GENTLY I SHAKE his arm, but he doesn’t awake. Holding my breath, I shake him harder; he’s so frail, and I don’t want to do anything to hasten the end. But I have to have the answers I seek. I have to at least try.
“Charles,” I whisper, bending close to his ear. “Charles!”
He opens his eyes with a gasp, and again I sense that he’s surprised to find himself here on earth. Was he dreaming of the sky? I don’t know what his concept of heaven is, but I suspect it’s not the same as mine.
“Charles, I can’t wait any longer. I need to know. I need to know why. I deserve to know why we weren’t enough for you. Me, your children, the home I made for you, for us all. But you had to have these other women, too! Why?”
“You weren’t supposed to find out,” he finally says, licking his lips, gesturing for more water, which I bring him. There’s a film over one of his eyes, clouding the blue.
“Of course I wasn’t supposed to find out! But a nurse—a very kind, decent girl—felt differently, and she gave them to me, because she admired my book.”
“That book.”
“Yes, that book. My book.” Suddenly I crave a cigarette, so viscerally that I almost clap my hands as if to summon a genie to provide it. I rarely smoke, but I need something to do with my hands, and I desire something bad, something terrible and filthy, in my lungs just now. Something to mask the stench of death and betrayal that has filled this small, humid hut on the edge of the world.
“I wrote a book,” Charles says, and he sounds drowsy, amused, his eyes half closed, and I’m afraid he’s drifting off again and as terrible, as horrible as it is, I won’t let him. I won’t let him slip peacefully away and die an untroubled death. Once, that was all I wished for him.
Now I deny it. Because it is in my power to do so. Drunk with that power, I am demanding his explanation, his attention. At last.
I shake him by his shoulders—his pitifully thin, shrunken shoulders—and ruthlessly ask, “Why? Why weren’t we enough? Why wasn’t I ever enough for you?”
He blinks again, and looks straight into my eyes, my heart, and says, “Anne, I never meant to hurt you.”
I laugh. I laugh because finally, Charles Lindbergh is like any man. Any stupid, flesh-and-blood, egotistical man. He is no better than any of them, even if it took him almost to his last breath to reveal this to me, and it fills me with triumph and joy.
Which are followed, dizzyingly, by disappointment and despair.