Her Last Flight(81)

These days, the beaches were more crowded. So many people had moved to California at the end of the twenties, and then as the crops kept failing in the Midwest and the farmers moved here in their droves. This promised land, California. Even when money was tight, you could still pack up a picnic lunch and your bathing suit and take the family to the beach. The sand and sun and ocean were all free. The smell of brine, the cool breeze off the water, the tide that filled the rock pools. The noise of the seagulls, the tiny, interesting crabs, the way the waves rose and hung and unfurled in perfect arcs—all these miracles could be experienced by anybody for nothing at all, like a birthright, and so they packed the beach at Huntington, at Santa Monica, at Long Beach, and learned to paddle in the cold Pacific current, to swim and to surf.

Irene didn’t want to see any of these people. She didn’t want to be seen, to be recognized, to be eaten alive and have nothing left of herself. She went instead to the old spot, where Sam had once had a house not so far up that strip of beach, where there was a wide spot in the road on which the surfers parked their cars at dawn. Before she left the car, she tied a scarf around her head to disguise her hair, the sandy curls Sam had cut for her on Howland Island, which were now an iconic symbol of American womanhood and rendered her instantly recognizable. Under a silk scarf, nobody even saw her.

The old path was still there, snaking carefully down the cliffs. Right here, the bend where she and Sam had spoken their first words. The beach was not deserted. People were out there enjoying the surf, picnicking from baskets. None of them noticed her, this lean woman wearing a white shirt and plain dungaree trousers, her hair bound in a silk scarf that rippled and whipped in the gusts of wind that came off the water.

The sun was falling now, and Irene hadn’t eaten since eight o’clock that morning. Her stomach was vast and empty. She should return home now. She should go back to the house that she and George had designed and built together.

She turned and started up the path, but instead of walking to where she had parked the car, she walked along the edge of the cliff until she came to the small, weathered gray cottage that had once belonged to Sam. Irene knew the house well. She and Sam had spent hours there in the weeks before the flight to Australia, poring over maps and charts. Sam used to make her cocoa, while he drank coffee spiked with whiskey. She never drank cocoa anymore because it reminded her of Sam, and those weeks and months that marked the territory between Irene’s discovery of flying and the world’s discovery of Irene. When flying had just been flying, this terrific adventure she was undertaking with Sam, and the future opened before her in bright, grand colors.

Now she stood on the sandy path, ten or fifteen yards from the southwest corner of the cottage, not far from the place where she and Sam had stood after returning from the airfield with Irene’s new spark plugs, the day they had met. The house and the ocean had not changed; the sky, the setting sun, the smell of the sea and the warm grass, everything was exactly as it had been that first evening. In fact, the encounter returned to her so vividly that, at first, she took no particular notice of the aging yellow Nash roadster parked outside the front of the house, because it belonged there in her memory. Then she stiffened and put her hand to her mouth. She looked at the small stone terrace, the deck chairs where she used to sit with Sam on sunny afternoons, and saw a man in one of them.

“Hello there,” he called.

“I thought you were in San Diego,” she called back.

“I thought you were in New York.”

She held up her arm. “No, I cracked up in Fort Worth.”

They stared quietly at each other. The surf crashed. Sam had a bruise on his jaw, a black eye. A thick white bandage wound around his forehead and the back of his skull. His clothes were too bulky for his lean body, suggesting more bandages underneath. A pair of crutches lay on the stone next to the deck chair. Irene walked closer.

“How did you get out of the hospital so soon?” Irene said, which was a way of asking how badly he was hurt.

“I just walked out. Never liked hospitals. I figure the sea air will cure you faster than a hospital can.”

Irene came to a stop at the edge of the terrace. The sunset could not disguise the wan, fatigued cast of Sam’s skin. “You look like hell,” she said. “Don’t you have someone to look after you?”

“I’m not an invalid.”

“What are you making for supper?”

“I don’t know. Boil an egg or something.”

Irene climbed over the low wall of the terrace and put her hand on the lower half of Sam’s forehead, the part that wasn’t covered by the bandage. “I don’t think you have any fever.”

“Of course I don’t have any fever.”

“What about that actress of yours? What’s her name? She ought to be here, looking after you.”

“I believe she would tell you that’s not part of her job description.”

Irene stared at Sam, who stared back. They hadn’t been this close, or this alone, since Australia. Possibly they hadn’t touched, except for a handshake or two.

Irene said, “I thought you’d have sold this place by now.”

Sam settled his head back and closed his eyes. “I would never sell this house.”



Inside, everything was the same, as if it hadn’t been touched since she left it. The single big parlor, overlooking the water. The tiny kitchen. The lavatory. The hallway that led to the bathroom and to Sam’s bedroom, which she had never entered or even glimpsed. To the right of the parlor was a small office, lined with bookshelves, where Sam had kept all his books and maps. He had this idiosyncratic method of shelving them. He once tried to explain to Irene, but it just ended in laughter. Somehow he always found what he was looking for.