouser pockets, to then move those same hands to take her hair down and twist it back up again, unthinkingly, as if she were as free here on the ground as she claims humans will one day be in the air—Helena is smiling a zealous smile as she says this, and Myka is appalled at her own disinclination to find that smile a counterfeit in any way.
“But what prompted this?” Myka asks. “How could you even have generated such ideas?”
“Have you never wanted to leave it all—not behind, but below? To ascend into the heavens? To join not the winged creatures but the very clouds themselves? To feel so exalted?” She sounds like a revivalist, preaching to a flock of one.
But Myka has no wish to find herself among the converted. She decides to take the tack proposed by her editors: she says, as casually as she can, that Miss Wells—Helena—certainly seems to receive significant help from male figures. Financial support, at the very least, from the senior Mr. Wells. “And I understand that your brother Mr. Charles Wells spends a great deal of time with you here as well,” Myka says.
Helena shrugs. “Yes, I have a father and a brother, as many women do. As indeed you might, Miss Bering. Even a journalist may have a family, may she not?”
“I have a father.”
“And does this father of yours—Mr. Bering, I presume—write your exposés, Miss Bering?”
“Of course not!”
“And yet the name under the title would still be ‘Bering,’” Helena says, as if musing idly, “whether it is Mr. Bering or Miss Bering.”
Myka is suddenly tired of hearing her father’s name. It is hers, but it is also her father’s, so she says, “Please stop. Call me Myka, will you?”
Helena smiles. Her zeal is ever so slightly contained. “Myka. Let us see if I can prove to you that I am what I say I am. Then you will write about me, and I will see if you are what you say you are.”
Over the course of several days, Helena shows Myka each stage in her work: her initial drawings of what appear to be sails to attach to the balloon’s netting. Her attempts at devising an appropriate controlling apparatus. The small models and larger prototypes she constructed. And finally there is her first full-scale attempt, the pieces of which lie on the floor of her workroom in mute testimony to her lack of success. “But I am undaunted,” she declares to Myka. “I have modified the system, and my next flight will constitute a victory!” The light about her is unmistakable, even as she gazes with some mournfulness upon a pile of broken bamboo sticks (“alas for my fine masts!”), and Myka finds herself beginning to believe that what she is seeing is real: this woman is truly an inventor, with thoughts and skills equal—or, no, superior!—to those of any man. The idea takes Myka’s breath away.
But Myka is a journalist: she is here not to have her breath stolen by a romantic personality of any sort, but to report on the actual facts of a situation. She tries to trip Helena up by raising the topic of other approaches to navigating the air: Count von Zeppelin in Germany, for example, and his dream of heavy airships. Helena has knowledge of, and scoffs at, this work. “Engines!” she exclaims. “We take to the air to escape such infernal noise. They have their uses of course, here on the dirt of the earth, but the sky is a land of silent majesty. How wrong, how misguided of any of us to try to change its very nature!”
Myka says, with as much restraint as she can muster in the face of such devotion, “You are a strange one, Helena Wells.”
Helena Wells now brings that strange intensity to bear upon Myka herself. “I have made myself familiar with the work that appears under that Bering name of course,” she says. “And what it says of you… you are a challenging one, Myka Bering. So here we are, strange and challenging. What are we to do about that?”
Myka is about to dismiss her with a quick “Nothing whatsoever,” but before she can utter the words, their gazes catch and hold. Strange and challenging indeed, Myka thinks, and she cannot look away. Why this staring should mean that they move closer to each other, she does not know, but they had been separated by a dinner table’s length at least, and now they are not. Now they are close enough that the reach of an arm would lead them to touch, and why that should seem imminent, even inevitable—Myka does not know that either, but now: imminent. Inevitable.
Until Myka hears a soft “ahem” behind her, that is, and Charles Wells is saying, “Helena, Father wishes to see you.”
Helena exhales, releasing the tension that has gathered between her and Myka. She quirks an eyebrow; then she is gone.
Charles Wells regards Myka for a long moment. “Do I need to apologize for my sister’s behavior, Miss Bering?” he asks.
Myka shakes her head. “No. Not to me. But is that something you have to do… regularly?”
“May I trust that you will not put this into your newspaper?”
“Off the record. All right.”
He says, as if offering a real confidence, “My sister is somewhat unconventional.”
Such understatement makes Myka laugh. “That is self-evident, Mr. Wells.”
“Well,” he says, with a bit of a huff, “you are self-possessed. So I will simply say, please do call upon me for help if she distresses you in any way.”
Myka wants to tell him, “She does not distress me. She unsettles me, but I do not think you can help me with that.” What she does say to Helena, later, is, “Your brother cares for you. He cares for your reputation as well.”
Helena snorts. “My brother cares for his own reputation.” Then she softens. “But he does care for me. He is the greatest of help in my strange endeavors: I could do none of it without Charles. For flights, one needs an aide-de-camp, of sorts, on the ground, and if there is one thing that can be said of my brother, the man is game.”
“And he truly doesn’t work on any of your designs with you?”
“Are you truly still on about that? My brother is a fine fellow, but he couldn’t design a tabletop. He does, however, place very knowledgeable bets on horse races.” She looks more closely at Myka. “He is a fine fellow. I don’t wish to give you an incorrect impression, not if you… like my brother.”
“I like your brother fine,” Myka says, but while she finds it sweet that Helena seems to care for her brother as much as he cares for her, she does not understand why Helena is so concerned about Myka’s impression of him. She is not here for Charles Wells. She watches as Helena begins to test a series of pulleys attached to a swinging bamboo arm, and she writes, in her reporter’s notebook, “Miss Wells, at work, is a picture of beautiful concentration.” She reads what she has written. She crosses out the word “beautiful” and replaces it with “diligent.”
****
Helena takes three weeks to construct her new sails, masts, and rigging. Myka spends those weeks watching her work, and in that time she files two stories: one about the basics of ballooning, as the art now stands—she wants to prepare readers for what she hopes is to come—and one (with Helena’s nonchalant blessing) about the eccentricities of a woman who seeks to bring about a revolution in the air. “IS MY CYNICAL REPORTER PERSUADED QUERY WILL THIS WORK” Mr. Pulitzer cables her. Myka cables back, “DISBELIEF SUSPENDED UNTIL TEST FLIGHT STOP CONFIRMATION SOON”.
Myka is persuaded, at the very least, that while Charles is, yes, frequently present, he is there because he and his sister do get along so amiably, because he (“out of all the people in the world,” Helena says) does not seem to care how outlandish she is when she is at home; she is simply his sister. He confides to Myka that Helena will, when venturing into the wider world, sometimes make an effort at greater conformity, at least in appearance, which he does appreciate. He imagines, however, that should this “balloon folly,” as he calls it, succeed as Helena predicts, she will drop any such pretense. “Will that bother you too terribly?” Myka asks.
Charles offers her a resigned grin. “I imagine the fact of her changing the world will overshadow all else. What’s a pair of trousers between siblings at that point?”
Later, Helena comments, “You and Charles are getting on well.”
Myka responds, “He has great insight into your character.”
“So you talk about me, do you?”
“We have little in common but an interest in you.” She stops; that sounds somehow too familiar. “Your work, I mean.”
Helena looks, for a moment, as if she will say something. But she swallows whatever words she may have intended, and she turns back to that work.
****
One afternoon, as that work is nearing completion, Helena turns to Myka. She says, matter-of-factly, “You’ll come with me of course.”
“I… with you where?”
Helena seems to shimmer with delight. “To the sky,” she says. “In the montgolfier.”
And that is how Myka finds herself, in the company of Helena and Charles, on a vast expanse of ground on the Wells estate, gazing upon an enormous silk envelope that has been filled with coal gas from a utility line. “Gaslights dim, in town, while the inflation is occurring,” Helena says avidly as she gazes upon her handiwork. “It really does require quite a volume of the stuff.” The day is gloomy, and those gaslights might have been needed. But Helena of course cares for nothing but her balloon.
Given the application of the sails and their accompanying apparatus, it is like no balloon Myka has ever seen. She has examined Helena’s drawings closely, of course, but they did not prepare her for gazing up at this looming reality. When she looks at what is on the ground, however, the sight seems more familiar: Charles and Helena have attached the hoop and the basket in which Helena (and Myka!) will travel, plus several lines that they are taking great care to disentangle and hold apart from one another. Sandbags hold the basket down. Myka had offered to help with all of this physical labor, but Helena refused. “You must observe, for your story,” she had said.
Now she holds out a hand to Myka. “Are you ready?” she asks.
Myka is not ready at all, but she nods and takes Helena’s hand. Helena boosts her to help her climb into the basket, but Myka’s skirts tangle, and she tumbles ungracefully over the edge. “I see why you are so devoted to your trousers,” Myka says, as Helena hops nimbly in after her.
“Utilitarian,” Helena agrees cheerfully. She heaves several sandbags out onto the grass as Charles hangs onto the side of the basket. “What is your sense, brother of mine?” she asks. “Is it straining to escape your grasp?”
Charles’s face is turned pink from exertion. “What do you think? Give the damn order, Helena, or you will lose your chance to perform your little captain’s ritual.”
“Very well,” Helena says, and she shouts, “Hands off!”
Charles drops his hands, and immediately, just like that, he himself seems to be dropping away from them, becoming smaller and smaller and smaller with astonishing rapidity. Myka looks up, looks down again, and now she can barely see him; the ground is simply an expanse of different greens, punctuated by a rooftop here, a copse of trees there.
“What do you think?” Helena asks.
Myka says, “I’m… awestruck.” It is a weak word; someone who writes for a living should come up with something better, but it will have to do for now. “Seeing the world from here…”
Helena nods. “Some call it the angel’s perspective. Its striking nature abates somewhat, the more often you ascend. But there is still that moment, that moment when the earth must relinquish its strong grip, when you feel the lift of escape into the sky… that moment strikes awe into me still, far more so than the view ever did.” She becomes preoccupied with her gauges and controls as they continue their ascent, and Myka is struck further by how quickly not only the sights of the earth have become smaller, but also the sounds. The atmosphere is not silent; rather, it is quiet. She would say it is like the quiet of night, but the quiet of night cannot be seen; to be seen it must be pierced by light and thus disrupted. Yet this quiet she sees all around her, sees it in the cotton tendrils of approaching clouds, in the blurred blue of the surrounding sky. She sees it gathering in Helena, too, when Helena turns again to face Myka. “Do you feel it?” Helena asks.
“Yes,” Myka says. “Everywhere.”
Helena says quietly, “For some time, this had been the only circumstance under which I found some measure of peace… the mad rushing of my brain calmed.”
“You speak in the past tense. Does it no longer bring you tranquility? Or is it my presence that disturbs you?”
She expects a smile, but instead Helena gives her complete seriousness. “Your presence does disturb me,” she says, “though not in the manner you suggest. I find both peace and disturbance in your presence. I find… I find something very like joy in your presence. I find myself wishing, when not in your presence, to be with you once again, to feel that peace, that joy. But I find also, when I am with you, that I wonder if my joy might be greater still, and so I am disturbed. Even here, especially here, in the sky, where there is no figure to pass judgment on me or on you but the sun over our heads, I find myself wondering if my joy might be greater still.” A light Myka recognizes is shining in Helena’s eyes now; her gaze is effervescent. “I wonder if I might kiss you, Myka Bering.”
Myka knows that for once, Helena Wells has spoken in a way that makes her sound, to Myka at any rate, entirely sane: who has the ability to see, or the right to judge, what can and cannot, what should and should not, be done up here, in the sky? So she faces Helena, who wears an expression of open, silent challenge, and she says, “I wonder if you might, Helena Wells. Kiss me if you dare.”
Helena has the grace to breathe for a moment. Then she says, “If I dare? I have wished to dare nothing more, not even this flight, not since you strode your journalistic way into my family’s home. Do you dare?”
They are but inches from each other, inches that might be miles, so far apart do the concerns of the world below keep them. Each is singular; each has done deeds she was repeatedly told she should not, could not; each has prevailed. Is this another of those? Or will it be their undoing? In the end, Myka does not care. She does dare: because of where they are, she does dare. Helena called it a place of peace, but Myka feels that here, now, is the only circumstance under which she has ever, ever found herself free.
That freedom allows her to let loose her hands from the edge of the basket and place them on Helena’s body. That freedom allows her to feel amazement but not shock as Helena leans to her and kisses her. That freedom allows her to accept that kiss, to open her mouth to welcome more of that kiss; that freedom allows her to understand that Helena was right: this is greater joy, made still greater by the possibility of where they are. If they kiss, if they do anything else, who is here to see? The birds, only the birds, and this high in the air, it is only the travelers, the migrators, those who have far more pressing business to occupy their avian minds than the affairs of two amorous women, afloat and in love.
They are amorous. Myka feels her heart flutter, as a bird’s wing. But that is the wrong movement for this, it is small and too fast, timid really. The movement of her blood should be as strong and stately and sure as this great airship’s push through the sky, as strong and sure as Helena’s mouth molding to hers, as strong as Helena’s hands that fall to her hips and pull her closer.
Years ago she had had to threaten to slap Sam Martino when he tried to get fresh with her on her family’s porch after an evening of parlor games. She had declared, “I am not that kind of girl.” In the intervening years, she has in actual fact slapped men; she has made similar declarations, and she has believed them to be true.
As it happens, she was right: she is not that kind of girl. She is this kind, the kind that wants to be borne by the wind but not to feel its movement, to hear nothing but its heavy breath and her own heavy breath and then the happy voice of another, one who says “I will return to kissing you in one moment, just as soon as I have noted our altitude and direction and made the necessary adjustments to the sails.”
Myka writes in her reporter’s notebook, reading aloud as she does so: “Miss Wells pauses in her aesthetic contemplation to do her scientific duty in tending to her apparatus.”
In response to which, Helena looks over her shoulder and quotes back at her, “‘Aesthetic contemplation’? Very well then, shall I contemplate your lips again now? Aesthetically, of course.”
“Of course,” Myka agrees, and then her lips are being contemplated quite enthusiastically. She is soaring, with the sky all around her, with nothing but a balloon and more sky above, and nothing but clouds below.
Far too little time elapses before Helena murmurs, “I hesitate to say it, but we must descend. I have a good idea of where we should be, if the sails have worked, and it will be a decent location to set down.”
They have not seen the ground since they broke through the clouds… or at least, Myka assumes they have not seen the ground. She admits there have been lengths of time when her attention was engaged elsewhere. She leans to Helena and kisses her once more, an extremely promiscuous kiss that puts a look in Helena’s eyes that Myka wants very deeply to see again. “Hold that thought,” she says.
Helena swallows. “If I hold this thought, I will be unable to beach the leviathan.” She in turn bends for one more kiss, in which she makes the thought she is holding rather evident. But she does then direct her attention to her controls. “Here,” she says, then repeats, after a throat-clearing, “Here. Let us speak of mechanics, for your story. I have opened the valve to let some gas escape from the top of the balloon—look up through the mouth; you can see—and so we enter the cloud bank.” How strange it seems to glide down into fog, a fog that in all its chill and damp can be truly felt upon the skin; Myka shudders at the creeping unpleasantness of it until relief comes in the form of Helena’s warm voice: “I will drop the guide-rope as soon as we break the clouds. I will see where we are, and then I will ready the grapnel-hook. From that point it should take but little time to reach the ground. The only instance that might present a problem is—” They are breaking the clouds now, but it is into a driving rain and swirling wind, and suddenly the world is made of dark and noise, such that Myka barely registers Helena mildly saying, “Oh dear.”
“Oh dear what?”
“Oh dear, I believe we are in for what is known as a hard descent.” Helena begins throwing and pulling ropes, throwing and pulling levers, but they must not have emerged from the clouds where Helena intended, because instead of any kind of empty expanse below them, what Myka sees, through the rain, are trees, and more trees, and still more trees. Myka can see that Helena is trying to steer, but it isn’t working: one of her precious sails rips away from the net, taking its rope and sticks, as well as those of several more, with it. They are skimming the treetops now, and Myka feels a lurch as the guide-rope catches on something, then frees itself—“Hold on!” Helena yells, so Myka grabs a rope with one hand and the basket with another and hopes for the best—she realizes what Helena is doing when she sees the gap among the trees, sees Helena grab the cord for the ripping-valve, the one that will deflate the balloon in seconds; it is meant to be pulled the minute the basket hits the ground, but the guide-rope catches again, and Helena falls to the side, cord still in hand. The balloon gives an enormous gasp, and then it is collapsing, ropes and silk trailing, falling; the basket hurtles into a tree and caroms off, down, tumbling, until finally it comes to rest on its side, as if that had been its plan all along: to tip over and decant Myka, just like that, onto the earth once again.
Myka, on that earth, is being rained on. She shakes her head, trying to see through the gloom—for it is far darker down here, under the storm, under the trees, than it had been above—to find Helena. Where could she be?
A voice, from overhead, cries, “Lo! I am hanged!”
For just one minute, Myka is terrified that it is true—so profoundly terrified, in fact, that she will look back on this moment as the moment, the moment of true realization—but then she looks up. Yes, Helena is dangling from some combination of rigging and tree branch, but she is by no means hanged. She is upside down with her arms bound to her sides and her face rapidly reddening, but she is very much alive, and likely to remain that way for some time.
“You don’t look hanged,” Myka tells her. “You look… suspended.”
Helena swings herself a little, trying to wiggle an arm free. “If I could only get hands on my knife, I would cut myself down.”
Myka looks down and wipes rain from her face. “I have a knife. Hold on a minute, and I’ll climb up there and cut you loose.”
“Why do you have a knife?”
“You said you’d made yourself familiar with my work!”
“And?” Helena’s expression of that syllable really is far too serene for someone who has just crashed a balloon. Why she feels a need to insult Myka on top of that…
“If you really had, you’d know I’ve had to get myself out of some pretty sticky situations,” Myka tells her.
At that, Helena looks as shamefaced as someone who is hanging upside down in a tree can. “I assumed you were exaggerating for effect.”
“Just as I assumed you were, when you talked about your fabulous ambitions for your balloon.”
“Point taken. Conceded. All the things one could do to points that would signify ‘you win.’”
Myka grumbles, “You’re just saying that because you want me to hurry and get you down.”
“I do want you to hurry; I don’t believe there is any blood remaining in my lower extremities. But the point will remain in your favor.”
“All right,” Myka says. She hoists herself up into the tree and makes her way, branch by branch, to Helena.
“You climb like a monkey,” Helena remarks. “In skirts! Very impressive.”
“Sticky situations,” Myka reminds her.
“Involving tree climbing?”
“In one case, involving fire escapes. Close enough.” She reaches Helena and begins to saw at the rigging ropes.
Much later, rain continues to fall. Myka and Helena are huddled under the basket, which is now itself tilted half upside down, propped up on two large, broken tree-limb staves. Some remnants of balloon silk are draped over it to make something like a tent.
“Charles will sigh at me,” Helena says, with a sigh of her own. “So will Father, at having to purchase an entirely new balloon. They say I have been keeping all the silkworms in China in business for months as it is.”
“I’m sure they like to keep busy,” Myka says. In her head—her head that is resting on Helena’s shoulder—she is composing the narrative of their flight. Minus several saliently salacious details, of course. “Thank you for colliding with the trees,” she says.
“What? Why?”
“The story will be far more exciting with a dramatic crash at the end.”
“But the flight will seem a failure. And things were going so well this time, too. We did emerge somewhat near my intended destination. If only the weather had cooperated!” She peers at the rain. The rain, unconcerned, continues to fall.
“You seem to have ended up with a similar pile of sticks,” Myka points out.
“Yes, but this pile worked far better in the air than the previous. This represents real progress toward a truly maneuverable airship!”
“I don’t think being able to steer is going to be as helpful as you think.”
“And why not?”
“Well, if you can’t land…”
“I shall live in the airship,” Helena declares. “In the air, always. Certain aspects of life up there might be… quite nice. Wouldn’t you say?” She leans over to Myka, and the rain and the dirt and the breakage recede, for they are of the earth, and Myka and Helena are still creatures of the sky.
****
The rain eventually stops, and they are able to rendezvous with Charles, who does indeed sigh at his sister’s talent for destruction as he helps gather the detritus and load it into the cart he has procured for the journey home. Myka and Helena ride in the back of the cart, with the wounded remnants. Myka steals one kiss, just one, but that one kiss makes Helena smile widely at her for the remainder of the ride.
When they reach the estate, however, Myka explains that she must return to town, to her typewriter, and compose her story. Helena protests, “But I have a typewriter! You could write it here!”
“I don’t think that would work very well,” Myka tells her, “because of the distractions.” She hopes Helena will understand what she means, because she cannot say it directly, because Charles is right there. There will be other, better times to say such words, she is certain.
Myka files her story a day later. She is quite proud of its conclusion: “At the last, the undaunted inventor asserted her continued desire to conquer, even to live in, the air. This reporter has certainly come believe that if anyone could bring about such a miraculous state of affairs, it is Miss Helena Wells.” Mr. Pulitzer and the rest are thrilled, but when Myka visits the Wells estate and begins to convey to Helena the good news, Helena responds by poking moodily at her new pile of broken sticks. She does not look at Myka as she asks, “Did you exaggerate for effect?”
“I didn’t have to,” Myka tells her. “Thank you again for crashing. Mr. Pulitzer thinks that the account of that alone will sell papers. He thinks I should put myself in peril more often, in many and varied circumstances.”
Helena still does not look at Myka. “I suppose you will be leaving then. To put yourself in peril in those other circumstances.”
“I will need to move on to a new story, for I have investigative work to do,” Myka agrees, “but—”
“So do I,” Helena says. “Have work to do. And will do it far better, I suppose, without distractions.”
So was that all she had been: a distraction in the sky? Myka does not want to think that, but if that is the way Helena wants things to be, then Myka will accept that that is how they will be. “I suppose this is goodbye, then,” she says.
“I suppose it is,” Helena shrugs.
If Helena would just look at Myka, that might help Myka determine whether she should say something, if Helena actually wants her to say something, or if she herself even truly has any interest in saying something. Perhaps instead she should just walk away and go home and return to life as it was… “Well,” she finally says. “If you ever find yourself in America.”
“I have never been to America,” Helena says.
Myka tries to leave the door ajar: “You should come. Someday. When you can finally steer your balloon, you can fly it over the Atlantic.”
Helena looks up. “Perhaps I should land directly in front of your door, on the grounds of your family’s home.”
“I live in a boarding house downtown, Helena,” Myka says. “There wouldn’t be enough room in the street for the basket, let alone the balloon.”
“Then I would land with great ostentation outside the city, indeed with such ostentation that the famous investigative journalist Myka Bering will be called to report on the situation. I could somehow contrive to make it seem perilous.” She is beginning to sound a bit more like herself.
“Could you?” Myka asks, and Helena nods. “So how long do you think it might take? For you to make it across, I mean, for this ostentatious landing that might put me in peril?” She tries not to sound eager. Tries not to think it possible… tries not to picture how they would greet each other, in the crazy event that it did happen.
Helena says, instantly, “Once the apparatus is perfected? Five days.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s a simple calculation. The journey is 3500 miles; a balloon of the necessary size might travel 35 miles per hour. I’ve rounded up to account for any difficulties encountered en route.” She seems to be recovering her jaunty tone—but Myka imagines that may be simply because she is considering, once again, the potential success of her work.
“So this is a journey you’ve been… thinking about?” Myka tries.
Helena nods more enthusiastically. “Since a beautiful American journalist walked in, determined to show me up as a charlatan.” Beautiful?, Myka thinks wistfully, as Helena goes on, “What better way to prove to you that I was no such charlatan, I thought, than to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to your very homeland!”
“Oh.” So. Thinking about it to show Myka up.
“But now I think, what better way to prove to you…” Helena pauses. She looks back down at the wreckage. “To prove to you that I do not want this to be our final goodbye.”
“You don’t?” Helena now looks back up at her, and Myka takes a breath. “All right. I don’t either. I’ve…” If she does not say it now, she never will. “I’ve asked Mr. Pulitzer to make me an official foreign correspondent.”
“And has he agreed?” Now threaded through Helena’s voice, Myka thinks she hears, is fear: she is afraid to give in to her avidity, afraid to glow.
“Not yet,” Myka admits. “He’s unpersuaded. But… I could keep asking. If… there were a reason.”
“I can think of a quite significant one,” Helena says. She touches Myka’s face, very gently, and leans to kiss her, just as gently.
“I find that very significant. And very persuasive.”
Helena looks down again. “I had let myself dream of this, even before our flight. I imagined making an argument to you: could we not be useful to each other in our respective pursuits? Your habit of close observation of the world might, I believe, keep me from some of my more… outlandish flights of fancy. I might add that Charles and my father would worship you as a result. And I in turn might… show you a different perspective?”
“That of the angels?” Myka asks, in what she hopes is a tease.
“You must admit it is a singular view. Imagine: intrepid journalist Myka Bering, borne on the wings of those angels to the most exotic locales, reporting on all manner of doings.”
“Doesn’t that reduce you to being a… balloon chauffeur?”
Helena laughs. “Can you in all seriousness believe that the montgolfier is the only technology in which I take an interest? I haven’t even shown you my larger workroom—well, warehouse, really, considering its size. And there is so much more to find out. We will go everywhere and learn everything.” And there is that radiance: it is in her eyes, in her voice…
“I’ll write about it while you study it?” It is an idea too wonderful to be believed, and yet here she is, standing in front of Helena, believing it wholeheartedly.
Helena, clearly warming even further to the notion: “We will be famous!”
Myka says, “Infamous, more likely.”
“The infamous Wells and Bering!” Helena exclaims.
“The infamous Bering and Wells,” Myka corrects.
They kiss again, and this time it is an ascent: beginning gently, as gently as before, then escalating, gaining power, gaining velocity, then breaking, as if above the clouds, into sunlight and peace, nothing but silence and love. “The infamous Bering and Wells,” Myka repeats, but now with a smile. Then, more seriously: “I thought I was alone.”
“So did I,” Helena says.
“You really shouldn’t be alone. I think it’s dangerous.”
“Indeed. Who knows what trouble I might get into?”
“Exactly my point. Who’s going to cut you down from the next tree?”
“Charles might, but he would not be nearly so adept. Nor lovely to behold. And yet in any event, who says there will be a next tree?” Now it is Myka’s turn to refrain from comment, merely to gaze. “Oh, very well. And the next and the next.” Helena smiles, and Myka marks the difference between this and the smile of their first meeting: this is no wild expression of a solitary inventor’s mania. This smile shines on what she and Myka will make, will discover, together. “Could it really be you?” Helena asks, and in her voice Myka now marks what is familiar: it is the same awe that spoke of the lift, the escape into the sky, the flight to a place of peace.
Heaven and earth and everything between: the two of them, together, could find a way to have all of this. Myka says, “I think it had better not be anyone else.”
And indeed, it never was.
END