The Game of Love and Death(14)

“Is that so,” her nana would say when Flora would report her sighting.

Those were the words Nana always used when she thought Flora was stretching the truth to better fit her imagination. But if it was possible that her parents were up there, perhaps Mr. Lindbergh had seen them from his airplane. And maybe when she learned to fly herself, she could visit them. Just that one moment it took for her plane to pass the cloud … that would be enough.

The sky’s brightness flared, making Flora’s vision swim. Sound rippled through the crowd, and Flora turned to look, wiping her eyes. Mr. Lindbergh had arrived in a long black motorcar. All around, the shout arose from her schoolmates. “I can’t see! I can’t see!” And it was true. The children enrolled at Flora’s school had been positioned on the far side of the huge crowd, where there wasn’t any sort of view. She couldn’t help but notice that all of the white people had been given the best spots to stand, and she wondered if Mr. Lindbergh had asked for it to be that way.

The din of the thousands of children rose as the pilot approached the front, surrounded by a group of men from the city and the mayor herself. From Flora’s spot, she could see a row of hats skimming the surface of the gathered children. But then, across that sea of bodies, an uncovered head attached to a man wearing a baggy leather jacket emerged. He raised his tanned hand to wave it at the throng. Flora glimpsed his face, the same face her parents had seen when he flew by.

She knew she would not get to touch even his sleeve, let alone give him her extra piece of gingerbread. But she’d gotten something. “And somethin’ ain’t nothin’,” as her uncle often put it.

Then Mr. Lindbergh was guided back into his motorcar. Its engine faded and the crowd’s roar broke into a quilt of individual voices again. The scattered laughter of children shoving each other in jest, the muffled sound of feet trampling the lawn, the occasional shout from a boy or girl who needed to find a restroom. The roar diminished, creating pockets of silence where Flora could once again hear her own thoughts.

She was not yet ready to leave, and when the opportunity for her to slip behind a sweeping redwood presented itself, she took it. She could make her own way home. The teacher probably wouldn’t even miss her. She set her lunch pail down. Uncle Sherman could eat the gingerbread. The comforting scent of rich earth, a blend of growth and decay, rose up and surrounded her. Beneath her hands, the tree bark felt rough. Through its swaying branches, she could barely make out the blue overhead. But even that view was enough, and every inch of her strained upward as if she’d been created to be part of it, with threads of her left nice and loose so she might be pulled more easily into the blue.



At that same moment, Henry was on his bicycle, heading home from the same park, holding his cap on his head with one hand and the handlebars with the other. He whistled a happy tune, as much from the thrill of shaking Mr. Lindbergh’s hand as from being permitted to skip school that day. Having recently lost his father and moved in with the Thornes, he was allowed a variety of small freedoms such as this. He never took them if Ethan objected, but Ethan was home that day with a fever, so he couldn’t possibly mind.

Henry was tired of people looking at him with sad eyes. He planned to spend his free afternoon riding his bicycle around town, breathing in all the non-school air, the best kind there was. As he passed through the shadow of a giant redwood, a black cat chased a swooping sparrow across the street. Henry swerved to avoid the cat and bumped up onto the sidewalk, where a girl in a blue dress and pigtails had appeared.

He squeezed the brakes, sending up an awful squeal. The bicycle skidded, its wheel sliding forward until the whole thing tipped, taking him with it. He scraped his palms and tore the knee of his pants. The girl, meanwhile, tumbled backward with a shout. He hadn’t hit her, but nearly so. Henry lifted the bicycle off of himself and sat on the sidewalk, dazed.

“Are you all right?” he asked the girl, who was looking at her own skinned hands.

She nodded. “But my dress is dirty. And it’s my second-best one.”


“I’m awful sorry,” Henry said. “Let me help you home.”

“I don’t need any help,” she said. “It’s just down the hill.”

Henry thought about letting her go. He didn’t know her, and her expression was anything but friendly. But it didn’t seem the right thing to do. “I ought to walk you home.” He stood and held out his hand. There was a long pause. The sparrow, which had escaped, flitted overhead and trilled.

“I’m fine,” she said. She brushed the dirt from her dress. The cat lowered itself onto the sidewalk next to them and started cleaning its back leg shamelessly in the way that cats do.

“How about if I just walk next to you?” It felt like a competition now, to see which one of them would give in first. He looked into her eyes, and she returned his gaze just as fiercely. There was no instrument to measure the slight change in the atmosphere between them. They were scarcely aware of it themselves. Neither would remember the meeting until years later, except in the vaguest of ways. But both would recall the feeling of being brought into something, even as neither had the word for it or the experience to understand what it meant.

After a pause, she shrugged and stood. “I have some gingerbread. It was meant for Mr. Lindbergh, but if you want it, you could have it. It’s probably smashed, anyway.”