Her Last Flight(93)

I stop the car at the veterinary hospital and open the door meekly for the ankle-biters to hop out. I usher them into the waiting room, where Lindquist sits on the bench. Sandy forms a mound of calico fluff on her lap. Next to her sits Mr. Caruthers, and at his feet lies Mollie, head on paws, who rises and wags her tail as the children approach.

“How’s the beagle?” I ask.

“Oh, she’s fine. A little indigestion, that’s all. I just thought that Mollie and me, we’d maybe stay for a bit and keep everybody company.” He gives me this sort of half-ashamed smile, not unlike Mollie’s own expression. “She’s good with kids, you know. When they’re sad.”

The children crowd around Lindquist’s lap. I start to turn for the door, give them all a bit of privacy, but Sandy chooses to lift her head and blink at me. Her eyes are cloudy and sort of confused. Probably they’ve slipped her something to make her comfortable. We should all be so lucky. I step forward and reach between limbs to give the old furball a little scratch around the ears, the way she likes, and wish her Godspeed.

Then I head back outdoors and light a cigarette, which I smoke in long, deep drags, staring through the fronds of the palm to the blue sky above.



After our last walk through the streets of Paris, Velázquez delivered me to my room at the Scribe, but he kept his clothes on. He said I had had too much to drink, and would neither enjoy nor remember the occasion properly, and he wanted our last time in bed to be memorable, like it had been four days ago when I had driven out to the airfield to meet him. I asked if he would lie with me until I fell asleep. He hesitated and then agreed.

I remember I put on my nightclothes and swallowed some aspirin with water before I climbed into bed, as was my habit when I was drunk. Velázquez stayed dressed atop the covers, so he wouldn’t be tempted, he said. He put his arm around me, however, and I laid my head on his chest. I told him I was sorry about his fiancée, and he thanked me gravely.

“But it was selfish of me to tell you that story,” he said. “It’s a terrible, tragic story, and I should not have added to your burden.”

“Why did you tell me, then?” I asked.

“Because I want someone else to remember her, in case I am killed. I want someone else to know that she was alive, and how she died.”

“Don’t say stupid things like that. You won’t be killed.”

He reached for his cigarettes on the nightstand and lit one. He told me to go to sleep, and that’s the last thing I remember about Velázquez, his solemn voice commanding me to sleep, and the smell of his cigarette, those pungent Gauloises he used to smoke, the smell of good-bye.



I make straight for the cottage when we return to Coolibah. The yellow Ford is parked out front—Olle’s come home—and so is Leo’s moped, and I can’t face either of them, I really can’t. I am only just held together by a thread.

I run a bath and emerge an hour later, wrinkled and shivering, to wrap myself in the bathrobe that appeared on the hook one day, no explanation, a typical Lindquist maneuver. I badly want a drink, but to fetch a drink means returning to the main house and Olle’s library, and that is impossible in my present condition, so I light a cigarette instead. I lie on the bed like this, in my bathrobe, smoking in long, deep drags as I stare at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling, and I feel this terrible hole in the bed, where the cat used to sleep, and also a terrible hole in my chest, as if someone has reached inside and torn away some piece of flesh. The cavity grows and grows, splitting my ribs apart, until at last I spring from the bed, crush out the cigarette, and sit down in the chair before the desk, where my life’s work lies in neat stacks of manila folders, carefully labeled.



This is where Leo finds me some time later, when he knocks on the door. I bark, Come in, without looking up, and hear the creak of hinges.

“Irene sent me,” he says, apologetic. “She figured you might be hungry, since you didn’t come to dinner.”

Though I’m afraid of the likely state of my face, I turn anyway. Leo’s carrying a tray with a plate of food on it, a glass of water and also a glass of something else. I can tell from his expression that I’m not myself.

“Thanks. Just set it on the dresser.”

He stares at me another second or two before he steps to the dresser and nudges aside my hairbrush with his knuckles to make room for the tray. “You should eat.”

“I know I should. I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

“The bourbon was my idea. Thought you could use a drink. Don’t tell Irene.”

“Is it a double?”

“What do you think?”

I scrape back the chair and fetch the bourbon from the tray. It’s a double, neat, as if he read my mind from all the way across the lawn. I thank him sincerely and return to the desk.

“What’re you working on?” he asks.

“This and that,” I tell him, and then I figure I owe him for the bourbon and add, “George Morrow. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to him. After he called off the search, I mean. There’s nothing in the newspapers. He’s turned into a recluse or something.”

Leo shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I guess he was pretty upset. She was his wife, right? His whole life was wrapped up in her.”