Her Last Flight(58)
“Anything you can do?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “You know I’m in love with you, don’t you? You know if I could wave a wand and it would be the three of us, you and me and Pixie—”
“No, don’t.”
“—I’d do whatever I could to wave that wand. Because that would be heaven for me. To have you both. I’d give up anything for that.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t give up flying.”
“If I had to, though?”
“I’d never ask you to,” Irene said, without thinking, and Sam turned and seized her hands.
“What are you saying?” he said. “What are you telling me, Irene?”
“Nothing! You’ve got a wife, Sam.”
“Then just tell me you care. Say that I’m not the only one of us lying here at night, burning up with love for somebody who isn’t mine.”
Well, what could Irene say to that? She wasn’t the kind of woman who could lie outright. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could move in on another woman’s husband, either. She was stuck. Stuck in more ways than one, remember, since it was just the two of them on an island in the middle of the Pacific, no one to know or care what went on in that particular moment, whether they kissed or did not, confessed their hearts or did not, made love in the darkness or did not. Just Sam and Irene and whatever God was paying attention at the time.
Well, let’s be honest. In fact, there were plenty of people who cared what was going on, and moreover figured they knew, all right. Millions! As Irene sat in the sand with Sam, holding hands, thinking about how to reply, housewives and bus drivers and secretaries and farmers around the world were right then imagining that scene between the two of them, people just like you imagining what would happen if you too were marooned on a desert island with some man or woman with whom you were secretly enamored. The more cynical among you might call this an old story, a chestnut, but chestnuts have their purpose, don’t they? They allow us to imagine some all-too-human aspect of our condition on this earth, some thought or fantasy or conundrum we share in common, we flawed and yearning animals, we complicated and contradictory beings. That was why the world was transfixed with the story of the lost pilots. Sam and Irene, c’est nous.
If you were Irene, what would you say?
If you were Sam, what would you do?
At 0431 local time the next morning, the Farragut dropped anchor about two hundred yards off the rim of Howland Island. Once dawn broke, the captain dispatched a boat containing himself, an oarsman, and the reporter and photographer from the UPI, to survey the atoll for any sign of the lost pilots.
The news crossed the wire at 0603.
Hanalei, Hawai’i
October 1947
Lindquist tells me to look out the window at that glorious sight below, and I tell her to stick her glorious sights in the world’s darkest cave. I ask her what was the real reason she made me come up here with her today. Is this some kind of murder plot? Are we going to crash on this island of hers and end our miseries?
“Of course not,” she yells, over the noise of the engines. “What a waste of a good airplane.”
“Maroon us on the island, then? Deliver me the full Foster and Mallory experience? The crabs, the peanut butter, the saltwater distillery? Listen up, dame. The desert island survival story, that’s a dime a dozen. All variations on a theme of building campfires and eating shellfish and getting sunburnt. Who cares anymore? You know there’s only one thing people really want to know.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
I lean forward. “Did you or didn’t you?”
Try as I might, I don’t remember how I knew my father was running around on my mother. It seems to me it was just a fact of life. She never tried to hide it from me. As far back as I could recall, she would talk about your father’s little girlfriend, in this scornful tone of voice, or that hussy of your father’s, in the same way as you might refer to his beloved automobile or his stamp collection. Sure, I would hear her cry at night when he was away, presumably with some paramour, which was another word my mother favored. But I was just a kid, and I sometimes cried at night, so I didn’t think this was especially strange. I adored my father. I thought my father was the most wonderful man alive, handsome and brave and smart, and I knew he loved me more than anything else in the world. He would come home and lift me in the air and call me his best girl, and he would take me out for milkshakes at the drugstore, just me and him, and tell me stories about his day. Of course I loved my mother, but I worshiped Dad; I gave him all my secret loyalty. I looked at my mother and felt an awful, guilty, childlike sense of superiority, because Dad certainly wasn’t running around on me. I was the apple of his eye. Nobody more dear to him than his Janey.
Not until I was older did I realize the truth. Not until later did I understand how much grief my father’s sins caused my mother, how it felt when you were betrayed by somebody you loved that much. Because eventually my father left my mother. She came to me one day, when I was about thirteen or so, and said that Dad had left us for good this time, and soon after that Mama met my stepfather and we moved away and that was that. Mama said we were dead to Dad and he was dead to us, and I should just forget all about him and look upon my stepfather as my new father, my real father, a man I could trust.