Looking inside the bag, Jamie said, “Hallelujah, he sent cream puffs.”
After they’d eaten, they settled around the gramophone, Jamie reclining on the floor beside Marian’s chair, Caleb lying on the settee.
“Marian,” Jamie said, breaking through some idle talk about Caleb’s hunting, “Sarah said she thought Wallace might not have liked that I was making drawings. Do you think that could be true?”
“Sarah?” Marian said.
“The girl in Seattle,” Caleb said.
“Because I always thought he was encouraging,” Jamie said, “but when I really think about it now, I wonder if he might have been the opposite.”
“I don’t know,” Marian said. She hadn’t paid much attention to the dynamic between Wallace and Jamie, had been too preoccupied with flying.
“Sarah’s father offered me a job,” Jamie said. “I could have gone to live in Seattle. I could have had a whole life there, but I said no. Do you know why?”
“Why?” She was afraid the answer would be that he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in Missoula.
“Because his fortune came from meatpacking.” Jamie laughed, sagged sideways onto one elbow. “Of all things. What luck!” He grew solemn. “I must be a fool.”
In a garbled torrent, he told the story of meeting Sarah in the park, about her mother and sisters, the big house, the art, the topiaries, the seduction of being praised. When he’d reached the ignominious end, he dramatically drained his glass. Brightly, before Marian had gathered her thoughts to speak, he said, “Say, would you dance for me?” He tapped his knee in time with the record.
“What?” Marian said.
“You and Caleb. I’d like to sketch people dancing.”
“I’m a terrible dancer, Jamie.”
Caleb, though, stood and pulled her up from her chair, brought her firmly into his arms.
“You don’t have to give him his way on everything,” she whispered.
“What’s the harm in dancing?” He turned her.
Craning her neck, Marian glimpsed doodled lines in Jamie’s sketchbook that did not quite add up to pictures but still resembled dancers. She found herself responding to the feel of Caleb, his familiar smell: earthy and coniferous, so different from Barclay’s perfumed musk. Though her feet were clumsy and her body stiff, though Jamie was pouring more moon into his glass, she felt weepy from happiness.
When the record finally fizzed and went silent, she stepped away from Caleb, wiped her brow on her sleeve. Jamie had fallen asleep, his head flopped back against the chair, the sketch pad still in his lap. Caleb put on a different record, drew her onto the settee beside him. “Why didn’t you visit sooner?” he said.
She tried to make up an excuse, but she was too wrung out. “Barclay didn’t want me to go anywhere. He wasn’t letting me fly for a while. He was punishing me for not wanting a baby.”
“For not wanting one or not having one?”
“They’re the same thing, at least for now. He shouldn’t have been surprised. I always told him I didn’t want one, but he has this idea that he knows me better than I know myself, when really he’s obsessed with trying to make the real me match his imagined version of me.”
Caleb’s jaw was tight. “He’s a bastard,” he said.
“Marian.” Jamie was awake. He hadn’t moved but was gazing at her from the floor, his face haggard. “Will you take me somewhere?”
“What do you mean? Now?”
“Soon. I need to leave here.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Just somewhere else.” He drew his knees up to his chest. He’d gotten so thin. “You’re gone. Wallace is gone. Caleb’s always off hunting. It feels like Seattle is the only thing that’s ever going to happen to me.”
“Can’t you just finish high school?”
“You didn’t.”
She started to formulate some wry response about not everyone getting to marry Barclay Macqueen, but before she could speak, he said, plaintively, “Please, Marian. I can’t stay here.”
* * *
—
Her model planes still hung from the cottage’s ceiling, dusty, the glue showing yellow in places. Everything was as she’d left it. Jamie had confined his chaos to the house. It was nearly dawn, but she sat in the armchair and flipped through some books—Captain Cook in the South Pacific, Fridtjof Nansen in Greenland. She waited for them to fill her with an eager sense of nascent adventure, but they lay dead in her hands. Before, she’d been certain the world would fall open to her once she could fly. Now she knew she would never see any of those places.