Chapter Eleven

Flying

Rose and Fabrizio lay motionless on the cold stone. It had come to this. All their love, all their grief had led to this–a couple bodies on the ground. They had no future. They would not find that golden, shining happiness one fine morning. All they could share now was the lead that filled their bodies.

No one nearby heard the shots. Everyone had left, gone home. There was no one to help them and no one to find them in nearly enough time.

Rose felt a rush of air through her lungs and her eyes shot open just has they had popped open that fateful night four years before.

Fabrizio.

She pushed herself off of him. "Fabri," she whispered, nearly choking on the words, "Fabri, wake up." She gently turned him over. There was so much blood. His face was placid now with no sign of anguish or pain. "No..." she choked on a sob. She cradled him in her arms and squeezed his hand. Rocking back and forth she put her cheek to his cold, dark hair and ran her fingers through it. She kissed his forehead, face, and eyes. The night felt colder like a rush of sudden wind and she was more alone than she'd ever been.

Stumbling to her feet as she gently laid her lover down on the ground, she rose to her full height, looking for anything and desperate for help. She clutched her blouse. It too was drenched. Looking down at Fabrizio she held the material in her fists–there were tears. Pulling her shirt away from her body a ways, she saw holes. Slowly, she poked her index through the blood-soaked hole in the white cotton. Most of the blood on her chest was concentrated around the bullet holes in her shirt. In a panic she ripped it open with buttons bursting. She moved her hands up and down her front with all manner of high pitched emissions as if to molest her own body. There were no wounds. But there were bullet holes in her shirt and blood that was not the dead man's.

After hours answering questions by police and doctor examinations Rose was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. They never found the men. Were they just common thieves or were they Germans, or maybe Prussians? It was a paranoid and ridiculous assumption, but people were quick to blame the popular object of hate. It would have been easy to blame the enemy. When she got home she burned her bloodied and bullet-holed shirt in the furnace.

She moved in with Fabrizio's family after the funeral Signora Di Rossi who had always disapproved of her, now hated her. She silently blamed Rose for the death of her son. Her son had been an angel, and his bride–a good for nothing American whore that brought him to his untimely end. Rose was no virgin, that much was obvious. And she insisted upon educating herself.

On the night of the last spat with Signora Di Rossi, Mama threw a plate at Rose's head. It broke on impact and split open the younger woman's forehead. Rose stumbled to the washroom, defeated and humiliated. Staring hard into the dirty mirror, she saw the cut on her forehead was nearly healed. The only thing worse than a scar on her forehead and bleeding all over her face–was it's disappearance.

After the shattering row, Rose was offered refuge at Gino Impertori's home with his family, another student. She declined the generous offer, thanking her friend. Instead she disguised herself as a man, got back into a plane and started transporting them through war-torn France, working as a mechanic and civilian pilot. Apparently, she wasn't close enough to the front back in Italy she threw herself in as much danger as possible next to taking up a rifle–which she would have–if only she'd been a man. She was a woman and women had their place, no matter how she struggled to break through, she wasn't going to do it in this war. Though she doubted she'd live to see another.

But she could still participate in the war nonetheless. She could be in the midst of carnage and cannons even if she couldn't take shots from the trenches, but by God, she wanted to. If she could hurt every man, woman, and child she would. She was alone in the world, hiding from one life, running from the other. Her father–dead under suspicious circumstances. Jack–went down the Titanic, came back, but didn't bother with her. And Fabrizio...poor darling Fabrizio killed by human trash. She must be going insane too, she concluded. But do crazy people know there's something wrong with them? Rose became angry at everything. And why not? Everything she loved, everything she tried to build was destroyed. She wanted to die but she just...couldn't...

One afternoon Rose had found herself lost in a storm somewhere over the French countryside. Miraculously, she survived the storm and managed to keep her plane in the air. It wasn't until the storm gave out that her little bi-plane began to do the same.

"Shit!" Her fingers and hands began to sweat as she fiddled with the controls. "Nothing's wrong! Why are you doing this!" The plane was losing altitude. She thought she had gotten through without a scratch. Hell, all her scratches just vanished anyway.

"Come on!" she pleaded. Then she looked at the fuel gage.

She had no fuel.

It was all to no avail and it was too late to bring her down gently, the plane started coming down faster and faster by the nose. She couldn't pull it up far enough. She was going down by the nose and she would hit the ground head on. All she could do was grit her teeth and brace herself for the end that was sure to come.

With a resounding boom Rose's small plane lodged itself between two trees on the edge of a field.

Rose came to a few minutes later. She awoke with a pounding head that seemed to rattle every time she moved and she felt like she was going to vomit. She looked from her position in the cockpit, the harsh afternoon sunlight attacking her eyes. She traced her hand down her chest feeling the tears in her jacket and the warm blood that soaked it. Her nausea and disorientation allowed her not to notice, or frankly care, about the smell of burning flesh.

Reaching up with her arms as a child may reach for her mother, she pulled herself ungracefully out of the cockpit and stumbled out of the plane, falling several feet to the ground and landing awkwardly on her right arm. She moaned in pain and she rose, dizzy and sick.

Yes, she was still alive. "Not again!" she sobbed weakly. "Why can't I DIE? I want to DIE!"

With her hair stuffed in her hat, her goggles over her eyes, and her oversized jacket she appeared awkwardly large and sexless. In the distance, she made out a glimmer of metal, like a sword. The midday sun caught the steal, blinding Rose for a moment. She squinted, undoing her chin strap and pulling her goggles up to her forehead. Over the hill the spire of metal that she took for a sword took shape and form–on top of a helmet.

In a panic, she reached under her jacket for the pistol she had never used and was not supposed to have. It was at this moment Rose realized she was dressed like a man and standing ten feet from an American plane. It was also at this moment she realized she still had the strong and stubborn urge to live. She ducked behind the broken wing and gripped her gun ready to shoot, telling herself it was going to be self-defense.

She began stripping herself of jacket and gear and tearing down her feminine red curls. She was a woman not a soldier. Maybe she would be spared. The German soldier got closer, inspecting her plane. He knew he'd seen someone.

Rose hated herself for hiding. But she wasn't a solider. She wasn't a man. They didn't let women fight. Rose was stuck doing this. If she was shot down flying through combat zones the army would do nothing for her. No Purple Heart, no compensation for her family if she died–not that she had a family anyway. Hell, they might arrest her for her deception. Everything she'd done or had was because of men. Cal. Jack. Fabrizio. And everything she'd lost was because of men. She was alone, cowering under a piece of shattered machinery.

She knew that moments ago there was a gash in her stomach that wasn't there anymore. She knew that moments ago there was pain all over her body and now she felt fine. Never in her life was she as angry as she was now. Would did he think he was stalking her around her own plane, trying to kill her. Was he stupid? He wasn't supposed to kill her, a mere mechanic, a woman. Not as if he could anyway.

She shot up from her hiding place. "Turn around!" she screamed, gripping the pistol tight with both hands, arms stretched at length. She was no longer afraid to die or not to die. But she felt...invincible. A crazed invincibility.

The soldier turned around, panicked himself and fired. Rose slammed into the body of the plane, with a loud bang of her flesh body and the plane's metal one. As she slid down to the ground once more, she vaguely heard a rifle drop and scrambling footsteps.

"Bitte!" he pleaded, looking at her young female face, "bitte!" The young soldier tore off his pointy helmet. He didn't mean to shoot her. He didn't mean to kill an innocent girl. Rose studied his face just before life left her once more. He looked quite young himself, and frighteningly vulnerable. He was blond-haired with a child's sweet brown eyes and nose much to small for his grown face. The German, the kraut, the enemy. A scared child crying. He didn't mean to shoot her, he just panicked. She died in his begging arms.

A surge of air rushed through Rose's lungs. Her eyes and mouth abruptly popped open, she gasped as if to cry. The young soldier tensed up with shock, but did not let her go. Rose gazed at him with mournful sympathy. She slowly pushed his hands away, he stumbled back.

She rose to her feet, aching as her wounds healed. "Just go," she said.

"Fraulein..."

"Go," Rose grabbed him hard by the uniform, "go," she ordered, looking directly into his nervous eyes. He stumbled backwards again, tripping over his feet. He ran, not daring to look back at her.

The young German didn't notice the British medic as he ran by, not sure whether to thank God or run from the devil with red hair. The Brit, already in a hurry, watched the boy run passed him. He'd been heading up to inspect the crash, then there was a shot. And now the young German that failed to notice his British uniform.

Rose felt sick again. But this was a strange kind of sickness, like every around was spinning around her...or in her...or...something... Perhaps this was finally death. Maybe this was the feeling, the slip from life to death...real death. It was so strange, she'd certainly never felt it before. She collapsed on the grass once more and crawled under her bi-plane, and waited to see what would happen to her.

There were more footsteps. Rose groaned. She didn't move, not because she was scared or apathetic, but because she didn't feel like getting shot again. She'd been shot twice and had her body slammed back in forth so violently that it literally rattled and tore her insides, burned her flesh and scrambled her brains. Literally.

"Hello?" said a voice. Rose slowly turned her head, letting the grass brush her nose. One eye opened, the other followed. She felt a body crouch next to her. "Miss?"

She rolled over as if she were in pain, though she knew she damn well wasn't, the hole in her chest had healed minutes ago. Lying prostrate on her back, she looked her new company in the face.

His face darkened in shadow from the plane. He was wholly familiar with a swarthy complexion, black mustache, strong upper body, and old eyes, glowing and sad. Rose recalled being a small girl, falling under a horse in the stable on her grandfather's country estate in Massachusetts. She remembered black demon spider-like legs kicking in blind fury. Her father's old friend had come join them that weekend. His face was the sign of her rescue. She would not die under the horse's legs. He dove under the animal, as though he thought himself invincible of swept her away, cradled in his arms. How old was she then? Six? Seven? What his name? Wasn't he at Papa's funeral five years ago? The mustache was new, but the voice and the face and the smile, they were the same. She might have been crazy and perhaps she was mistaking for her father's friend, but the sudden sign of home, that piece of childhood, the life and identity she had forsaken for one moment she could have back. Horseback riding and ice cream and dolls and Mother and Father and their lovely friends. The man that played tea party with her when she had no friends and Mother and Father were too busy and important. The man that carried through the pasture her on his shoulder after the horse disaster and told her wonderful stories.

He came back for her father's funeral. He gave his condolences and strange look she didn't understand. She wanted to talk about the day with the horse, but all she could think about was Papa and why he and Mama (though she never called her that anymore) were so rigid and why he had to die so suddenly. But that man, his old friend. What was his name?

"Mr. MacLeod?"