Her Last Flight(106)

So it’s not as if I don’t approve the paucity of photographs in the Lindquist household. It’s just odd. And I have the feeling the solution to this mystery lies before me, except I’m unwilling to lift the lid that conceals it. I feel as if I have spent the past month approaching a precipice, step by step, and now there’s nowhere left to go, the edge lies before me—much as it did on Ki’ilau, as Lindquist described the events in Spain to me in calm, precise, terrible words like the dripping of rain into a barrel. And I cannot take that last step, because where will I go? Right over the edge into nothing.

“Did she seem upset to you?” asks Olle.

“Does she ever seem upset? That’s not her style, and you know it.”

“I know. But you understand me. Is she going to be okay?”

“She’s survived worse. It’s just a cat.”

“It’s not just a cat. You know that.” He drinks. I pull out my cigarettes and offer him one, and he’s grateful. He lights me up first, then himself, and then he adds, “You loved that cat.”

“Says you. Now, listen up. There’s something you need to understand. You know her dad was a drunk, right?”

“She’s mentioned it.”

“So when your parent is a drunk, you learn certain things. You learn to hide what you’re feeling. You learn that most people can’t be trusted. You learn that if you love somebody, that person is probably going to hurt you, and there’s nothing you can do about it but try not to love people if you can possibly help it.”

Olle reaches for an ashtray.

I continue. “Of course, some do the opposite. You go around falling in love with every last person you meet, hoping someone will take you in like some kind of stray animal and keep you fed and watered and warm. All depends on the person. But I’d say your wife is among the first tribe.”

“Takes one to know one?”

“You bet.”

Olle finishes the bourbon and heads for the bottle. He refills himself, tops me up a little, and sets the bottle down on the sofa table next to the cardboard box. He settles himself back down beside me—he’s a big man, solid Scandinavian frame—and says, “She won’t stop grieving him. I don’t think she ever will.”

“Can you blame her?”

“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. I never thought she . . . I never in a hundred years thought I stood a chance with her. The day she married me, I was the happiest man alive. Of course, I knew I couldn’t compare to him, but I thought I could make her happy. I could be something else to her. She needed someone dependable, a reliable husband after what she went through. I thought I was that man. I thought I could accept being the second place in her heart, as long as I had some place there at all. As long as she was sleeping next to me at night, I thought I could win her over.”

“It was a nice thought.”

“She never talks about him. I wish she would. I’d know she was getting over him. Well, if you ask me, that fellow was no hero. Always taking risks, doing just what he wanted, never caring about anybody but himself. If you ask me—”

“Careful,” I say.

He turns to me and scrunches his eyebrows together, and I realize he doesn’t know. Lindquist hasn’t told him the truth.

I shrug. “You’re not an impartial observer, that’s all.”

“No, I guess I’m not. I hate the son of a gun and always will. All I have in this world is what he left behind.” He rises to his feet and sets down the empty glass. “I better see about the kids now.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good—”

But he’s already lurching through the door, and I think it just figures, Lindquist would find another fellow who likes his liquor.



I spend some time staring at the box, finishing my cigarette. I have no further taste for bourbon, for some reason. From upstairs comes the creak of floorboards and the murmur of voices, as Olle wakes the children. He’s a good father. I’ve seen him with Doris and Wesley, and he loves his kids, no doubt about that, plays games and offers hugs and all those things. Life is not divided neatly into good people and bad people, good parents and bad parents. We are all of us human and scarred with sin. We make mistakes, some small and some terrible.

But he has drunk two double glasses of fine Kentucky bourbon before breakfast.

I stub out the cigarette and rise. The box can wait.



By the time I’ve got the ankle-biters dressed and fed and delivered safely to the schoolhouse gate, I’m so weary my eyes are crossing. I should go to bed. Instead I pour myself some of Lani’s good, strong coffee, light myself another cigarette, and return to the cardboard box in Olle’s library. Except Olle is already there, asleep on the sofa, and the pictures lie scattered around him.

I pick them up, one by one, and the funny thing is I don’t look at them. I don’t believe I want to know what’s trapped inside these photographs. But I stack them neatly on my lap, and on the very top—I can’t help noticing this—there sits a wedding photograph.

Now, it’s possible I arranged it on purpose, as I picked them up; that I subconsciously sorted these photographs, without really looking, and crowned the whole stack with this one, to be examined first. Weddings are always the most interesting of human events to capture on film, after all. All those people gathered together to witness the union of two people who belong to them, and who will now belong to each other. How do you tell the story of all those individual stories, how do you weave it all together in a single frame?