Anne Tammel - Poet - Speaker - Author of Fiction
ISA and AMELIA EARHART
Beneath
the layer the sun can reach, the glare from morning clouds in her eyes, Amelia
drops the yoke and descends to eight hundred feet in search of the ship’s
lights.
Her
limbs tremble; she does not remember when she last ate. Her face burns from the
South Pacific sun and whistling tropical winds. Her mouth is dry; there are no
drops of water left to splash on her cheeks.
I’ve got to get back. She tries to count
back through the hours and minutes, lightheaded from fuel dripping in the
cockpit. At least reach someone out
there, somewhere.
She
reaches deep into her flight jacket pocket, the one she’s worn since the start
of this journey, and feels a mass of dried out twigs—withered orchid
stamens from those days early on in the Puerto Rican sun, most of their oil now
gone, the strands twisted and brittle like the branches of those lace barks in
Rangoon.
Her
cockpit fills with aromatic vanilla—the scent from that stolen evening
several weeks back, when she realized she might not ever go home.
Amelia
focuses back on those first intentions: to carry the orchids secretly with her,
replant their sensuous seeds then watch the blooms flower shamelessly toward
her and her lover…
She
repeats into the lifeless radio: We are
on the line position 157-337.
Will
repeat this message...We are running north and south.
The
plane feels weightless now from the drop in fuel. The gauge hovers close to
empty.
If
she drops, how will they find her?
Who
will hear my words?
Not
able to see the ship, the island, or even the surface of the choppy Pacific
through the dense morning fog, Amelia closes her eyes. She searches back
through the days that brought her to this.
How
did she get here?
It
seems yesterday she was a thin woman of nearly thirty, pacing the tarmac and
turning her back on an impending marriage. How did this happen? Will she make
it back to her lover?
If
I could only talk to my young self, Amelia looks out at the
expanse of morning, what
would I say?
~
Isa
grew up searching for Amelia.
Each
year, since she was four, Isa would follow July like it
was a fleeting kite, counting hopscotch through the scalding sidewalk
afternoons and waiting for the twenty-fourth—the same birthday she shared
with the elusive icon.
In
the morning, Isa’s father would stop everything, balance on his knee then with
Sinatra-like charm, sing Happy Birthday and present a gold-bowed present from
Saks Fifth Avenue or Gimbels.
In
the evening, Isa’s family would slice a watermelon, share a chocolate cake and
laugh in the dark next to the tiki lamps, counting
out stars and planning the days that would come.
Before
she fell asleep, her father would be packing his “back east” suitcase to leave
in the morning. She almost never got to say goodbye as the taxi pulled away
from the house through that dawn fog.
Each
time he flew away, Isa’s father came back with something.
Her
fifth birthday, it was a five-dollar bill she studied in the wind under the
lemon tree.
Two
years later, coming back from Italy, he presented a Florentine diary with an
ornate gold lock.
Her
ninth birthday, it was a red bicycle Isa rode for hours. She would close her
eyes, chase that summer wind, and forget everything was unravelling
at home: her mother working more each flower-filled day, running more powerful
enterprises, her father flying back to New York more every year that passed. It
was there that his career called him; and after his late-night flight landed in
San Francisco, he would rush home with stories of skyscrapers and weathery skies, of taxis and fine restaurants, of men and
women passing by in elegant coats on bustling city streets—streets so
busy, no one ever slept.
So
when he left and while Isa waited, each of those Julys drew her closer to
Amelia, Isa’s heroine born the same day seventy years prior.
People
have always asked if Isa’s dreams are real. She doesn’t know if they actually
are. But when Amelia shows up, it’s if she really is there. Everything makes
sense.
And
that is the only time that anything has ever “all made sense.”
This
is what makes the dreams real to Isa. Except that lately, Amelia keeps showing
up more and more, saying things like, “Isa,
mistakes you make now can cloud the rest of your life.”
The
dreams began that same year Isa’s father flew back to New York and the
gray-lined skyscrapers for good. On Isa’s tenth birthday, he handed her a
gold-wrapped book about Amelia, said let’s
see you reach for the skies, then with hat tipped properly, back east
suitcase in hand, Wall Street suit and polished wingtips, hailed down the taxi.
Isa
drank much too-hot chocolate through a straw and burnt her mouth the day that
Yellow Checker cab rolled away, leaving only a cloud of dust to fill the long
gravel drive.
Isa’s
mother sat on the phone late into that night wearing a patchwork gypsy skirt,
consumed with something she refused to discuss.
Days
later, when Isa learned her father’s plane had gone down, she wondered what she
had done to chase him away, to make it so bad he wasn’t ever coming back.
In
the weeks that followed, Isa would walk the long gravel in bare feet at dawn to
watch for signs of him. Her feet grew so rough that summer, she could run the
entire forty-foot driveway in ninety-degree heat and never even notice the
gravel—just whether she had made it on time to watch the Yellow Checker
Cabs pass the house.
When
she didn’t see a taxi, Isa imagined Amelia flying over San Jose in her small
Lockheed Electra plane.
In Isa’s mind, Amelia still crossed the
skies in her Electra, wherever she was. Whatever happened, Amelia could find
Isa’s father. She could carry the message to him to come home, or at least take
Isa back with him to that city lined with skyscrapers, shiny storefronts, and
the people in svelte coats rushing into the warmth of the finest restaurants.
One
morning, Isa walked to the curb and sat out all day, not going inside even for
dinner.
That
night, shivering in the dark, Isa took a hot bath, went to bed late, and stared
out at the moon before she closed her eyes. All she wanted was for her father
to come back, as if she could somehow make him appear.
In
Isa’s dream that night, Amelia walked a long windy runway. Her skin drenched
with sun, she squinted her eyes. She wore all-white flight gear and studied Isa
before she spoke. Then said slowly in her sober voice, He’s with the stars now, Isa. Not such a bad place to be...
Maybe
it’s just that Isa wanted to believe her father had joined the heroes and
heroines who crossed the sky. Or maybe whoever her father was, wherever he was,
he always was a hero to her. Or maybe the dream meant something more.
But
one thing Isa always knew: Amelia was out there somewhere.
Amelia
would show up after the worst days and say:
Give it time. Someday women will rule the world. or
Don’t turn there. This way—fast! As if Isa’s father
were still out there somewhere, saying everything he had always said, sending
messages across the skies through Amelia.
Lately
though, Amelia has been showing up in dreams, saying things Isa doesn’t want to
hear—just as she is planning her wedding and move to Los Angeles with
Adam: Are you sure that’s wise? or You can’t imagine
that man’s going to fit with your life.
Isa
doesn’t want to hear more. She shoves the long ivory veil back into its box,
noticing she hasn’t even started dinner. It’s already eight.
But
since Amelia has always been right in the end, she can’t simply let go.
Where
is the voice coming from?
What
exactly does it mean?
Copyright (C) Anne Tammel 2015
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