Caleb had written to tell her that Jamie had not improved, that he kept talking about her taking him somewhere as though his departure was imminent. Might it be worth a try? Caleb thought he knew someone to rent the house, care for the dogs and Fiddler.
Caleb never wrote unless it was important.
Marian had told Barclay she forgave him, let him fuck her, willed her womb closed. She started flying across the line again, mailed two letters from a nowhere town. One was to Jamie, telling him to be ready, that she would come get him soon and without warning. The other was a query, though an unanswerable one because she instructed the recipient not to write back. She didn’t want Barclay to see any letters coming from Vancouver.
The only clouds were sparse and stringy, like shreds of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire. The propeller was a circular smudge, a transparent disturbance. Barclay had known what the price of forgiveness （even feigned） would be. Flight, of course. He gave it grudgingly, suspiciously, knew each trip she made over the line was a pantomime of escape.
* * *
—
In the front cockpit, Jamie gazed blearily down. He’d gulped a good amount of moon before they left, a last drink, he’d told himself, proud about recognizing his need to take a break from booze, smug about resisting the urge to smuggle a bottle along for the flight. If only Sarah could be in the plane, too. He imagined her interest, her delight in the landscape below. When he’d first returned to Missoula, after Wallace left for Denver and Marian for Barclay, he’d missed Sarah so badly and so persistently that the sensation had scared him, and he’d fled into his work and into booze like a panicked elk fleeing into a lake to escape swarming flies. With his painting, he could summon her image. With his painting, he could show her, though he still didn’t know what exactly. After nearly a year, thoughts of her no longer distressed him but offered something like companionship, especially when he drank. He imagined long, rambling conversations with her, peppered her with questions she never answered.
Marian descended into a long valley. Raw country turned into farmland that turned into neighborhoods, a city sprawled out under transiting cloud shadows, ending at the sea. As she bore to the north, across the harbor from downtown, Jamie picked out the small airfield that was the center of the circle around which they had begun revolving, drawing closer and closer as though a tether were being reeled in.
* * *
—
“If you’d have let me write back, I would have warned you I only have my smallest room free.”
Geraldine was for the most part as Marian remembered, fair and soft and bosomy in a way that seemed maternal, reassuring, though her manner was more brisk and her gaze more skeptical.
“That’s fine,” Marian said.
“Is it fine with you?” Geraldine said to Jamie. “You’re the one staying.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“You might want to look first.”
He’d been quiet in the taxi from the airfield. Marian imagined he’d been feeling the beginnings of a hangover months in the making, or maybe absorbing the unfamiliarity of the place, the difficulty of starting over. “Go look,” she told him, though she knew he would not refuse the room.
While Geraldine took him upstairs, she waited at the kitchen table. She had last sat there only a year ago, the morning of the day she flew over the crevasse. Jamie and Geraldine were gone longer than she expected. The house seemed quiet; the other boarders must be out. She looked at her watch, thinking about how far she could get from Vancouver before sunset, where she might manage to spend the night without word getting back to Barclay.
Laughter and footsteps. Creaking stairs. When they came back into the kitchen, both of them seemed lighter and brighter than before, pinker. “Is it all right?” she asked Jamie.
“A palace,” he said cheerfully.
“No guests,” Geraldine said, suddenly stern, her brightness snuffed out. “Be in by midnight. And no drinking in the house.”
“All right,” Jamie said.
“Go unpack, then,” Marian said. “I’ll wait here.”
When he was gone, Marian stood. “Will you tell him I said goodbye?” she said to Geraldine.
“You won’t stay the night?”
“I can’t. My husband is expecting me.”
“Not even a cup of tea?”
“I can’t.”
Geraldine looked at her with concern that was more practical than sentimental. “Why couldn’t I write back to your letter? Is your brother in some kind of trouble? You ought to tell me if he is.”