“No. Or, nothing a change of scene won’t fix.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“It’s a long story.”
“About what?”
Marian had been moving toward the door, with Geraldine following. “My husband, mostly.”
“Ah.” The woman nodded, her mouth in a twist that suggested she knew a thing or two about husbands.
“I don’t like goodbyes,” Marian said at the door. “Jamie knows that. He won’t be surprised.”
“I don’t mind goodbyes,” Geraldine said. “I’ll pass along yours.”
An Incomplete History of the Graves Family
1932–1935
In May 1932, Amelia Earhart flies a Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland, alone. The first solo Atlantic crossing since Lindbergh. A difficult flight, stormy and almost fifteen hours long. Ice builds up on the wings. The plane spins down three thousand feet. When she regains control, she is low over the whitecaps. She might have disappeared then, in a cold place without islands or atolls, where people couldn’t dream her back to life, make her a castaway. They would have looked for her and found only water, as they did anyway, later. Probably she would have become just another dead pilot, briefly famous, lost in pursuit of a dream, now forgotten.
Night in Hopewell, New Jersey. A baby’s empty crib. A ransom note on the windowsill. Charles Lindbergh’s first child, a son, twenty months old, is gone.
Chaos. Uproar. Headlines as big as they go. Everyone’s a sleuth. Everyone wants a piece of the action. From prison, even Al Capone offers to help.
After ten weeks and a thousand false leads, after Lindbergh pays ransom to a man who promises his son is safe on a boat that turns out not to exist, the baby is found four miles from the Lindbergh house, skull fractured, badly decomposed, dead since the night he was taken. Lindbergh has always been quiet, truthfully pretty weird. （Once, as a prank, he filled a friend’s water pitcher with kerosene, watched him drink. Lindberg laughed until he cried; the friend went to the hospital.） He turns further inward, peers out of himself through a narrow chink, a gap in the curtains. His wife, Anne, never sees him cry.
Amy Johnson of Britain-to-Australia fame flies from London to Cape Town in a de Havilland Puss Moth named Desert Cloud, beating the solo record set by her own husband—Jim Mollison, a drunken lout and relentless philanderer but a good pilot. The Saharan dunes ripple silver under a full moon.
In August, Barclay finds Marian’s replacement diaphragm. Lately he’s been penetrating her without fanfare, like an animal obligated to breed, but one night, trying to elicit pleasure, to make her respond to him as she used to, he puts his fingers in her, feels the rubber rim. He strikes her across the face with an open hand, and she hits him back, fist closed. “If you go up in that plane again,” he says, one hand over his watering eye, “I’ll pour gasoline on it and light a match.”
“Then I’ll do the same to myself.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Where did you get it?”
She won’t say. His sister is no ally, but Marian won’t betray her. He throws the diaphragm on the fire.
After that she is kept to the ground, where the air feels thick and heavy, her movements sluggish. Barclay mates with her grimly, daily. She doesn’t think he makes her suffer out of hate. She thinks he believes pregnancy will come as a kind of cure, convert her entirely and immediately into the woman he thinks she should be, prove he’s been right all along. He believes she will love him for his rightness. Sometimes he rages at her for lying there like a corpse, trying to make me feel wrong about it. He insists she has been with other men, makes insinuations about Caleb, about lovers scattered as widely across Canada as his caches of booze. He gets better at catching her wrists, dodging her blows. Her self, her interior habitat, once full of purpose, has become hollow and inert and uncanny, as though she is a hermit crab who has somehow mistakenly shed the inner animal instead of the shell. Her body grows hard, bony, thinner than she’s ever been. He is heavy on her; the air is heavy on her; weight and oppression are constant, uniform.
Still she is not pregnant.
“I’m a witch,” she tells him when he demands to know her trick. She sees he almost believes her, in spite of himself.
When she took him to Vancouver, she had told Jamie to send letters to the post office of a town she could visit between deliveries. But now, since she can’t fly, she can’t pick up her letters, and she doesn’t dare write to him. She doesn’t want Barclay to know where he is.