“I see. Yes, all right, I’ll try.”
Neither of them said what they both knew to be true: What did it matter whether they landed in one piece or ran head-on into a wave and got it over with all at once? They were in one of the most remote, little-traveled areas of the largest body of water in the world, it was pitch-black, and, most important, no one had any idea of where they were. They had taken off from Waimea after-hours, with no attendant around. No flight plan had been filed, the transponder had been turned off, no radio contact had been made. The chances of anyone accidentally spotting their little orange raft, if they ever made it out of the plane, were a million to one, probably less.
But the will to live, if even for a few hours longer, didn’t depend on such considerations, and when she turned on the lights they both peered hard to determine how the waves were running.
It took a while for them to make sense of the water’s surface. “I don’t see any waves at all,” Torkelsson said.
“There have to be waves.”
“No, it’s like a lake, there’s nothing.”
“There have to be waves,” she said again, but she couldn’t see any either, only a flat surface of green so pale it was almost white. She’d never come in over water at night, so she wasn’t sure if the color was the result of her lights, or if it was a sign of relatively shallow water.
“Watch out!” Torkelsson shouted.
“
But in his agitation he had lashed out, and his arm hit her wrist, jerking the steering yoke to the left. The ailerons responded as they must: Up went the left one, down came the right one. The plane dipped precipitously to its left. The left wingtip touched the surface of the water. Like a stone skimmed over a lake, it touched, skipped, touched, skipped, touched...and finally broke the surface. The wing entered the water and caught.
The plane cart-wheeled, its forward momentum carrying it through the air for half a revolution, so that for one long, strange, dizzy second they were looking straight down into the floodlit water, tumbling tail-first. Claudia’s ear was warm and wet with blood. She had hit her head on something but had never felt it. Helplessly suspended upside down in her harness, seemingly suspended in time and space, she saw the tow bar and a pair of sunglasses on a lanyard float past the windshield, caught in the glare of the landing lights.
IN silence, the mortally wounded airplane lay on the surface, its cabin filling with water, its occupants slumped forward in their harnesses, unmoving.
It took a long time for it to sink in the warm, shallow lagoon, and when it did the strut of its nose wheel collapsed, so that the plane tipped gently forward onto its nose cone, only the tail still breaking the surface. The landing lights remained on for a while, outlining the plane’s dark, broken silhouette and making a lovely, luminescent fairy ring of turquoise and white in the black, still waters. Then they blinked out.
TWO
AT eighty-two, Dagmar Torkelsson was less inclined to melancholy than many people with half her years. She rarely dwelt on old regrets or might-have-beens, or on the losses, physical and emotional, that came with age. But on this particular afternoon, seated on the memorial bench that she herself had purchased for the community’s cliff walk in the name of her long-dead brothers Torkel, Mag-nus, and Andreas, her thoughts were of the past; of Torkel and Magnus in particular.
The path, as usual, was deserted despite the twelve sumptuous homes in the walled, gated community. Few of the residents did much walking there, which was fine with Dagmar as long as a portion of their homeowner dues continued to go for upkeep. The existence of this lovely path had been the final selling point that had convinced her to purchase there, despite the obscene price (which she could certainly afford, but which offended her sensibilities all the same). Hugging the rims of rocky, surf-splashed coves where green sea turtles could often be seen just below the surface of the water, it wound for a quarter-mile, mostly out of sight of the homes. In all the years she had lived there, she could count on the fingers of her two hands the days she had failed to stroll it, even when her arthritis required a cane or sometimes—hateful, clumsy thing—a walker.
She had had the bench placed at the cliff walk’s highest, prettiest spot, a few feet off the path, at the tip of a little promontory that overlooked what she thought of as her own private cove twenty feet below. There she knew the resident sea turtles by sight and had given them names of old friends they reminded her of, regardless of the fact that she didn’t know and didn’t want to know how to tell the males from the females. Most days would find her seated here at four-fifteen, forty-five minutes before her dinner was delivered. For three quarters of an hour she would contentedly smoke her two pre-prandial cigarillos, sip her pre-prandial schnapps from the worked silver cap of the antique flask that had come with her from Sweden such a long time ago, and delicately toss canned sardines in tomato sauce to the turtles, using a linen napkin to wipe her fingers between tosses. She had decided that they preferred the tomato sauce variety to those that came in oil when she concluded that the strange grunts they sometimes uttered were expressions of appreciation. Dessert, as always, would be pieces of cinnamon bun left over from her breakfast.
Usually, her mind was pleasantly empty of all but her surroundings when she sat here; the ever-present warm breeze, the murmuring of the ocean, the rustling of the palm fronds, the salt air. When anything approaching a complete thought crossed her mind, it was likely to be of her own dinner to come. As a resident of Hulopo’e Beach Estates she had a membership at the posh Mauna Kai Resort a few hundred yards up the coast; and while the tennis and golf privileges didn’t do her much good, she took full advantage of the access to their maid services, their kitchens, and their catering. Her home was cleaned by Mauna Kai staff every other week, and her dinners came from their menu at least four times a week; six or seven, if you counted leftovers. The good-looking young waiter with the black, bedroom eyes would put the meal on her dining-terrace table, then politely come and get her, proffering his arm to be leaned on. It was all very nice.
