He Rescued a Dog Over My Gran, So I Took His Helicopters novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Minutes
Victoria watches her husband's helicopter turn away from Dutch Ravine Road as Gran dies, then signs his divorce papers with bandaged hands, and the chief pilot says the Priority Line was never his ex's.
My grandmother stopped breathing at 4:17 a.m. on a mountain road, with the fire on both sides of us and a helicopter four minutes away.
I know the time because I was watching my phone.
The company app showed every aircraft as a blue dot.
My husband, Beck, had made me install it the week he started the company.
At 4:09 I called him from the ditch where I had dragged Gran out of her car.
A burned power pole lay across the hood, and the road behind us was orange.
He picked up on the second ring.
"I've got a bird on you, Vic," he said. "Four minutes. Stay with her."
"She can't breathe, Beck."
"Four minutes. I promise."
He used his calm voice, the one that settles donors, and I believed him.
Gran gripped my sleeve with her good hand.
"The blue folder," she said. "In the glove box. Don't you let that one burn."
I wrapped my sweater around my fist and opened the car door.
The handle took the skin off both my palms anyway.
I found the folder and zipped it inside my jacket and went back to her.
The dot hung over the ridge above us.
I could hear the rotors through the smoke, and Gran smiled at the sound.
"There he is," she said.
At 4:13 the dot turned north.
I watched it go until I could not hear it anymore.
"It's circling," I told her. "It's coming back."
It did not come back.
Gran's hand went loose on my sleeve at 4:17.
I said her name until a ground crew found us, a long time later.
Eleven days after that, my phone showed me what the helicopter had been doing.
Hollenbeck Air had posted a video, and four million people had watched it.
Drone footage showed our best aircraft landing on a ridge at 4:13 a.m., and a woman running toward it with a golden retriever.
The caption said: "Our crew never leaves anyone behind. Meet Duchess."
In the second clip Beck stood in the glow of the rotor lights with his arm around Sheridan Merriweather.
Sheridan was his first love, and she kept horses on the next ridge.
She was crying into the dog's neck, and Beck was smiling at the camera.
Forty thousand people had left hearts under it.
Beck and I had not spoken since the hospital, so that night I sent him one message.
"The dot turned at 4:13."
His answer came the next morning.
"I know you're hurting, but you're being dramatic. Sheridan lost her barn. Gran was 81. Please don't make this about the helicopter."
I looked at that for a long time with my bandaged hands in my lap.
Then I typed: "Send me the papers."
His mother came to the house that afternoon with a lawyer and a pot of soup.
Phyllis Hollenbeck had always been kind to me when nobody else in that family was.
"Sit down, sweetheart," she said. "Look at your poor hands."
She had bought a thick foam grip for a pen so I could hold it through the gauze.
The lawyer laid out the divorce papers on the kitchen island.
At the bottom of each page it said: Prepared September 19.
That was three weeks before the fire.
"Where is Beck?" I asked.
"At the base," Phyllis said. "The state contract vote is next month, and he can't be seen anywhere near this."
I asked what I was giving up, and the lawyer said it was standard.
I would get ninety thousand dollars and my car.
I would waive any claim to Hollenbeck Air, which I had never wanted.
I did not argue, and I did not read the middle pages.
I fit the foam grip over the pen and signed my name through the gauze, one slow letter at a time.
Phyllis's eyes went to my bag on the chair, where a corner of the blue folder stuck out.
"Is that all you took from that road?" she asked.
"It's what Gran asked me to take."
"Of course," Phyllis said, and she smiled.
So I picked up my bag and walked out of that house.
At the end of the driveway a white truck was parked with its engine off.
It had the Hollenbeck Air logo on the door.
The man at the wheel was Jude Merrick, Beck's chief pilot.
I knew his voice better than his face, because he worked nights.
For three years, whenever Beck did not pick up, I had called the company's Priority Line to ask where my husband was.
Jude always answered on the first ring.
"Not tonight, Victoria," he would say, and I would say, "Thanks, Jude," and hang up.
He rolled down his window now and looked at my hands.
"You stopped calling the line," he said.
"It's Sheridan's line," I said. "Beck told me that my first week. I only called when nothing else worked, and I wasn't going to call it on that road."
Jude's jaw moved.
"I answered that line every night for three years, Victoria."
He kept his eyes on mine.
"It was never hers."
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