The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  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 belongings,” 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?

  “No, honey, I’m Stephanie, the nurse anesthetist.” The other anesthesiologist had gone for coffee, she explained, but she’d be taking over, and in fact
she was giving me Versed that very minute. “It’s going to feel like you’ve had a couple of glasses of wine.”

  The last thing I remember was Sol’s face, leaning over me to kiss me. He whispered that he loved me. His lips were very soft. And then I was gone.

  CHAPTER 25

  Complications

  The first time Dr. Khaira came out to the waiting room after Mrs. Browning’s surgery, I was sitting all by myself reading a Glamour magazine. “Everything went beautifully, buddy,” he said, sitting down beside me, and I quickly shut the article I was reading, thinking how Gene was right: as soon as he left to go to the bathroom, someone would come and tell us what was going on. “Her vital signs are perfect—and her gallbladder was about to rupture, so it was a good thing we got it out,” Dr. Khaira said. “We’re just waiting for her to wake up from the anesthesia, and then you can go see her.”

  “Great!” I said.

  Dr. Khaira gave me a fist bump. “Stay out of trouble, kiddo.”

  A half an hour later, the anesthesiologist came out from the recovery room. Gene was back from “the can” (his word) by then, so the doctor told us both that Mrs. Browning had a minor reaction to the anesthetic that they’d given her to relax her muscles, but that it would wear off in no time—anywhere from eight hours, up to a day.

  “What kind of side effects are we talking about here?” Gene asked, rising to a stand, since the doctor never sat down.

  The anesthesiologist shrugged and said, “Temporary paralysis of all her voluntary skeletal muscles. We’ll be admitting her overnight, obviously.”

  “Are her eyes open yet?” I asked, and he looked down at me like I was a tool before telling me that eyelids are voluntary skeletal muscles, so obviously hers were paralyzed shut.

  “So basically, you can’t be sure she’s not awake inside that head of hers?” Gene asked. “’Cause I don’t want her to know nothin’.”

  “She’ll be kept sedated,” the anesthesiologist said. “Instead of waking up five minutes after surgery, it might just be tomorrow.”

  I felt kind of weird collecting my things in my backpack and leaving knowing she was still on a ventilator and that she couldn’t move any muscle in her entire body and that she’d practically predicted this. I thought about the conversation that we’d had the day after I’d sent her to Dr. Khaira, when she’d said that if she went ahead with the surgery and she couldn’t “resume regular life as I know it now,” she’d rather not be anywhere at all. I had just stared at her, thinking about my grandma and how her regular life as she’d known it had gotten all fucked up, when Mrs. Browning added, “I would rather meet my maker than face the inside of a nursing home, if you catch my drift.”

  I could tell Gene felt sort of uneasy about leaving her behind, too. He’d rolled up his Car and Driver magazine and paused just beside the sliding doors of the hospital to tell me that we should just meet up the same time tomorrow and pretend that nothing bad had happened and that it was still Tuesday. “That way Mary doesn’t get to be right—she was so sure something would go wrong,” he’d said, hovering on the gray mat, which made the doors keep opening and closing, blasting me with cold air and then warmth. I had already cut an entire day of school, but I’d told him I’d find a way to get there.

  It wasn’t until the next day that I heard anything about Mrs. Browning naming me her decision maker. I should’ve been in first period study hall, listening to the sound of student’s text alerts, but instead I was sitting in a different waiting room this time, a smaller, more private one just outside the double doors of the Intensive Care Unit, when Dr. Khaira came out to talk to me. The skin under his eyes looked puffy, and, for once, his mouth wasn’t smiling.

  “The muscle relaxant is out of her system, but she still hasn’t opened her eyes yet,” he said. “She’s losing a lot of blood from somewhere, and I’m going to have to take her back to the OR to find out where.” Then he showed me the form that had my name on it in Mrs. Browning’s shaky writing. “Do you know anything about this?”

  I read the top of the form and said, “What exactly is a medical power of attorney again?” and Dr. Khaira kind of threw up one of his arms as if that was his answer.

  “Without an exploratory surgery, she might die. I need the power of attorney to sign a consent form for the surgery . . . but you can’t when you’re only fifteen years old.” Dr. Khaira ran his fingers through his hair like he might want to pull it out, clump by clump, and said that since she was a “full code”—meaning she’d authorized him to save her life—he was just going to do the surgery and call in the hospital lawyers later.

  “Should we page Gene?” I asked. “He’s probably in the cafeteria. He would know what Mrs. Browning would want.”

  Dr. Khaira looked up from his hands. “Is Gene eighteen years of age or older?”

  I thought of how Gene’s even got vertical forehead wrinkles, as if eroded by years of standing in the rain. “I’m guessing he’s like . . . eighty-five?”

  “How’s Gene related to Mrs. Browning?”

  “He’s not,” I said. “He’s just in the writers’ group, too.”

  “Find him,” Dr. Khaira said.

  When Gene made it up to the waiting room ten minutes later, he listened to what Dr. Khaira had to say about the emergency surgery. “I’d say go ahead and do whatever you need to do,” Gene said.

  ONCE DR. KHAIRA HAD LEFT, GENE SAT DOWN NEXT TO ME AND shook his head, like he still couldn’t believe it. Finally he said, “She called me the night before the surgery, said she had a favor to ask of me—the whole power of attorney thing. And I told her I’ve been through all of this once before, and let me tell ya, once is enough . . .” he trailed off, still shaking his head, probably thinking of his wife, Lucille, who was starring in his story about saving the bottles of wine during the war—it had all been for her, his quest to come home alive with a souvenir. Then he seemed to remember that I was still there. “Looks like when she wakes up tomorrow we’re gonna have to pretend it’s yesterday,” he said instead, and I smiled at the idea of Mrs. Browning waking up, and everything going back to normal.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, I STOPPED BY MRS. DESMOND’S CLASSroom, even though we don’t have psychology on Wednesdays. I’d been married to Holden for over three weeks by now, and Henry had been dead for six days. She was sitting behind her desk, which was covered in papers, but she put down her red pen as soon as she noticed me. “Can I talk to you?” I asked, shifting my slipping backpack up onto my shoulder.

  “Of course!” she said, and her face lit up like she was wishing for any excuse not to have to grade another paper. “Please—have a seat! Is this about the Marriage Project?”

  “About that . . .” I said, pulling up chair. “I want a divorce from Holden Saunders.”

  Mrs. Desmond frowned and her eyebrows furrowed, and I wondered if it sounded dramatic, considering that after Friday—the day we were supposed to turn in our sacks of flour to get full credit—we could pretend we’d never met anyway. Mrs. Desmond was probably older than Mom, but her hair reminded me of Aunt Andie’s: brown and frizzy, which made it easier to keep talking, so I told her the story of Henry’s demise—the abbreviated version, minus the public ridicule. Finally, she said, “I have to tell you, Elyse, that in all my years running the Marriage Project, I’ve never had a student divorce. I’d hate for you to be the first couple unable to work it out.”

  “Don’t we automatically fail if the kid gets killed, anyway?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily,” she said, with encouragement in her voice, as if it were just my grade that I’d been worried about. “If you and Holden write an informative essay about what you’ve learned regarding teen pregnancy, you can still get a C. After all, that’s the point of the project, isn’t it?”

  “What if I expand the paper to include divorce statistics after the death of a child, and I write it alone?”

  Mrs. Desmond sighed before picking up her pen again. “Elyse, I think you two need
to find a way to work this out.”

  AFTER SCHOOL, I WAS ROOTING THROUGH MY LOCKER WITH MY backpack on my knee when Holden Saunders walked toward me wearing jeans and my favorite navy sweater of his that makes his eyes bluer, but his face was serious, so I knew he must’ve heard from Mrs. Desmond about the divorce. It was easier to peer into my backpack and search for my ringing cell phone than to meet his eyes. Dr. Khaira was calling to tell me that Mrs. Browning’s second surgery went great. “Did you get the bleeding stopped?” I asked, and he said yes. When I asked if she was awake, he said, “Not yet, kiddo; she’s still sedated from the surgery.” Holden just stood parked next to my locker and watched me talk to Dr. Khaira.

  After I hung up, Holden said, “Wow. Go, Dr. Strickler,” as if I’d had an incredible promotion from hospital volunteer. I shrugged and zipped up my backpack. “You really rocked that physics bridge,” he added.

  “Thank you. I know.” I slammed my locker shut.

  “What was that—like, the Golden Gate?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  “We live in a city with four hundred and forty-six bridges, and you think I’m gonna pick one from San Francisco?” I started walking.

  The corridor was empty, which was probably why he said, “Elyse—wait. I’m sorry,” instead of avoiding me in front of his friends like he had all week. “This Homecoming thing with Karina isn’t, like, exclusive or anything.” I turned around and asked him what he was saying. “I’m saying she’s not my girlfriend. No one’s my girlfriend. Me and you can hang out again. I had fun—I still think you’re cool.”

  It wasn’t fun; I thought I might love you; and it’s “You and I” not “me and you.” I turned and started walking again.

  “Don’t you care about your psychology grade?” he called after me.