Romney Grant
Stuck on the tarmac, snow blowing like hell outside and they wouldn’t hold my connection. I figured you’d understand. And now hours late, I step into ICU, the light grainy as if this present has shifted to past tense, and there you are, jaw slack, putty skin, a sheet draped neatly over your girth. You finally made it. Good on you, Dad.
I imagine the cigarette falling from your lips as you went down, the silver smoke drifting out your open mouth after you hit the floor, drifting out and up to the yellowed stipple of the ceiling; cigarette burning that long black finger into the wood, the rancid marrow of its filter strange comfort when you finally opened your eyes. Three days on the parquet, we figured, communications scrambled, power out on the left, an erratic wheeze and chortle finally kick-starting your seized engine.
Even before, there was little left but the stories. The hockey jersey under your flight jacket. The flak, the bitter cold, and the barmaids in York. Pissing on the tail before each mission. Your DFC. And Pall Malls, a full carton to line your belt; the odds, you’d said, in favor of going down. We’d heard it all, so many times. But someone else—a member of your squadron, in an unexpected letter from Cardiff—told me about the North Sea.
I have tried to imagine three minutes in a tailspin to the frigid waters, the silver wake drifting, emasculated, untethered. Three minutes, doors iced shut, fates sealed, black waters rising to meet you, and the Luftwaffe banking, its target as good as gone. But you pulled it back, all nineteen years of you, vice grip on the yoke and brine sweet in your nostrils, just enough lift left to make land, the Halifax’s fuselage twisted beyond return.
I trimmed your nails after the last resurrection, the yellowed cartilage like chalk, the wax paper skin of your hands and feet. You inspected the job, pointed to a ragged edge. A wonder you cared, arm slung across your chest, words never found, no shelf for a cigarette in the slide of your mouth. That apologetic smile. Were you doing anything but time? You’d fought hard to go down, some would say to the death, three heart attacks followed the stroke, but they pulled you back, no heroic measures, again and again and again, paddles to the chest, clutch popped mere feet to the North Sea. I recalled to you that day in the ward, the vice grip of your hand around my wrist, “a gun, anything” to reach the finish, but you said you couldn’t remember.
“It took me many years to appreciate how fundamentally my father’s experience as a WWII bomber pilot defined his character. Writing this piece gave me the tears that had long eluded me. I believe now that he did the best he could.” —Romney Grant
Romney Grant is an award-winning television producer, senior business executive and former lawyer enjoying presumptive retirement by writing full time. Several of her short stories have appeared in print and she has an extensive portfolio of commercial/business copy. Romney is currently seeking a publisher for her first novel, The Sound.