Her Last Flight(54)

Sandy got up suddenly and nipped Sam’s nose. Ouch, he said, laughing, and Irene sat up a little and took the cat in her arms and buried her nose in the clean-smelling fur. “So what happened? Did you leave?”

“Leave? Nah. I was just trying to shape her up. I didn’t want a divorce. I couldn’t do that to Pixie, take her away from her mother. But I swear to God, I never figured Bertha’d do what she did.”

Sandy jumped from Irene’s lap and stalked off into the darkness. The whites of her, enamored of moonlight, vanished last. Irene realized her palms were damp, her heart was thumping. She said daringly, “Well, what did she do?”

Sam sat up and took out another cigarette, and while he was lighting it, while he held the cigarette in one corner of his mouth and snicked the flame from the lighter, he spoke from the other corner of his mouth. “I had a show down in Vacaville the next day. I drove there, checked into this motor inn, like I always do. Got up in the morning, did some flying, had some dinner with a friend or two, came back in the evening. Manager said there was a parcel for me.”

The cigarette was now lit. He stuck the lighter back in the pocket of his flight suit and removed the cigarette from his mouth and just sat there, dropping ash into the sand, staring at the salt froth that shimmered atop the reef.

Irene sat up next to him and gathered her knees in her arms. “So?”

“She’d cut off her pinky toe—the left one—and sent it to me in a brown cardboard box, lined with tissue. And a note saying she’d slit her throat if I didn’t come back.”



The next morning, Irene got up early and did the next best thing to taking a bath. She went swimming in the clear, salty water of the island’s leeward shore. The reef dropped off quickly, so she stayed close to the island’s edge, stroking back and forth as the sun rose from the opposite horizon. Then she plunged underwater and opened her eyes. She had seen pictures of coral reefs, but nothing could prepare you for the reality, for the colorful, intricate explosion of life. When she came up gasping, the barrenness of dry land amazed her.

There was no sign of Sam. The airplane had come to rest on the other side of the rise at the center of the island, and he was probably still sleeping under the shelter of the right wing. Irene crawled onto the beach and let the warm air dry her skin. When she rose and put her clothes on, she thought she saw a flash of movement in the grass, which might have been a bird or might not. Otherwise, the world was still, and for the first time Irene felt the enormity of those hundreds of miles of ocean surrounding them on all sides, those billions of cubic feet of salt water. The insignificance of this speck of land on which they had perched.

She headed back to the airplane.

Sam wasn’t in the hollow where he had slept. Irene rummaged in her kit bag until she found her tortoiseshell comb and sat on a rock to untangle her wet hair. As she sat there, swearing, Sam sauntered up from the north, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki trousers, shaking the droplets from his hair.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“My damned hair!”

He cocked his head to one side. “Why don’t you cut it?”

“My mother always said—before she died—” She stopped short.

“And how long ago was that?” Sam asked.

“When I was eleven.”

Sam nodded. “That’s an awful long time ago, though.”

He held his crumpled shirt in one hand and seemed unaware that his chest remained bare, unaware that Irene was aware. She kept her gaze on his face, but the chest remained at the periphery, pale to the neck, ridged on each side with hungry ribs. When they were little, Irene and her cousins used to swim all the time in the pond at her grandparents’ house, and she hadn’t paid any attention to the boys’ chests, except to envy them for their shirtlessness. Now she tried to summon the old nonchalance.

“I don’t have any scissors,” she said.

“I’ve got a pair in the toolkit.”

She set down the comb. “All right.”

Sam went to fetch the scissors from the toolkit. Sandy stalked up from nowhere and licked her paws with an air of worldliness. Irene peered closer and saw a smear of blood on the white fur of the cat’s chin, and she thought about the large black rat she’d seen scurrying between some clumps of seagrass yesterday afternoon.

Sam returned with the scissors and held them out to her. Irene looped her fingers through the handle and seized a fistful of hair, matted and wet from the swim, uncombed since the morning they left Honolulu.

“Well?” said Sam. “Go on.”

She handed back the scissors. “You do it. I don’t have a mirror.”

“I’ve never cut a woman’s hair before.”

“Neither have I, and at least you can see what you’re doing.”

“All right. Turn around.”

Irene turned around on her rock, and Sam went down on one knee and looked this way and that around her hair, brow furrowed. Well? she said, and he replied that it was an awful lot of hair, and how much did she want cut off, anyway?

“To the ears, I guess.”

“The bottom of the ears, or the top?”

“Start at the bottom.”

Sam took a piece of hair that grew next to her temple, stretched it out, examined it, and lifted the scissors. Irene closed her eyes and heard the soft whisk of the scissors closing, felt the tug of the blades cutting through the strands. She opened her eyes. He took another piece and did the same thing, then proceeded methodically around her head, picking and slicing, picking and slicing. Irene remained absolutely still, her hands folded on her lap. The hair piled up in giant drifts on the sand around her, though she didn’t look down until after it was over. Until Sam sat back and surveyed his work.