Her Last Flight(115)

This morning is a Sunday morning, 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.

Or maybe it’s Coolibah that keeps me here. My father did not leave me with nothing, after all; he gave me a brother and a sister, and the woman he loved, and they’re all trooping in from the beach right now, still dripping with salt water. I stand on the lanai and wave.

“Where were you, Janey?” Doris demands. “The waves were that high!”

“Unavoidably detained by the birthday boy, I’m afraid.” (There is a snort from Irene’s direction.) “But I’m here now, aren’t I? Where’s Olle?”

“He’s picking up the present right now. Kaiko’s trying to start the fire in the pit. Doris! Wesley! For goodness’ sake, go around back. You’ll get the rugs all wet.” Irene turns to me. “You’ll help them with the cake, won’t you? Doris wants to bake it all herself, but you remember what happened last time. And she has to let Wesley do at least some of the frosting.”

“Oh, sure, and I’ll just telephone Uncle Joe and convince him to end the Berlin blockade while I’m at it. Can’t you at least lay out a few preliminary spankings?”

Irene shrugs. “You’re on your own. I’ve got the pig to worry about.”



In the end, it all comes together. Nobody mentions that Doris’s cake is lopsided, or that Wesley forgot the frosting h in birthday, which is a miracle because Kaiko’s the kind of fellow who comes out and says whatever thought’s inside his head. Olle drinks too much, but everybody expects that, and anyway he never drinks too too much, if you know what I mean, at least around the children, whom he adores almost as much as their mother.

As for that suckling pig, well. Irene always was the kind of infuriating woman who does things impeccably, and this particular pig is practically perfect, down to the pineapple in its mouth. Kaiko got the coals going, so it cooked all day in its pit and the meat falls apart from the bones whenever you prick it with your fork. Now the fire dances in the night, and everybody’s laughing and happy, and it’s time to give Leo his present.

Olle does the honors, because Leo’s his son, after all, and because he went to the trouble to fetch this present all the way from the other side of the island early this morning, from a certain fellow we know who lives near Lihue with his wife and two kids. Olle sets the box in front of Leo, and the box topples over, and out pops a startled beagle puppy, eight weeks old.

Leo starts to cry.



The three of us ride home on the moped, Leo and me and the puppy on my lap. Leo’s named her Frankie and already loves her more than me. We’ve agreed she should stay at my place, because it isn’t right to keep a respectable bitch in a bachelor apartment above a tavern, and as we pull into my driveway, Leo casually suggests that maybe he should just give up the apartment altogether, since both pieces of his heart are living here. I hand him the leash and tell him to walk his dog.

While they’re outside seeing to business, I light a few candles and open a bottle of champagne and slip into something less comfortable. The cottage is small, as I said, but Irene keeps coming by with lamps and cushions and books and frying pans to fill it up like some kind of permanent residence. Each time she does this I think of a mother bird dropping worms in a nest. Outside, Leo’s talking to the puppy. The thought of Velázquez flashes across my mind and is gone, leaving behind a vapor of peace.

The door opens. Leo says, “I think a newspaper might not be a bad . . .”

I turn around. “A bad what?”

He closes the door and drops the leash. “Nothing.”



When Leo is fast asleep, I climb out of bed and develop the film from the birthday party. A gentle Hawaiian rain falls outside. Once the negatives are dry, I select a few I like best. There’s a beautiful one of Doris and Wesley carrying out the cake; you can’t even tell that Doris was yelling at Wesley because he was going too fast. I also caught Irene from the side while she watched Olle make one of his rambling, heartfelt toasts. The fire makes a fascinating pattern on her scarred skin. You can see the affection in her gaze, the tolerance that—it seems to me, anyway—is the heart of any marriage. I sometimes wonder if my father gave himself permission to go because he knew Olle was waiting in the wings, adoring Irene from afar, and that while Olle wasn’t perfect, he was kind and true, and he wasn’t going to leave.