Of course, though, what I wanted was for Redwood to read that right then, right now, not in a few months. I wanted him to know his rejection—if that’s even what it was—hadn’t hurt.
“What would you say drew you to this role of Marian Graves?” the writer asked when we were ensconced in my living room with canned seltzers and half glasses of white wine （“Just a cheeky one, as my friend Hugo would say,” Hadley says, referring to Sir Hugo Woolsey, her neighbor and a producer of Peregrine）。 I splayed sideways in an armchair. She was perched on the couch, her recorder on the coffee table.
“I’m sure you’ve done your research and know about my parents,” I said. “I’ve always been interested in disappearance. A lot of the time—maybe most of the time—when people disappear it’s actually, literally death, but it’s not perceived that way. There’s an escape hatch built into disappearance. It is an escape hatch. Marian gets framed in the context of what really happened, like her never coming back is some unsolved mystery, but even if she turned into a yeti and roamed Antarctica for fifty years, there’s really only one upshot at this point. She’d be a hundred years old now. Disappearance comes for us all, you know? I used to wonder if my parents might be alive, like if somehow they’d faked their own deaths. You can’t help picking at things. A couple of years ago I even hired an investigator, but he didn’t find anything. He said he didn’t think there was anything to find. Just a really big lake. Anyway, if they were alive, that would have meant they went to great lengths to abandon me.”
The writer blinked. She said, “What do you think now?”
“Now it seems like they never existed at all.”
She nodded slowly, leaned even farther forward, asked, “Are you a searcher, Hadley?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me put it this way. I think of a seeker as someone looking for enlightenment. I mean searcher as something more open-ended, someone who’s actively trying to find their way.”
I looked out the window at Mark trailing his hand in the water. “Maybe I am,” I said, “but not a good one because I always seem to be a little bit lost.” That was a nice pull quote for her, I always seem to be a little bit lost, something to superimpose in big italics over a photo of me styled to look rebellious but also waify: leather jacket with no shirt underneath, heavy eyeliner, forlorn expression.
She said, “And what about love? Are you searching for that, too?”
“I’m probably more likely to find enlightenment.”
“Is it possible they’re the same thing?”
“No,” I said, “I think they’re opposites.”
* * *
—
After the table read was over, after the assistant director had read “Fade to black” into the mic as Marian sank into the depths, when everyone was milling around congratulating each other, I sought out Redwood while pretending I wasn’t.
“Hey,” I said, feigning surprise when we came face-to-face. “You do exist. I thought maybe I’d hallucinated you.”
He laughed nervously and tucked his hair behind his ears. “FYI, all those pink elephants were real, too,” he said.
“We could just pretend it was a normal business lunch and not an intergalactic journey, if you want.”
Quietly, glancing around, he said, “After you get drunk or high with someone, do you ever wonder if you made a total idiot out of yourself?”
“No,” I said. “I assume I did.”
He smiled, relieved. “You didn’t at all. But maybe I did?”
“To be honest, I don’t totally remember what we said.”
“Yeah, to me, that always feels like part of the problem.”
“Just assume everything you said was brilliant.”
“What if I have a nagging feeling most of it was ridiculous?”
“Maybe we could do it again,” I ventured, “and just stick to wine?”
“Yeah,” he said. “For sure.” And he was about to say something else, but someone called him away.
Lodgings
British Columbia
June 1932
Three months after Marian visited Missoula The Stearman crossed into Canada. Below, the world was green with new growth, and the wind blew easterly through the bright morning, rutting the sky and bouncing the plane. Marian banked west.
Jamie was hunkered down in the front cockpit with his valise and his box of paints and brushes. Cases of whiskey would occupy that space on the way back; Marian would blame engine trouble for her delayed return, say she’d had to put down in the wilderness, fix the plane herself. Barclay might not believe her, but at least by then her task will be done.