The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday Read Free Book Online Page A

things. Different things. Some men liked to have me simply for how young I was. Some liked to give me things—mandolins, records, bottles of French and Spanish wine. But I had one immediate need myself in my endeavor, and that was that I not get pregnant. And somehow I was lucky even in that realm: I never had even a scare. It appeared I was barren.”
    Françoise put her head down again on her pillow. She turned to me and expressed a truth I was coming to learn: Sometimes even the most steadfast facts of our lives can be undone by time and chance.
    â€œThen when I was sixteen,” she said, “I noticed one day my menstruation had stopped. Years of work each day the same, each day a different challenge but the same results. Here I was now. Suddenly pregnant.” Her mother told her she must not keep the baby. Her father had recovered himself during that period, and had made plans to return to the Congo, where he would be embroiled in a business transaction that could keep them from returning to Rotterdam even to visit for years. Her father was lucky to have found work again. Françoise would not be able to join them if she was with child.
    At that moment in her telling me all of this, a new tear appeared in the outside corner of Françoise’s eye like the tear that comes upon first waking. It rolled down her cheek and into her ear. Now her face was all hot and wet. It was the first show of defeated sadness I’d ever observed in her. Being full of wine herself, her energy started to flag. She came over to the sofa where I sat and buried her nose in my neck. We lay down together on the long sofa.
    â€œIsn’t it silly?” she said. I had my arms wrapped around her now. “The choices we make.”
    And then, before finishing her story, she closed her eyes. “It’s hard even to think of it now,” Françoise said. She stopped speaking. Her breathing grew slow and heavy. Minutes passed with us lying that way. I did not have the heart to wake her. While I waited, too lit by the story to sleep myself, I was plunged into the memory of my last moments with my own parents: The week before my father told me I was to leave for Rotterdam, the three of us had traveled to Prague together. My father had just made a major upgrade to his Tiger Moth biplane, and he wanted to take us each up in it. But when we arrived, my mother refused to join us, no matter how my father implored her. She was afraid of flying, she said, though she’d been up before, and she didn’t want to go.
    â€œTake Poxl,” she said, her hand distractedly playing with the amber of her earring. “He likes to fly with you. I’ll take the car to town for the afternoon.”
    There was some loose skin around my father’s eyes that twitched when he was most agitated. It twitched then without abandon. It wasn’t until this moment, lying alongside Françoise, that it struck me this might have been a sign my father knew of my mother’s indiscretions.
    We took to the sky that afternoon while my mother was in town. A second throttle sat in my rear seat. After flying me faster and more recklessly than my fastidious father ever had before, he shouted back to me, “Take over, Poxl.”
    For the first time after all those flights watching the back of my father’s helmeted head, first in his Be-50 and then in this Tiger Moth, I took that plane upward. The slightest nudge of the throttle sent us down at an angle that seemed to me to cause mortal danger. I straightened us and then my stomach made quickly for my feet. But soon I had us horizontal. A kind of ease overcame me in my seat. Thin fog passed through us like the skin of vacated bodies, and when I looked far enough across our leeward side, I saw that these were the wisps of clouds we were inside of. Wind forced us up and I pushed in, sent us down. I’d been flying I don’t know how long before, for the very last time, my