1974

FORTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, as we fly across the country in first class, I can’t help but think, He hates this.

Charles has always believed first class is the worst thing that’s happened to aviation, worse than anything that commercial airlines have done—worse than the snappy stewardesses in their daring skirts; worse than the pilots being hidden away by a curtain or a door; worse than the relentless effort to make passengers forget that they’re flying at all. It’s like being trapped in a can, he always says. Sealed off. Given a drink. Told to relax. People can pull shades down over the windows, so they don’t even have to see that they’re thirty thousand feet up in the air.

I glance at his face; it is without color, translucent. His eyes are closed. He insisted on sitting up until the other passengers boarded, even though there’s a curtain, thoughtfully provided by the airline, hiding us all—the doctor, the nurse, our children, me. Him, on a stretcher balanced across one row of first-class seats. The IV is attached to his arm—so thin, like a sapling tree branch. He is dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt.

Frail as he is, when he was carried on board—the rest of us surrounding him, our backs to the world, as if to shun the healthy—he sat up straight and returned the salute of the pilot and the copilot who stood at the top of the ramp, tears in their eyes.

Even that effort exhausted him. And now, he sleeps.

I keep opening my purse, looking at the letters. Cruelly, I want to shake them in his face until he opens his eyes; I want to demand that he read them aloud just so I can hear him tell me, finally, something that is real and honest and from his heart. Even if the words were not intended for me—and why weren’t they? Where is my touching letter of farewell? Or is it supposed to be enough—as it was always supposed to be enough—that he had chosen me in the first place; chosen me now, to be at his side?

I snap my purse shut; of course, I can’t do that; I can’t make him read the letters out loud. Not in front of my children.

So I sit beside him quietly, the loyal wife, as far as anyone can tell; his flying partner once more on this, his final journey. We’ve reached cruising altitude and the bright, chipper “ding” has sounded, allowing us to move about if we feel like it. Scott is on watch right now; he is across the aisle from his father, studying him, his face a cipher. I have no idea what he is thinking, or remembering; I know only that he, of all my children, has the hardest road to travel to forgiveness.

Jon is staring out the window, and I don’t know what he sees. He is a man of few words, even fewer than his father. But unlike his father, Jon is not comfortable in the air. His home is the sea; his passion the creatures within it.

Land flew out earlier, and will meet us in Honolulu; his task is to arrange transportation to the far side of the island, Maui, so that Charles can be close to Hana and the home he built for us there. Good, obedient Land; if his father is air, his brother water, he is just as his name sounds—the earth. Land. Solid, a man of the west, a rancher.

The girls are with their families, Reeve in Vermont, Ansy in France. Both have small children and can’t join us on this last journey, but they were able to say their goodbyes earlier.

How I love my children! How thankful I am for them, and all they have given me—joy, frustration, hope; a reason to go on living when I thought I had none. And now grandchildren. But are they enough? Enough to salvage this family when—if—I reveal what I know?

I touch my husband, just the gentlest touch, and it’s like it was in the beginning, when I could never quite convince myself I had the right. Only now, instead of a young god, he is near death, soon to be gone in body if never in memory, and it’s not fair. I wanted to have these last days to remember the best of our life together, the good times, the impossibly sweet times.

Isn’t that what you’re supposed to remember when a spouse lies dying? Aren’t you supposed to forget and, most important, to forgive?

But once again, he has denied me a wifely right. Because of the letters in my purse, I’ll never be able to forget all the years missing him, wanting him, wondering why he could be with me for only a few days before starting to pace, to look out windows, to plan to fly away from me once more. My own secret does not seem as enormous now; it cannot compare to the ones he has been keeping from me.

I look at him, lying strangely still, unrecognizably weak, his mouth slightly open, his jaw slack; for the first time not telling any one of us what to do or think or feel.

And I understand that betrayal is more enormous than forgiveness. One more thing Charles has taught me, in a lifetime of lessons and lectures.