It’s grass dying of thirst and tall berms of oleander running down the middle of the freeway, blooming and poisonous and hardy as fuck, dividing northbound from southbound, lava from champagne, and it’s cacti and yuccas and aloes and agaves and water-hoarding succulents with names like blue chalk fingers and blue horizon and queen of the night and burro’s tail and purple emperor and firesticks and cobweb houseleek and zebra haworthia and campfire jade and ghost plant and flamingo glow and string of pearls and painted lady. I want Redwood to know all this. （Seriously, though, he said again, like all the angels?） I want him to know that L.A. is a desert wind blowing through the garden of paradise. I need him to understand that I am a purple emperor, and I am a painted lady, and it is: all. so. succulent.
I told him, and he said yes. Yes, exactly. And I thought I saw a cold point of light, like a star but not a star, coming from him, coming from nowhere.
Marriage
North Atlantic
October 1931
Two months after Jamie came home from Seattle
Marian Macqueen, seventeen years old and newly married, stood at the stern of an ocean liner, the chill of the railing seeping through her gloves as light drained from the murky sky. Barclay was bringing her to Scotland for a honeymoon. She’d been told she would meet his father’s people and his acquaintances from school and see castles and highlands. They’d gone by train from Missoula to New York City. “I don’t know what you’re looking at,” Barclay had said somewhere in the plains while Marian stared hungrily out the window. “There’s nothing out there.”
The gust of the train washed through golden prairie grass, tossed blackbirds into flight. “I want to see it anyway,” she said.
After a week in New York, they had boarded this ship （Cunard, not L&O） bound for Liverpool, from where they would take another train north. The first three days had been stormy enough that the decks were closed to passengers except for the glassed-in parts of the promenade, and Marian had roamed impatiently, peering out the rain-streaked windows at the shifting, whitecapped water. Barclay was seasick, but she was untouched. Quickly she’d developed the knack for inclining her body with the roll of the ship, penduluming from side to side as she walked down the corridors. Other passengers staggered drunkenly or clung to the railings while she only grazed her fingertips along the walls.
“Very good, madam!” said a passing steward. “You have your sea legs.”
She imagined her father would be proud to see how unaffected she was. She imagined explaining to Addison that she was accustomed to motion, describing her aerobatics, how the plane felt like an extension of her own body, except more responsive, more coordinated than her limbs ever would be. She could spin and loop and always know exactly where she was. He would be proud of that, too, she thought. An undertow of self-pity caught her. It would be nice if somebody were proud of her. Wallace wasn’t capable. She and Jamie were barely speaking, and who could ever tell what Caleb thought. Barclay was proud of having married her, but he saw her flying as a rival.
On deck, damp blew around her, scouring her cheeks. As best she could figure, at some point during this night they would pass not far from where the Josephina had gone down, where she, Marian, had been set on a course that had taken turn after turn until returning her to this patch of ocean as a rich man’s bride, the wife of a criminal.
She was wearing clothes selected for her by women at Henri Bendel in New York to replace the clothes that, after their engagement, had been selected for her by women at the Missoula Mercantile to replace her shirts and trousers: a silk dress and stockings, T-strap shoes, onyx-and-diamond danglers clamped to her ears, a rope of pearls slung twice around her neck, a mink coat and a navy cloche. She had three trunks full of such things. Barclay had insisted on all of it. The responsibility of owning so many fine and delicate possessions, so many sparkling bits and bobs that served no real purpose but must not be forgotten or lost or broken, worked on her like a kind of drag, slowing her. She was unused to shoes that should not be gotten wet and gossamer fabrics that snagged or stretched unless she remembered to move cautiously at all times. If the three trunks had gone up in a bonfire, she would have felt only relief, but since Barclay knew far more about how women should look than she did, she deferred.
Her hair had been cut in the Plaza Hotel salon by a woman whose own hair was a miracle of sharp angles and avian sleekness, like Mercury’s helmet. “It’s so short already I don’t know if I can do much with it,” the woman had said, fingering Marian’s pale crop, but somehow she had snipped it into something that might be taken as daring and gamine.