The Secrets of Flight (24 page)

“No one except Mrs. Byrd,” I say, holding up the ginger bread. “She seemed to think you'd be sleeping.”

“Sleeping, ha! I don't have time to sleep.”

“Where's Rita?” I ask, and then—thinking she's going to
hit me with the broom in her hand—flinch as Mama moves toward me.

“That's none of your business now, is it?” she says, hurrying past.

“I brought her something—I'd like to give it to her,” I say.

“She's at day camp,” she says, over her shoulder, taking the second flight of steps, and I rush to keep up. “Keep your treats, Miri. And you need to leave before anyone gets home,” she says.

“Mama, look at me, please. This is your grandchild I'm carrying,” I plead, breathless, and she stops on the landing and finally turns to meet my eyes.

“You don't exist to me anymore. That baby does not exist to me,” she says, jerking her head toward my belly, and never have I heard her so cold.

“But Sol says as soon as he graduates, we can move to Wakefield and raise her Jewish—”

“You joined a church, Miriam. A
church
!” Mama says in a scary hiss. “You made your choice. Don't call. Don't write. Don't
confuse
Rita. Leave her alone, Miri—leave
us
alone.”

E
VEN WHEN
I
GO, WEEPING INTO MY HANDS,
I
DON
'
T REALLY
believe it's over. But three months later, when the baby I've carried for nine months emerges lifeless and blue, with a cord wrapped around its beautiful neck, I think of my mother's words and give up. I made my choice, and these are the consequences. My baby doesn't exist, and Sarah's daughter will never be mine.

For a long time, I don't exist to me, either.

I
t was amazing how quickly the transformation had occurred: in one moment I'd walked in, fully dressed, to the preoperative holding area and less than a half an hour later, I'd been stripped—my Mary Janes replaced by socks with treads, my clothes by a checkered gown, and my dignity tucked into a plastic bag and placed somewhere out of reach. Thank heavens I possessed my own teeth. Climbing aboard the gurney as if it were a rowboat being cast out to sea, I felt different suddenly, lost and uncertain. I was a patient now.

“Retired?” asked a young woman, after confirming my insurance information for her computerized records.

“Retired pilot,” I said pointedly, mostly just to get her to look up. It worked. Her typing fingers paused, and her rosy face finally met my own for the first time since she'd scooted over to my gurney on her rolling stool.

“No kidding! How cool!” she said, with a genuine smile before quickly reassuring me that it would be just a few more
questions, and then she could let my friends and family back to wait with me.

Friends and family,
I thought with a sigh, as I rearranged my blankets over my legs. I'd been trying not to fret about Elyse's silence since her return from Key West the Monday before and trying not to think the worst when she'd skipped last week's meeting of the writers' group. I even felt foolish for packing her a gift, simply because, weeks ago, she'd promised to be here. Surely, between her parents' divorce and her mother's shaky career, the girl had more important things to worry about than me.

At last, the young woman finished typing my demographic information into the computer, at which point a nurse popped her head in to ask for my preoperative paperwork to pass on to the anesthesiologist. As I handed over the forms, I couldn't help thinking of my uncomfortable conversation with Gene Rosskemp the night before, when I'd asked if he would be willing to act as my medical power of attorney.

“That's what you've got Dave for,” Gene reminded me, and, with great reluctance, I admitted that Dave couldn't be my power of attorney, because he had actually stopped speaking to me over a slight miscommunication.

“Who is Hannah Bergman?” Dave had asked me during our final conversation. He was calling with news from Seattle: Baby Tyler had cut two teeth and was just learning to walk, Carrie was almost finished her first year of teaching, and Dave had just gotten a job with a start-up company doing computer software.

“I don't know. You tell me,” I'd said, as if it were a game. “Who is Hannah Bergman?”

“Some lady who wrote me a letter. She says she's Dad's sister.” I had inhaled sharply, as if stabbed in the gut, when he added, “Her maiden name was Rubinowicz.”

“I have no idea,” I said, my voice off-key.

“She wrote a bunch of stories about Dad that sounded legit—stuff he told me about growing up in Texas, and his father's mango tree in the backyard. She knew he hadn't gotten into medical school three times . . .”

I'd clutched the phone harder, as if it might steady me.

“She says Dad's name wasn't Thomas. She says it was Solomon, and that he changed it to hide his religion. Is this true, Mom?” Dave had asked, and for a moment, I just stood there swaying, my heart rattling inside my rib cage. “Am I really Jewish? Is that my last name?” Dave added.

“Your last name is Browning. Check your birth certificate,” I'd said sharply, my teacher-self returning.

“What about the ‘secret love language'?” he asked after a moment. “What was that really?”

I should tell him it was Yiddish,
I thought. “I told you. Just something Dad and I made up,” I heard myself say.

“An entire language.” Dave's voice was grim.

“That's right.”

“Why won't you tell me the truth?” he'd shouted, startling me. My son was never a shouter.

“The past has nothing to do with you,” I said.

“How can you say that? I'm your son! Your history is my history!”

I told him I wouldn't be spoken to that way, that I was deserving of his respect, and that if he continued to yell—

“I want to know who I am!” he'd shouted again, and with hands trembling, I hung up the phone. After three weeks of silence, before I could apologize, before I could tell him why we told the lie that became our lives, Dave and Carrie and Tyler were gone.

Remembering this now, alone in the preoperative holding area, made my throat clench and my eyes blurry. How could I have explained? We abandoned the past for the sake of our dreams, which included Dave's limitless future, unmarred by hate. But that didn't change the fact of my cowardice.

“Mrs. Browning?” asked an uncertain voice from somewhere behind me. I looked over my shoulder to see none other than Elyse herself, peeking from behind the curtain that surrounded my bed. I sat up straighter, wiped the corner of my eye, and managed a watery smile.

“How
are
you, my dear?” I said, reaching out a hand to her. I could hear the flush of delight in my own voice.

Elyse answered with a shrug. “Better than you, I guess, right?”

But she didn't look better than me. There were circles under her eyes, and her shoulders were hunched again. Perhaps she was cold, I decided, in her thin jersey shirt and jeans, so I offered the present I'd brought along specifically to give her—my leather flight jacket. I pointed to a plastic bag on the lower metal rungs of the bed. “Go ahead. I brought it for you,” I said. I watched her mouth gape a little, when she realized what it was, and then I smiled as she slipped it on. “Check the pocket,” I remembered, and she pulled out the Dictaphone and snapped it open.

“No tapes?”

“Oh dear. I must've forgotten them. But here, let me see you,” I added, and she stood up straighter, the jacket transforming her hunched posture into a straight-backed, self-assured pilot. She could've been a fly girl, right then. She could've even been me. “It's perfect. You keep it.”

Her eyebrows went up in alarm. “I don't want to keep it. It's yours.”

“Well, it can't stay mine forever,” I said, and her hazel eyes filled with tears.

“My grandma died last week,” she finally said. “I left on Sunday, and she died on Thursday.”

“Oh, my dear . . .”

“We went back to Key West last weekend and scattered her ashes. Thank you,” she added quietly. “If you hadn't sent me, I never would've seen her again.”

I sighed and rubbed my temple; a headache was gathering like a storm behind my left eyebrow.

Elyse shoved her hands back into the pockets of the jacket. “My mom and my aunt are in shock that Grandma died. She was only diagnosed with cancer a month ago.”

“And you must be in shock, too, I gather.”

“I don't know what I am. I feel like . . . I'm not a kid anymore.”

“Oh, my dear,” I said again, looking up at her heart-shaped face.

A nurse yanked back the curtain. “Your brother-in-law's here. Is it okay to let him back?”

“Brother-in . . . ?”

“I hope it's okay,” Elyse said. “I saw Gene Rosskemp in the
hallway and told him to come on back. I thought only family were allowed.”

“Oh goodness,” I said, inwardly groaning, but smiling and nodding my okay to the nurse, who mistook my yanking up the blankets around my neck as a sign that I needed more warm blankets—bless her—before scurrying off to retrieve Gene. Honestly, I was surprised he'd shown up at all.

“What happened with the flour baby?” I asked Elyse, as we waited for Gene.

“Oh. He died, too.” God only knows what my face did, because she rushed to console me: “It's okay! Really. Now that I'm not worrying about
him
all the time, I've been thinking about my novel again—how you said the half sisters need to be united against something, once they find each other? I figured out that they want to make their school part of the Civilian Pilot Training Program, but the headmaster doesn't think girls can fly. And so they secretly apply to FDR's program anyway, but the headmaster's
evil son,
who tries to seduce all of the girls at the school, keeps thwarting their flight plans, and the only way to succeed is to
kill
him and
burn
him and scatter his ashes at sea.”

“My word!” I said, massaging my temples again, as Gene appeared, looking a mite sheepish.

“Hey, Mary. Thought you could use a little cheering squad here,” he said, and then I smiled, surprised, because he was actually right. “You just ask for the good stuff, you hear? So you don't go waking up in the middle of surgery.”

“That happens?” My neck craned forward in a spasm of disbelief. “People wake up before it's over?”

“Only very rarely,” Elyse said, with an authoritative nod. It wasn't until Gene nudged her and she smiled that I realized they were teasing me.

“Tell 'em you want the hammer,” Gene insisted. “And while you're off in la-la-land, Elyse and I will hang out in the waiting room.”

It was heartening to imagine two people simply being there for the sole purpose of awaiting news of my recovery. My shoulders dropped with relief. “It's supposed to just take forty-five minutes. I'll be home tonight.”

“Forty-five minutes or four hours, don't matter. I've got my dirty magazines”—he held up
Car and Driver
—“and Elyse's got . . . ?”

“Oh!” she remembered, reaching into her backpack to pull out a hardback book. “I brought this for you. It's my grandmother's book, about a Women Airforce Service Pilot, so I thought you'd like it, even if it's not very literary.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, running my fingers over the cover of the old and yellowed book. The dust cover, if there had ever been one, was long lost, and instead it was just a brown binding with the words
The Secrets of Flight
embossed in green.

“That's what Grandma said. The girls in the story are all beautiful and sexy, and they're always talking about boys more than the war, while they do their hair. And they always say, ‘Yee haw!' when they take off. But I couldn't put it down,” she added sheepishly. “I finished it in a day.”

It sounded like drivel, but naturally I was curious. Perhaps the author was related to someone I might've known in
flight school, someone who'd only imagined us to be glamorous pilots, rather than the hard workers we really were. I looked at the binding.

Margarita Schiff,
I thought, perplexed by the name and still wincing from my headache when the anesthesiologist arrived, a young man with a doughy complexion, who forgot to introduce himself before launching into the potential side effects of general anesthesia, including death. I glanced at Elyse, who gulped, and then to Gene, who smiled and nodded at the form.
Let the man do his job
.

After shakily signing my life away, I watched as the anesthesiologist stuffed the clipboard with my papers into a slot at the end of the bed.

“I have a terrible headache,” I said, but he left without a backward glance.

“Mary, in a few minutes, you won't even know you have a head,” Gene said with a wink, and when I shot him a skeptical look, he added, “You gotta give yourself over to these people. It may not seem like it, but they know what they're doin'.”

When Dr. Khaira stopped by next, I could almost believe it. He shook Gene's hand, and knocked his fist against Elyse's before thanking her for sending him such an interesting and delightful patient. I remembered how tempted I'd been to reveal my name to him that day in his office, just by way of apology. It seemed like he would've understood that when I left Miri Lichtenstein behind, I was giving up much more than a Congressional Gold Medal.

Dr. Khaira listened attentively as I gave him a bit of advice that my husband, the late Dr. Thomas Browning, always said:
that treating older people is like driving on ice. “Do not make sudden, large movements.” He laughed and squeezed my shoulder and promised to be very precise.

“Ma'am, your family is going to have to come with me now,” said the nurse, peeking behind the curtain again. “They're ready for you in the OR.”

Elyse reached over and gave my hand a squeeze, while Gene flashed me two thumbs-up, before they both ducked out behind the nurse. It occurred to me then that somehow Gene hadn't made a single pun in the last half hour, which made me wonder if it was a sign of my own dire condition.

I looked down at the book on my lap,
The Secrets of Flight,
which, after a few unsettling moments, I cracked open. It wasn't as if I were expecting to hunker down and read for a while, but I was anxious, and it was there, and sometimes the only comfort one will know in a time of uncertainty is a book—even a very bad one, about women pilots styling their hair.

The author did, at least, have enough sense to choose an intriguing quote for the title page:

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in . . .

Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

I would drink deeper; fish in the sky,

whose bottom is pebbly with stars.

Ah, yes, Mr. Henry David Thoreau—always a winner, I thought, as I flipped one page back, to the dedication:
To Miriam Lichtenstein, my “Aunt Miri,” who made every sky seem like someplace worth fishing.

“Uh oh—let's put that in here with the rest of your belong
ings,” said a bubbly woman in scrubs, slipping the book from my hands. My mouth opened to protest, but the words were trapped inside me.

It is I—I am she—

“Look at you, tach'ing away,” the girl added, pointing at the heart monitor on the wall, where my startled and desperate heart was on display for anyone to see.

“Rita?” I finally managed, wondering how it could be true: How could I have inspired that little girl, when she knew nothing of me, nothing except that I'd left to fly? How could Sarah's daughter have written me a book?