One afternoon Barclay and Sadler drive away, not to return until morning. She waits through supper with Kate and Mother, waits beside the fire while Mother’s knitting needles click away the seconds, waits in bed through midnight, beyond midnight, until the silence feels settled. She creeps down the stairs, testing every footfall, certain the tattletale house will betray her.
The September night is warm and clear, with half a moon. She wears trousers, a plain shirt, a canvas jacket. She takes a knapsack containing a wool blanket, a water canteen, some food, a flashlight, a compass, a knife, and a stash of money she’d withdrawn from the bank in Missoula on her last visit and kept buried in a tin can near the airstrip. Everything else she thinks of as her own is in the cottage behind Wallace’s house. Mrs. Barclay Macqueen’s fine clothes and jewelry—none of it has anything to do with her. The moon blues the ranch road as she crosses it, casts her shadow, blues the wings of the Stearman. She’d thought Barclay might have disabled it in some way, was prepared to walk over the mountains, but after she pours in oil and cleans the spark plugs, the engine turns right over. When she discovers the gas tank is still half full, she trembles with anger and shame. He’d been so certain she wouldn’t disobey him.
She wishes she could go to Missoula, to Caleb, to her cottage. She wishes she could go to Miss Dolly’s, to Mrs. Wu. But it is too much to hope that no one at the ranch will hear the plane take off, that anyone will be fooled by her note. In Missoula, she would be found before noon.
A trundling rush along the bumpy ground in the dark, a parting. She banks over the moonlit mass of trees, turns northwest. The sky stays clear, but even the densest clouds would not have stopped her. Passing over the dark sheen of a lake, she takes off her wedding ring and drops it.
* * *
—
“He doesn’t know about the baby?” Jamie says after Marian has told him the story. The morning she left Bannockburn, she had landed the plane in the wilderness when it ran out of fuel, concealed it as best she could by pushing it nose-in among some trees before walking ten miles to the nearest town. There, she’d spoken to no one except the bored station clerk who’d sold her a one-way train ticket to Boise. She’d gotten off after two stations and bought a ticket to San Francisco, repeated the ruse once more, then stayed on a train to Vancouver.
“No,” she tells Jamie.
“He doesn’t know where you went, either?”
“I didn’t tell him, and I’m almost positive he never knew I brought you here. He would have gloated and held it over my head. Still, he might show up sometime. I’m afraid he will, but I can’t do anything about it. If he comes, just tell him you don’t know where I went, which will be true.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“You ought to be. I’m sorry, Jamie. It’s all my fault.”
They are walking beside Oppenheimer Park. On a baseball diamond, a team of Japanese men is practicing. Jamie points at them. “They’re the best in the city. If you stay, we’ll go to a game. Everyone comes out.”
“I can’t stay long. Promise to be careful, will you?”
“What can Barclay take from me? I don’t have anything.”
“You know it’s not what he’d take. I’ve always been afraid of exactly this situation.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have stayed with him for my sake.”
“I didn’t. I was paralyzed somehow.”
“What made you un-paralyzed?”
“Getting pregnant.”
He hesitated.
“I can’t have it,” she says brusquely. “I’d be tied to him forever. Even if by some miracle he never found out, he’d have gotten his way. And adoption is out of the question. I couldn’t leave a baby to wonder about its parents. It’s not an experience I’d recommend.”
“No. Me neither.” He ushers Marian into a tearoom.
As they sit, she says, changing the subject, “What did you decide about the bohemian life?” A waiter brings a ceramic pot, two handleless cups.
“I didn’t so much make a decision as slide into an ongoing compromise.”
“This tea is green. What kind of compromise?”
“Try it. It’s good. The compromise is that I’m living day to day without making any sweeping decisions.”
Just live each day was what Judith had told him to do when he confessed his anxieties. She’d shrugged her bare shoulders, sitting naked on her mattress, smoking a cigarette, unable to comprehend why he would worry so much. Don’t decide anything. He has not yet told Marian about Judith, whom he is desperately in both lust and love with. Marian would not like Judith, would find her pretentious and self-absorbed, and he is not sure he wants to grapple with whether that view might be correct.