Her Last Flight(114)

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.