The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  I can’t say that she looked the same, however. “You’ve cut your braid!” I realized, with a bit of sadness, I must confess.

  “I have to blow it dry now with a special brush, which is kind of a pain,” she said.

  “Well, it looks lovely,” I said, and I meant it. Her pale blond bob suited her heart-shaped face, but she didn’t look like Sarah anymore.

  “Oh, I almost forgot—your chapters,” she said, rifling in her backpack for the next two packets of papers: one titled “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life,” and the other, “Steel in Love.”

  “It’s interesting, reminiscing like this,” I mused, touching the sheaf of papers, still surprised, once again, to see my life neatly typed and collated, with a chapter heading, no less. “It’s as if not a day has gone by. I still feel the same on the inside, and then I look in the mirror and see an old woman staring back. It’s . . . disorienting.” I looked up at Elyse’s smooth skin, realizing she wouldn’t know her own beauty until it was gone.

  “Sol would still recognize you,” she said, with such passionate naïveté that it made me wonder if she’d slipped down the rabbit hole herself. Maybe love is like a check ride, I thought, the test to see if you can keep a clear head when you’re falling and still manage to put the plane down gently.

  “Oh my dear, it was all a very long time ago.” When I leaned back in my chair, my stomach growled.

  “Should I heat up the soup in the microwave or”—she suddenly glanced around—“on the stove?”

  I told her I wasn’t ready to eat just yet, that I’d save it for later. I didn’t want her to see me picking out all the dumplings. Besides, I still didn’t have an appetite. I thanked her for the soup, and the sack of flour—

  “Oh, this is our baby—Henry!” Elyse said, giddily turning over the paper sack so I could see a smiley face drawn on the side. “We got married in psychology class, and now we have to share babysitting duties for the next two weeks.” I gave her a small smile, too tired to let her know that when one is nurturing and caring for one’s own child, it is no longer called babysitting.

  “And who, pray tell, is the father of this lovely sack of flour?” I asked, and Elyse’s cheeks bloomed an even deeper shade of crimson.

  “Holden Saunders,” she said, a shy confession. It occurred to me in that moment that Elyse Strickler would not be a young girl for much longer. How so much could change in a matter of a week. “This flour has my teacher’s autograph on it, so at the end of the project we turn in the same baby,” she added. “But I can buy you more. Send me to the store with a list, and I’ll pick up whatever you need.”

  As I sank into a nearby kitchen chair, I realized with some dismay that, if I never wanted to see the likes of a Meals on Wheels volunteer darkening my doorstep with his specter of grossly inedible food, I would probably have to take her up on that. The whole effort of preparing for Elyse’s arrival—the shower, the dressing, the top curl, and now standing for five whole minutes—had already tired me out. I glanced up at her and smiled: like any good fly girl, she was standing at attention, waiting for her instructions. “So, it seems that my gallbladder has been giving me trouble,” I said, before explaining that the first attack hit after the noodle kugel, followed by the big one two days later, after I had a craving for eggnog and Boston cream pie, followed by four days of intravenous antibiotics before I left the hospital against medical advice.

  “Against medical advice?” Elyse said, her eyes growing wide. “But why?”

  “Well, first of all, I was there too long. One day is too long, when it comes to the hospital. And second, they wanted to remove my gallbladder—at my age! They said with the infection, it would be at risk of rupturing and causing me tremendous complications, all of which were possibly fatal. And I figured, what do I have to lose?” As soon as the words had floated from my lips, I regretted them. Presumably, Elyse’s grandmother, struggling with cancer of some variety, wanted desperately to live, and there I sat, ready to crumple my own life up in a ball and toss it away.

  “I think you should do what they tell you to do,” Elyse said. “I know someone, too—a really good surgeon. He’s a friend of my dad’s.”

  “Yes, well . . .” I sighed and smoothed down the edge of the tablecloth from where I was sitting. “How is your grandmother?”

  Elyse glanced down at her folded hands and shook her head, as if she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud. Finally, she looked up at me. “Did you really mean what you said about sending me to visit her? Because I’d pay you back—I’d type your whole memoir for free.”

  I hesitated, and not because of the cost. “What’s your mother’s story?” I asked. “Why won’t she send you herself?”

  “She said I can’t go until Christmas break. But Aunt Andie says Grandma might not make it that long. Mom says that Aunt Andie’s being a melodramatic pessimist.”

  There were risks to optimism, I knew. It had led me to believe the doctors, when they said Thomas would get better after his stroke. Perhaps if I’d feared the worst, I would’ve been at his bedside to kiss him goodbye.

  “Does your mother know that you come here?”

  “Mom’s not really aware of anything right now,” Elyse admitted. She told me about the other night, when her younger brother Hugh was wheezing, and she’d come upon him in the kitchen, sitting on the counter and squeezing his liquid asthma medication into the nebulizer for a treatment—all by himself. “I mean, he’s five; he’s had asthma since he was two, but still. She never even noticed his cough.”

  I thought of how I’d been not too much older than Elyse when I left home against the wishes of my parents. I thought that if I were dying and my grandson Tyler were alive, I would’ve given anything to see him one last time. I thought that if Elyse’s grandmother didn’t make it until Christmas, surely her mother would wish she’d sent Elyse, and then it would be too late. “My dear, I always mean what I say.” I reached over to lay my hand on top of hers. “Of course I’ll pay for the tickets.”

  After she’d walked me through the baffling process of purchasing airplane tickets online, she wrote down a surgeon’s name and number with specific instructions. By the end of her visit, I knew I would call. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to let Elyse down when her own grandmother was dying, or even my ever-present worry about who exactly would find my body should I succeed in passing away on my own terms. I realized that for the first time in years, it mattered to someone whether I lived or died.

  OF COURSE I WOULD RUN INTO SELENA MARKMANN THREE DAYS later on my way out of the high rise, when, after the hullaballoo of sirens and paramedics last week, I wanted nothing more than to slip anonymously out of the building. It was only three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon, but Selena’s purple eye shadow met the arch of her eyebrows, as if she were ready for a night out Flamenco dancing. “Mary Browning, what happened to you?” Selena said loudly, despite the fact that the lobby was full of people. “Jean and I were saying you’d never missed a group meeting, so we knew it was serious.” I told her that it was nothing of the sort, that I merely dropped the leg of a coffee table on my foot, and I couldn’t walk myself down to the ER. “But . . . you were wearing oxygen,” she said, baffled. I flipped my hand as if waving away a mosquito and said that, according to my husband, the late Dr. Thomas Browning, if a patient is over a certain age and she passes wind, she receives a colonoscopy; if she hiccups, an EKG gets ordered stat; and if she clears her throat, an oxygen mask is applied. Selena just blinked and looked down at my feet, which were clad in my usual Mary Janes. “They gave me a boot, but if it’s not fractured, why bother? And who has time for crutches?” I added, moving quickly away from her and out the door. At least I remembered to limp. When I glanced back, Selena was just standing there in the lobby, holding her packages.

  I RODE A BUS OVER TO SHADYSIDE HOSPITAL AND THEN CROSSED the street to the doctor’s office. After giving the receptionist my name, I took a seat in the waiting room and wasn’t
even halfway finished with the first page of forms when the nurse called me back.

  “But . . . is there a gown?” I asked, after following her down the hall to an office with two chairs facing a desk, rather than an examining table.

  “Oh, he’ll speak to you first in here. Stay dressed,” the nurse said with a smile, and I sat down with some relief, thinking that I already liked his old-fashioned style.

  Just as I was wondering if the doctor was “older”—nearing retirement, but young to me, of course—the door opened and he entered.

  There were two things Elyse hadn’t mentioned when she recommended the surgeon: the first, that he was quite handsome. Dr. Khaira was tall, with warm brown eyes and smooth cinnamon skin. The other thing, of course, was his nationality. Perhaps because I’d been imagining my husband’s friend from residency, Dr. Peter Kara, a redheaded Irishman, it hadn’t occurred to me that this doctor might be Middle Eastern. At least Dr. Khaira’s accent was undetectable, as he told me that he’d reviewed my CT scans and the good news was that I didn’t have cancer.

  “Was there a rumor that I did?” I asked.

  He explained that someone must’ve thought so, because my primary care doctor had suggested that I see him, a surgical oncologist—that he was used to removing tumors wrapped around people’s organs. “Thankfully, you just have run-of-the-mill gallstones.”

  I reminded him that I was only there on the recommendation of Rich Strickler, whose name had worked like magic to get me a next-day appointment.

  Dr. Khaira snapped his fingers. “That’s right! Now I remember. How do you know Rich?”

  “Well, I don’t really. But I’ve gotten to know his daughter through my writers’ group.” Well enough to fly her out to Key West on Friday morning, I might have said.

  “Elyse is such a great kid,” Dr. Khaira said.

  “Oh, yes,” I agreed.

  “How’s Jane?”

  “I believe it’s a difficult time for her,” I said to the surgeon, and he nodded slowly, as if a bit perplexed, and then looked back at the computer that contained my hospital reports. I cleared my throat. “Tell me, do you really think surgery is necessary at my age?”

  “Well, you just had acute cholecystitis. You’ve got a seventy percent chance of having another gallbladder attack with more serious complications every time. You’re lucky that you pulled through with the antibiotics.” He looked over at me and smiled. “There’s no reason that you shouldn’t do well with surgery. You’ve got no other major medical problems, and you look about ten years younger than your stated age.”

  There it was: the doctor compliment. I reminded him of how hospitals had a way of rapidly aging everyone—from the young patient to the old. Hospitals even took their toll on the people who worked there, especially those who rendered the most difficult decisions. Except for Dr. Khaira, I thought to myself. Judging by the diplomas on the walls, he was very experienced, and yet, he appeared to be a happy-go-lucky man who hadn’t known a sleepless night. Could I trust him? I cleared my throat again and asked him if, since he specialized in oncology, I would have to find another surgeon.

  “Of course not. You’re a friend of the Stricklers. I’ll be happy to do it,” Dr. Khaira said, and there was an unspoken It’ll be fun in his smile. I could guess, pretty easily, that a simple case like mine could provide him with great satisfaction after all the malignant tentacles he’d fished out of people’s bellies. I wondered if he was one of those surgeons who believed all miracles occurred by the grace of their own hands, or if he answered to a higher power. Could he be Muslim or Hindu? I suddenly wondered, but of course, I knew better than to ask.

  “Where are you from?” I asked instead, thinking, Iran? Iraq? Pakistan?

  “San Francisco,” Dr. Khaira said, and I told him I meant originally. “Well, I was conceived in Buffalo.”

  “And your parents?” I asked. “Where were they from?”

  “Why? Are you familiar with small towns in India?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “And what about your parents?” he added, with playful irritation in his voice.

  Maybe it was because I had inadvertently insulted him, and I wanted to show him that we had something in common. Or maybe I was thinking of something I’d said to Elyse the other day: Every family has secrets and they’re usually only important to the people who are keeping them. “My parents were from Germany—German Jews,” I found myself saying to Dr. Khaira.

  He glanced at the name on my chart and gave me a quizzical look. “Well, that is unexpected.”

  For one strange moment, I wanted to confess my real name—to give it to him like a present, and see if he might forgive me. But then I thought of Jacob wrestling with the angel all through the night, and how, in biblical times, one never revealed one’s name to a stranger, for fear of surrendering one’s power. I couldn’t tell him when Elyse didn’t even know my name. But I wanted to.

  Thankfully, Dr. Khaira didn’t seem to be waiting for any great confessions. He simply picked up his pen again and twirled it like a mini-baton between thumb and index finger and then launched into taking the rest of my social history—had I ever smoked, used drugs, drank alcohol? “Retired?” he added, when we’d been through the list.

  “Oh, yes,” I said and gave him the brief but true history of me: World War II fly girl, mother to one son, English teacher, and published author. Obviously this was Dr. Khaira’s final appointment on an evening when he had no pressing plans, because he leaned back in his chair and asked me what on earth had prompted me to write a book. “My husband,” I said and told him how I had been upsetting certain well-to-do people at dinner parties in New York by spouting off my feminist opinions on the subservient nature of traditional wifedom. “If you have something to say, maybe you could try writing it down,” Thomas had gently suggested in the car on the way home, never suspecting that I would do exactly that—and sell it to a publishing house. Dr. Khaira laughed. I added that Thomas had died of a stroke, but that we’d been married fifty years before that.

  “Fifty years. Wow. What’s your secret?” Dr. Khaira asked, giving his pen another spin.

  “Open communication,” I said, remembering Dave as a young man, bragging to his then girlfriend Carrie about how Thomas and I had invented a “secret love language,” when Dave was a boy. We’d given it up by the time he’d reached junior high, but he’d never forgotten. “My parents just spoke in pig Latin until we figured it out,” Carrie had said with a laugh.

  “A daily dose of laughter,” I went on. “Democratic decision making. And three little words. Well, one word, repeated three times.” And then I told him the silly phrase Thomas and I would use: Dubba dubba dubba. It was a great way to end a fight: you got the last word, even if the last word was complete and utter nonsense.

  “Are you married, Dr. Khaira?” I asked, as he glanced over my living will, which I’d brought with me.

  “Not anymore.” Dr. Khaira looked up and said rather wryly, “I guess I failed my husband training.”

  He glanced down at the papers on his desk and seemed to remember what we were both there for. “So, about your living will here. It says you don’t want to be resuscitated, you don’t want to be on a ventilator, and you don’t want IV antibiotics. But I’m going to need you to reverse your code status just for the surgery.” I could feel my eyes dilating, as he rushed to explain, “You’re going to be on a ventilator during the surgery, right? That’s general anesthesia, my friend. And we might even run a bag of IV antibiotics while you’re open. I need to be able to treat you for the simple stuff—postop infection, pneumonia, whatever. Then, after the discharge, your living will can go back into effect. Let me just get you through the postop period, and then you can go home peacefully.” And die however you please, his tone said. He asked me about decision makers, and I wondered how awkward it might be to ask Gene Rosskemp—or any other of the writers, for that matter—to act as my medical power of attorney. “Brothers, sisters, children?” he added.
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br />   I let myself dream for just a moment. I imagined if Sarah had lived. I imagined that her daughter had grown up with my son, and their children knew each other, and we met on Friday nights for dinner. Oh, how I’d loved the warmth around the table, the comfort in knowing we were all there, our heads bowed in the candlelight. I imagined if Thomas and I had raised Rita like our own, and Dave would’ve had the sibling he’d always wished for. I blinked and realized Dr. Khaira was still staring at me, waiting for an answer. “I’m afraid my family is all gone now,” I said.

  “But you have one son?”

  “Dave and his wife and child were killed by a drunk driver,” I said, and then I startled myself when tears filled my eyes, and I started to weep.

  “Oh my God. When was this?”

  “Not recently,” I admitted, still crying despite the foolishness of it. “In fact, quite some time ago. But there hasn’t been a day since that I didn’t wish it had been me instead.” So much potential, wasted, I thought, for his full life and my own joy.

  That afternoon in the doctor’s office as I continued to cry, Dr. Khaira just sat there watching me, respectful of my sorrow, I felt. Finally, with shaking fingers, I reached for a tissue on his desk. It embarrassed me to do so: the tissues were here for the people who had to hear that despite the surgery, the cancer was back. Not for me. “Please, I’m sorry.” I blew my nose and wiped my eyes. “What more do you have to ask, Dr. Khaira?”

  “Please. Call me Satinder,” he said.

  “Satinder, I’m sorry that I asked about your parents.”

  “Asked me what?” he said and then smiled back. “See, I already forgot.”

  OUTSIDE THE OFFICE, THE DAY WAS BRIGHT, AND I HADN’T BEEN waiting very long when the bus pulled up at the stop. Once I’d swiped my bus pass and was safely in my seat, the driver snapped off his hazards and we were moving once again toward Squirrel Hill. My mind was drifting back to another place, right after the war, when Sarah was consumed by her own worries of who would raise her daughter.