The Secrets of Flight (18 page)

L
ATER,
I
CURL UP ON CLEAN SHEETS AND USE SOME PAPER FROM
the hotel nightstand to pen a letter to Sarah about the events of the day. I leave out the part about getting spooked in the storm, and how the whole plane could have flipped over and crushed us during the ground spin. Instead, I tell her about what happened after we landed and the goons in the restaurant who think we're just here to entertain the troops.

“You're always writing,” Murph says, running a towel over her wet hair. “And you're not even the one with the fiancé,” she adds, jerking her head toward Grace, who grins through a yawn in the comfy chair where she's reading an actual book instead of an aviation manual.

“I just want to remember it all,” I say, feeling sheepish, because when I'm not corresponding with Sarah, I'm writing letters to Sol. He writes me back, too, pages of longhand about his past and our future.
I'll set up a medical practice out of our home, so whenever you return from the sky, you'll know that I'll be there.
I love that in Sol's dreams I can still fly when the war ends, no matter what decision is reached at the hearing later this month. I can even envision our someday family: a little blond boy with his arms outstretched at the top of the steps waiting for me to scoop him up. Or in Sol's arms beside the runway after the air show, waiting to greet me as I climb down from the cockpit.

“What are you reading over there, Gracie-Grace?” Murph asks, combing her orange locks.

“‘The Open Boat'?” Grace says, looking up from her pages. “Stephen Crane. I read it ages and ages ago, but I didn't really appreciate it until now.”

I think back to my high school English class. “Something about a captain, a cook, and a correspondent who are trapped out at sea?”

Grace nods and smiles.

“Sounds like flight school,” Ana says.

I decide then that Murphee Sutherland would be the Captain, the way she barks at us to get cracking each morning—our beds made for inspection, our boots tied before we march out to formation. Meanwhile, Ana Santos is the cook, who keeps cheerfully bailing out the boat and asking about what we will eat when we make it to shore. And I am the correspondent.

“Wasn't there another guy? An oiler?” Murphee asks. Grace says the only thing she can remember about the oiler is that he ends up dead in the shallows.

T
HREE DAYS LATER, BACK IN
S
WEETWATER, THERE ARE SIRENS ON
the airfield in the evening, and I run out of the mess tent to see fire trucks and an ambulance screaming toward a plume of smoking metal hidden somewhere beyond the trees, several miles away. Dust and grit sting my eyes, and I can't stop watching the commotion and panting with panic. When I finally get back to the bunk, Grace is already there, huddling on her cot. “Oh, thank God it wasn't you!” she says, letting go of her knees when I walk through the door and rushing over to hug me. Her eyes are big and brown, matching the fear in my own.

“Who was it?” I ask, but Grace doesn't know, and so I take off my boots and zoot suit and slump on my own cot, my heart turning somersaults in my chest as we wait. One by one, pilots return from the field, ordered to ground by Captain Digby.

“Who was it?” Vera asks, the moment she steps across the
threshold of the barracks, her arms strangely empty without her behemoth binder.

“Who was it?” Ana asks, forty minutes later, and we shake our heads.

Another half hour goes by and still there's no sign of Murphee.

“Where the hell is she?” Ana says, pacing back and forth.

“You know how she likes to talk to people—she's probably getting the scoop,” I say, only I'm not quite confident. Murphee likes to take unnecessary chances and has already risked a pink slip for her wild abandonment of precision flying.

“Did you see it?” Murphee asks, finally bursting into the room. Grace bounds up from the bed and hugs her, and tears of relief prick my eyes. “I watched it fall. The plane lost its engines and just dropped like a meteor—Louise Hayes,” Murphee adds, before we can ask again. “No survivors.”

“Oh my God,” Vera breathes, and Ana starts pacing again.

The falling feeling sweeps over me again.
Louise, I just went dancing with you. You were a wallflower with me. How can you be dead?

“But there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and her takeoff was perfect,” Grace says.

“Sabotage,” Murphee says, slamming the door to her footlocker.

I think of Louise warning me to carefully inspect my plane and doubting that the birds were responsible for my engine failure that day in the Stearman. “But . . . sabotage how?” I ask.

“Sugar in the gas tank,” Murphee says. “The plane can still get up, until eventually the carburetor quits and the engine just conks out.”

“Come on,” I say. “Who would do such a thing?”

“You'd be surprised. Some men go crazy by the idea of women ‘invading the cockpit.' Of course, the military will probably call it ‘pilot error.'”

I think of the last crash investigation, for the WASP at Camp Davis whose plane went down when her engine was hit by a shell from the gun crew trying to qualify for overseas duty. Jackie Cochran had flown to that site, too, but left it to the military to sort out the paperwork. “Pilot error,” they claimed again, despite the fact that the pilot had radioed she'd been hit by the flak from the antiaircraft guns the guys were shooting during tow-target duty.

“What's Jackie Cochran going to do? Make a stink and have them scrub the whole program? We're on thin ice as it is,” Vera says, reminding me that the congressional hearing to militarize the WASP is coming up at the end of this month.

“Jesus,” Grace says. “Someone should pay for this.”

“No one will pay—and certainly not the goddamn government,” Murphee says, her voice bitter. “They won't so much as give her a flag for her coffin. We're just civilians, remember?”

There's a soft knock at the door, and Mildred Winter, another pilot, pops her head into our room. “Someone's here for Miri. And Captain Digby wants us at the flagpole in ten.”

No one asks who's here for Miri. Nobody catcalls and tells me they'll see me k-i-s-s-i-n-g in a tree; no one has the energy for that now. In the silence, I pull my boots back on and run outside and into the wind. Inside the gate, Sol is there. Just seeing him like that, clutching his fedora in his hands, makes my heart lurch with relief. Finally reaching him, I let him hold
me for a long moment, thinking how strange it is that I was ever afraid to touch him.

“I heard a plane went down,” he whispers into my hair, before kissing my forehead and then my cheeks. “I was afraid it was you.”

“It was my friend Louise,” I say, the words choking in my throat, and he hugs me harder, for a long time. Engines are roaring, planes are landing, and the wind is still howling in my ears. “You came all the way from Abilene?” I finally say.

“My father—he's the one who heard someone talking about it at the shop. He gave me the keys to the truck and told me to go make sure you were all right.” I feel a swell of love rise up like a wave, and I don't know if it's for Sol or his father. “There's something else . . .” Sol slowly adds, a flicker of worry crossing his face. “I got a call today from a school in New York. They accepted me for the fall class.”

“Medical school?” I gasp and pull away. “You got in? Sol, that's—wonderful.”

“Sort of. Maybe. The timing is bad . . .”

“You've been waiting for this your whole life!”

“I know, it's just . . .” His head sags, almost guiltily. “I don't want to leave you.”

I place my hands on his cheeks and tilt his head up until our eyes meet again. “This is your calling. You have to go.”

T
HAT NIGHT,
L
OUISE
'
S BUNKMATES TAKE UP A COLLECTION TO
send her body home, and we all pitch in what little money we have. We don't talk about how she wanted to be a vet, or that she thought flying was easier than swing dancing. She's
still very much in the present tense, still scooping up the cockroaches in the bathroom to set them free, because to dwell on her in the past tense means we'd have to dwell on ourselves. We are shaken but silent. I can't sleep again, my mind awash with plane sabotage and Louise's flagless coffin. I think of Sarah, lying in a TB sanatorium, and Mama making dress after dress after dress in Uncle Hyman's store, and of Sol's face, twisting with worry, despite all the promises for the rest of our lives. Is he afraid to say goodbye because he knows it might be forever?

The rest of the week goes by and while things are not exactly back to normal, it's the military, which means the routine is always the routine: marching, breakfast, marching, ground school, marching, lunch, flight line. Planes go up, planes come down, and while I might cast a quick glance over the man servicing my AT-6, I push away the fear before it can disable me, the same way we push away the topic of death at dinner. The truth is, none of us wants to think about things we can't change. If I worry that maybe I'm next, I'm already done for, so instead I wake up each day and tell myself there's a reason I'm here.

On June 26, we're at the bunk after PT and changing into our flight suits, when Murph rushes in from the field. “They're shutting us down!” she says, and I stop lacing my boots to regard her standing there. “They're shutting us down!” she repeats, like a wild-eyed, orange-haired Paul Revere, and there's a sudden constriction in my chest, making it hard to speak.

“They can't do that,” Grace says.

Murph hands us each a mimeographed paper like a pilot dropping an evacuation flyer—and we are civilians in a town about to be wiped off the map. It's a letter from General Arnold
informing us that as of December 20, 1944, the Women Airforce Service will disband. Effective immediately, the program will no longer take new pilots.

“What about the petition to Congress?” I say at last.

“You heard the lobbyists—we weren't meant to replace them, we were meant to
release
them for combat,” she says bitterly. “The men are coming home and they want their jobs back. The bill sunk. We're not part of the military, and we never will be.”

I imagine this news reaching the house on Beacon Street, as Uncle Hyman reads the paper and drinks his morning coffee—turning redder by the sip—and Mama rinses the dishes. At first she's annoyed when he begins to read aloud—
can't he see how busy she is?—
but then, as he's pontificating about how women should never have been allowed to fly in the first place, she snatches the paper away and scans the print herself.
Disbanded
, she sees, and for the first time in four months, Mama exhales. But then I think of Sarah, alone in her dreary room, searching the sky through her hospital window.
You're staying,
she says, and in my mind, and it's an order, not an option. I have six months to fly—possibly for the rest of my life. “I'm staying,” I say aloud, and Murph looks at me with surprise.

“Aren't we all?”

I
n the forthcoming days after my appointment with Dr. Khaira, I approached my gallbladder surgery as if I were awaiting execution. At night, it was all I could imagine: the steel operating room table, my prone body frozen under the bright lights, the sharp instruments slicing me open. It wasn't Dr. Khaira's skill that I doubted, only his optimism: whenever I thought of undergoing general anesthesia, I couldn't imagine ever waking up again.

So, I went shopping for books to distract me, for a new soft nightgown and sheets, for fat-free frozen yogurt, since I'd promised Dr. Khaira not an ounce of Häagen-Dazs would cross these lips until after the surgery, knowing it could precipitate another attack. In fact, just as I was leaving the little corner store, with my bag of carefully selected, nutritionally tasteless items, Gary the grocer called out, “Oh, Mrs. Browning? You're a nickel short.” It must've been the shock on my face that made him wave his hand and tell me to never mind.

“No, no, no—you need your money!” I insisted, fumbling in my change purse and setting down five single pennies with shaking fingers. The last thing that I wanted was the charity discount for senior citizens who'd forgotten basic addition.

Still flustered from my mistake, I rushed from the store, whose bells jangled on the door, before sidestepping an older man on the sidewalk going the opposite way.

“It takes a bullshitter to spot a bullshitter!” the man called, which made me hurry on, until the same voice said, “Mary Browning, there's not a damn thing wrong with your foot,” and I whirled around to see Gene Rosskemp standing there. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt under his jacket and in his hand was a stick, the end of which contained a stuffed horse's head. The head was bright white, the mane absurdly pink and purple.

“I beg your pardon?”

He waved the horse's head in the air, streamers and all, and said, “Come on now,
pony
up. What the hell happened to you? Selena said you left on a stretcher by an ambulance because you stubbed your big toe.”

“It spontaneously and miraculously healed,” I said, and would've tap-danced to prove it, but at this point, having given Gary the grocer the wrong change, I was now officially afraid of the cracks in the sidewalk. Instead, I asked him why on earth he was holding a pony.

“It's for the newest member of the Rosskemp clan—we finally got ourselves a little girl! Thought I'd send a gift, although I don't know how the hell I'm gonna ship this thing.”

“Maybe you can wait and give it to her when they visit.”

“Eh.” Gene waved his hand in the air. “They live in Califor
nia. They'll never visit. I get a Christmas card each year. Birth announcements. A thank-you letter if I send a gift.” He took out his wallet and then slid out a picture and handed it to me. I peered at the lovely little blond boy wearing a conductor hat and sitting in a large toy train.

“Beautiful boy,” I said, handing it back.

“That ‘beautiful boy' is a professor of linguistics now at UCLA. He's the one whose wife just had a baby girl. I don't blame him for not keeping in better touch. His dad and I had a falling-out along the way. Can't say I exactly know why.” Gene glanced to our right and steered me out of the path of foot traffic and over toward the bench on the edge of the sidewalk. “My grandson does his best to keep me in the loop. And I do my best to make sure they remember me,” Gene added, patting the horse on its head as he sat down.

It occurred to me then that maybe I was wrong about the writers' group. It had been ages since I'd listened to the stories between their stories, ages since I'd heard anything but the loud pulse of my own losses and regrets. But they must have been suffering, too, suffering and struggling to find something to feel hopeful about.

“I know a secret about you, Mary Browning,” Gene said, dropping his voice.

“Oh?” I said, flushing with fear.

“A little birdy told me at the last meeting that you flew planes during the war. You acted all impressed with my model airplanes, and you never even told me you were the real deal!”

“Well, I-I wasn't
acting
that day. It was marvelous watching you fly . . .”

“Aw, Mary, don't patronize me,” he said, even though I
wasn't. I'd loved feeling the sunshine on my face and the small thrill of standing next to a man who wanted nothing more than to show me his passion. “I was waiting to hear what was wrong with my story, when you didn't show up the other night,” he added, even quieter then. “Waiting to have my ass handed to me, looking forward to it, really.”

“I have to have my gallbladder out, and I'm terrified,” I blurted, feeling foolish by my own irrational fear—after all, the other Jean had had her chest sawed open the year before and lived to write horrid prose about it. I plopped down on the bench next to Gene and heaved my packages onto my lap. It felt good to sit.

“Oh, I had mine out after the war, and it was no big deal,” Gene said. “These days they just pump you full of gas and slip a tiny camera inside you, snip, tug, and it's out—piece of cake. Was for me and they sliced me open all the way from here to here.” He drew a long, invisible line across the top right corner of his belly. “'Course, just a few years ago, I started to get some right-sided pain again, right? And I go to the emergency room and they run tests, and after a while, the doctor comes in really shocked—and the last thing you want is to have something that makes a doctor practically speechless, right? And he says, ‘You're not going to believe this but somebody left a metal clamp inside of you sixty years ago.' He slaps up an X-ray on the light box and I see with my own eyes, plain as day, the handles. Looks like a pair of scissors! And doc says it must've shifted or something, which caused my pain. So, they took me back to the OR to remove the clamp.” He smiled at me. “But that's not gonna happen to you.”

“Good Lord,” I whispered.

“Relax, Mary. The more you worry about shit going wrong, the more you open yourself up to it. Don't get stuck in your own head. Bad place to be—unless you're writing or something.”

“I liked your story very much, Gene,” I said, suddenly reminded. “In fact, it actually surprised me.”

A smile spread across his face. “Surprised you?”

“You actually made me care about an inanimate object—a truckload of wine! I cared about whether the wine would make it past the French police. I cared when it looked like the bottles might be broken. I wanted the Seventy-Fifth Squadron to succeed in the great rescue. And when you and your wife shared a bottle on your anniversary? Delightful.”

“Mary Browning, are you feeling okay?” Gene said, and I could tell I'd made his day, possibly his month. “Is this the bad gallbladder talking?”

I laughed, until I realized that the woman in a purple tracksuit striding toward us—fists pumping, weights swinging from her ankles—was actually Selena Markmann. She would have kept powering on by if Gene hadn't whistled like the construction worker that he once was.

“Mary Browning!” Selena exclaimed, as if I were the catcaller. “There you are! I just had the pleasure of meeting Tyler's nephew. How wonderful for you!”

I stared at her. “Who . . . ?”

“Your grandson
Tyler,
who works for
Microsoft
?” she reminded me. “His nephew is visiting. He said he's a cousin of the twins? Your great-granddaughters?” It was quite strange: the woman sounded utterly serious.

I blinked. “Oh?”

“Yes, he's here. Well, not here here. He's back at the high-rise. I asked how long he was visiting for, and he said he lives in the area. How nice for you to finally have some family nearby.”

“Oh, yes. Very nice. My. I had almost forgotten he was coming,” I said, woozily rising to a stand and collecting my packages.

“Well, he's up there,” Selena said.

“He is? Still?”

“Sitting outside your door on the floor, waiting for you. I gave him the fiction for next week's meeting. You'll be there, won't you?”

This Tuesday's writers' group was exactly one week before my surgery. I would dissect fiction one last time before Satinder Khaira would dissect me. “I'll be there with bells on,” I said.

Gene smiled and said, “Thatta girl, Mary. You'll be
horsing around
in no time!” he added with a wink, waving around that silly horse again.

I quickly walked the single block back to the high-rise and then took the elevator to the third floor. Sure enough, in the shadow of the hallway, I could see a boy sitting in the hall, his legs stretched out across the floor, and a laptop open on his knees. I thought of Dave and my scalp began to tingle.

“Mary Browning?” the boy asked, when I stopped in front of my door.

“Hello,” I said, eyeing him. He had reddish hair, very fair skin, and a smattering of freckles across his cheeks and nose. “And you are . . . ?”

“Toby Strickler.” He shut the lid of his computer and scrambled to his feet. “You know my sister, Elyse?”

“Oh, Elyse! Yes, of course. Come in, come in,” I said, quickly
unlocking my door and ushering him inside before Selena could return. “How is she?” I added, after shutting the door and setting my packages down on the counter.

“I don't know how she is. She left.” Toby put his backpack on the linoleum floor before sliding his computer onto my kitchen table, right next to my own. I couldn't help wondering why he was in possession of a laptop computer when his older sister was not. I was about to inquire, when he asked, “So, how do you know my sister?”

“Well, we met at the library—at the writers' group. I believe you met Selena, earlier, who is also a member?”

“Oh, yeah. Here.” Toby stooped down to unzip his backpack and rummaged around until he came up with two packets of collated papers: a short story by Victor Chenkovitch about the Holocaust, which would probably be more uplifting than the next chapter from Jean Fester's memoir: we were finally at her partial colectomy. Before I could thank Toby, he stood up and added, rather sternly, “You bought my sister a plane ticket to Key West?”

“Yes. Why?” I asked, startled. “Is everything all right?”

“Well, she's fine. But my mom got called into her boss's office because of it.”

“Because Elyse went to Key West? I'm sorry; I don't follow . . .”

“My little brother was sick, and Mom needed Elyse to watch him. I could've stayed home all day, but Mom didn't trust me to be in charge for ten hours. And my dad wasn't around, and Mom didn't have any help, so she canceled this really important deposition again and got in trouble with her boss.”

“I see. Well. Goodness, I'm awfully sorry.” I pulled out one
of the kitchen chairs, intending to offer it to the boy, but sank into it myself, since he seemed intent on standing, hands on his hips.

“Mom was really mad at Dad because she thought he bought the tickets for Elyse, but he said he didn't know anything about it. Mom said she didn't believe him, because Elyse told her the tickets came from him, so they got in a bigger fight, and now they're getting a divorce.”

“Oh, dear.” I massaged my head.

“And, you know, she's under age eighteen. She can't just go flying off to—wherever,” Toby said, playing an excellent mimic of his mother, I presumed.

“Excellent point, sir.” I thought of myself, long ago, leaving home for the sky, and how my mother and Uncle Hyman had said more or less the same thing. “As I understood it, your grandmother is very ill.”

At least that got his shoulders to drop. “Mom doesn't really know what's going on.”

“And how did you figure out that it was I who bought Elyse the tickets?”

“I hacked her email,” Toby said with a shrug. “She has the easiest passwords. And there was a confirmation email from Travelocity. It had your name and address, and the price of the tickets and everything.”

“My credit card number, too?” I asked, alarmed.

“Just the last four digits.” He was watching me, waiting now, but I wasn't sure for what. “So?” he prompted.

“So . . . ?”

“So, why would you pay a thousand dollars to send my sister to Key West?”

That made me laugh, because really, how could I answer that? It was, indeed, a very good question. Because she looked like my sister Sarah? Because she reminded me a little of me? Because I had quite a lot of money and no one to spend it on? “I guess the best answer is that I can afford it. And it seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps I may have overstepped my bounds.”

“Just seems like a lot to spend on airfare. During hurricane season.”

“It is a lot of money. But there are times to save and times to spend.” I sighed. “Is your mother aware that I was the one to send Elyse to Key West without consulting her?”

“I didn't tell her yet.”

“I see. Well . . .” I searched my brain for something I might offer the boy to keep his mouth shut, until the answer struck me: “Would
you
like to go visit your grandmother in Florida, too?” A flicker of confusion crossed his face, followed by a slow smile, and then a laugh of obvious disbelief. It was a lovely sound, and I knew, in that moment, he wouldn't tell a soul.

“Elyse is in big trouble. I don't want to be in big trouble, too.”

“No, of course not, you're very right. You're a bright young man. You can't just . . . as you pointed out . . . come and go as you please.” I hesitated and then asked him what he wanted from me.

“I don't really know,” he finally said. “I just want things to go back to normal.”

I nodded in complete understanding. Since old age had settled upon me, I'd been feeling the same way. “Is there anything I can do?”