The Last Flight

It is a truism of human behavior: Honesty is the best policy. That which is done in the dark corrupts. In the novel, characters harbor secrets. Some are huge, moral lapses that rise to the level of criminal behavior: Rory murdered his first wife and now pretends to be an upright and admirable husband to a second wife he routinely beats; Dex runs a thriving underworld of drug production and sales while pretending to be a low-level soldier in the crime syndicate; working as a waitress, Eva cooks meth in her basement and works the streets of Berkeley selling to desperate (and wealthy) students, athletes, and professors; Brittany pretends to be a customer looking for a fix while working for the feds, her charade nearly costing Eva her life. Other secrets are less dramatic but every bit as corrosive. For years Danielle observes Rory’s abusive treatment of Claire but says nothing, either out of a twisted sense of loyalty or because of fear for her own well-being; Claire lives for a harrowing two weeks as someone else, wearing her clothes, living in her apartment, and keeping secret even from her one close friend the reality of her desperate flight to freedom. Unlike lies—often designed to save the teller from possible harm or punishment—secrets maintain behavior that the doers know in their hearts is wrong, harmful, and dangerous. Lies are designed to change the status quo; secrets are designed to maintain it.

The longer a secret is kept the longer the toxic conditions that require it persist. It is only in the novel’s difficult moments of truth—when Eva finally tells Liz about her drug life, or when Claire heads to the CNN studios, or when Danielle finally asks for Claire’s forgiveness—that the novel offers any hope for positive change. In deciding to escape to Puerto Rico rather than return to cooperate with the feds in San Francisco, Eva becomes the novel’s tragic example of the impact of allowing secrets to remain undisclosed. She believes she is embarking on a more authentic existence as she plans to switch to a window seat: “I want to view the world—its wide vista expanding in a graceful arc below me—and imagine myself in it. My true self, the person Liz showed me I can be” (302). However, she dies in the crash, and the seat change that she sees as emblematic of her “true self” only creates confusion regarding her identity and whether she is dead at all.

No individual woman emerges as the novel’s authentic hero. Rather it is a network of women—some friends, some virtual strangers—coming together to support, counsel, and ultimately save each other who emerge as the novel’s heroic center.

The condition of each of the novel’s central female characters is isolation—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Not only Claire Cook and Eva James, but Liz, Kelly, Danielle, Eva’s mother, Charlotte Price, and the murdered Maggie Moretti—each character feels displaced, apart, and trapped. They are each in different ways imprisoned by men.

Alone, they are powerless and doomed to lives of quiet anxiety. Together, they wield remarkable power. “If we don’t tell our stories, together, we’ll never take control of the narrative” (255), Claire tells her CNN interviewer. The novel does not explain why Liz befriends her neighbor, Eva, to the point that Eva becomes a kind of second daughter, or why Kelly takes such an interest in the life of one of her customers, Claire. These friendships lack traditional motives, which are often transparently self-serving; the novel suggests the binding power of solidarity among women is as mysterious as it is powerful. In the friendship that Eva discovers with Liz, Eva struggles to understand this feeling of acceptance and support: “To be seen, instead of constantly protecting herself, measuring her words and actions against discovery. She nearly broke into tears so strong was her desire to be known” (171).

Female friendship then emerges as the novel’s tonic force. Danielle, Liz’s daughter and Rory’s special assistant, epitomizes the theme. For years she works for a boss she knows is a vicious and cruel misogynist and most probably a murderer. She says nothing, watching as Claire is tormented quietly and relentlessly by her “loving” husband. Her decision at last to step forward is without logic save the logic that the novel itself celebrates: the heroic willingness of women to help each other.