The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  “Is she going to be able to go back to her apartment again?” I asked.

  “That’s my intent,” Dr. Khaira said. Then he looked at Mom again, who clasped her hands together on her lap as if she were about to say grace and said she wanted to be sure we’re doing this for all the right reasons—that we weren’t “moving forward with aggressive interventions because we can.” And I couldn’t remember what the right reasons might be: because Gene and Dr. Khaira and I wanted her to be all right?

  “Give me three days,” Satinder said. “If I can’t get her extubated by Tuesday, we’ll stop everything and let her go.”

  MOM AND I DROVE HOME IN SILENCE, WITH MY BIKE IN THE back of the station wagon. I knew I should’ve thanked her for coming, but I didn’t want her to think that just because I was proud of her back in the ICU, I wasn’t still mad about everything to do with Grandma—and everything to do with her and me.

  “Elyse, I really don’t know what to say,” Mom finally said. “How well do you know this woman?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that, so I confessed instead that Mrs. Browning was the person who’d bought my tickets to Florida. “I was typing her memoir, but we didn’t get to finish . . .”

  “Why on earth would she name you as the power of attorney? I mean, she had to be desperately lonely . . . and just plain desperate . . .”

  “I was nice to her. And she was so nice to me.” Then I started to cry again, thinking of everything I’d told her about my plot, and my parents and my life, and everything I hadn’t told her but that she’d known anyway.

  “Honey, I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what you’ve been going through,” Mom finally said. “You’re fifteen. And I want to protect you—”

  “You’re too late,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. My tears were gone now; there was just a hard lump in my throat. “I didn’t ask you to come today.”

  “I know,” Mom said, her voice quiet. “I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could tell me about something so important.” I watched as she turned back onto the road leading into the Regal Estates. “Let’s go home and get the boys. We’ll all go out for pancakes,” Mom finally decided, injecting her voice with false enthusiasm. The last place I wanted to be on a Saturday morning was at a diner, surrounded by a bunch of happy families, but then she added, “It’ll be my birthday treat.”

  Oh God. How had I forgotten her birthday—how had we all forgotten? It seemed too late to wish her a happy one now, after Grandma was dead and Daddy was having sex with a drug rep. There wasn’t another car on the road for miles, but Mom put on her blinker when she turned into the driveway. I waited until she’d parked in front of the garage to tell her I was sorry for not having a present. She stared at me for a beat, like she was waiting for me to apologize for something else, but then she just shrugged and said, “All I really want for my birthday is to be with the three of you.”

  THE HOUSE WAS EMPTY WHEN WE GOT INSIDE.

  “Toby? Hugh?” Mom called, as we came in through the kitchen. “Boys?”

  “We’re going out for pancakes!” I yelled, and then, when there was no reply, I ran upstairs to check their rooms. The only signs of my brothers were Toby’s chess set—paused midgame with a queen dangerously close to checkmate—and a torture bed of Legos on Huggie’s floor.

  Coming back downstairs, I could hear Mom calling, “Huggie?” her voice growing frantic. She whirled around and startled when she saw me in the doorway of the family room. “When I left they were watching TV. And now they’re gone!”

  “Maybe Daddy—”

  “Daddy is at a continuing medical education conference today!” Mom shrieked, just as I heard the door in the foyer open followed by scampering feet.

  “Hello?” I heard Aunt Andie call. “Anybody home?”

  We hurried into the front hall, where the boys were shedding their coats on the floor, as if it were the mudroom.

  “Mama!” Huggie said, rushing at my mother’s legs.

  “They showed up at my condo,” Aunt Andie said. “I thought it would be best to bring them back before you freaked out.”

  “Too late,” I mouthed behind Mom.

  “We walked down the hill and took the bus from Waterworks Mall,” Toby explained.

  “You took public transportation?” Mom said, stooping to cradle Huggie with her arms, as if he were still a baby with a squishy head.

  Toby fished in his pocket and held up a little bottle. “I made him Purell.”

  “Would you believe he found Great-Aunt Miriam?” Aunt Andie said. “The one Mom wrote the book about?”

  “Wait,” I said. “You found her? How?”

  “Google Books.”

  “Mom had been told her aunt Miri was killed in a plane crash, but there was another rumor in the neighborhood, which she’d never wanted to believe, that Miri had abandoned the family and was alive and well in New York,” Aunt Andie said.

  “You asked me for more information, right?” Toby said to me, since I’d come to him curious about Grandma’s real-life inspiration for The Secrets of Flight, the story of a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot and her sister, a Broadway actress. “So I typed in every family member’s name in the family tree, and ‘Sarah Glazier’ came up in the ninth essay of this book, Miss Bixby Takes a Wife. It’s about a girl who dies of TB the same year that the cure is invented,” he said. “The author’s name is ‘Mary Browning.’ Only she and Miriam Lichtenstein were both from Squirrel Hill, Pennsylvania, and they both were pilots, and they were both born on September the first, 1922.”

  “How long did it take you to come up with this?” I asked.

  Toby shrugged. “About five minutes.”

  “Are you all right?” Mom asked me, so my eyes must’ve been getting as big and crazy as they felt.

  “We have to go to the hospital right now,” I said.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Secrets of Flight

  I wake up the first time to an electric shock on my left lower leg—the sort police officers use to silence unruly college students. At least that’s what I imagine. I try to jerk my leg away, but my leg won’t move.

  “Still nothing,” I hear the anesthesiologist say, before he zaps me again.

  A great force is pressing upon my lungs, and my arms are frozen to the mattress. Meanwhile, my eyelids are inexplicably sealed shut, no matter how hard I try to open them. A catastrophe has occurred. My body is a cadaver, and I’m trapped inside.

  The nurse calls from the end of the bed, “Don’t worry, Mary, you’re just having a reaction to the medication. It’s going to take some time to wear off.”

  My chest is like an expanding balloon on the verge of an explosion. If I could just raise my arms. Shrug my shoulder. Lift a finger.

  “Is she sedated?” I hear Dr. Khaira ask.

  “Giving her Versed right now,” the nurse says.

  “Her count is dropping,” he adds. “I might have to take her back to the OR.”

  Oh no, I think. Please, God, don’t let me—

  I AM NOT AWARE OF ANYTHING FOR CLOSE TO A WEEK. I AM KEPT intentionally unconscious by the team of doctors and nurses, and for that, I am grateful. When I finally become aware of my surroundings once again, I am in a different sort of pain than before—deeper and gnawing—and I’m unable to pinpoint the source. My limbs are no longer paralyzed, just profoundly sleepy, and it doesn’t occur to me to try to move; I am too weak and tired. I can hear people talking, though. I become a floating brain, absorbing the conversations around me, the voices between the beeps.

  Doctors make their rounds and discuss my remarkable progress, but I assume, having no idea that I’m in a private room, that they are referring to the patient in the next bed. I hear the residents chitchat as they place an intravenous catheter in my groin. The third-year male resident coaches the intern ingénue through the procedure. I feel the bee sting at the start, and the pushing and pulling, but it is nothing now, this pain, and it doesn’t compare to what I’ve been t
hrough. I listen to the younger one, who says that she finds this ICU stuff depressing, that she’s thinking of switching specialties to ophthalmology, where “nobody gets naked,” and I think, Am I naked? I am not dead, but I am not alive; I hover somewhere in between.

  My nurses are truly gifts from God. They talk in my ear, and call me “Mary,” and tell me what they are doing as they do it, even when they are just rolling me over in the bed. Sometimes they tell me to relax, other times they tell me that I’m doing just fine, and they always let me know that it’s me they mean, not the lady in the next bed.

  I hear Satinder Khaira, too, and I can tell that despite his confidence, he is beside himself because of whatever unfortunate turn of events has led me here. In fact, whenever the team of surgeons comes by, it’s his voice I can pick out, the only person who doesn’t just speak of me in regional segments of my anatomy. When the chief resident reports my urine output and my level of inspired oxygen, I hear Satinder say, “Did you know this lady was a pilot, and she wrote a book?” and the shuffling stops; I hear these young doctors remember that whatever I am now, I was once a human being, too.

  I listen to his voice when he’s not on rounds, as well, when he’s telling a woman—possibly one of the nurses?—that she’s too thin; she ought to eat more, and when the woman swears she is, he says, “What exactly do you eat? I want a calorie count, lady.”

  “Tree bark and kitty litter. Food, Satinder. I eat food.”

  “Well, you look worse than she does and she’s been in a coma for the last week,” he says. Then he adds, “Happy birthday, Jane,” and this Jane, whoever she is, replies, “You remembered.”

  I SLEEP, TOO. STRANGE, DRUG-INDUCED DREAMS THAT ARE INterrupted by periodic jerks of my muscles, and I startle awake, only to find myself running through another long, dark corridor, where I am opening stadium doors, and searching for Dave—not grown-up Dave, but Dave as a young boy—and each door that I open reveals more darkness, and more strangers, and more terror. I want to cry out for help, but the sounds won’t come out of me, and nearby voices mingle with my nightmares until I realize that I am awake again, listening to the cadence of my hospital room, and its telltale sign of background beeping and breaths going through a hollow tube, as if someone were snorkeling nearby, and I am eavesdropping on a conversation underwater.

  “Still unresponsive,” I hear a woman say. “They’re going to take her off the ventilator and see what happens.”

  “God, it’s all so surreal,” says another feminine voice. “Just imagine if Mom knew . . .”

  “What kind of stuff did she tell you—near the end?” the woman asks, with an unmistakable catch in her throat.

  “Mom?” There’s a pause. “She told me not to buy Pottery Barn furniture.”

  I hear a snicker of laughter. “Classic,” the woman says.

  “She told me she wished we would just enjoy our lives and stop trying to rule them.”

  “But it’s so hard to let go.”

  “Okay, folks, time for Mary to get a bath. You’ll have to wait outside,” the nurse says.

  And I’m sorry for the woman in the next bed, that her daughters must be moved from the room all on account of me.

  I DREAM THAT I AM FLYING THROUGH THE SEASONS—WITHOUT a plane, without an engine—the wind lifting me through the air and over the autumn trees. I drink up the glorious color of each flapping leaf, and then I dip down, as if the air were water, and the first flakes begin to fall, and I am flying through the glimmering, snowy forest, and I am laughing because it’s so beautiful, and then the trees open up to a clearing, and the sun gets brighter, and I push my arms back and soar upward to the blue sky, and then I hear Sol, whispering in my ear, Miriam Lichtenstein, wake up.

  I open my eyes. The sky is gone, and the beeping is back, and I am sitting in a hospital room. There’s a curtain drawn over the window, while the one closest to the door reveals nothing but bustling chaos outside it: people in scrubs and white coats rushing past. In the chair beside my bed sits a girl with mounds of wiry brown hair, drawing on a pad of paper, and I wonder if she could be my daughter-in-law, except that Carrie is petite and blond and never wears jangly jewelry. The girl yawns and shifts in her seat, shoots me a glance, and then startles and stands up.

  “Miriam Lichtenstein?”

  I smile and nod. “Hello, my dear,” I say. “I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t quite remember how you and I might’ve met before . . .” but the girl is squinting at me, unable to read my lips. I haven’t figured out yet that the snorkeling sound is coming from my own neck and there’s a breathing tube still connected to the ventilator. Who. Are. You? I slowly mouth the words.

  “I’m Andie,” she says, and my eyebrows furrow.

  Do you know my son Dave? I want to say. I’ve lost him at a baseball stadium.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually awake . . .” this Andie person says, collecting her things in a little cloth bag with handles: her sketchpad, her colored pencils, her erasers. “I’ve gotta go make some calls. Just—stay right here, okay?” she says, and I smile at the eagerness of her nod and try to convey with my open-palmed shrug, Where else would I go?

  But I wait, and she never returns, and I suppose I probably doze off, but try as I might, I never return to the sky. The next time I open my eyes, there is a young doctor—a girl, really, with a ponytail and glasses and a long white coat—at the foot of my bed taking inventory of my vital statistics for her clipboard. The poor dear, I think. Her eyes are so tired. I watch as she checks the ventilator, then the bag of urine, then the heart monitor, making notation after notation. Then our eyes meet, and she gasps and takes a step back. “You’re awake!” she says. “Mrs. Browning, you’re awake! Holy sh—” She clamps a hand over her mouth, and her laughter sounds so startled and amazed that it makes me smile. “Mrs. Browning, your family will be so happy. Your family has been waiting for you!” And she clasps my hand, for just a second, before pulling away. “I’ll be right back!”

  No! Wait—

  But thankfully, she doesn’t go far. I can see her standing in the doorway of my room and looking down the hallway at someone whose footsteps are approaching. The intern is pointing at my bed—pointing at me. “Go. Look,” she says to someone, an order, and I think how interesting it is that bad news requires a preamble, but good news needs only a witness. How curious it is that I am the good news.

  A woman with short blond hair and a visitor’s tag on her jacket squeezes past the intern, and I recognize her right away, even though we’ve never met before. Her name tag says “Jane Strickler” but somehow I know she must belong to Sarah.

  “Miriam Lichtenstein?” she says, rushing toward me with an outstretched hand, and I nod and smile and mouth, Hello. Even though she’s laughing with disbelief, I can see the tears invading her blue eyes. “I’m Jane—Margarita’s daughter; Sarah’s granddaughter,” she says, and I squeeze her hand back and then pull it to my cheek, and mouth, Hello, Jane. “Elyse!” she calls, over her shoulder, and I open my eyes again and lean over to see the girl rushing in the room, and she’s wearing my flight jacket. It’s not until then that I remember that we met on my birthday, and she was my present.

  Elyse leans over and gives me a hug. “I’m so sorry this happened to you,” she says in my ear.

  Me, too, I mouth and nod, squeezing her back. And when she pulls away, I wonder for just a second about the day we met, and the phone call from the doctor about my bone density test, before I left for writers’ group . . . Jane must see me trying to work something out, because she leans over and asks, “Yes, Aunt Miri? What is it?”

  Did I break my hip? I slowly mouth, pointing to my own anatomy, and that makes them look at each other and smile.

  “You had your gallbladder out,” Elyse says.

  “Your hips are fantastic,” Jane adds. “You could dance a rumba.”

  No, thank you, I mouth, and when they laugh, their giddy joy makes me smile.

  IT TAKES M
E EIGHT WEEKS TO GET BACK TO MY APARTMENT, AND five months before I return to the writers’ group. In the hospital ICU, I am disconnected from the ventilator and transferred to a step-down unit, and from there to a rehab center, where I attend physical therapy sessions twice a day, and try to convince myself that despite the plethora of older people in wheelchairs and the foul smells, this is not a nursing home. I try to convince myself that despite the healing hole in my neck and my difficulty walking to the bathroom without assistance, I am not the tragedy that I feel like, but that I am, as Jane keeps insisting, a miracle.

  What she still doesn’t understand is that she is the miracle—they all are, these nieces of mine—but especially Jane, who stops by the rehab center every day of the week, usually while her children are in school and sometimes after hours with Elyse. Jane is unemployed these days and still trying to figure out what kind of law she wants to practice or if she even intends to return to it at all. For now, she seems content to sit at my bedside and encourage me to eat and to talk. I’m tired, but she coaxes out the answers to her stream of questions about my growing-up years, about my impressions of her mother—“She was a whiz at hopscotch and reading picture books,” I say—my time as a fly girl, and how Sol and I fell in love.

  “Why didn’t you ever pilot again, later on?” she asked me one day, and I remembered how Sol had offered to buy me flight time on a Beechcraft Bonanza F-35 for my birthday one year. I’d refused, telling him I didn’t want to take the risk when we finally had Dave.

  “The truth is, it just wouldn’t have been the same,” I said to Jane.

  She seems to want some advice on what to do with the rest of her life, which I can’t possibly give her, but I can tell her to enjoy the one she’s got now, to enjoy her children, because she’ll wake up one morning and wish she could do it all over again.