Crossing the Horizon

by Laurie Notaro

  The fuselage was rocking back and forth; it was hard for Elsie to get her balance and stand. Holding on to her seat, she leaned over and shook Hinchliffe slightly, and within a couple of moments he was alert.

  He looked at her steadily, trying to focus, and finally said, “We’re down?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “We’re down.”

  From behind her, she heard the clanking of metal hitting metal in the same measure as the waves swung the plane. She could not see that far back into the darkness, but she caught a slight, brilliant reflection of something moving in the shadows. The fuel cans, she thought. They are bumping into one another like little boats.

  She looked down at the floor of the Endeavour and saw inches of water covering her boots. The water was coming in silently, snaking in by swirls and revolutions.

  Hinchliffe felt the cold strike at his ankles, which roused him immediately.

  “Water’s in?” he said calmly. “How much?”

  “Only a couple of inches, but it’s rising fast,” Elsie responded. “We need to get out. We’re sinking.”

  He nodded, then stood up, looking at the door and hesitant to open it. If he did, the water would rush in, pushing both of them back, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to get out.

  “Not that way,” he said. “We have to break the windshield.”

  He looked around below him for his bag of tools, but with the water rushing in and no lights on in the cabin, it was impossible. He felt down where the bag should have been, but it had slid during the impact and he only grasped water. Then he, too, heard the clanging of the fuel cans and reached back, feeling for one that was still standing and would be full of petrol. He found one, then another, and brought them back up to the front of the plane.

  His first swing didn’t do much, but his second one cracked the glass, and on the third try, the windshield on his side shattered and burst about the nose of the Endeavour like a waterfall of diamonds. The hole was big enough for Elsie to slip through. He helped her to his seat and she eased up onto the nose of the plane.

  “Climb onto the wing,” he instructed as he helped her out.

  He took another swing at the windshield with the can, demolishing the side that Elsie had been looking out of for the last thirty-six hours. Then, after her, he scrambled onto the nose. She held out her hand to guide him.

  Outside of the cabin, it was cold. He had known the temperature was below freezing before they ditched.

  Elsie was shivering a little as they sat next to each other, the two of them huddled on the top of the Endeavour, rocking in a sea that seemed so remarkably calm now, as if it had forgiven them for trying to breach it. The rain was gone. They had left that storm behind them with the fog.

  The waves lapped at the plane, rolling it from one side to the other, pushing and pulling, just enough to make them sway in sync, sitting up above the waves, back and forth. Her shivering was more concentrated now, and Hinchliffe took off his coat.

  “What is that up there?” she asked, and pointed as he laid the coat over her shoulders.

  Looking north, he saw the flickering of light high in the sky, green turning to blue, turning to vermillion, fading to purple. The blaze expanded and contracted across the stars, flickering, flashing, almost dancing, before retreating once again to a pinpoint. Suddenly it banded across the horizon and reached out, almost as if it were trying to touch them. The green fluorescence danced, spinning and twisting inside, and then moving more quickly as Elsie’s eyes tried to follow it.

  “The Northern Lights,” Ray said, watching them, too.

  “If you could see music,” Elsie said as the glow of color, crimson and violet, streaked over the night in brilliant, beautiful wisps, “that’s what it would look like.”

  They both sat and followed the spinning of the sky, analogous to an enormous brilliant wand being conducted across it, for what seemed an infinite amount of time. The waves dipped, rocking the husk of the plane delicately. Crests lapped at the wings, rolling over the deep layer of ice that had brought them down.

  “What’s that below?” Elsie asked, looking at the cluster of tiny twinkling lights far lower than the waltz of color in the sky. “Are those stars, Ray?”

  “No,” he said as he, too, began to shiver. “Those are the lights of Newfoundland. Probably St. John’s.”

  “So far away,” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Far away, Elsie, but not so far.”

  “Oh, they are the most lovely thing,” she said, pulling Ray’s coat closer around her. “The most lovely thing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SPRING 1928

  Ray and Emilie Hinchliffe, March 10, 1928.

  The lights at Seamore Place burned bright through the day while the stream of friends and family members constantly rolled in. The house was filled with the concerned, the despairing, and the curious, all seeking news of Elsie, wanting to offer their comfort or issue their opinions about weather, flying, odds of rescue.

  Janet, Kenneth, and Margaret took Seamore Place as their outpost, constantly providing for those who swooped in through the front door with gaping, open arms, back pats, and quivering lips. People they hadn’t heard from in years stopped by to pay their respects, hoping to hear a thread that hadn’t yet hit the papers or to confirm if the horrifying stories printed were indeed true. Kenneth paced with a nervous Chim at his side, and was relieved to have an interruption when someone new was announced; Janet sat on the settee and looked out the window, as if her sister were about to drive up and come bounding out of her Rolls; and Margaret concerned herself with organizing the grief and shock in the form of teacups, small plates, and the selection of biscuits and cakes. It was duty at its rawest and most numb. When they passed one another in a room or a hallway, they were silent. There was nothing to say.

  They welcomed the reporters from the Daily Express and the Times, eager to press them for new information. In exchange, Margaret told them what she knew.

  “No message of any kind has been received by me or my family from my sister,” she told them. “All we know we have learned from the papers. She had promised not to go on the flight with Captain Hinchliffe, and we never dreamed that she would do so. There is no doubt, however, that she has gone.”

  When darkness seeped in, the house was a shining beacon in Mayfair, every lamp blazing brilliantly. When a maid habitually turned off a light in the upstairs hall, Margaret turned furious and scolded the poor girl mercilessly. “They must all be left on,” she demanded. “All of them. Even the third floor. Especially the third floor.”

  In Egypt, Lord Inchcape kept silent. He said nothing to his wife in the hours and days that reluctantly passed, passively, quietly, with no word of his daughter. When he felt as if he might collapse, he sat up straighter; when he sensed that he might not be able to speak, his voice boomed. He held his wife’s hand when he wanted to break. He would not let Jane suspect or question that anything might be even the slightest bit different in her life than it was the week prior until it was definite that Elsie would not return.

  He could not risk it.

  * * *

  MYSTERIOUS SEA REPORT

  OWNER OF UNKNOWN STATION TELLS OF INTERCEPTED MESSAGE

  What may prove to be the first “at sea” report of the transatlantic flight of Captain Walter Hinchliffe, British aviator, was picked up last night by George Dawson, operating station 2-Y-W here, said The Associated Press.

  The announced interception of a message, apparently relayed by the French steamer Roussilio, four days out of Bordeaux, reporting the passage of a large plane, low overhead, heading west.

  Interference prevented complete copying of the message, Dawson said.

  —WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 1928, THE TIMES, LONDON

  * * *

  BULLETIN

  A message from Portland, Maine, states that coastguards at the Biddeford Pool Station this afternoon are investigating an unconfirmed report of a yellow object a
nd two persons—possibly the aeroplane the Endeavour with Capt. Hinchliffe and Miss Elsie Mackay—have been seen on Stratton, off the Old Orchard Beach. One report said that watchers could unmistakably see a yellow object and two persons, who seemed to be waving through the mist. According to a later report, the coast guardsmen searched Stratton Island, but found no trace of the Endeavour.

  —NEW YORK, THURSDAY, MARCH 15

  * * *

  At ten thirty a.m. on Thursday, March 15, the fifty hours of flying time that the plane had after leaving Cranwell were exhausted.

  The police began clearing out the stragglers at Mitchel Field who were still holding to the thread of hope that Hinchliffe and Elsie would arrive at any moment. Most of the thousands of well-wishers had already departed hours before, but there were still one hundred or so people who were convinced that the British war hero and the heiress would come roaring out of the sky with a miracle story to be told. The lights on the field had been turned off at dawn, and the fifty soldiers who were instructed to remain under arms to police the airport were told to go home.

  * * *

  JEALOUS ATLANTIC

  HINCHLIFFE LATEST VICTIM

  FLIGHT ENDS IN DISASTER

  New York—That the Atlantic has claimed two more aviation victims—Captain Hinchliffe and the Hon. Elsie Mackay—is generally agreed.

  Unless Hinchliffe appears immediately there is no hope for his safety.

  Lord Inchcape, in a reply from Egypt to a question whether he was aware of his daughter’s participation in the flight, cabled that he had no knowledge whatever of the flight.

  The ‘Daily Express’ reveals extraordinary preparations taken by Captain Hinchliffe to ensure success. Before his departure, he said to an expert: “They say that March is too early for transatlantic flying. My reply is that it is too late for delay. I have discovered that 12 expeditions are awaiting the word ‘Go.’ I will get the record for this country or—”

  One expert says that Hinchliffe realised more than anybody the dangers of the adventure.

  “If he is down in the sea it is not an error of flying,” he declared. “His experience of fog and mist is unequalled. He has been beaten by factors over which he had no control. When I reminded Hinchliffe of the possibility of snow and ice settling on the wings and forcing the plane down, he replied, ‘Yes, that’s the snag, and one point on which I cannot obtain data, as none is available. If it happens, I will just plod on. Levine told me he had been forced down close to the ocean. I don’t know. I’ve left nothing else to chance.’ ”

  Hinchliffe’s mother says: “I can’t think that my boy had dropped into the ocean. He suffered a lot during the war.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 16

  * * *

  Emilie Hinchliffe was smiling. Over the last four days, she had always been smiling, particularly when she was with Joan or a man with a pen and paper in his hand.

  “I don’t worry,” she said cheerfully, widening the smile after the reporter asked if she was afraid her husband had perished in the freezing waves of the Atlantic. “It wouldn’t do any good, would it? He is a wonderful flier and knows his business.”

  She had repeated that same directive so many times now that she didn’t even need to think about it. She just opened her mouth and it was there.

  Ray wouldn’t want her to worry, she knew; all she had to do was wait. There were so many scenarios, it was foolish to focus on just one, and the most dire one at that. Her husband had flown through war, bullets, flames, and a forest, and he had survived. He had lived. He had lived with half a face and a crushed skull and his arm hanging on by tendons and shreds of flesh, his jaw flopped open and cracked. He had lived. There were so many possibilities, she reminded herself. There was not just one outcome of all this.

  He didn’t bring a wireless, and if they were marooned in the thick Labrador forest, trying to make their way out, it would take time. If they had landed on one of the gigantic ice floes, someone would find them. A ship would pass; perhaps one of the Canadian pilots looking for them would spot them. His body was not one lying next to the plane on a mountaintop, she knew. She knew that. His body was not there, already cold and frozen, warm blood turned solid, dusted and buried in white. That could not be him.

  It would take time, she said to herself again, and she had that. She had plenty of it.

  On the third night of waiting, she went to bed with Joan tucked into the curl of her body, listening to her daughter breathe, then finally sleep. If this part of him was here, was breathing, was holding on to her, she thought, then the rest of him was an extension, a branch that stretched somewhere out there, the line of life that traveled and reached him.

  Ro Sinclair was still very wide-awake, getting caught in the sheets from all of her restlessness, in Joan’s room, when a knock on the door came again.

  Emilie did not answer it. She stayed with Joan, covering the child’s little baby hand in her own. She heard Ro go to the door, the door open, and then nothing. It was silence. After a few moments Emilie tried not to wake the toddler as she climbed over her to see what it could have been. As her foot touched the floor, a flash of hope struck her that it could be Ray; that he had finally come home.

  At the door, she saw Ro’s back, her arms in an embrace, a man’s head in the crook of her neck. It was Gordon Sinclair, silent, quietly holding his wife.

  In that moment, she felt everything inside her rip in half.

  * * *

  Sophie had been staying at a small hotel near her flat once she learned on the morning of the thirteenth that her name had appeared in the papers as Elsie’s companion. As soon as reporters from the Daily Express knocked on her door that afternoon, she left and checked into the hotel under an assumed name. She was grief-stricken, befuddled, and felt betrayed. She’d understood all too well that once she watched Elsie vanish into the sky, her friend was gone, and there would possibly be no return. She had opposed the flight from the beginning, then slowly warmed to it as she got to know Captain Hinchliffe and saw the preparations he was making and the precautions he had put into place. But it wasn’t until Kenneth, Alexander, and Frederick had left and Elsie changed her mind that she realized how overjoyed she was, and how they had just narrowly missed something terrible happening.

  Then everything changed: Elsie had gone with no word since. When the hour had come that horrible impossibilities had overtaken any optimistic probabilities, she called and spoke to Kenneth. Yes, she told him, Elsie was on the plane. I watched her go.

  This he already knew. Two days after the Endeavour took off, he had received a letter from his sister: “Captain Hinchliffe had told me that we can leave in the morning and by the time you get this, we shall be well away. I know we shall get there. —Elsie.”

  The press, in a mad rush to find Lord Inchcape’s heiress daughter, ran amok in their search, throwing out all kinds of theories in hopes that something, anything, would stick. The Daily Express and other newspapers suspected Sophie of being Elsie hiding under a different name, or that she was Elsie’s maid, or that she was Gordon Sinclair, perpetuating a massive publicity stunt. When they realized, however, that she was Elsie’s friend and had witnessed the Endeavour taking off, they stopped short of nothing to locate her, hounding her mother on the phone and appearing at the front door. With her family unable to leave their house without navigating through a crowd of shouting reporters, she finally gave a written statement with the hopes of making them vanish.

  “I am surprised to read the statements in some newspapers about my supposed disappearance,” she said. “I have been in London all the time, but I have not been in good health of late, and my pain and anxiety about Miss Mackay, who was a true friend, made it quite impossible for me to bear the thought of interviews. So with the complete consent of my family I have kept my temporary place of residence a secret. I know nothing at all about the flight except for what I have read in newspapers.

  “It was a terrible shock to me to see that Mi
ss Mackay had gone, for I never dreamt of such a thing. The pain of her loss is very dreadful, and I am sure no one would wish to add to it.”

  * * *

  Charles Levine refused to believe it.

  Sitting at his desk in his quiet, solitary office, Levine was certain Hinchliffe would be found, safe and buoyant on some pallet of ice floating in the sea or struggling to make his way out of the heavy snowdrifts of Newfoundland wearing snowshoes made from parts of the plane. He had crashed the Miss Columbia in Italy with this man; he felt he knew his spirit, his will, his ability to emerge unscathed, just like Levine himself. The two of them, Levine remarked in thought, were indestructible by outside forces. They might become wounded, they might fall, but they rose and rose again.

  He thought about his own flight over the Atlantic coming down so close to the water, so weighted by ice that he was sure he had run his winning streak right out. But the plane had fought hard and battled against its fate; it had risen and gone on to conquer that whole damn ocean. If he did it, Hinchliffe could do it.

  But it had been nine days of waiting for Hinchliffe to rise again, to announce himself and emerge the victor. He refused to believe that this was the ending for Hinchliffe, that this was the completion of his course.

  It was unreasonable.

  Preposterous.

  Hinchliffe must be alive.

  Levine shook his head, pursed his lips tightly, and felt his eyes begin to burn.

  He shook his head again, then quickly put his palms against his face.

  * * *

  Lord Inchcape stood at the top of the ship’s gangway in Liverpool and looked all the way down. On his arm was his wife and in his other hand was his silver-tipped cane. Wearing a suit he had owned for years, he now trampled the hem at every step. Lady Inchcape looked tired and pale, but gave a modest smile when she saw Kenneth and Margaret waiting for them on the pier below.