“You believe that?”
“I have to.”
“And you think you’ll be able to pretend to love him for the rest of your life?”
“I did love him. I might be able to again, despite this.”
“How can you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell him that I do. He wants to believe I do.”
“No. No. A person like that has no limits. He’ll never be satisfied. He’ll always want more from you.” Something seemed to coalesce in Jamie, some idea or resolve. “He belongs in jail. That’s the answer. Everyone knows what he does. There must be some lawman somewhere he hasn’t paid off.”
“Please just leave it alone.” This possibility that Jamie would try, in some feeble way, to avenge her honor, frightened her. “Please. You’ll only make things worse.”
Jamie’s cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. “You think he’s dangerous. I can see it. You’re afraid of him. This isn’t love.”
She felt heavy as lead, too heavy to argue anymore. She told him there was nothing else to say.
Jamie hadn’t come to the wedding, and Wallace had already left to go dry out in Denver. Marian and Barclay stood in front of a judge in the Kalispell courthouse with Sadler and Barclay’s sister, Kate, as witnesses. Afterward, they’d taken a photo outside on the steps while a gusty wind blew leaves around their feet. They’d had lunch in a restaurant, and Sadler had driven them directly to Missoula to catch an eastbound train.
* * *
—
The fourth night at sea, Barclay managed to appear for dinner. Instead of going to smoke cigars after, he joined her for a turn on deck. He held her arm and made her walk on the inside, away from the railing, as though she were the unsteady one. Beyond the ship lay blowing darkness, an absolute void. “It’s not pleasant to imagine falling in,” Barclay said.
“It reminds me of flying through cloud at night. Sometimes you feel as though you don’t even exist at all.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Or liberating. You realize how little you matter.”
He gathered her under his arm. “You matter.”
“Not really. No one does.” They were strolling beneath the long line of davit-hung lifeboats, a procession of keels passing overhead. She said, “We must be close to where the Josephina went down.”
“I don’t like to think about it,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d known my parents. Wallace has said, or not quite said, that they weren’t happy together. They married hastily.” But who was she to judge anyone’s reasons for marrying? Her parents might have known full well they would be unhappy and had bound themselves together anyway for reasons long lost. “Jamie and I would have been children in that house in New York. I can’t imagine it. If you change one thing, you change everything.”
“It would have been terrible,” Barclay said, kissing the back of her glove, “because I wouldn’t have met you.”
What would Wallace’s life have been like if the twins had never been sent to him? She had called the doctor in Denver long distance before they left New York. Wallace seemed committed to his treatment, he said, though the process was not easy, especially not in the early stages. Wallace, when he came to the phone, sounded shaky but lucid. He said he was beginning to hope he would be able to paint again.
“I wonder if I would have learned to fly,” she said to Barclay.
They had reached the stern. “I’m sure of it.”
“Why?”
“Because flying is in your bones.” She peered at his shadowed face above the faint white glow of his shirtfront, surprised. She wanted to say that she, too, believed this, but before she could, he added, “That’s how I felt when I saw you. You were in my bones.”
He was always busy choosing bits and pieces of their lives to weave into the story he was constructing around them like a bird building a nest, like a prisoner building a prison. But when he leaned close to her, her body responded, as it always did. At least there was that. She held him tightly, using him as a shield against the void that pressed in around the ship.
Edinburgh, Scotland
November 1931
One month later
A clever puzzle of a city, assembled from blocks of pale, sooty stone. Marian, out walking, often found herself above or below where she wanted to be, as the cobbled streets made a complex lattice wedged in among the abrupt rises and falls of the underlying landscape, navigable only via tunnels and narrow passageways, bridges and steep, hidden stairways. Glimpses of the sea came and went. The castle lay curled like a sleeping dragon at the top of the main street, while, on the other side of town, a massive rough outcropping of rock, the Salisbury Crags, stood up higher than all the spires and domes and chimneys as though in primitive rebuke to human ambition.