Sarah, how can I explain? I thought. I didn’t understand what I was giving up, until it was too late. If I could do it all over, I would’ve tried harder; I would’ve convinced him that I made a promise for both of us. I just wasn’t given a chance.
The bus lurched to a halt at Forbes Avenue, and I quickly gathered up my purse and shakily made my way down the steps. As soon as I’d made it off the last one, the driver slammed the doors shut and peeled away, making me feel as if I’d been spit out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t help thinking that I probably deserved it.
CHAPTER 16
Miami
Grandma’s boyfriend Ray picked me up at the Key West airport, saying, “Change of plans, little buddy. We have to go to Miami tonight.”
“Miami,” I repeated, slipping my arm through the other shoulder strap of my backpack. I had just come through Miami. I had run an all-out sprint to reach my connecting flight, which was on this tiny little commuter plane sitting on the runway in the wind. I ran so hard to catch that flight that I overtook a beeping cart carrying an old woman with two canes and an even older man who looked like he might’ve been dead. I ran so hard that I think I passed the pilot, too, a tall blond guy, jogging out of the restroom with a little carry-on. And now we had to go all the way back? “What for?”
“There’s a problem with Margot’s bag. How was the flight?”
I told him it was fine. I didn’t tell him how the pilot warned us it was going to be a bumpy ride due to the imminence of Hurricane Claudette, and that I felt queasy the whole way from worrying my plane would crash, just to make Mom right: something bad was definitely going to happen since she hadn’t approved of the trip. Or maybe I’d made myself sick thinking about Thea, who hadn’t sent me a single text in the week since I ditched her for the physics bridge. I also didn’t tell him that Mrs. Browning had actually flown me first class from Pittsburgh to Miami, that the seats were wide leather armchairs, and that stewards had brought me warm towels like at a Japanese restaurant, and cranberry juice in a wineglass. I didn’t tell him because then he’d probably ask me who the heck Mrs. Browning was. This morning, when Mom freaked out, I’d lied and told her that Daddy had bought the tickets. It was only after I said it out loud that I realized if I had asked him, he probably would have.
Ray put a hand on my back to lead me out of the air-conditioned lobby and into the balmy dark of the parking lot, where palm trees tussled in the breeze and the soft air felt like it was actually caressing my face. A problem with Margot’s bag didn’t mean much to me, and I wondered just for a second if shopping for a new one would be involved. When it looked like Grandma wasn’t waiting in the car after all, I thought of Mom going, “What do we really know about this Ray guy?”
But Grandma was in the back of the topless Jeep after all, just curled up in a sleeping ball, looking sort of like a child. When Ray reached through the air where a window should’ve been to give her shoulder a shake, Grandma slowly sat up and stretched. “Hiya, baby cakes,” she said to me with a yawn. “Just taking a little snooze, since your plane was late. Wow—look at you, honey!” she added. “I’m loving your hair. It makes you look so different.”
I blinked. Grandma looked different, too, just like Mom had warned me, except that in this case “looking different” was a euphemism for “bald” the way “big-boned” meant “fat,” and “not feeling well” meant “about to die.” Grandma must’ve seen it on my face, because then she said, running a hand over her slick scalp, “Oh, sweetie. Jane didn’t tell you about my new do, did she?”
I shook my head. When Grandma had first moved down to the Keys, replacing her cardigans and blazers with pink shorts, halter tops, and dangly earrings, Mom had grumbled that she’d looked different then, too. I’d vaguely imagined that Grandma was finally going to get gray hair and maybe some knitting needles or something.
“I shaved my head when the chemo made it fall out in clumps. Your mom probably expected me to wear a wig or one of my scarves the entire time, but they tend to blow off in the Jeep. Did Ray tell you the plan?”
I nodded and then shook my head again, wondering if I’d forgotten to pack all words, or just the right ones.
“We’re off to Miami, so that I can have a little procedure done first thing in the morning,” Grandma said, pushing the front seat forward so she could hop out on sandaled feet. She was wearing a linen jumper, which covered her knees and most of her calves as well. “Kind of an emergency deal, or I’d have waited until after you left.”
It was hard to imagine what kind of emergency could still allow Grandma to smile so warmly, but I made the corners of my mouth go up in return. Then we hugged, and everything felt right again, at least until we stopped at an Exxon miles up Route 1, which was when I saw in the fluorescent light of the bathroom that Grandma was actually yellow.
WE STAYED AT A HOTEL RIGHT ON MIAMI BEACH IN A ROOM with two queen-size beds. When Grandma climbed into bed next to me, I saw the bag filled with putrid green fluid attached to her side and I wished that she had chosen to buddy up with Ray instead. When she checked to make sure I’d called Mom to let her know I got here safely, I said I’d already called, which was true—except that I didn’t specify where “here” was, since Mom would’ve been even more furious, no doubt, “on so many levels.” Mom could never admit to being angry on just one level. It wouldn’t just be because I’d flown all the way down to Key West, only to have me retrace my steps in the backseat of a topless Jeep, driven by a suspicious man, who knew nothing of Key West flora and fauna, much less about how to care for a bald woman with bag problems, or just that he slept in the next bed wearing nothing but boxers and a white T-shirt, but mostly because an emergency trip to Miami meant that Grandma was very, very sick, and Mom didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t want me to believe it, either.
The next morning, Ray looked a bit worried when he dropped us off at the hospital after breakfast. “Are you sure you’ll be fine?” he said, hesitating.
No, no, no, we’re not, I pleaded with my eyes. I’d just found out in the car that the bag on Grandma’s side was actually connected by a tube to her biliary tree—not an actual tree, but “little ducts connecting things together,” she cheerfully put it. The ducts were clogged with cancer, and the bag wasn’t filling right, and a radiologist was going to have to put in a stent—“kind of like a fancy straw,” Grandma said—to open the tree back up again. “Will there be blood?” I asked, feeling suddenly queasy, but Grandma said that all we should see was “more yucky green stuff.”
And then Grandma linked her thin, yellow arm through mine and told Ray to beat it. “Elyse can take care of me. Go sell your boat.” That was the other thing they forgot to tell me until then: that Ray had already planned to meet a man from Michigan about a sale. Once Ray was gone, we sat in the hallway, waiting for Grandma to be called in by the radiologist. On my lap, I held my PSAT book of a thousand questions.
“So,” Grandma said, stroking the curled ends of my new haircut. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
I felt my face flushing as I told her about Holden Saunders and the marriage project and how he’d given me a ride to the airport that morning. I left the part out before it, where Mom was screaming at me for making plans without consulting her. Holden already knew about my trip, so when I called him on his cell phone before school, he said of course he’d take me. He seemed to like the idea of an adventure, if it meant cutting class. We got stuck in the Fort Pitt tunnel traffic, and I almost didn’t care if I missed the flight, because it was me in the passenger seat of his MINI Cooper—me, who had passed all the other girls waiting in the cold at the bus stop. Once we got through the tunnel, Holden drove like a maniac, weaving in and out of traffic, and I was holding on to the Jesus bar above my window when an old Smiths song that my dad loves came on the radio—“And if a ten-ton truck, crashes into us, / To die by your side, would be a heavenly way to die . . .” For just a second, I felt like that would be true. When we pulled up at the air
port, Holden popped the trunk, grabbed my little suitcase, and then ran around the car to hand it to me. “Now don’t worry about Henry this weekend,” he said, and I laughed. Then he bent down, and I kissed him, somewhere between his lips and his dimple, before he finished the reason for his leaning, which was to pick my backpack up off the ground. Blushing wildly, I slung it over my shoulder, and he grinned and said, “Come back safe.”
I told Grandma about the kiss. Under the circumstances, I left out the part about the heavenly way to die.
Grandma laughed and said, “You remind me of me!” Then she told me more about the boy that she loved when she was fifteen, Jonathan Byrd. Jonathan had grown up next door to her in a four-story house with six brothers and sisters. All the children played instruments—Jonathan was a trumpeter—and his mother played the guitar. “One summer we took a trip to the countryside,” Grandma said, and her face had a faraway look, like we weren’t actually sitting in the hallway of the hospital, watching patients being wheeled by. “We all piled in to the Volkswagen bus for the forty-five-minute drive from Pittsburgh to Yough Lake, and the whole way there, none of them stopped singing—it started with hymns but eventually digressed into ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ so I could join in. When we picked up a hitchhiker, we serenaded him, too, butchering Buddy Holly all the way down the highway.”
I laughed, and she smiled. A janitor came down the hallway, mopping the floor, but Grandma didn’t seem to notice.
“Would you want to see him again?” I asked.
“Jonathan? Oh. I would love to. But not like this.” She swept her hand over her checkered blue gown. “Certainly not bald.”
A middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie and only one shoe crutched his way toward us. He seemed mad at the crutches, swearing with every swing step. Behind him, one of the transporters was wheeling a little old lady with white hair and glasses who reminded me of Mrs. Browning. I wondered if she’d made the appointment with Daddy’s friend Dr. Khaira and, if so, would she actually listen to him? Then I thought how weird it was that I knew so much about her, and she wouldn’t even tell me her real name. Even weirder that there was so much I didn’t even know about my own grandmother. She was a writer like me, or at least, she had been. We probably had a lot in common.
“I’m sorry I never read your book, Grandma,” I said, as another man was pushed by on a gurney, wearing the same thin, checkered gown that Grandma had on. She turned and looked at me. “The novel you wrote when you were twenty-six?”
“Oh, honey,” she said with a laugh, “of all the things I’m sorry about, that’s not one of them. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you more. I’m sorry your mother was so hurt that I started a new life after Grandpa died. I’m sorry that Jane and I . . . weren’t closer.”
“Were you upset when she married Daddy?”
“Because he’s Christian? I might’ve worried a little about how the children would be raised. But for the last four years I’ve been with Ray, who’s agnostic. Your mother was in love, and your father’s a good man, and that’s all that really mattered to me.”
When I thought of Mom and Daddy, my eyes felt wet with tears, which I quickly swiped away with my fingers, but Grandma must’ve noticed.
“Jane thinks I don’t know something’s up at home,” she said. “She thinks I don’t know that she’s keeping things from me. No one wants to worry me, or upset me, or give me any more bad news. I guess it’s just part of my disappearing act.”
It seemed like I should make some sort of honest confession right then. So I said, “Daddy moved out two weeks ago. He says he wants a divorce. And Mom’s been worried about her job. She feels like they’re looking for an excuse to fire her since she canceled a deposition and lost a client. She’s kind of a mess right now.” Grandma listened and nodded, and her face looked so crumpled with concern that I almost regretted telling her the truth. But then the radiologist finally called her name, and she lowered her shoulders and stood up with such dignity, that I was awed. From where I sat, I could just see the edge of the cold, steel table that awaited her. The sign on the wall said INTERVENTIONAL RADIOLOGY but the room looked like a morgue from a CSI show. Watching Grandma walk through the swinging door, I held my own back a little straighter, pretending my PSAT book was balanced on my head, not my knees. Then I waited and watched the traffic of gurneys in the hallway.
When they finally pushed Grandma out of the room, she was on a stretcher. I stood up and shut my book.
“Hi, Grandma. How did it go?”
“It went,” she said with a wince. “Apparently feeling ‘pressure’ is a euphemism for ‘intense pain.’”
I followed the stretcher into the recovery room, which was filled with a line of other gurneys. A nurse connected Grandma’s IV to a bag of clear fluid, stole a glance toward my book, and asked what I was studying for. I told her that I wasn’t, really . . . The nurse laughed. Grandma said, under closed lids, that I was going to be a doctor and a writer, that I’d decided that when I was five years old.
“Wow—good for you,” the nurse said, and I could tell by her voice that she didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it, either.
When Grandma reached out her hand, I slipped it in my own and bent close to listen to her quiet voice. “Elyse, about writing—wait as long as you can before you put yourself out there. You don’t have the luxury that we did forty years ago: you can’t just disappear.”
“Okay.” I squeezed and she squeezed back. “Can I still read your novel?” I asked, and she opened her eyes.
“It’s not very literary.” I started to protest, and she said, “But I will make sure to get you a copy.”
After that Grandma napped for a while on the stretcher, while I sat in the chair next to her bed and watched the ebb and flow of the recovery room. At last, the nurse came back in, checked Grandma’s vital signs, along with the output on the bag, and said we could go.
We walked out through the automatic doors of the hospital into blinding sunlight. I squinted at the sky, wondering if it had ever looked so blue in Pittsburgh, wondering how it was possible that people were sunbathing and windsurfing and Rollerblading while other people were dying. Beneath the flapping palm trees, a landscaper was spraying a white cloud of gas, some kind of fertilizer I guess, across the bushes and grass, and I tried not to inhale the toxic fumes.
“God, I hope that stuff doesn’t give me cancer,” Grandma muttered.
I glanced over at her and, without thinking, let the breath that I was holding on to turn into a mouthful of laughter. Grandma met my eyes with a sly smile, and I laughed even harder, especially when I remembered that I’d left my review book in the recovery room, and I wasn’t going back for it.
CHAPTER 17
Hard Landing
June 1944
I am flying through the night—without a plane, without an engine—over the Texas prairie, whose endless sky is full of shooting stars. I could gaze at them forever until it occurs to me my parachute hasn’t been deployed; in fact, I’m not even wearing one. I’m falling fast, accelerating through space and time toward impact, my heart peaking in the back of my throat, when Murphee Sutherland suddenly barks, “Come on, ladies. Up and at ’em.” I open my eyes, briefly disoriented, and then exhale. Grace groans as she pulls herself out of bed and reaches for her boots, and Ana wonders if there will be powdered eggs for breakfast again, while Vera warily reminds us that today’s the day we fly the Texan AT-6—the claustrophobia-inducing, closed-cockpit plane with the narrow landing gear. “Six hundred horsepower engine,” Ana reminds us with a grin, and Murph says, “Oh, baby.” As we pull on our clothes and lace up our boots and step out into the wind, sunlight is just making its way over the horizon. It’s marching time.
We are four months into our required flight hours, through primary and basic ground school and moving to the advanced phase of instrument flying, where we’ll learn to rely only on the dashboard in the plane to guide us. At the end come two solo c
ross-country trips, one five-hundred-miler, in the Stearman—without a radio, without flying in formation—and a thousand-mile flight in the AT-6. If I pass, I’ll get my silver wings at graduation in October before we receive our official orders, scattering us to air bases across the country.
That’s the plan, anyway, until Captain Digby, a whistle dangling from his lips, hands me a letter after calisthenics. I recognize Mama’s neat handwriting on the outside of the envelope. I need you at home, she’s written. Consider quitting the program.
“The doctor says Sarah’s not responding to the treatments,” Mama says later, after I beg a favor from Mr. Hendricks and use the telephone in the instructor’s lounge.
“What are they giving her?” I ask, shivering in my government-issued shorts and T-shirt, still sweaty from the morning’s PT.
“I don’t know. I’m not there.”
“Is she—going to be okay?” Tears fill my eyes as the last word gets lodged in my throat.
“Of course, she’ll be all right, but it would cheer her up, Miri, just to see your face,” Mama adds. “And I can use your help in the shop and taking care of Rita.”
Through the ready room window, I see the women heading out to the flight line, the first time we get to fly with a classmate. Today’s mission will take us a state away, to Oklahoma, where we’ll stay overnight at the officers’ quarters, and then ferry a different aircraft back to Sweetwater. “I can’t just up and leave. There’s a war going on.”
“The war is not in Texas,” Mama says, her voice sharp. “And you sound awfully happy these days,” she adds, making me wonder if Sarah’s been sharing the letters I’ve written just for her.
“Do you want me to be unhappy?” I ask, a silly question, Sarah would say. As if happiness mattered to Mama. Were Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph really worried about feeling happy?
“What if something happens to you, Miri?” she adds, her pitch climbing. “You can’t pretend it’s not dangerous.”
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