Her Last Flight

by Beatriz Williams

  God watch over them both, Pixie and Irene. The two living pieces of his heart. God keep them—

  A thump shook the fuselage. Mallory opened his eyes.

  “Señor Mallory?”

  The thick bull shoulders of Velázquez appeared in the hatchway, framed by the sunlight. He had just laid something heavy on the metal deck, like a sack of flour, and now he climbed nimbly over this thing and grasped it under the shoulders and dragged it next to Mallory, without any apparent effort.

  “Jesus Christ,” whispered Mallory.

  Velázquez shrugged and crossed himself.

  “I told the bastard if he tried to get back on my airplane, I would shoot him.”

  Ki’ilau, Hawai’i

  November 1947

  Doris explains to me that they are here on a solemn mission, to scatter Sandy’s ashes on the sea below the cliffs, where her father died. Sandy loved Daddy best, she says. Sandy would drape herself on Daddy’s shoulders while he flew his airplane. She would leap on his lap the second he sat down and stay there, purring, for hours. Sometimes kneading her claws into his trousers, like this (Doris makes claws of her fingers). So this place is just where Sandy would want to settle a final time.

  Irene holds the box as we descend along the path on the windward side of the island, where Mallory sometimes came to surf, because the wave on this particular stretch is legendary. That’s the word Lindquist uses, anyway, legendary, but to my mind the proper term is something more like suicidal. Maybe it’s the recent squall, but the surf arrives in giant curls of water that rise from the ocean like gods, sudden and enormous, a quarter mile away. The sight is unreal to me. If it weren’t for Wesley’s small, damp hand, tucked into mine, I think I might fall from the surface of the earth.

  We step onto the beach. The sand is hard from the recent rain. Irene takes off her shoes and motions to us to do the same. Together we step into the churning water, up to our ankles. Doris takes my other hand and squeezes it hard. From the corner of my gaze, I spy Leo, who stands with Sophie next to the pile of shoes and socks, about fifteen yards away, as if to protect our belongings. From what, I can’t imagine. Irene opens the box, which is made of wood, about six inches square, and mouths a few words I can’t hear. The kids and I hold tight to each other’s hands. Irene throws out her arm in a wide arc, and the dust makes a glittering smear in the air, hangs there like a rainbow, before it showers into the surf.

  “Good-bye, Sandy!” Wesley calls out, in a boy’s soprano, packed with excitement.

  After a moment, Irene turns and tells Wesley and Doris to go looking for seashells with Leo and Mrs. Rofrano, because she needs to speak to me. The kids scamper off and Irene sits next to me on the wet sand, Indian style as before, one hand on each knee. A long raincoat covers her usual shirt and trousers, and her back is straight, like a ballet dancer’s.

  “There’s something I want you to know,” she says. “I want you to know that he was happy here, as happy as he could be. He did not come here to die. He wanted to live.”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t surf in that, if I wanted to live.”

  “But you have to understand that he thrived on that thrill. He needed it. I think it was the war, the things he saw there, the way just about everybody died around him. So he needed to test this thing that had protected him, whatever you want to call it, luck or fate or Providence, to make sure it still existed. Then he could go to sleep at night and feel he would wake up alive.” She pauses. “That’s what I think, anyway. He never liked to talk about it.”

  I settle back on my hands and stare at the ocean. “What about you? Were you happy?”

  “Not at first. At first I was miserable about the baby, and the burns took ages to heal, whereas Sam was back on his feet in a month. He was my strength. He was the one who flew us to Hawai’i, who found this place, who made contact with the Rofranos and arranged for the sale of the house, so we could have something to live on. He was the one who brought Sandy from California, who held me every night when these terrible dreams woke me, who took me out surfing again when my body could stand it. We bought Coolibah and fixed it up together. Then we had Doris. Every day of that pregnancy was like a torture to me. I was so afraid of losing the baby. I had these nightmares that I was in the desert again, that she was coming out of me. But then she was born healthy and kicking and . . . well, Doris. You know.”

  “She’s Doris, all right.”

  “Oh, we fell in love with her, right from the start. Sam just adored her with this idolatrous love; he carried her around everywhere with him, wouldn’t let her out of his sight. We’d already started the airline. First it was just a charter for tourists, but soon we were running regular flights and taking on pilots. Wesley arrived right after. I was so busy. I learned I could just put everything in a box, everything that had happened, and put that box at the back of the closet, and we were happy. The world had left us alone at last, we were still madly in love after all this time. We had these two beautiful children together, we were flying every day, we could step right outside our house and surf side by side. We were in paradise! But it turned out that Sam couldn’t put everything in a box, the way I could. The lid wouldn’t stay shut, no matter how hard he tried.”

  She speaks in a clear, precise voice, as if she’s considered all these thoughts before. When I sneak a glance or two in her direction, she’s staring straight ahead, without actually looking at anything. Even this pause seems considered.

  “You might think,” she continues, “that if you love somebody long enough and hard enough, you can make him happy. If you give him a home, and children, and love. If you give him comfort at night, and adventure during the day. And he was happy. For weeks at a time, it was so good. It was miraculous. He took this joy in the children, you can’t imagine. And then the darkness would fall again. I always knew because he would fly somewhere, or drive somewhere, or surf somewhere.” She lifts her right hand and points. “Right out there. You see that wave? That was his favorite, when he was in despair, because he knew it might kill him.”

  “When? What day was it?”

  “Just over three years ago. The ninth of September 1944.”

  “I was in Paris.” I stare in wonder at the horizon and think of the Hotel Scribe, of the journey out to the Orly air base in a Jeep driven by the jittery eighteen-year-old GI assigned to me by the Allied command. I cross my legs together, just like Irene’s, and tell her, “I met Raoul Velázquez a few days later. On the eleventh.”

  “Ah,” she says softly. “Ah. Of course.”

  “Of course?”

  Irene turns to me. “There was a storm the night before. I remember listening to the wind and the rain and thinking Sam would want to surf in the morning, when the weather had cleared but the waves would be coming in like mountains. And sure enough, when I woke, he was already gone. He left a note to say he would be back in time to take the children to school.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  “No. As soon as I saw the note, I had this terrible feeling. I told myself it was silly, that Sam was indestructible, but when he hadn’t returned by ten o’clock I knew something was wrong. The funny thing is, I thought he had cracked up the airplane. I never thought the ocean would take him. But when I landed here, his ship was sitting on the grass, just fine. The sun was glinting on the fuselage. I found his shoes and towel and things on the sand. I sat down next to them and waited. Waited and waited. You see, he had promised me.”

  “Promised you what?”

  “That he would die in my arms. Isn’t that ridiculous?” She laughs softly. “Ridiculous and sentimental. I thought he couldn’t be dead, because he’d sworn to God he would die in my arms, and nowhere else.”

  We’re silent for a moment, contemplating the rhythms of the surf, and then I ask her how long she waited. Whether anything of him ever turned up.

  “No. Not a thing. As if the ocean just swallowed him. It was Olle who came looking for me, in the afternoon. He took care of
everything for me. I was destroyed. I only held myself together at all because of the children, and because Olle wouldn’t let me alone.” She laughs again. “So I married him out of gratitude, I think. And maybe because I was so mad at Sam for dying.”

  “Mad? You were mad at him?”

  “Of course I was. Weren’t you? I was furious. For throwing himself away like that, when we loved him so much. For making us wake up every morning and find a way to go on without him.”

  From down the beach comes the sound of laughter, as Doris screeches her delight over some seashell. The sun’s come out, but the wind still churns, and the surf arrives in tall, angry, chaotic waves. I think that I would like to be a wave myself right now, to throw myself against a rock and just expire.

  At the bar in Nuremberg, after Captain Hawley put his officer’s cap back on his head and left me alone with my letter, I went upstairs and took off my clothes and lay on my bed. I considered whether I wanted to live or not. It seemed to me that nobody was left alive who mattered to me, nobody on earth left to live for. Velázquez was dead; my father, or so I then supposed, had been dead for years. I might as well have been dead to my mother and stepfather. My own body appeared to recognize its isolation and was now wasting away, day by day. Every morning I trudged into the tribunal courtroom and learned that the world itself was not worth living in, that man was so corrupt and so evil that further existence was pointless, that humanity did not deserve to continue.

  You are like Sam reborn as a woman, Irene had said.

  I don’t know if that’s true. In my last memory of my father, I’m thirteen years old and he’s taking me out to dinner for my birthday, just the two of us, at some restaurant in San Francisco. He orders turbot and Scotch whiskey; I have chicken and a lemon soda. Over some chocolate cake for dessert, he hands me a box, and inside that box is a necklace on a silver chain, on which hangs a tiny shell containing a tiny freshwater pearl. I’m so overcome by this beautiful object, I burst into tears. Dad fastens it around my neck and says that whenever we’re apart, as we must be, I should look at this necklace and remember how much he loves me. That I am everything in the world to him, and always will be. He drives me home the long way and walks me to the door, but he doesn’t go inside because of Mama. He just hugs me and kisses me good-bye and walks down the step and gets into his car. He waves out the window as he leaves. I remain on the step until the smell of him drifts away. And that’s all there is.

  I don’t really know why I didn’t die that night in Nuremberg. I wanted to die, or at least I didn’t want to go on living in this terrible new world in which everybody I loved was dead. But something inside me would not die. I woke twelve hours later and realized I hadn’t thrown up those whiskey sours after all, and Velázquez’s letter still lay on my chest, right on top of my father’s necklace.

  I am Perseverance, remember. I am Survival.

  Eventually I rise, as I must, and dust off the sand. I turn my face down the beach, where Doris and Wesley are kicking salt water at each other, the little urchins. The small, unexpected offspring of my father and a woman against whom I have lived all my life in opposition, side against side, and now that contested ground has shimmered away like some kind of mirage.

  Irene rises next to me and asks whether I can forgive her.

  I lift my hands and stare at the palms, and I have the strangest feeling that they don’t belong to me anymore, that nothing belongs to me, the whole world is new and strange. I remember something Velázquez once told me about crashing his airplane, how he had survived crackup after crackup and how you never felt your injuries until later. God numbed your pain, he said, otherwise you might lose your head in the aftermath, you might be unable to save yourself, for example, from the burning wreckage.

  Between my fingers, something moves. I lower my hands and perceive an object wobbling in the air, next to the faltering clouds. Then the noise reaches me, the uncertain putter of an airplane.

  “What on earth?” mutters Irene. “Kaiko?”

  I turn to face her. One hand shields her face from the glare; her eyes are narrow, trained on the airplane, as if calculating its odds of survival. She’s got no idea who’s aboard, of course. She took off for Ki’ilau before they arrived: the invading army of my fellow journalists, that necessary nuisance known as the world’s press, ruthless guardians of a democratic people’s right to know everybody else’s beeswax. Hapless Kaiko leading them smack bang into her paradise.

  I turn back and loop my arm around her elbow, so we face the onslaught together. “Here’s a better question. Can you forgive me?”

  And yet she rises to the occasion. Doesn’t she always? She stands her ground as they thunder toward her in their crumpled suits, their sweating collars, white-faced and miraculously alive after the hairiest landing I have ever witnessed. The flashbulbs, the shouted questions. The wind whips her silvery hair. She holds up her hand and they stop, my God! I have never seen that before. I cross my arms and stand the ground by her side. Bill Cushing avoids my stare with an expression of downcast shame that reminds me of Mollie the beagle.

  “Gentlemen,” says Irene, in her solemn, clear voice. “I appreciate all the trouble you’ve taken to find me, and your generous concern for my welfare. But I’m afraid you’re too late. I have already contracted exclusive rights to both story and pictures with Miss Eugenia Everett of the Associated Press, and will be unable to answer your questions.”

  Epilogue

  It is the easiest thing in the world to die. The hardest is to live.

  —Eddie Rickenbacker

  Hanalei, Hawai’i

  April 1949

  The book’s taking longer than I figured. I thought that once I collected all the pieces of this puzzle, it would be a snap—so to speak—to arrange them in place and link them together with a few choice words. It turns out that writing books doesn’t work that way.

  But I am still here.

  Habits are habits, and I often rise at two or three in the morning to work on the manuscript. If the words are stuck inside me somewhere, I’ll develop a roll or two of film, or maybe I’ll sit and look at the photographs Irene gave me, the ones of my father here in Kauai.

  I’ve heard it said that according to certain human cultures, when you capture an image of somebody you capture a piece of his soul. I don’t know if that’s true. I think it depends on the image, on the skill of the person drawing or painting or snapping a shutter. Whether that person possesses a particular magic quality of soul catching, and maybe that’s why we look in awe upon the great artists, because they catch souls for a living, while the rest of us drive buses and milk cows and add sums in ledgers.

  On the other hand. When I look upon these pictures of my father, taken by some untaught finger pressing down on the shutter release of an amateur camera, I have the uncanny feeling that he’s looking back at me from his monochrome eyes in his monochrome face. This one, for example. He looks a little sideways at me, eyebrow cocked the way I remember it, and his hair falls on his forehead. He’s leaning on a surfboard against a wide, pale ocean, upon a beach I recognize as the one nestled under the cliff nearby, the beach where Irene and Doris and Wesley taught me to surf. In another one, he’s holding a baby Doris, and you can’t see much of his face because it’s turned toward this tiny infant, but that little sliver of him is soft with wonder. There are eleven others, no more, but each one captures him in a different mood, a different moment, a different piece of his soul, so that when I hold them together in my hands, I feel as if I’m holding my father safe and whole.

  I no longer live in the guest cottage at Coolibah but in my own little house on the other side of Hanalei, from which I can bicycle daily to surf with my brother and sister when they get home from school or to greet Leo when he returns from the sea. He comes home with me most nights. Before you ask, we’re not married or even engaged, but Hanalei is tolerant of these things. Sam and Irene never married, you know.

  This morning is a Sunday mo
rning, so Leo stays in bed while I make coffee. I have my own darkroom and also my own study in the spare bedroom, although I prefer to work in the airfield cafeteria. I like the hustle and bustle, for some reason. I get antsy when it’s too quiet. Anyway, Leo thanks me for the coffee and tries to pull me back into bed, but I’m having none of that. Today I have important plans, I tell him.

  “But it’s my birthday,” he says. “What could be more important than that?”

  “My gracious, what are you? Seven?”

  “Twenty-four,” he says with dignity.

  I admit he’s got a point, and allow myself to be pulled back into sin. Leo is impossible to resist most of the time, and especially on a Sunday morning, even though we have already made love a thousand times in a thousand ways, because there is never enough of this. You do not come to the end of your life and say to yourself, Gosh, I wish I hadn’t slept with my lover so much.

  Although there’s another reason, a reason we don’t mention as we lie sweating against each other afterward, hearts going ga-thud in that familiar slow, heavy rhythm. Tomorrow I leave for another photography assignment, this time on the Yangtze River to capture the evacuation of British refugees, and I don’t know exactly when I’ll return.

  An hour later I’m on my bicycle, pedaling west toward Coolibah, while the breeze tumbles through my hair and the early sun warms my shoulders. I like to tell Leo that it isn’t him that keeps me here, it’s the weather. I don’t know, maybe it’s both.