Flight Plan

10 minutes

General Audience

The car stopped in the driveway of a white colonial style house with a manicured lawn. She thanked the driver, and stepped out onto the red paving stone. Zeli, Judge Azelia Martin to her colleagues, placed her small bag on the neatly laid stone, clasped her fingers at her waist, and turned slowly. She took in every detail of the lawn and house. In the yard, seasonal warblers were perched on the feeders that hung from the boughs of a live oak. The regular residents seemed put off by the colorful newcomers, and chirped plaintively at them. Then, just as the car disappeared down the quiet street, a hawk flew in toward the song birds. She watched them react; some scattering, others flying at the raptor, trying to drive it off. Nodding, she unclasped her hands, retrieved her carry-on bag, and walked toward the front door.

The older woman who opened it sighed when she saw Zeli, and placed her hand on her heart. Zeli's mother was, like her siblings and father, taller than she. And yet, when looking down at Zeli, she seemed to be looking up. The relief in her mother's eyes was profound, and she pulled the door back.

"Come in Zel," she said.

Zeli crossed the threshold, and hugged her mother, noticing as she pulled away a little mist at the corner of Sarah Martin's eyes. Sarah looked at her bag, and then behind her. Zeli saw disappointment there, but Sarah covered it up well.

"You're not staying long," her mother observed.

"I'm in court tomorrow morning." 

"Oh. Oh dear," replied Sarah, pulling into herself a little. "I didn't realize when I called..."

Zeli smiled, and placed a hand on her mother's arm at the elbow.

"It's alright, mom."

The physics were off, but it was Zeli who seemed to lift her mother up to her. The taller woman straightened, like a child reassured.

"It'll be enough time," she continued. "Where is he?"

Sarah took Zeli's free hand in two of her own, and led her to a couch in the front room. They sat down, Zeli placing the bag at her feet, Sarah angling her knees toward her daughter's, and collecting her hands like talismans, burying them deep within her own. As her mother gathered her thoughts, Zeli scanned the room. The color scheme was white and earth-toned, very modern-looking despite the colonial exterior. Half of the paintings on the wall were her father's. There were two of Dad's white Cessna.

"No new paintings," observed Zeli.

"No," said her mother, meaningfully.

"When did he stop?" asked Zeli, as if she were asking when a package was expected.

"Oh...eight months ago," Sarah said. "He said he wanted to focus more on his garden."

Zeli smiled. She found herself looking past her mother at a family portrait on the wall. She was in the front as if she were the youngest, though she was actually second oldest. Her older brother and the twins were just behind her. Behind the children, her mother leaned into her father. Frederick, a head taller than his oldest son, stretched his arms around his family like a protective eagle. Zeli couldn't help but notice the contrast and the similarity between the shortest and tallest members of the Martin family. She had his tapered fingers. Her hazel eyes were also her father's, and in more ways than one.

"So is he in the garden now?" asked Zeli.

"Yes, in the greenhouse. Do you think he'll listen to you?"

Zeli didn't answer. Her eyes still flitted about the room, taking in what was seen and not seen.

"The boys didn't talk to him," said Zeli, and it really was a statement, not a question.

Her mother gave her a supercilious look. Zeli smoothed her skirt, and absently combed her fingers through her short, straight hair. She let her shoulders settle, and closed her eyes for a moment. She opened her eyes.

"Okay," she said, patting her mother on the knee, and standing. "It's going to be okay."

                                                                                                    #

In firm caresses, about the spilling plumage of a yellow hibiscus, his hands moved slowly, imparting a pattern of growth. Frederick was ambidextrous, and his practiced left found the places where the growth was wayward, while the shears in his right made the appropriate corrections. Zeli, who’d entered without a sound, watched her father from behind a Calliandra emarginata. She didn't try to conceal herself. He knew she was there.

"And who is this, her hour come at last, that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" said her father, without turning around.

Zeli grinned, and walked toward him. Without having to turn from the yellow flower, he bent his long legs, and presented a ruddy cheek to her. She kissed it.

"Hey Daddy."

"Hello, my Azelia," he said.

Then they became quiet for a time. More than anyone else in the Martin family, Zeli and Frederick understood silence. That the others did not, that her mother and siblings felt the compulsion to fill silence, as if it were an enemy, was just another way in which Zeli and Frederick were of a piece. There was, actually, a structure to silence. She understood it, as did he. One could listen to the silence, and feel the rise and fall of its cresting density, and know, by feeling, that moment when speech was really called for.

"Please pardon Sir Yeats," said her father, directing his comments toward the hibiscus. "But methinks this busy northern wind must carry cold tidings."

Zeli watched his eyes on the flowers. That is, she watched his fingers and palms feel their way through the green spray, his eyes following after, like a man trying to dress without waking his wife.

"Hmm..." she said, "I don't believe the Irishman accepted a knighthood."

"Is that right?" said her father, wrinkling his brow. "Well, the way I see it, neurosurgeons can be praised for knowing any poetry at all. Do you have a preferred epigraph?"

Zeli played along, wrinkling her brow in affected scholarly concentration.

"Try this: She sang beyond the genius of the sea," Zeli said.

He stopped, and glanced in her general direction, his hands still exploring the flower.

"Ooh. I like the sound of that one. Who is it?"

He turned back to his work.

"Wallace Stevens, I think," she said. "You'd like him Dad. Kind of a surgeon in poetic dress. And he's American. Was. Look him up."

"I will have to at that," he said.

She let two waves of silence crest and crash.

"And, speaking of things American," began Zeli, "I couldn't help but notice your lawn."

His trimming paused a half-second; long enough to take the metric weight of her words.

"Opinions? Suggestions?" he said.

"An observation."

"Naturally," he replied, smiling wanly.

Zeli had missed her father. The waves that passed between them spoke so much more than words, that she sometimes wondered whether there wasn't something to the idea of mind-to-mind communication. When she spoke now, she felt she was only spelling out a chain of reasoning that had begun in her brain, crossed over to his, and then returned to its source, completing an invisible circuit.

"The lawn's been professionally mowed," she said.

"Yes," he said. "Like all the lawns on this privileged little slice of paradise."

"Daddy, you've always cut your own grass. 'Physician, heal thyself,' was your phrase, if I recall."

He chuckled.

"A little blasphemous of me, though, wasn't it?"

"No more than usual," she said with a smile.

"Well, perhaps I'm getting a little old for riding lawn mowers, and too soft to keep thumbing my nose at the Joneses. The rest of the Joneses, I mean. I'm an old man, Zeli. If anyone has the right to have someone else mow his lawn, it's an old man."

"Your fingers are nimble enough," she said.

"They make finger-powered mowers now?"

She smiled sadly, perceiving the clever misdirection. Zeli wondered how many childhood conversations, if she could play them out again, would read differently under the mature gaze with which she now saw him.

"Will you be joining us this year?" said Frederick.

"I RSVP'd to Mom. It'll just be the kids and me this time. Tom has a big contract coming up in January."

He stopped, and looked at her. It was the same unfocused glance with which he'd favored her earlier, but then, her father did have a way of looking off into the distance when he was thinking. He frowned.

"You tell Tom that life is short, and that he has to start scheduling unscheduled time."

She laughed. "Maybe you can tell him for me. He's obstinate, like you."

"That's unfortunate," said her father, with a sigh. "It means he has to learn the hard way."

She lapsed into silence, pondering that, and listening to the muted clicking of the shears. She watched his hands as they moved up and down the spray of the hibiscus, methodically checking and rechecking each length of green stem.

"You're taking the Cessna into the Hawaii again, Dad? That's two, maybe three refueling stops."

His eyebrows peaked at their middles, unconsciously making wings.

"Naturally," he said. "You know that's the best part of the trip for me."

She did know that. Flying, and having people there to cheer his dramatic entrance, was one of the chief joys of Frederick's retired life. His flush of pride as he and Mom stepped down to terra firma, and greeted their extended progeny, was the vindication of his hard-won life. It was his promise to them that they could start from nothing, and end mastering even the air. Zeli knew that being there to see it was the best gift his daughter could give him. But she also knew that her father was exploring the same length of green stem, feeling up and down it again for the third time. She started to say something, but he seemed to intercept the sound, and roll it into his own sentence.

"Is it hard to be a judge?" he asked.

She didn't hear him at first. Her collected courage dissipated. Now she'd have to find it again. The silent circuit carried hidden meaning between them, but he was swifter to anticipate, decode, and redirect it.

"I...no, I don't think so," she said.

"I could never do it," said her father.

He moved a half-step away from her, and placed the shears on top of a small shelf adjacent to a white collapsible table bearing a line of potted plants. His movement was mechanical. She noted that his hand traced the familiar line from the shelf to the table, and that he'd walked it carefully around the table's corner before he'd stepped back, and set down the shears.

"Oh, I think you'd be good at it, Dad," she said. "It's not all that different from brain surgery. You look at the facts, and make the analysis. Then, if you're good, you try to cut as little as possible. And, if do you mess up, it's a lot harder to get sued."

He laughed heartily. Zeli felt the same flush of pride she always did when she made her father laugh. It was not nothing to please a god.

"It's the cutting part I wouldn't be able to handle," he said, at length. "Sentencing, I mean. It's different with people's lives."

She nodded, understanding.

"But that's another way my job is easier than yours was," she said. "Brains are unforgiving. If your hand shakes a little, well, there goes the honeymoon, the homecoming, and First Holy Communion. With me, it's different. If the convicted is a defiant ass, I don't feel too bad about throwing the book at him. If repentant, then I take a totally different approach."

"Oh yes?" he said. "What's that?"

"You taught it to me, actually."

"I did?" he said, bemused. "Who knew I had such a penetrating legal mind? Do tell."

Zeli waited a moment. She took a deep breath. Through the silent surf, a way had been made by which she could reach the shore.

"When we were kids," she began, "and we got in big trouble — after the truth was already out, I mean, and we were in the weeping phase — you'd ask us a question."

His brow wrinkled up; Merlin trying to remember the future-past. She continued.

"You'd lay out the facts, and ask us to tell you what natural consequences followed from it. You had a way of asking questions, and of looking at us, that made us come to the right conclusion. Our punishment was just a result. We could see the chain of causes, so that it felt right to us, and it always left room for hope."

He smiled. For the first time since she'd arrived, he was meeting her eyes. More or less. In the filtered light of the greenhouse, his eyes had a cloudy look.

"Interesting method," he said, "letting the good ones sentence themselves. I like that. I'm surprised they let you get away with it."

She swallowed. Tears formed in her eyes.

"Dad, reach out and pick up the shears."

His mouth opened. The lines in Frederick's face changed, settling like quick cement.

"What's this-"

Zeli repeated her command. She stepped into his space, looking up into his eyes — her own eyes, but older — and giving him no quarter.

Slowly, he turned toward the small shelf. His right hand reached out for the shears. Surgeon's or no, it shook as it hovered in the air. He seemed to take aim. The hand shot out suddenly. It landed just short of his tool, but the tips of his fingers made contact, and the momentum pushed the shears forward. They fell from the shelf, and clattered on the brick floor.

"Dad," she said. "Pick up the shears."

He turned to her, the color gone from his face. She imagined the betrayal he felt.

"Find the shears, Dad," she repeated, wincing.

For an instant, his face flashed something like hate, but he stifled it just as quickly. He bent his long legs, and crooked his long back, and searched for the shears. They'd fallen behind the shelf, just beside a stand on which rested his beloved yellow hibiscus. In the light, she could see them as plain as day, the chrome blades mirroring the sun. He was standing directly over them. He took aim again, and reached out. His long tapered fingers groped the nearby floor, grazed the shears, and reeled them in like a struggling catfish. With a grunt of satisfaction, he stood up. But too quickly.

As he stood, he displayed the shears in triumph, turning them through the air for her to see. His extended arm hit the glazed pot in which sat the yellow hibiscus flower, and swept it from its stand. The flower pot tumbled from its shelf, spun once on its axis, and shattered loudly on the red-brick floor.

Then the silence was terrible. The waves between them were red and thick, like electric blood. Zeli steeled herself.

"You can't fly the Cessna anymore, Daddy."

He looked up at her, and, for a moment, she was back in her memories. Only now, she was her father, and he was a little one. She'd had to give him some bad news. She hoped little Frederick would heal in time. It was not, she now reflected, like pronouncing a sentence. Without the element of guilt, there was nothing to make it seem fair. His crime was only age, and it was a sentence that fell on them all.

He was shaking a little. She found a stool on rollers, and positioned it behind him. Small as she was, she reached up, and lowered the tall man down to it. He let himself be lowered. His anger of a moment before seemed to have flown away. It had taken something else with it. He slumped forward on the stool, suddenly shorter.

Zeli leaned in, and hugged him close.

"I'm so sorry, Daddy."                                                                                                    #

Zeli walked toward the waiting car, carrying her small bag. As she got to the door, she turned, and saw the live oak with the hanging feeders. Most of the birds were gone now, but, on the immaculate grass, beneath the spreading oak, two remained. One was a colorful warbler, lying dead on the lawn. The other was the hawk she'd seen earlier. It held the warbler down, tearing into its inert body with a hooked beak. The bird stopped, and looked up at her. The waves passed between them too. The hawk crooked its head to the side, and seemed almost to shrug.

"I know how you feel," said Zeli, and climbed into the waiting car.

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