We are all fighting it—fighting the transitory, the evanescence, against death and the shortness of life and that futile feeling—the “Qu’as-tu fais?” feeling.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, September 25, 1933

IT WAS THE FIFTH of October, a Wednesday, ten months since her parents had gone. “Mrs. Donnelly? Margaret Sheehan Donnelly?” a voice on the phone said when she walked into the house and ran to the ringing phone at five P.M. “This is Captain Ron Davis with the United States Coast Guard.”

She was almost relieved to hear it wasn’t a telemarketer, as most calls that began “Mrs. Donnelly?” at five P.M. on weekdays were. “Yes?” she said. “This is Margaret Donnelly.”

“Mrs. Donnelly,” he said, “I am calling you from Honolulu, Hawaii. And I’m afraid I am the bearer of some distressing news for you.”

“Yes,” she said, conscious of having anticipated any such call for nearly a year now, conscious of feeling her breath quicken and her body relent.

“I understand that your parents, Henry and Ruth Gutterson, have been missing for a while?”

Margaret said this was correct.

“Well, there was a piece of tailwing washed up on Christmas Island, a good bit south of us here, a few weeks ago. The call numbers on the fuselage, I’m afraid,” he said, “correspond to a charter plane touring all the islands, which your parents were on five months ago.”

“Five months ago?” She actually managed a little laugh because it was so ludicrous; they’d been dead all of these last five months. There was relief, too. But no surprise about the news itself. “Why are you only calling me now?”

“They didn’t leave correct information,” the captain said. “They left false names and addresses, which we only know now, of course. They gave us the phone number to their home in Iowa, I believe, but no one was ever there to answer it. So we started to think that maybe they didn’t have any family. Even so, we put out some feelers to hotels and such and people had seen them, but they had left the same name and information those places and they had paid cash. We had almost given up when, on a stroke of luck, someone at the charter service discovered the FAA flyer and put two and two together. We had the Cedar Bluff police send us a copy of their handwriting just yesterday, and now, yes, we’re certain it was them.”

Margaret felt her hands shaking, fury at the edges. “But that FAA notice went out to every private airport nationwide in December. They should’ve had it in April, before they got onto that plane.” How many other places, she wondered, had her parents been where the flyer was sitting right there on someone’s desk?

“Well, you’ll have to talk to the charter service about that. But if they got a paper in December, it’s not surprising that it had fallen beneath a few things by April.”

Margaret squeezed her eyes shut, pinched the bridge of her nose, and leaned against the wall. “Have you found anything else?”

“Not so far. And the tailpiece doesn’t give us much idea where they went down or when. The amount of water that moved through this area with some doozy storms this past month, let alone the last five months—they could’ve gone down two hundred miles from where that piece was found. And, well, I don’t have to tell you that with five months’ time passed, lots will have been, well, long gone by now.”

“I don’t expect to find their bodies,” she said flatly. “I was just curious if there could be any more of the plane.”

“Yes, there could be. But it seems unlikely. Like I said, it’s a minor miracle we found anything.”

Margaret thought for a moment, tried to figure out what questions she could ask this man and what she needed to ask the charter service. It was difficult to think clearly. “So, could you just run through for me what happened? When they chartered a plane, where they were going, things like that.”

“Of course,” the captain said. Margaret liked his efficiency and matter-of-factness. There was no unnecessary warmth or pity. He explained that there had been a charter pilot with them and they were supposed to be flying around the islands, but the last contact was well south. The guy in the tower at Hawaii County Airport informed them that they were well off their course—at 13 degrees north and 160 degrees west—and they said they were encountering some fierce turbulence and were going to turn back. But then contact was lost. This was about two hours after takeoff. The date, exactly, was April 3.

“How does anyone get lost in this day and age?” Margaret asked, realizing this had been her initial fear, deemed ridiculous.

“We looked for them, trust me. Hawaii County called us and we alerted all fishing boats in the area—there weren’t many, given the weather—plus sent two cutters and three search planes of our own,” Captain Davis said. “But there was nothing. To be honest, Mrs. Donnelly, we’re still trying to piece it together. Christmas Island, where the piece of the tail was found, is nearly seven hundred miles south of Hawaii and the last contact was somewhere in between. They could’ve been trying to get a landing strip and the weather was easier that way—the storm was pretty much moving north-northeast, and so to fly southwest was flying a little bit out of it. Still, that’s a long way to go for a landing strip, even in the middle of the Pacific, and the pilot said they were turning back.”

“Could they have simply run out of fuel?”

“It’s possible, yes.”

She sighed. There didn’t seem to be much else to tell. It wouldn’t do any good to cross-examine him. “Okay,” she said. “You’ll call me if you find or learn anything else?”

“Yes, absolutely, Mrs. Donnelly. And again, I’m so sorry to be calling you with this news.”

“Any news at this point . . . ” she said, trailing off. “It’s not unwelcome. Thank you.”

He offered his condolences once again and they hung up. She was at the kitchen phone, still in her raincoat and still with the mail under her arm. She set that down and let her hand fall to her side, where she knew Fern’s cool muzzle was waiting. The sun had nearly set and the kitchen was dark. The only sound was cars swishing by, home, horns, and bus brakes squeaking. Fern started scratched her ear and there was that slight percussive sound of toenails scratching through fur against cartilage and skin, and then she started panting because she was expecting to go out.

Margaret ran Captain Davis’s call through her head as if she were trying on the information for size. She didn’t have to wonder how she felt—it was relief, plain and simple. Not happiness, not pleasure, but relief in having full-on pain, at last, in having certain pain, rather than wonder. Not even the frustration of the charter service’s ineptitude could diminish the stillness she felt seeping all the way through her. And was she relieved that they’d been dead, most likely, for so long? It did mean they had only been running away from their children for five months, which was a lot different from ten. Perhaps they had been trying to come home in the spring, after all, as Margaret had hoped—maybe Hawaii was meant to be the end of it, the farthest reach of their wandering before turning back.

JUST THE MONTH before, John had told her he’d given up, that he felt certain they were dead, and that perhaps it was time to really close the farm up—not just put the valuable things in storage and leave couches and beds out with sheets draped over them, but to store everything, make the house empty. It was a Saturday when he told her, right after his glider lesson, and he and Susan stopped in Lincoln Park for lunch on their way downtown. Susan and Terry were in the backyard, looking at the new cherry tree they’d planted to replace the old, failing magnolia. Margaret was slicing cheese for sandwiches and John leaned against the counter next to her.

“Well,” he said, looking away from her briefly, out the window, and then looking back just as Margaret glanced at him and noticed his eyes were brimming. “I think they’ve gone,” he said.

She focused on the hunk of cheddar and her knife. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Just this feeling. And the fact that we’ve heard nothing in five months. In the whole nine or ten months they’ve been gone, we’ve learned three things. Bank withdrawals in two places and one phone call, to Philippe, who wasn’t alive to receive it. If they aren’t dead, then they are dead to us. They mean to be dead to us. And so, maybe we should accept that they’re gone.”

This surprised her—both because it seemed extreme and because John had generally been more positive. “You can’t really believe that,” she said. “After the way this time has gone, and the confusing, inadvertent, silly little appearances they’ve made—you’re going to tell me that you’re sure they’re dead?”

“I just feel it,” John said simply. “I think it’s the right thing to feel.” He seemed relieved. His was a smile, or a face, of relief.

“Do you really believe this, without any evidence?”

“I am—it feels nice to do something. To decide something.”

“To take control,” Margaret suggested.

“I guess.”

“Well,” she replied, “I’m still expecting them to pop up on a talk show, or in the crowd at a Monday Night Football game. Maybe on The Price Is Right.”

John laughed, because she was asking for it, and because he didn’t know what else to say.

“Since when have you felt this way?” Margaret asked. “What made you decide?”

“I don’t know whether it has to do with the glider lessons or whether I’m just fed up. But I started to feel it a little bit, this sense of, well, letting go, when I started flying, and it was why we gave you the flying lessons for your birthday, which—”

“I—” Margaret broke in, starting to explain herself.

“No, don’t use them,” John said. “It’s fine. Really, it is. I’m sorry I pushed them on you.”

“It was a nice thought,” Margaret said, and meant it. “Anyway.”

“I just worked it out in my head today, up there. How long they’ve been gone. What we do know about them. Whatever is the name of that rule about the simplest solution likely being the right one?”

“Occam’s razor.” Margaret nodded, ignoring the petulant voice in her head saying her brother had resolved their parents’ death in about the time it took to cook a roast or rearrange the living room furniture. “I’m glad for you,” she said. “But I think it might take me a little longer.”

In the hard squint of her eyes as she looked at the sandwich plate she was assembling, John saw how distressed he had made her and he backed off, let her go. He felt foolish, for what he’d been trying to do anyway. And what was that again? He didn’t even know. He just wanted her not to be sad, he wanted to do something, and he did feel better, giving up on them. If it was spiteful, he didn’t care. And maybe he needed her to agree with him. If she agreed that their parents must be dead, that would be something, wouldn’t it? They could get on with their lives. But she wasn’t buying it. Even with the information the Lindbergh letters gave her, or maybe because of it, Margaret had been like a small animal caught in a trap this whole year, and still was no better. Maybe it was easier for John because he remembered, if barely, Mother being in the hospital, and it factored into his earliest knowledge of her. He stood next to his sister and put his arm across her shoulder as she worked. She was taller than his wife, her shoulders stronger, straighter. Susan was so very narrow, although Margaret was, in fact, thinner. He patted her arm and she patted the small of his back in return.

It was a September day that was already nostalgic for summer, warm, but with a duller edge, and then the leaves. Football was replacing baseball. Apples were coming in and he was supposed to go to an orchard up near Wisconsin the next day, with Susan and their grandchildren. He had wished before that Margaret and Terry had borne children, they would have been such good, loving, devoted parents, look how devoted to their dog they were, for chrissakes, you’d think they did have a child. That September Saturday, he wished this could’ve been, more than ever. Children renew us; they renew life itself, it’s true, and they’d be a help to Margaret just then.

Over lunch, they talked about John’s gliding lessons. It was the first time Susan had watched, and although she was originally apprehensive, she left the field more excited than John.

“It could not have been more graceful,” Susan said. “None of this accelerating or decelerating to hit the runway just right—”

“Well, that’s not exactly true—” John broke in.

“Okay, so you lifted or depressed some flaps. What I mean is that there was no loud throttle gunning or pulling back. It was so much more peaceful than all that. What I can’t believe,” Susan went on, “is how far those things can go without falling out of the sky.”

Terry joked, “I won my elementary school’s paper airplane competition in the third grade. I got my plane to cross the entire gymnasium because I managed to wait until a big gust of wind came in through the doors that opened onto the playground. I thought it was cheating, really, except no one ever said anything about it.”

“I thought it was so beautiful,” Susan said, looking at John, reaching for half a ham sandwich, “that I’m considering joining John for a ride once he’s certified.”

“That’s wonderful,” Margaret said, half enthusiastically. Although she supported John’s new enthusiasm and was glad for him, she found herself wishing that all elements of flying—at least the flying done in small private planes with someone she loved in the pilot’s seat—would go out of her life. At first she thought the flying lessons for her fifty-fifth birthday were a cruel, insensitive, and crass present, and then she came to see it was just badly miscalculated. The four of them had met for dinner at their favorite steakhouse downtown and John and Susan gave her a card with Snoopy as the Red Baron on front. Inside, they had slipped a gift certificate for lessons at Palwaukee Airport in Wheeling. “Apparently they have a great flight school there,” Susan told her. “I have a friend who just got her license and she said it was the best experience of her life.”

“What a great present,” Terry said. “Very thoughtful, guys.”

Margaret was a terrible pretender when it came to gifts that confused or displeased her and this one did both. She was so bothered by the gift, and she didn’t exactly know why at the time, but it was all she could do to put the certificate back in the envelope without bursting into tears. She’d turned down the opportunity to take lessons and solo when she was a teenager, deeply disappointing her mother and baffling her father, and John knew all this. Way back then, had she felt like she had won something by holding firm in her refusal? Sure. Did she think, now, four decades on, that this small victory had been worth her parents’ large disappointment? No. There are things that parents want us to do that matter more to them than to us, and it never mattered as much to her to say no as it would’ve mattered to them if she’d taken at least one lesson. Soloed once. She hadn’t really understood this at the time, and now—it was ancient history and she still had no interest in flying. Besides, they weren’t even around to know, to be pleased by it. Still, why, however, a gift of lessons nearly brought her to tears was unclear—hormones, she told herself.

Margaret ate her steak in peace and listened to stories of the new grandbaby, Ruth, who was eight months old already, how was that possible? More about the Ireland trip John and Susan, alone, were taking—Terry still had relatives there, so he was trying to explain where they were from and how they got to England, and then to Canada, where Terry grew up.

John could tell, looking at the straight, flat lines around his sister’s eyes, that the flying lessons bewildered her and he felt terrible, but he hadn’t necessarily expected her to understand it, at first. He had hoped that, as she thought about it, she’d come to see the lessons as a chance to understand Mother a little bit more, somehow. She was so hung up on the fact that their parents’ actions didn’t make any sense, that she had missed something, and the Lindbergh letters sent her into a tailspin of confusion and sadness. John didn’t see any more sense in it than she, but he didn’t feel like he had missed something, either. Maybe he was more prepared for them to make no sense; maybe he was just asking less of them; or maybe he was fooling himself. In any event, he had anticipated that Margaret would need to think about the lessons, but he hadn’t guessed they’d make her so sad.

They split two big hunks of chocolate cake. Susan had brought one candle, which she discreetly lit and Margaret discreetly extinguished, in one breath. They had made a pact, the four of them, since their fiftieth birthdays, to never put more than one candle on the cake.

As they waited for the valets to pull their cars around, John took her aside. “Look, I know the flying lessons might seem like a morbid gift,” he said. “But I think it’s sort of like climbing back on the horse that throws you off—or like facing your worst fear. Or think of doing something that Mother did, just to see what it feels like. I’ve been flying again lately—Susan does not even know. She thinks I’ve been playing a lot of tennis.” He chuckled at this small infidelity. “But I feel peaceful up there. Like nowhere else. And maybe that’s what it was like for her.”

Margaret nodded, and their cars arrived.

Recalling all of this at the lunch table while John and Susan oohed and ahhhed about gliders, Margaret thought about what her mother would have been like, flying after all these years, getting up to the only place where, according to the letters anyway, she felt truly free and alive, a space of paradise, nearly indescribable, not just peaceful, as John suggested. Maybe they never came down, they just kept going, on and on, up there, leaving behind all the concerns that had kept her from flying the whole rest of her life, namely, her children and then her grandchildren.

While Susan was clearing dishes, John quietly suggested calling some storage places, to put everything in Cedar Bluff away. They’d talk about the house later. There must be legal issues. Margaret felt a little overwhelmed but he wasn’t really asking her to respond. He stepped out the front door, kissed her, then Susan did, and they said they’d call later. The idea of renting some storage and removing the articles of her parents’ life to a space for which she held the key both shamed her and satisfied her. When they came back, they would have to beg, she mused. They would have to apologize and make her understand, which could take months, years even. She would let them know what it was like, wondering, not being able to get on with your life.

And yet, regardless of not quite believing or understanding John’s certainty, she knew he was probably right. It made good sense. If Officer Sargent had called her the next day to say they’d been found and they were dead and he was sorry, she wouldn’t have been surprised. But even then, the wondering would continue—why and how and when, where? She guessed John felt the same, even if he didn’t know it, because how could he really, truly, stop wondering? How could he just decide to stop?

YET ANOTHER MONTH passed; they did nothing about storage but call for prices and availability; and then came the evening of the Coast Guard call. When she hung up the phone, Margaret stayed in the kitchen, sitting down at the table and looking out at the garden and the evening light going from gray to real darkness punctuated by neighbors’ squares of light all around, when she heard the front door close. Eventually—how much time had passed?—the hall light went on and the closet door opened. Terry took off his overcoat and hung it up. Then he came into the kitchen, flicking on the overhead light as he passed the switch. He saw her and was startled. “Jesus,” he said. “You scared me. What are you doing?” He didn’t look at her but went to the mail, picked it up, opened a few things.

“Eh?” he said when she didn’t answer.

“Oh, just sitting here.”

“Did you just get in?” he said, opening up a credit card bill. “Why are all the lights off?”

“It wasn’t quite dark when I got home.” She turned her head to look at the clock on the microwave. “A half hour ago.”

“What have you been doing? You look like you just walked in.” Terry finally set the mail down, got a glass from the cabinet, and went to the refrigerator for some apple juice. Like clockwork, every day, he did this.

“Thinking, I guess.”

Terry poured his juice and then looked at her carefully and silently for a moment.

“What’s going on?” He put his glass down and came to stand near to her. He kissed her on the cheek.

“They found a plane they think my parents were on. A King Air. Went down somewhere near Honolulu five months ago.”

“Oh, honey,” he said, taking hold of her arms, which were crossed in front of her. He tried to pull her up to him but she resisted for some reason and he relaxed, pulled a chair out next to her, and took her hand. “Five months? Who called?”

“The Coast Guard. They said a piece of the tailwing washed up on Christmas Island a few weeks ago. A charter service out there says my parents went up with one of their pilots back in April. They were just flying to Kauai, to the northwest, although Christmas Island is seven hundred miles southwest, which doesn’t make much sense.”

“No,” Terry agreed. He tried to catch her gaze as she looked off into some invisible corner just to the right of him. Then he pulled her to him again, and she let herself go this time. She felt his shirt moisten under her eyes and she felt his collarbone, pronounced and strong in his lean, softening body, and she bounced gently against it with each ugly, embarrassing sob.

The Coast Guard called John, too, and he reached Margaret about twenty minutes after Terry got home. “Well, they went out with style,” he said.

“You talk about this like it was a suicide,” she said.

“Wasn’t it? The risks they took—you’re telling me they weren’t something like suidical?”

She didn’t answer him. She knew John was a big proponent of do-not-resuscitate orders and even euthanasia. Still, these were his own parents. She was crying again, and John said he wanted to drive down and see her, be there. She handed the phone to Terry, who agreed it was a good idea for John and Susan to come, if they could. Terry’d get some food.

They all sat in the TV room, sipping water or wine or scotch and making the phone calls they needed to make, John and Margaret alternating as much as they could. They got on the phone together to call their father’s one remaining sibling, Uncle Jack, in a home in Madison. And when they were finished with the phone calls, they talked about having a service, a Mass and a luncheon, there was no rush, of course, but when was convenient and where would they have it? John said he’d make some calls in the morning to find a place for a luncheon. They’d have to go through the will, figure out the farm. “Not tonight,” Margaret said simply as John rattled off the to-do list. “Not now.”

“Of course not,” he said.

They watched a basketball game while Terry called his own mother and sister to report the news. No one said much—neither Margaret nor John had any idea where to begin, not for themselves or for each other. John, too, was glad the wait was over and that there was a conclusion after all—a conclusion, even, that his parents seemed to have chosen in some way or another. And yet everything seemed so wrong, so off. However much it was a fitting ending, as he himself had said, it was an incredibly stupid one.

They both tried to imagine it, their parents in the last moments, the panic that even Father must’ve felt as the water approached. Did he take the wheel? Did he say: “I’ve banged up planes more times than I have fingers to count. I’ve rolled them end over end, side to side, you name it. I’ve landed with engine fires, broken wheels, with no visibility whatsoever—not even my own nose on my own face. I know what it feels like when the ground rushes up to meet you so fast it feels as if a hand is swatting you on the cheek at a hundred miles an hour. I know the relief and the laughter and the headache I get when I finish upside down, held in by my boot straps, looking at a fine crop of corn that pokes up nearly to my nose”?

Or did he not utter a word because he knew this forced landing would be his last? Margaret would’ve crawled to the very back of the large King Air cabin. She would not have been able to watch out the cockpit window. She would’ve strapped herself in at the emergency exit, where there was no window, no way of seeing what was coming. She could never watch her death approaching like a high-speed train.

And what were their regrets? Did they wish, at long last, that they hadn’t taken such a foolish trip? Did they wish that they’d called their children, just once? And how horrible is it that Margaret and John couldn’t help but hope that in their parents’ final moments they experienced a rush of regret and sadness, of panic that they would never see their children’s, or any of their grandchildren’s, faces again?

John decided that his mother was wearing her red silk dress with the pearl buttons. She wore this dress to an awards ceremony when the Iowa Aviation Association gave Father a distinguished service award a few years back. John imagined Mother in this dress, strapped into her seat, with her arms folded across her chest. She would have had the far-off look in her eyes that he knew by heart, except maybe Mother was biting the corner of her lip in fear. Maybe she pulled down her shade and leaned her head forward against the seat in front of her. Maybe she put her head in Father’s lap, if he was next to her; or maybe he was up front, trying to do something, and she was alone in the cabin, her head pressed against the upholstery of the seat and her hands clasped together, slipped between her knees, held tight there. “Henry,” she would have called out in a near-whisper. “Henry, come back to me, here.”

And then it was late, the game over. John and Susan drove back up to Wilmette and Margaret wondered what she’d do next, since sleep wasn’t likely. “It will be easier now,” John said to her as he left, hugging her briefly and kissing her cheek. She said yes, she knew that. He suggested that they look two weeks ahead for a funeral—that far out, their schedules could easily be loosened up a bit and they could have time to think about what they wanted to do. There was no particular rush.

The next day, John checked into the plane, the charter service, all of it. He found out the King Air was fairly new and in good repair. Manufactured and sold to the charter company in 1980, it had three thousand hours of flight time on it and was designed to fly for two to three times that long, which is to say that she probably had another ten years in her, if not more. There were ten seats—a single seat most forward in the cabin, near the door, then three rows with two seats each, and finally a couch for three, adjacent to the bathroom. A four-inch trim of a lacquered wood ran along the cabin wall and each tan leather seat had its own drink holder plus footrests. The cabin walls were taupeish. They stocked the pantry with Lifesavers, honey-roasted peanuts, pretzels, and Doritos in the red bag, ham and cheese sandwiches on rye, and roast beef on pumpernickel. There were chocolate chip cookies and brownies with walnuts on top. Eight-ounce cans of Coke, diet Coke, ginger ale, 7 UP, and orange Fanta. There were small bottles of Bacardi rum, Gordon’s vodka, and Gilbey’s gin. The ice machine was broken on the day his parents flew and thus the company had put a cooler of ice on the plane in case the passengers wanted a drink.

King Airs cruise at about 250 miles per hour, or half as fast as an average jet. His father had worn his old flight jacket, the heat of Hawaii and the stiffness of the leather notwithstanding. The charter manager remembered this. “He was wearing a vintage flight jacket and I asked where he got it and he said he’d been an Air Mail pilot,” the charter manager said, speaking freely only after he discerned that John was not going to berate him for the FAA flyer mix-up, as Margaret had when she called. The man whistled through his teeth. “Ain’t that something, an Air Mail pilot,” he said.

He also told John that the pilot who went down with his parents was thirty-five years old and his name was John Lowenstein. He had been a pilot for Allegheny Airlines for ten years and decided that he didn’t want to travel quite as much. Then the airlines went under and he decided it was time to move on. He had loved Hawaii on his honeymoon. His wife, a schoolteacher, wanted to live in a warmer place than Boston and so they moved. “If you had to choose between Boston and Hawaii, how long would you have to think about it?” he said with a laugh. Anyway, Lowenstein found his way to Hawaii Charter about five years ago, the manager said, and just recently had become co-owner. Lowenstein had a good sense of humor, the manager said. “He was always cracking some joke or another. Real full of life.” He left behind a three-year-old daughter and his wife. Did John want to contact them?

“Maybe someday,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’d say to them just now.” He took a Boston address. The pilot’s wife had moved back to be near her family, the manager said. It was too hard for her to be in Hawaii.

Driving home from the hospital that evening, sitting through nasty traffic prompted by resurfacing on Lake Shore Drive, John tried to ascertain how he felt differently, now that his parents were dead, and he couldn’t tell. He didn’t feel much differently. There was no punch of sadness or grief or shock and he knew it wasn’t coming. The stupidity of what they’d done, the selfishness, that was all still there, wasn’t going away. He was glad they’d made a choice so monumental at the end of their lives. He was glad for this, he told himself. His parents were strong, assertive people and it was good they had lived their last year assertively, doing exactly what they wanted. It was good.

The freeway ended, turned west, became Sheridan, and John had a ways farther north to go still. At a stoplight, his vision went blurry, then he couldn’t breathe but for the heaves he hardly recognized and he pulled over, pounded on the steering wheel, let the cars pass him, and made a lot of noise. It was dark enough, no one could really tell.

WITH MARGARET’S GRIEF for their death came a manic remembering, a determination to fit her memories into, around, the letters, to weave them together so as to allow them in her understanding of her mother. If Margaret could do this, she told herself, she could accept her parents’ end, their decision to go. And so she remembered coming home from school when she was young, and her mother’s eyes red and swollen with crying, and how she believed for some reason that Mother was allergic to dandelions, that they did this to her eyes, and maybe Mother told her this, or maybe it was John, she didn’t know. But once when Mother got up from a Sunday nap, and Margaret and her father were making, with little success, a cake for Mother’s Day, Margaret said, “Mother, I thought you were sleeping but your eyes are red like you’ve been picking dandelions.” Dad had laughed and patted her back and said, “We all need a good cry sometimes, Margaret.”

She had been nine maybe, or ten. She wasn’t making the cake by herself but she did understand immediately that the dandelion story had been a lie. Her mother left the kitchen and did not come back until Father went upstairs at suppertime, brought her down with his arms wrapped around her, practically holding her up, and her eyes and her face looked worse. He sat down with her and Margaret served the dinner—meatballs they’d made with slightly more success than the cake. Mother didn’t really eat, a few bites, no more, but by the time cake was served, she was smiling and seemed to be coming back from whatever place it was she’d gone. She ate two pieces of cake. Later, when John and Margaret were doing the dishes, she gathered them both into a big hug and said she loved them very much, that she was sorry if she misbehaved sometimes.

Instances like this were very few and far between, especially as Margaret got older, but recalling it with their death, for the first time in years, was like finding a book that’d been pushed back behind the others on a shelf.

Margaret knew it wasn’t anyone’s fault, what had happened in the last year, in the last eighty years, and their family was wonderful, she was a wonderful mother—nothing, really, could touch that. The letters seemed to threaten everything and nothing, and it would likely stay that way, because you can’t change your memories when you’re fifty-five years old, not at any age. Still, she couldn’t help but feel that if she’d known about her mother’s depression sooner, much sooner, well, it would at least have explained a lot. Her inscrutability. Her sometimes maddening distance.

But then, the good memories, too, of sitting on her lap in the car, with Dad driving, John in the back, and the radio on, and Mother humming along—she loved Bing Crosby so much. Or lying down at bedtime and Mother rubbing her back, no matter if she was six or sixteen. Margaret remembered her sadness and she remembered her laughter spilling all through the house like April sun, her tickling John and Margaret, chasing them around as a pretend monster. In high school, Mother ordered literally dozens of college catalogues, looking through every one, dog-earing pages she found important or interesting, and when Margaret teased her that she was trying to ship her only daughter off somewhere far away, Mother said, “Never hem in yourself in, Margaret. You must seek out exactly what you want and go after it. And not just now, but always.”

Although it was normal parental encouragement, she kept it in her memory like a worry stone, and rubbed it throughout college, law school, even now. Then with she and Terry trying, too late, to have children, and their not being able to talk about their failure, not for years, Mother just listened, telling Margaret it would be fine, to think about adoption, to get some rest and be nice to herself. A new dress maybe. A vacation. Someplace with lots to do, not a beach, for distraction. And Margaret listened.

The other oddities, like hauling them to Amelia Earhart’s house or the scrapbooks, or getting so mad and tetchy on the subject of her own flying, the crying jags—Margaret and John may have rolled their eyes at her if she weren’t looking, but that was all. There wasn’t anything to talk about. Not really, and if none of the rest of this had happened—if they’d never flown away, if Margaret had never found those letters—none of this scrutiny would have occurred to her. Because Mother was, on average, much more even-tempered than not. She never lost her temper or was afraid, not even when Father crashed the plane on a fence or cow or even into the barn as he did several times—mostly she laughed at him. She was a good person and a good mother; she loved her children and her husband. What else was there to know?

THE MEMORIAL SERVICE and luncheon took place on Monday, October 17. It was cold and damp and gray outside, the sort that goes straight through you, gives you a headache like a hangover. Funeral wreaths and bouquets of every color and size lined the walls of the church; a dozen more arrangements were left at the house. Hordes of people turned up and the church was packed. The story had become something of a news item, with a front-section article in the Des Moines Register, Chicago Tribune, and Sun-Times, plus, oddly enough, a front-page article in the middle of the Wall Street Journal. The flowers came from distant, unknown people in places such as Hawaii, England, New York, and California. John and Margaret recognized all their parents’ friends plus other locals as well as their own friends; the partner to whom Margaret was closest, also a friend of Terry’s, Dan Dashiel, came from the office, and John’s longtime secretary, Barb, came, too. Terry’s sister came from Des Moines, but not his mother, which Margaret was glad of; her Alzheimer’s was a handful. Easily half the church were strangers.

John and Margaret had decided to let the priest choose the regular readings, then they each contributed something, nonscriptural, as extras. Margaret read from the Amelia Earhart biography, annotated by Mother, that they found in the attic, and a snippet from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s early journals, in which she talked about flying with her husband. If it seemed morbid at first, they quickly agreed on it. Mrs. Lindbergh was, after all, some kind of friend or idol to Ruth, a constant companion, and no one else but Margaret and John would know the real meaning of including her in the service; no one else would be asked to understand it, not even Terry and Susan, because how would Ruth’s children talk about the letters, with their spouses, with each other—how do you talk about your mother’s diaries? You don’t.

For his reading, John managed to dig up Dad’s old Air Mail Service manual, the flight instructions from Chicago to Omaha, which was his route for nearly ten years. John also read a few lines from old mail stories taken from a history book on the service. Margaret had barely set foot in St. Joan of Arc since her own wedding. Now, as then, Terry was the steel rod keeping her upright, his hand always at the right place in her back, supporting her through the service and the luncheon, always seeming to say, Not much more.

Two women came up to Margaret after the Mass as she disentangled herself from a tactless reporter from Cedar Rapids. The women were Mary Hitchens and Anna Klemman, whom Margaret previously remembered only dimly as Mother’s best friends, or at least the ones she saw the most of, at book clubs and luncheons. But then, of course, since the letters, Margaret knew more about them—Mary, in particular, who once truly hurt Margaret’s mother, and thus Margaret had nothing to say to her—wished, in fact, she would leave. Anna’s health had greatly declined in recent years, such that she didn’t recognize many people—neither Margaret nor John, for instance—and she talked to herself a great deal, loudly and usually into silence, reminding herself to take her pills, buy some paper towels, or “phone the children.”

“I’m driving down to Florida tomorrow,” Mary said to Margaret outside the church as everyone was milling about. “I guess it will take me about four or five days. I’m going to take my time, you know. I’m an old lady.”

“I’m going to the car while you talk to the girl, Mary,” Anna said, and Mary nearly stopped to remind her who Margaret was, but then didn’t, and Margaret was glad.

Mary was Mother’s age, give or take a few years—and she radiated vitality and health. The only thing that seemed to be fading in her was any talent she once might’ve had for getting to the point. She stood by Margaret for fifteen or twenty minutes as everyone passed by and said “Hello” and “I’m sorry” and “I’m so sorry” and “We’ll see you at the restaurant.” Margaret kept hoping, then praying Mary would leave. Maybe she’d think it was too long to leave Anna alone. Or maybe she’d see that Margaret had a lot to do—things to get together, even the church to go back into so that she could get the readings off the lectern, some of the flowers they had brought in. And she wanted to be sure the priest knew where he was going—they had, of course, invited him to the luncheon, although she had a difficult time even remembering his name. He was new to the parish; it wasn’t entirely clear that he even remembered who her parents were. Margaret excused herself to do all these things, and when she returned, Mary was still there, at the back of the church, still there even though fifteen minutes had passed and everyone was gone.

“Your mother would have liked the readings you chose,” Mary said when Margaret finally turned her attention to her. “She adored Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Used to talk about her lots.”

Margaret stood stock-still. Did Mary know?

“Oh, she really loved Mrs. Lindbergh.” Mary laughed a sweet, if cackling laugh. She told Margaret a couple of what she said were Mother’s favorite stories about the woman—operating a radio from way above Central America, flying an amphibious plane up around Iceland, and how she and Charles always outfitted their plane for sleeping in it, “Like truckdrivers, right?” Mary laughed. At the end, she added, “I think your mother wanted to be Mrs. Lindbergh. You know, flying all the time.”

“Yes, I know,” Margaret said, her chest growing tight. She looked out through the glass doors—Terry was sitting there in the car. “But of course, your mother”—Mary was chattering on more insistently now, gripping Margaret’s forearm for emphasis—“your mother was never really the same after baby Ruth Anne died. Something in her just went away,” Mary said.

Margaret felt slightly as if someone had hit her on the back of the head, and all she could say was, “Right, I know, Mary. You’re right.”

Mary nodded and still held on to Margaret’s arm in a half excitement that reminded Margaret of a child with a big secret to share, and she couldn’t believe what this woman had just said, like it was gossip. Margaret, finally, shook her arm quite hard and jostled Mary free—nearly knocking her over in the process. “I’ve got to get to the lunch, Mary,” Margaret said to the old woman’s surprised and slightly hurt face. “I’ve really got to go.”

Mary’s shock washed away then as her balance was regained—she’d grabbed a pew—and she began babbling again, something about not being able to come to the restaurant and she was sorry and maybe they could exchange Christmas cards? But Margaret was gone, to the car, driving, long before she was actually gone. She waved without looking back, and went through the doors into the chill.

In the car, she cried softly and Terry gave her his handkerchief, held her hand. She didn’t explain.

At the restaurant, a steakhouse that was never open for lunch except that the owners were good friends of her parents, there was a large ham and a beef roast, sliced for sandwiches, some scalloped potatoes and applesauce, vegetables and dip, biscuits and zucchini bread. Margaret kept hearing Mary’s voice: “She was never the same.” She kept feeling the insistent squeeze on her arm.

Mother’s walking friend Jeanie Cooper, whom Margaret didn’t know very well since she’d just come to town in her retirement a few years back, was very nice and helpful and also teary. “I loved your mother so much,” she said. “She was a wonderful, smart, funny woman. Oh, how I’ll miss her!” As for everyone else, it seemed that they all, like Margaret, had done their grieving in odd ways over the past ten months, and the news of their death and their memorial service therefore served as more of a catharsis. There were very few tears.

She found herself mostly concerned that everything was going well—that the iced-tea pitcher was full, the coffeemaker was working, the cookie tray had been replenished, and there were knives in the different mustards set alongside the ham and roast beef and cheese and party rolls. A couple of times she looked around the room, at the men who had watched her grow up and watched her parents and one another grow old. Would they all say things like Mary Hitchens? Could they all confess disarming observations of her parents, things that meant Margaret could never know her parents as well as she wanted to, as well as she used to think she did?

There were so many things out there—so many things besides Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Ruth Anne and depression and flying that she didn’t even know the beginnings of, she didn’t even know their shape. The dawning of this sense—the sense of phantom shapes and influences in her parents’ characters—was where she had begun this, the year in which they would die. And the bold pronouncement of this sense, in Mary Hitchens—because even reading the letters, Margaret had no idea why Mary had said to Ruth what she did so many years ago—this was what marked the end. It all seemed washed in murky grayness.

AFTER THE LUNCHEON, Margaret, Terry, John, Susan, children, and grandchildren changed into jeans and walking shoes and bundled up and went out to the north field, just as the sun was settling over nearly frozen gray ground. A marker had been placed there the day before, next to Ruth Anne’s boulder. It was cold—colder than the morning. A bitter, confident wind had kicked up and was coursing across the unobstructed landscape. It took twenty minutes to get there, and Margaret led the way as much as John. At last, there was the boulder, and the marker, just a simple rectangle, like a big brick —or a chock for airplane wheels, one of the grandkids pointed out—which had only their names written on it. All that marked the spot were the tire ruts that went around the boulder, and the decades-old rosebush, wound around the decaying fence post, vital enough, against most odds. It was pretty from here, a commanding point, a look out, the top of the runway.

What to say? John’s children seemed to be waiting. Talking among themselves a little, explaining to their small ones, not about the boulder but about the runway, where they were and what was happening. But their ears were half cocked to John and to Margaret. Finally, he found a voice: “I’d like to suggest that we all think of some stories today. Just mull over them all, your memories of this place, of them, and pick one. Tell someone. Tell your children. Write it down and store it away. At Thanksgiving, Christmas, holidays to come, we’ll read them. I loved my parents,” he said, his voice finally cracking, “and I’ll miss them.”

Margaret nodded, not being able to lift her gaze from the ground, not wanting to make contact with anyone. Finally, she looked up at John, met his teary eyes, nodded again. She dropped her rose at the marker, kissed it, and then the boulder.

Back at the farmhouse, some used the bathroom and Margaret walked around, making sure the windows were all locked tight. On a closet shelf, oddly enough, John had found a box of pictures taken over the side of the old Jenny while flying. The edge of her cowling was barely visible—a slanting black obscurity at the edge of the frame, and far below, a quilt of land with perfect straight stitches of color distinguishing corn from wheat, sod from soybeans, lawn from sidewalk, water from brown firmament. Some were of a body of water, a reservoir, the river, or even Lake Michigan, with water spreading just to the edges of the frame, known to be water only because of its uniformity.

Together, the pictures created a life, and he imagined putting them all together to make a giant treasure map, that would reveal a source, a resting place. His mother and father had taken the pictures, perhaps to show people where they had been, what it looked like, because who would believe it, back then? Today, they looked like surveyor’s photos, like something anyone might see looking out the window of a USAir flight across the Midwest, but not then; then, it was a miracle, God’s view. The pictures had long since yellowed, all creams and taupes and near-greens slightly warmer, yellowed the way gasoline exhaust yellows the metal it rushes over; the way age yellows skin and teeth and bones.

AS THEY DROVE HOME, the sun set in the middle of Illinois and Margaret felt hollowed out, eviscerated; she didn’t know what to feel anymore, and when would it all end? She learned so much more about her mother this last year, straight up to Mary Hitchens’s comment, but nothing was clear to her, she just didn’t understand. Terry tugged her hands out of her mouth, to keep her from chewing her nails, and she was glad she didn’t smoke, and she thought, Maybe we’ve done a good thing. Maybe it’s better not to have children. No one will ever have to feel this way, to go through this, about me.

She picked up the pile of mail that they’d brought back from the farm. Dozens of condolence cards were addresssed to the Gutterson family. Margaret paused with one letter sealed in a heavy cream formal envelope; it was addressed to “Margaret and John Henry Gutterson” and the engraved return address on the back flap read Darien, Connecticut. She couldn’t think of anyone she knew in Darien, and slid her penknife across the top, pulling the letter out. A Wall Street Journal clipping was folded inside.

October 12, 1988

Dear Margaret and John Henry,

I read this article in the Wall Street Journal today with great dismay. As you may or may not know, your mother wrote to me, over many years, and she was a very kind, loving, passionate, and brave person. And devoted, too. As a mother; as a wife; as a pilot. I never knew your father, but I can tell you how brave he was, to have flown the mail back when he did. Charles always said they were the craziest bunch of men, Air Mail pilots.

I wish I’d properly let your mother know how much I thought of her over the years. I didn’t, not in time anyway, and I regret that. What I knew of her was so terribly honest and heartfelt—she was always feeling, feeling, feeling, and I suppose this made her a little impulsive, and made her think of such adventures as this last trip—which, if it was selfish (undoubtedly, it was), it was also true. She was true, your mother. All on the surface. I never did meet her in the flesh.

I wish you the best in this difficult time and I shall cut a rose today and put it on my desk in tribute to your parents.

Sincerely,

Anne Morrow Lindbergh