Her Last Flight(50)

I reach for my pocketbook and light a cigarette. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”

The bell dingles on the door. I look over my shoulder to inspect the newcomer, and what do I see but Irene Lindquist in some kind of plain, neat uniform, sliding a pair of gloves over her long fingers.

“Ready?” she says.

“Ready for what?”

“I’m afraid I told you a lie. The passengers canceled last night, when they learned about the pilot change.”

“What the devil? Then why did you—” I catch sight of her steely expression. “Oh, no. Not on your life, Lindquist. I don’t fly.”

“You will today.”

“I will never. That’s final. It’s nonnegotiable. It’s the one single incontrovertible fact of my life.”



What I’m trying to tell you is that Lindquist allows me an entire bottle of Olle’s best Scotch whiskey—he keeps a supply in the airfield cafeteria for nervous passengers—on board the airplane, although she won’t allow me to smoke. The other terms of our arrangement aren’t worth mentioning. She drives a hard bargain, that’s all, and the next time Leo tries to tell me his stepmother’s got the kindest heart in the world, oh my, sweet as pie, wouldn’t hurt a fly, that stepmama of mine . . .

At which point I realize I’m singing these thoughts aloud, so I clam up before anything else escapes me.

“Oh, I’ve heard worse,” Lindquist says cheerfully.

Even to my inexperienced eye, this airplane isn’t exactly the raciest piece of metal aloft. It’s designed to carry tourists over the Hawaiian islands or else locals desiring a more snappy form of transportation than the ferries, and what you want for such purposes is an airplane that reassures passengers they’ll hit the ground again safely. It’s a chunky, sturdy beast of two engines and eight seats, not counting pilot and navigator, and what strikes me as I fasten the straps, taking care not to jostle the bottle in my lap, is that the pilot can’t exactly see out the cockpit window.

“Yes, I can,” says Lindquist.

“Not very well.”

“It’s better once we’re airborne, and the plane levels off.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m not complaining. The less I see the better. Are you sure I can’t have one little smoke?”

“Only if you let me take the bottle away.”

“Why am I here?” I wail. “What have you done to me?”

“I have a better question. What makes you think you can write a book about Sam Mallory without ever having flown in an airplane?”

“It is called imagination, Lindquist. You literal types wouldn’t understand.”

She puffs that away and continues doing whatever it is you do, when you’re preparing a machine to fly in the air. I hear the noise of engines like the buzz of angry insects. The air smells of gasoline and engine oil. Lindquist fiddles with her dials, scribbles something in her log, that kind of thing. I close my eyes and recall the way the water surged gently beneath my surfboard—no, hold on. That ended in disaster. Better to think of a ride that ended well, like Leo the other night. Leo before Uncle Kaiko. Leo before the fall. Leo—

The airplane moves. My eyes pop open. I suck down another mouthful of Scotch whiskey, and doesn’t it run smooth against the thump of my heart? The airplane turns. The engines spool to a roar. Build and build, until that ramshackle fuselage shakes under the pressure of so much power held in check, until the whole world rattles, something’s wrong, it’s an earthquake, it’s the end of the universe.

Then we go. Tear along at some godawful speed while the scream climbs up my lungs. No. No. NO! It’s too late, I’m strapped in this goddamn chair like an execution, I can’t get out, I can’t make her hear me through all that racket, my God, I can’t make her understand that I’ve changed my mind, I want to stop, I want to stay safe on the ground, now faster and faster, until I close my eyes again and give it all up. I say to myself, never mind, what does it matter, if I die I die, this is how Velázquez died, I will die as he died, I will know what he knew, I will feel as he felt, I will maybe see him somewhere—not in heaven, sinners as we are and unashamed, but somewhere warmer—and I’ll tell him maybe I might have married him, if he had lived, because it seems I had become a little attached to him after all, it seems I still keep the memory of him tucked deep beneath the glassy surface of that organ most people call a heart. And while I’m thinking all these thoughts, one after the other, experiencing this strange revelation, something happens.

We rise in the air.

All that rattling melts into something like peace.

And I think, Lord Almighty. I’m flying.

I lean forward and tap Lindquist on the shoulder. “Where are we going, anyhow?”

“Just a little island out to the west,” she says, “where we can be alone.”





Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)





August 1928: Howland Island



The island was shaped like a pickle instead of a potato chip not because of some cartographer’s error, but because it was not Baker Island. It was Howland Island, thirty-two miles to the north, and they had only just caught sight of it at the extreme southern edge of the horizon. So Sam and Irene had narrowly made landfall at all.