Her Last Flight(116)

Or maybe a wave is just a wave, and it was Sam Mallory’s time to die.

But my favorite picture is the last one, the one I took of Leo when Frankie overturned her box and made her appearance. If you don’t believe in love at first sight, then I recommend you look upon the face of a man who has just met his very own beagle puppy. Once the print’s hanging by its clothespin, I gaze at it for some time. He is utterly unaware of the camera; his expression is amazed and radiant. I have always loved the smooth texture of his skin, the elasticity of Leo, the way his face is capable of expressing the tiniest nuance of emotion. Velázquez was the opposite; you could not read a single thing on his face, not a hint of what he was thinking or feeling, his past or his present. That’s why I prize that photograph of him in my bed at the Hotel Scribe, because I happened to catch a rare moment of candor, when you could look into his dark eyes and see the real Velázquez, the exasperation and hope, his earthiness and his piety.

One more photograph, on which I don’t linger long. Doris took that one, because she’s curious about my camera, and I sometimes let her use it. Imp that she is, she snapped one of me. Me! When she knows I hate having my picture taken almost as much as I hate flying. Still, it’s a good photograph, if you judge it objectively. She’s got instincts, my little sister. (I still savor those words on my tongue sometimes, sister and brother.) I’m looking at Leo—you can just see his face in the corner of the frame—and my brow is furrowed slightly, my eyebrows pointing toward each other, though my lips are just turned up at the corners, as if I’m happy and puzzled at once. My dark hair is pulled back from my face, exposing my Mallory cheekbones, and in fact everything in my face screams of my father. That expression is the expression he’s worn in a hundred newspaper photographs, like the one taken long ago in Honolulu, as he watched his Irene deliver a public speech for the first time.



I set that one aside and tuck the photograph of Leo into my father’s leather diary, along with the others I like to keep with me on my travels, Velázquez and Irene and Wesley and Doris, and of course that old snap of Sam Mallory, from the first roll of film I ever took, staring out the window of that diner in the middle of California. I stuff the diary into my satchel, packed and ready for tomorrow, and at last I lift the covers and gently slide myself into bed, next to Leo.

Except I’ve already been replaced by Frankie, it seems. The beagle curls in a happy ball between us, breathing twice for each breath of ours, tiny heart beating.



I take the early ferry to Oahu the next morning, piloted by Leo. Frankie comes with us; Leo says she might as well learn the trade early. I fall asleep in the deckhouse, and Leo wakes me when we dock. A taxi sits nearby, ready to carry me to Hickam Air Force Base, where I’ll board a military transport plane to the Philippines, and then another to the Chinese mainland. Leo knows how anxious I am about these flights, far more than about taking photographs of General Mao’s brutal advance. He carries my suitcase to the taxi and tells me he tucked a bottle of Olle’s bourbon into my satchel.

“Send telegrams,” he says, “so we know you’re still alive.”

I nod. He kisses me good-bye. As I climb into the taxi and look out the window, I notice the other passengers glance curiously at him, their captain who stands with his back to the ocean, staring at this woman who’s leaving him. You can tell by his expression that he’s afraid she’s not coming back.

I tell the driver to stop the car. I open the door and walk back to Leo. I whisper something in his ear, and whatever I’ve said—I’m not saying what—I think it helps. His expression turns awestruck and full of hope. We kiss again like we mean it, and I return to the car, and the car continues on its way. I stare through the back window. He lifts his hand and waves, and that’s the last I see of him before we turn the corner, a single image printed on the film of my memory: Leo’s tanned hand spread against the blue sky.





Author’s Note




This book isn’t intended as a veiled biography of Amelia Earhart, and certainly not as a theory regarding her famous disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. But Earhart’s story has fascinated me since I was a girl, and a few years ago I posed myself a certain What if? that eventually reimagined itself and grew into Her Last Flight.

As a result, Irene Foster can best be described as a composite character, borrowing certain physical and biographical details from Earhart but also from some of the other extraordinary women and men at the frontiers of aviation. My research took me down all kinds of rabbit holes as I investigated those three extraordinary decades between the Wright brothers and Earhart’s disappearance, from the technological details of manned flight to the psychology of its pioneers, to the geography of the vast Pacific Ocean. (All of the locations mentioned are real, except Ki’ilau, which is based on the privately held island of Ni’ihau off the coast of Kauai.)

For those of you interested in learning more about the people who inspired this novel and the early aviation scene in general, I have a long list of books to recommend. Earhart herself—as Her Last Flight suggests—wrote several accounts of her famous flights, some of which are still available. The classic of the aviation memoir subgenre, though, is Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis, which appeared in 1951 and won the Pulitzer Prize. This is the kind of book you read with one hand while you’re stirring the pasta sauce with the other: a lyrical, philosophical action-adventure that holds you in profound suspense even though you know how it ends. Not only did I come to understand the technical and human challenges of extreme long-distance flying, I felt as if I’d stepped inside the mind of an aviator.