The Last Grand Adventure

by Rebecca Behrens

  “Can you do us a favor, Bea, while you’re here? Keep an eye on your grandmother. Let us know if she seems particularly flustered or if she says anything unusual. Especially if she forgets anything.” I nodded, although it would be hard know if my grandmother was acting different than usual, considering I had no clue what her “usual” was like.

  By the time we got back from the soda fountain, Dad was raring to go. He took a long look at his mother, who was standing with her arms crossed, watching him shove the last few boxes into a closet. “We’ll be back soon,” he said, like all of a sudden it bothered him to leave his mother in her stark new house. Which was funny, because he’d been fine with her living across the country, in Boston, as long as I’d been alive.

  Dad, Julie, and Sally congregated by the door, gathering their things. Quick, stiff hugs were shared with my grandmother, and longer and softer ones with me. My dad gave me a wistful look and made a comment about how I looked awfully grown-up, and so much like my mother. Which was nice to hear, although I knew how much she frustrated him. Sally sniffled and pulled a knotted bunch of pipe cleaners out of her jumper pocket. She held them out to me. They were very sticky.

  “I made them for you,” she said. I looked closer and could see that the pipe cleaners were two figures and the knots were helping them to hold hands. Maybe they were supposed to be us.

  “Thanks, Sally.”

  Then they piled into the car. Sally pressed her nose to the rear window, watching me and waving mournfully, as the car pulled away. I felt an unexpected pang of melancholy as they headed back to Burbank, without me.

  I settled into the scratchy green sofa. It had the same texture as the slightly hardened gumdrops. My grandmother sat across from me, in an equally uncomfortable armchair the color of Tang. Apparently, she’d brought none of her furniture from the east. It seemed funny to me that the home of an old woman would have mostly new things. The small ranch house was bright and clean and impersonal—sitting in it felt like being in a waiting room at the doctor’s office more than anything else.

  The clock on the wall tick-tick-ticked, and I itched to turn on the television set. When I was little, I barely watched television programs. I read books, comics, and magazines, and my mother and I sat side by side writing stories. When my parents split up, though, and my mom started going off on her adventures, I watched television more and more. I couldn’t see enough episodes of Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show. I loved watching those families sit down to dinner. I loved how their problems wrapped up within a half hour. I loved how television families never turned on the set and saw terrible things on the evening news. I got the same soothing feeling watching those TV shows as I used to get when my mother would come in my room at night and smooth my hair off my forehead as I fell asleep.

  But I felt like turning on the set might be rude. I was there to get to know my grandmother, after all.

  “So . . . how do you like living here?”

  “This overpriced waiting room?” Grandmother sniffed. She spoke sharply, and normally that would hurt my feelings, except I had noted the waiting-room feel too. Whether or not she knew it, we were on the same page. “If I wanted to wait out my days in a sterile shoebox of a home, I could have very well done that in Boston.”

  “Oh. But aren’t there lots of activities you can do here? Like golf, and movies at the community center.” We’d passed the golf course on our way in, although I only saw three old bald men baking in the sun on the green.

  “I have more important things to do.” Grandmother didn’t elaborate, but she did ease herself up out of her chair.

  “Like what?” Not sure of how to address her, I added, “Grandmother . . . Muriel?”

  “Pidge, darling. Just call me Pidge.” I watched her cross the room to the hall closet, wondering at her instruction. Pidge? What kind of name is that? Dad had never mentioned her having a nickname. He only called her “Mother.” Julie had told me to watch for my grandmother “saying something unusual”—did that include a strange nickname? Maybe she was worse off than she had seemed. I took a deep breath, to ward off that panicked feeling.

  My grandmother pulled a small brown leather valise, a little weathered, out of the closet and carried it back to the armchair. Her hands trembled as she snapped open the clasp. She pulled out a packet of letters—some old and yellowed, others at the top of the pile looking crisper, fresh. She held the letters with both hands, pressing the packet to her chest like she was giving it a tender hug.

  “Are those letters from . . .” I trailed off, realizing that I only knew of my late grandfather as “my pop,” the way my dad always referred to him. He’d died before I was born.

  “Meelie,” my grandmother finished, a hint of a smile curling up her lips. It was the first one I’d seen from her all day. “My sister.”

  I suppose there were many reasons why my grandmother never visited us in California. Oftentimes when my father got off the telephone with her, the conversation was ended by the exasperated smack of the handset into the cradle. If I ever asked her, during a birthday or Christmas call, if she’d like to visit us sometime, she usually told me that it was too costly or she was too busy with her garden. (That excuse, in particular, did not hold water in December.) But the biggest reason was because of who my grandmother’s sister was: the Amelia Earhart. According to my dad, that’s why she told him she had no interest in traveling by airplane to see us, and snippily reminded him that it had been his choice to settle down so far away from her.

  It wasn’t until I had brought home an Amelia Earhart biography book from school, and was splayed on the dry grass in our backyard reading, that I learned that part of our family history. My mother had walked by to water some of her rose bushes—this was long before my parents split.

  “Lost in a book?”

  “Yeah, about Amelia Earhart,” I had said, not looking up from the pages. The book was open to a picture of Amelia, who looked particularly lovely with her delicate features and the hint of a smile, like she had a good secret. I remember thinking that the image appeared more like a lady from a shampoo ad—except for the close-cropped hairdo—and less like my idea of a lady pilot. I didn’t really have a clear idea of what a lady pilot looked like, to be honest. Only the square-jawed air captains and glamorous stewardesses from magazine ads.

  “Oh!” My mother had set down her gardening gloves. “You know, you’re her grandniece.”

  I’d dropped the book so quickly the pages fanned out and I lost my place. “What?”

  My mother had picked the book back up. “Grandmother Muriel is her sister. Was her sister, I suppose. It’s something I’ve always been curious about—now that’s a story I’d love to write—although I’ve never talked much to Muriel about it. To be fair, I’ve never talked much to her, period.” Mom flipped through the pages with me, stopping on several other photos. “I think you have Earhart eyes,” she said, pointing. “Your father said something funny once, about Muriel being convinced for years and years afterward that Amelia would show up one day. Barnstorm your grandmother’s house in Boston, I guess, and land in the backyard.” My mother’s rueful smile showed me she was exaggerating about the backyard part. “But I suspect she’s given up that hope as time has passed. At least, she doesn’t refer to her sister in the present tense anymore.”

  I had never had a sibling, and it would be years before I got a Sally. But even so, I had only been able to imagine how sad and strange it would be to have to think about a sister in past tense.

  Sitting across from me in that waiting-room living room, Grandmother Muriel—I mean, Pidge—was still clutching the letters to her chest. “Can I read them?” I blurted out. I scooted to the edge of the scratchy sofa, ready to reach forward and grab the stack.

  She shot me a look that I wasn’t expecting to get from a grandmother: the sort of expression that Sally and I would exchange when one of us tattled on the other. Or maybe more like the dagger look I’d give Sally when I caug
ht her eavesdropping on my telephone calls with Barbara. “These are quite personal, Beatrice.”

  Ashamed, I scooted back into the bend of the sofa. Pidge watched me closely, pinching a letter between her index finger and thumb. “But at the same time, I feel as though it’s not fair for me to withhold them from you, given what I’m going to ask you to do.”

  A chill ran down my back. That sounded ominous. I didn’t think she was going to ask me to eat a bowl of ice cream. What have I gotten myself into? If I didn’t know that my family would be trapped in beach traffic on their way home, I would’ve risen up from the couch and gone to the phone in Pidge’s avocado-and-gold-colored kitchen and dialed my father to request a very early return. Although I did agree to come stay with her for the sake of “adventure.” I took another deep breath.

  “What are you going to ask me to do?” My voice wavered a bit.

  “Pack a bag, darling.”

  THREE

  Donk and Ellie

  Before I did repack my brand-new willow-green O’Nite suitcase—part of a set my mother had given me for Christmas, although I’d only ever used the weekend tote, for sleepovers at Barbara’s—Pidge explained it all. Over a dinner that consisted of a fluffernutter sandwich, despite the fact that Julie had stocked Pidge’s refrigerator with all sorts of casserole dishes, cheeses, cold cuts, and even a big wobbly gelatin mold from the supermarket, and she’d also filled the bare cupboards with cans of fruit cocktail and vegetables and crackers. But, as Pidge informed me, she “wasn’t much for cooking anymore,” so she let me loose in her kitchen. Julie would die before I ate peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for dinner. For that matter, so would my mother—although because it had been weeks since I had eaten dinner at her place, I didn’t so much factor her into my decision.

  I chewed on my sandwich, which I had accidentally-on-purpose overloaded with fillings. Fluff spurted out the sides and got all over my face. Pidge said nothing, and I was glad that she wasn’t the kind of grandmother to constantly come at you with a damp napkin.

  “My sister disappeared in 1937. You already knew about her, right? That my Meelie was, in fact, Amelia Earhart?” I nodded. “Well, I must say I’m relieved that your father has shared our rich family history with you.”

  I swallowed hard and hoped that she wouldn’t ask if I knew anything else about our “rich family history,” because I really didn’t and what little I’d gleaned was actually from my mother—Dad only liked to talk about my schoolwork and perhaps the latest episode of The Fugitive, and he was almost always at his office, anyway.

  “As I was saying: Meelie disappeared in 1937, during her famous around-the-world flight. They searched for a long, long time. Stories spread—that she was held prisoner by the Japanese during the war. That she survived a crash landing and was marooned on a desert island in the South Pacific. That she was really a top secret government spy, flying for covert operations. That she fabricated the whole disappearance just so she could escape to obscurity, and live happily ever after—in New Jersey, of all places.” Pidge paused for a moment, looking down at the letters, which she’d carried into the kitchen with us, although she wouldn’t let me anywhere near them while I was eating my messy sandwich. “Or I suppose most people believed she died.”

  I knew that—after finding out that Amelia was my grandmother’s sister, I had torn apart the card catalog at the library one afternoon, and I’d checked out every single book on her that I could find. Which were only a few, but I had still read them all. At the ends of each book, the authors suggested that whatever happened, it was most likely that Amelia was long dead. That was tragic and disappointing. But the not-knowing what really happened—that mystery was tantalizing.

  Pidge cleared her throat to make sure she had my full attention. “But only I  know the truth: My sister is alive.”

  “Really?”

  Pidge nodded, a faraway look in her faded blue eyes. “Ever since her disappearance, she has been writing me letters. Of course, I’ve gotten loads of mail from cranks over the years. They tell me that it’s Amelia writing, and she needs money—sent to a certain address. Or they spin wild stories of spy games and romance on a deserted island. But I knew, as soon as I received this first letter—one year to the day after she disappeared—that it truly was my sister writing to me.”

  Pidge paused, picking up the letter on the top of the pile. It was the most faded of them all; the envelope had become so thin that it was translucent and as Pidge struggled to coax the folded paper out, I worried it would rip. “I’ll read this one for you. I can’t allow you to touch it—it’s too delicate.” But as her hands shook, I couldn’t help but think it would be safer in mine.

  July 2, 1938

  My Dear Pidge,

  I haven’t written till now because there is so much I can’t say. Not yet. I can’t tell you why I’ve been gone this year, why my leaving was so spectacularly mysterious, and why I can’t share with you, or anyone, where I’ve been. It’s a small miracle that I can send this letter, and I am doing so only on the condition that my words are chosen carefully. I pray that this indeed reaches you, and I hope that receiving it offers you comfort, if not my whereabouts. I can only imagine what it’s been like for you and Mother. Wondering. Waiting. Worrying. Wishing.

  Do you still have your wooden elephant pal, Ellie, to cuddle with? Its donkey pal is by my side right now. (Yes—“Donk” was a stowaway in my flight bag.) I reach for my well-traveled toy during moments when the loneliness is so strong it knocks the wind out of me. And the more time passes, the more I have missed you, sister.

  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our childhood, those golden early years at our grandparents’ home. Atchison was a slice of heaven: the view down the bluff to the Missouri River, the scent of summer flowers—syringa and heliotrope—and sunbaked grass. Sometimes in my dreams I’m back there with you. Remember how we raced about the yard on brooms, pretending to ride our steeds? Or “Bogie,” the make-believe game we invented with our Kansas cousins? All those long days spent hunting rats in the barn and exploring the wonders of the natural world around us—I wish I still had my tattered copy of Insect Life. (I sure could’ve used it, where I’ve been hiding out these past months!) I’m writing this letter lying on my stomach, the same prone position we preferred for reading sessions in the yard. If I close my eyes, I can picture the late afternoon sunshine imprinting on the grass, shading the pages of a favorite collection of adventure stories. Our whole family loved the smell of a book. Surely you remember all these things, dear Pidge. But writing these recollections warms my soul, which is the only part of me that gets cold these days.

  My first memories of flying were actually at home, with you. We’d spin until we were sick on that Flying Dutchman, and we’d coast on the roller coaster that we constructed in the yard. With a dollop of lard on the hastily hammered wooden track, we were off: “Oh, Pidge, it’s just like flying!” Years later, I was trying to recapture those feelings up in the air. The joy and freedom we felt as children, flying around in bloomers Mother had sewn. We were so fortunate to have a mother who encouraged us to be rambunctious and curious, knowing we were happier with room to roam.

  I was also lucky to have a sister like you, a companion who would follow me in feats of daring along the banks of the river and under the beams of the barn. If only I could tell you right now the adventure I’ve had this year! Not in a letter, but face-to-face. I can promise you that I will see you again, even if I can’t promise you when. Then, the full truth of this last grand adventure will be revealed. Maybe when the time is right, we should reunite back in Kansas. For now, give Ellie a squeeze for me (if you still have her), and keep this letter safe and quiet. Please—I am trusting you to tell no one. I swear I’ll write as soon as I next can.

  Love,

  Your sister, Meelie

  The closing words hung in the air between us after Pidge finished reading, her voice wavering on the final lines. At first I couldn’t fi
gure out what to say. Then the questions filling up my head started spilling out of my mouth.

  “But how do you know this isn’t from just another one of the . . . cranks?”

  “Easy. How many people would know about Ellie and Donk? Amelia’s late husband, George, got all manners of publicity for Meelie when she was flying, and after the disappearance, but the reporters never wrote about her beloved childhood toy—much less her nobody of a sister’s wooden elephant.” Pidge frowned. “I wish I could recall what happened to my Ellie. Anyway, those memories she wrote about? They belong to me, too. I believe she included them so I’d know it was really her writing. All the letters are full of details of Meelie’s exploits that I am already well familiar with. It’s a tad egocentric that she turned them into a biography of sorts.” My grandmother laughed. “But Meelie always did like to write about her accomplishments.” Pidge paused. “I will never forget my sister’s voice. She has a particular way of seeing the world and of saying things. Trust me: only one person could have written this letter. The same is true for all of them.” Pidge patted the stack of letters on her lap.

  Her points were convincing. None of those library books I’d read had told much about Amelia’s childhood other than that she was born in Kansas. They’d never mentioned her building a roller coaster or loving adventure stories. They hadn’t helped me know this Meelie, the one who was someone’s sister and had once been a rambunctious kid wearing “bloomers.” Pidge’s certainty pushed my skepticism aside. I wanted to believe those letters were real, which brought up other questions.

  “So, in the other letters—has she told you what happened to her? Where she is? Why haven’t you seen her in all these years?”

  Pidge’s smile drooped slightly. “Well, no, she hasn’t told me those things. There’s never a return address, so I can’t send her any of my many, many questions. The letters—and she’s sent a total of five over the past thirty years, always without a legible postmark—are cagey. Meelie drops in the rare detail of her life since the flight—tantalizing tidbits, like how she said that she’s never cold, or that she could use her copy of Insect Life wherever she is. Sometimes words are scribbled out, although I don’t know who’s doing the redacting. Meelie made it clear that she can’t risk telling me the whole story until she sees me again, in person, and that I must wait patiently for that time. I tell you, my patience started to run out about twenty-nine years ago.” Pidge made a little laugh, but it stuck in her throat.