James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

August 5, Wednesday Night: Anniversary

Later, she prepared for bed carefully: a long bath, a single candle lit on the tub’s edge, the remains of the wine Joan left. The radio played a nonsense song, “Mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lambzy divey.” She washed her hair in the tub, sinking back until the water covered her ears, muffling the radio. Everything in her bunched together in tight fists, her stomach, her lungs, her back muscles, as if a race were about to start, but she forced herself to go slow. The wine tasted good. Warm water held her in its hand. Time felt mushy and possible.

She thought about the night of August 5, 1945, where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic payload; its crew slumbered in the barracks, while Erica Weiss’s mother packed for a trip to Fort Collins. Erica lay down to sleep, thinking about a phone call, thinking about long kisses held on a porch, thinking about a sculptor’s fingers sliding across her shoulder, touching her cheek. Nathaniel Shirley stared at his collage until midnight, hearing planes in his ears, watching Ginger Rogers spinning across a dance floor. “Here’s looking at you,” Bogey said at an airport in the fog. Nathaniel’s eyes always ended at Tokyo Rose, her dark hair, the twist in her neck. He thought about touching that hair, except it was never Tokyo Rose he touched in his imagination. It was Erica; her hair curled and smelling of shampoo. Meadoe’s grandfather in Hiroshima slept. Old, old light from stars so distant a million lives might have come and gone glittered in the sky.

Meadoe rubbed herself dry. Left the door open. She felt his eyes on her. Pulled on panties and a night shirt and headed for bed. She remembered the Casablanca dream where she sat in the theater. In the dream she’d directed herself. She’d turned so her companion could touch her. In the dream she’d had free will. In the dream she’d had curly hair.

11:55 p.m. The clock flicked to a new minute. Meadoe lay on her back, eyes part open but drifting, just on sleep’s edge, pleasantly buzzed. A wine glass sat on the night table where she could reach it. The radio played in the background, soft dance tunes, horns and clarinets. Big bands. Meadoe licked her lips. Felt herself doing it, knowing that she was almost asleep. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. Under the covers, heat pressed her on all sides. Moving slowly, concentrating on the buzz like a pressure point behind her eyes, she pushed away the blanket so only the sheet covered her.

In a dream now, she sat in her front parlor. Sun poured through the front windows. The house was almost intolerably hot, and even leaving the doors open didn’t help, but Erica, wearing a thin cotton blouse and shorts, didn’t consider it. Mother had been gone for two hours now. She wouldn’t be back for three days. Erica’s hair stuck to the side of her face, but it was nervousness, not the heat. On the table, the phone waited.

Nathaniel could be here in thirty minutes. Erica thought about his laugh. The way he touched her face. How when he was in the room she felt watery inside and hoped that he would hold her. The phone clicked when she lifted it.

In Meadoe’s home, the bed creaked; She incorporated it into the dream, turned it into a creaky chair. Erica held the phone, listening to the dial tone, in the dream, and Meadoe moved aside without opening her eyes both in her bed and in Erica’s front parlor. A weight lay beside her, scarcely breathing, and the air baked in the room. For a moment, nothing moved. The dial tone hummed. Meadoe’s heart pounded in her ears. A tug on the sheet. It slid off. Erica dialed the operator, waiting between each digit, trying to stay calm. A jostle in the bed. Lips on Meadoe’s neck. She scrunched her eyes tight, forcing herself to stay both in the dream and in her bed. A pressure moved off her arm; a hand, moved down her side, over her hip and then rested on bare leg. Meadoe breathed a sound at the touch, tried not to move. What if the hand went away? She desperately did not want to wake.

Meadoe held the phone. Pushed her curly hair away from her eyes. One ring. Two rings. In her bed, the nightshirt pushed up, uncovering her belly. Caressed, she pushed into the weight beside her. Felt his length, the heat of him. The hand moved off the middle of her chest. Slid down. Sweat coated her. She floated in it. The fingers paused at her pantie line. She wanted those fingers to keep moving. Wanted his touch.

She talked on the phone too. Nathaniel said he’ll come.

Erica… Meadoe… Erica… she didn’t know who she was, breathed hard. He’ll be here soon, Meadoe thought. Mother is gone. Mother is gone. He’ll be here soon.

The fingers stayed still, but the heel of the hand moved closer so Meadoe knew the fingers must be bent, his beautiful, sensitive sculptor’s fingers. She gasped, not afraid now that he would hear, and then the fingers slipped farther down.

Meadoe moaned, reached and grabbed the wrist, preventing him from going any lower. “Wait,” she said into her room’s hot, dark air. “Wait.”

Erica put on her shoes. She thought, I should wait. But she opened the front parlor door, rushed. In the dream, Meadoe/Erica ran up the street. Her house was closer to the intersection than Nathaniel’s. She should get there first. Her feet blurred beneath her. Up the long hill, made the intersection. He was not there yet. Traffic held her for a minute. Cars, trucks, military vehicles. She crossed.

Meadoe held the wrist. She ached, but she didn’t let it move.

A minute later, she saw Nathaniel. He was running, but when he noticed her standing there, he slowed to a walk. A grin stayed on his face. The smile was infectious, and Erica smiled back. They hugged at the same moment across the globe a bomber dropped its single bomb. Roared frantically away. Meadoe Omura’s grandfather lifted dirt by the shovelful from the bunker. Around him, other workers moved wheelbarrows, carried brick, mixed cement.

The traffic light changed, Nathaniel started across, but Erica held him back. A milk truck slammed through the red light and continued down the road. Erica smiled even broader. The bomb burst and the atomic age arrived. Quantum theory made real.

Nathaniel said, “Wow, good thing nobody was in the street.”

Erica nodded. She didn’t let go of his arm.

“Pretty warm out, don’t you think?” Nathaniel said.

Erica shaded her eyes. “A bit. Maybe we can go some place out of the sun?”

“Do you have something in mind?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and they walked toward her house.

In her bedroom, Meadoe held the hand still under her belly, and she walked hand in hand with Nathaniel down Harriston Boulevard. They went in her front door. A brief kiss. A fumbling with buttons and snaps. They laughed in the afternoon’s warmth, nearly stifling in the house, oblivious of heat and atomic bombs and milk trucks.

Meadoe forced her eyes open to the bedroom’s darkness. Their laughter rang in her house, echoey and distant. Moonlight slanted through the window, gathered in a form lying beside her.

His eyes were open, staring into her own across the years. Young eyes, long dead. They blinked.

“I’m not who you think I am,” said Meadoe.

The voice barely made it to her ears. It could have been no more than a breeze outside. Her own heart thudding in her veins. As light as a lover’s touch. “I know, Tokyo Rose,” he said, then the room was empty and twenty degrees cooler.

August 8, Saturday: Final Reel

“So you haven’t seen evidence of the ‘ghost’ since Wednesday night?” Joan pulled her notepad from a briefcase. She was in her therapist’s mode now, harder, more brusque than Joan the friend.

“No. He’s gone.” Meadoe leaned back in her chair.