Down, down, down.
When would they hit? Surely it couldn’t hurt her as much as she hurt now. She thought she was boiling in oil. She just wanted to die, she wanted to crash already, except the baby would die and so would Sam.
The airplane slammed into the ground. Her last thought, as they skidded along whatever surface Sam had found to crash on, was that this was probably how it was supposed to end, after all. In a crash somewhere, just the two of them.
By now, more than a week had passed since the disappearance of Irene Foster on the final leg of the Round the World Air Derby, and dozens of aircraft had crisscrossed that stretch of the Sahara Desert where she was presumed to have crashed.
The first headlines expressed shock.
IRENE FOSTER VANISHES OVER SAHARA!
Frantic Search for America’s Flying Sweetheart!
Husband Clings to Hope: “Irene Can and Will Survive Any Disaster!”
Across America and around the world, people who had forgotten all about the crash landing in the Pacific eight and a half years earlier, the frantic suspense as the navy combed the ocean for some sign of Irene Foster and Sam Mallory—and say, wasn’t there some scandal about Hawai’i, some dirty photographs?—now recalled the excitement of those three weeks. They gathered over radios and newspapers, inside barbershops and outside newsstands, and discussed the latest developments, the desperation of poor George Morrow who had dedicated his life and his career to his brilliant wife. Nobody even noticed when the first airplane crossed the finish line in the Round the World Air Derby; today, not even the most ardent student of trivia can name the man who piloted that ship. (For the record, it was Art Landon, who hadn’t heard the news about Irene and was shocked to learn that he’d won; he then spent a week with the search team, flying over the desert in search of wreckage.)
All that effort and expense, you might think! All those pilots who put themselves and their airplanes in danger to look for Irene, when she wasn’t anywhere near the Sahara! All those newspaper headlines, all that suspense shared by the citizens of the world! How could Irene subject everybody to such an ordeal? Disappear without trace? Surely she knew there would be a search, there would be reporters dispatched to North Africa, there would be millions of dollars wasted on her behalf!
In fact, she did understand all those things, which was why she posted an express letter to George Morrow at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca, the night before she departed Alexandria. In this letter, she informed her husband that she was irrevocably in love with Sam Mallory, was carrying his child, and had flown her airplane to join him instead of finishing the race. She asked George to forgive her and not to look for her, because she did not want to be found. She thanked him for all he had done for her, and wished him nothing but happiness in the future. She left it to him what to say to the press, but she trusted that he would encourage them to leave her in peace with Sam and their child, and allow her to find the contentment she had sought in vain all these years. (With love and gratitude, Irene.)
According to the hotel’s records and the testimony of the bellboy who delivered the letter, it arrived in George Morrow’s hands the next day while he sat in the lobby, waiting for news of his wife. He gave the messenger a ten cent tip and opened the envelope immediately.
So Irene hadn’t given her husband much thought. If there was one thing George Morrow could do better than just about anybody in the world, it was to handle the press. She figured—when she had time to think about it at all—that he had given the world some statement that skirted the truth, that made him out to be a patient, generous husband who wanted nothing for his wife but her happiness. She had, in fact, not the least idea that she had disappeared without trace, that she might now be clinging to survival amid the wreckage of her airplane in the middle of the Sahara, that the attention of the world was fixed on her, that hundreds of people were even now employed in a desperate race against the clock to find her. She would have been appalled; she would have been furious with George.
But she didn’t know any of this. If she had, she would have broken her silence long before she actually did crash in a desert, not in North Africa but in Spain, about three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Madrid.
As the Potez hit the ground, Irene expected to die instantly. She had forgotten that there was nobody in the world who had crashed an airplane so often and so skillfully as Sam Mallory. It was almost as if his entire career had been made in preparation for this moment, when the ship he was piloting—the one carrying the only person left to him on earth, in urgent need of medical care—ran out of fuel because some German bullet had pierced the main fuel tank, which went unnoticed until half an hour into the flight, when he was already over the strip of Nationalist territory between the Basques and Madrid.
The impact was like the end of the world. An almighty bang jolted through the metal frame and everything went flying, except Irene. She was strapped down not just to the stretcher but to the main deck itself, so that she was part of the airplane as it hurtled across the surface of the desert, over rocks and through bushes, bouncing and crashing and skidding until it came to rest at last, tail torn away, landing gear collapsed, propeller blades scattered across the desert floor.
Then silence.
The shock of it numbed Irene’s physical pain. She stared at the bare struts that ran along the top of this metal tube in which she was bound, unable to move. She tried to scream Sam’s name, even to whisper it, but she had no strength at all, not even that. Maybe I’m dead, she thought. A shaft of sunlight poured through some broken window. The pain returned. Her ears rang with it. Her lips were cracked and thirsty. She closed her eyes and thought, So this is how I die.
Some time later, Irene opened her eyes to sunshine and a desert landscape, a curious rock formation, pain such as she had never known. Something cool touched her forehead. Sam? she whispered.
I’m here, he said. The pressure of his hand on hers.
What’s happened?
We’ve crashed. We ran out of fuel. Waiting for help.
Sam?
What is it, Irene?
How bad am I?
He didn’t answer right away, and Irene thought that he wasn’t going to tell her, and she was angry. She had a right to know what was wrong with her body! She had a right to know what was causing this pain. She had a right to know if she was going to live or die. She had a right to know if her baby was dead.
Then he started to speak. He said that she was burned, on the side of her face and on her back, and that her left arm had been broken by some falling debris. The rest was cuts and bruises. He said she might lose the arm, but not to worry, because he always liked the right arm better anyway. As for her face, why, it just made her more interesting.
Sam? she said.
What is it, Irene?
I can’t feel the baby move. Is the baby still there?
There was a fragile silence.
Then: Don’t worry about the baby, said Sam.
Why not? said Irene. Why not worry? Is he gone? Is he gone, Sam? Tell me the truth. Is he gone?
Irene, said Sam. Irene.
Irene wasn’t crying, but a few tears slid from the corners of her eyes and down her temples into her ears. More followed, until they bled into each other, but she wasn’t crying. Her chest didn’t move, except in shallow, delicate breaths. A line of water ran from each eye. That was all.
When they had crashed in the middle of the night, Sam had carried her out of the wrecked fuselage because he was afraid of fumes. Now it was morning, and the desert heat began to take hold. They lay quietly in the shade while Irene dangled between sleep and hazy half-consciousness, and Sam gave her water and stroked her hair. In a moment of lucidity, she asked if he was hurt.
“Oh, just my bum ankle,” he said.
“Can you walk?”
“A little.”
“You should walk. You should try to find help.”
He was smoking a cigarette. She could smel
l the tobacco, a more pungent variety than the ones he used to smoke back in California. She wanted to turn her head and look at him, and possibly she could have done if she tried hard enough, but her skull felt so heavy and her neck so stiff. So she just imagined him instead, hair askew, smoking thoughtfully against a boulder or something while a blue sky surrounded him.
“Irene,” he said, “there’s nobody for miles. This is the desert, the badlands.”
“You should try.”
“Can’t leave you here alone. Might be days.”
“Then at least you’d save yourself.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, stroking her hair, “don’t worry. They’ll send someone out to look for us. Just sit tight, all right?”
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, believe me.”
He laughed and kissed her forehead and said she was the same old Irene, the same good sport, game for anything. What he didn’t say was that his bum ankle was actually broken in several places, and that his left ear was nearly torn off, and a deep gash cut through to the bone of his left thigh, narrowly missing the femoral artery. No, he wasn’t going anywhere, and certainly not miles out into the scorching desert. Not unless he had to.
Still, when night fell again, Sam managed to drag her back into the fuselage, which had settled deep enough in the earth that it was not such a great height, just a ledge. In the darkness, she couldn’t see the blood, or his mangled face, so she didn’t know how much effort this required. She went to sleep, and sometime during the night she dreamed that they were outside, the three of them, alone in the night, Sam and Irene and their dead child, who was wrapped in a bundle in Sam’s arms so she couldn’t touch him or see him. She tried to scream, to give some voice to her anguish, but the peculiar paralysis of dreams had stiffened her so she could neither move nor speak. The stars twinkled coldly at her grief. Even though she couldn’t actually say the words, she heard her own voice ask Sam where they should bury the baby, and he replied that when the sun rose he would dig a hole beneath a boulder nearby that reminded him of a bear.
She realized she was awake. She asked Sam to repeat what he had just said.
“I buried him with my own bare hands in the graveyard next to the airfield,” Sam said.
“Him,” Irene said.
“Yes. The commandant promised to put up a headstone when the bombing stops.”
As he spoke, Sam made some rustling movements. Irene didn’t know he was binding up his thigh and his ankle with some gauze in the medical kit. The iodine and the morphine he saved for her, because he knew that burns were the most painful wounds of all, and the most susceptible to infection.
“Did you give him a name?” Irene asked. “Will there be a name on the stone?”
“Henry Foster Mallory. Is that all right?”
Irene couldn’t think. She didn’t remember that she herself had told Sam, if their baby was a boy, to name their son after her father. Between the physical pain and the morphine for the pain, there was not enough room for memory or even grief. She only felt grief when she was asleep.
But she wanted to feel grief. She wanted to mourn. So she just said, Yes, that’s perfect, and let herself go.
After that, Irene did not want to live. She could survive the loss of a baby, because women did that all the time, and she could survive pain because she had experienced physical agony so often before. But she could not survive both at once, and when their water began to run out the next day, there was just no point in living, was there? Nobody was going to rescue them. She begged Sam to take his service pistol and shoot her. If she were dead, he could keep the rest of the water for himself; he could go for help, he could save himself.
Sam said that if she were dead, he would have no reason to save himself. He went on changing her bandages. He moved her inside the airplane, to shelter her from the sun, and sat with her, and brushed her hair, and wrote in his diary. He said he wanted some record of events to survive when the wreckage was found. In case his Pixie ever grew up and wondered what had happened to her father.
In the meantime, in the outside world, people were still obsessed with the mystery of Irene Foster’s disappearance, although not so much as three weeks ago because hope of discovering her alive had begun to fade. The Sahara was a harsh, miserable, inhospitable climate, after all. You could not survive long. So airplanes continued to crisscross North Africa, but not so many as before, and interestingly George Morrow was not among them. George Morrow was in Spain.
He had flown from Casablanca a week ago, and while there’s no record of exactly where he first landed—so much Republican paperwork was destroyed in the course of war—it’s certain he arrived at the government-held airfield in Valencia on the fifteenth of May. Probably he had heard some rumor, or received an anonymous note, because the Foster disappearance had captured attention everywhere, even in the midst of war, and many in Spain did not approve of wives leaving their husbands for lovers. So Morrow came to Valencia and asked to speak to the commandant, and the commandant—after some persuasion, no doubt—admitted that they had recently received word that Miss Foster and Mr. Mallory had gone missing while flying between Bilbao and Valencia, and that one of his best pilots was out right now, scouring the desert in order to find them.
Fine, said Morrow. But if he comes back empty-handed, I’m going to put on a flight suit myself and join him.
On the morning of the fourth day, a noise came from the southeast. For some reason Irene heard it first. She told Sam to wake up, somebody was coming, an airplane was coming. Sam crawled to the emergency kit for the flare gun and went outside. In his fatigue and dehydration, he nearly misfired it. Then it went off and sent an arc of red smoke through the air. The noise shifted a moment later.
“I think he’s seen us,” Sam said. By now, his voice was like the rasp of a saw. Irene couldn’t really speak at all. As she listened, she perceived that this airplane had a single engine, and that it was not in the best of condition. A moment later, the ship came into view through the open hatch, flashing in the sun. Irene watched it approach them in an acute descent. Whoever he was, he was a good pilot who understood the exact limit of the airplane’s capabilities. She thought all this without emotion, without any joy, because joy was now impossible. The ship landed two hundred yards away in a roar of propeller blades, a plume of fine desert sand. Seconds later, the hatch opened, and a man jumped to the ground, followed by another man.
At first, Irene couldn’t see their faces, because the morning sun struck fiercely on the fuselage and cast halos around them. They were both running. In seconds the halos faded and Irene, struggling upright, could at last see their faces.
The first man was her husband, George Morrow.
The second was Raoul Velázquez.
Hanalei, Hawai’i
November 1947
By the time we return to Hanalei, dawn is breaking to the east behind a bank of gathering clouds, and the wind is picking up. I seem to have forgotten my fear of flying, or maybe I no longer care what happens to me. The bumps and jerks of the airplane induce no more panic than the twists of a roller coaster. Instead I stare out the window at the clouds around me, the wondrous, monstrous three dimensions of them, the delicate pattern of wave meeting shore, the infinite beauty of the earth, and I begin to see why man must fly.
We drive back silently to Coolibah down the empty road. When we reach the driveway, Lindquist stops the car and reaches into the back for the cardboard box she was carrying earlier.
“This is for you,” she says.
I peek inside and close the lid swiftly. “Thank God. I thought it was the cat.”
“Sandy? Good Lord, of course not. I’m going to pick her up at the vet’s right now. I wanted her cremated.” She puts her hands back on the steering wheel and stares at the pale house before us. “Tell Olle where I’ve gone, will you? Ask him to take the children to school this morning?”
There’s something funny about the way she says this. I sit there by her si
de, hand on the door handle, not quite ready to open it. She’s the one who breaks the silence.
“I appreciate your forbearance, by the way.”
“Forbearance?”
“Not killing me.” She tilts her head in the direction of my jacket pocket. “I wasn’t sure what you meant to do with that.”
“I wasn’t sure, either, to be perfectly honest.”
“I guess you had every right to hate me, growing up. It was either hate me or hate Sam, and I’d rather you hated me.”
I open the door and step out. “You’ve got it all wrong, Foster,” I say, through the open window. “The person I hated was myself.”
Captain Leo has already left for the docks. I can tell because his moped is gone from its usual spot, near the gazebo. I march indoors to the noise of the Buick, turning around to head back down the highway toward Lihue. I make straight for the library with my cardboard box.
Now, I forget. Have I described this library? Because it’s certainly not in the usual style, if you know what I mean. That masculine leather-and-mahogany atmosphere you expect to seep from the cornices? Why, there aren’t even any cornices! The walls are covered by simple shelves, containing nothing but books—Lindquist is not the knickknack sort of person, she hasn’t got the time of day for objects that offer no practical purpose—and the furniture is spare, except for an armchair near the window that looks as if it was meant to sleep in. The liquor cabinet is built into the wall, not far from the desk. You open the door and rummage through all the bottles until you find the right poison. The owner walks in just as I’m walking away with a nice double bourbon.
“Where’s Irene?” he demands.
“Relax. She’s alive and well. She took me on a little trip last night to unburden herself. Now she’s headed to the vet to pick up the cat’s ashes. She asked me to tell you to deliver the tadpoles to school this morning.”
Her Last Flight Page 32
