Mrs. Fahey brightens. “Oh, I’m glad! His talent seemed unusual. I hope he’s famous one day. No, I shouldn’t frame it that way. I hope he’s fulfilled.”
“Me too.”
The woman looks at her, head cocked. “The way Jamie described you, I was expecting someone more…unorthodox. I mean in the way you dress.”
“I’m trying not to stand out.”
“Why?”
“My husband will have people looking for me.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Fahey says. “I see.”
The next morning, when Mrs. Fahey comes to Marian’s hotel to escort her to the doctor, she unrolls a sheet of paper, holds it up so Marian can study her own charcoal image. “Jamie would draw me differently now,” she says. “It doesn’t seem possible I was ever so sure of myself.”
“I don’t pretend to know you well, but I think you are very brave.” Mrs. Fahey rerolls the drawing, holds it out. “You take this. As a reminder.”
Marian shakes her head. “I don’t know if I can keep it safe. But someday I’d like to have it. Do you mind holding on to it a while longer?”
A tray of instruments rattling on wheels. A bright ceiling light. The sweetness of ether. An afternoon spent in bed in the hotel. Some blood. A dull pain. In the evening she writes a long letter, pages and pages, folds them carefully into an envelope. From the hotel’s telephone book she copies the address for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, buys a stamp from the man at the front desk. The next day she wanders along the waterfront, all the way down to a Hooverville that had once been a shipyard, looks out over the broken, ramshackle geometry of the shacks, dirt packed like grout in between. The pane of ice in her is gone, as is the bit of life floating beneath it, but she has not been restored to how she was before, only feels a new loss, welcome but still felt.
On her way back to the hotel, she posts her letter.
The next day she books passage to Alaska. Jane Smith, she tells the man in the ticket window, and so he records her on the manifest.
* * *
—
In 1934, planes can fly farther, faster, in worse weather. More routes are opening.
Jean Batten, a New Zealander, flies from England to Australia, beating Amy Johnson’s record by four days. （Today there is a statue of her at the Auckland airport.） Sir Charles Kingsford Smith crosses the Pacific from west to east. （The Sydney airport is named for him.）
The Alaska Territory is big country, rough country, country without roads, country best traveled by air. Fly an hour or walk a week, they say. Mail routes that take a dogsled nearly a month might take a plane seven hours. Alaskans are already the flyingest people, but they need more pilots. In the end it is simple for Marian to do the thing she’s always longed to do: get paid to fly.
Fresh off the ship in Anchorage, she’d found a place to live, bought a truck, and gone from hangar to hangar, Jane Smith in search of work, showing her logbook as proof of her experience. Asked about a license, she’d said, “I never got one,” and no one pressed her about why not. （Alaskans aren’t big on bureaucracy.） The logbook is an irregular document. So many destinations recorded no more precisely than “Canada,” so many flights marked simply “Cargo.” Even her name, so scrupulously plain, has an air of erasure. A man with a hangdog face, scarred lip, and crumpled hat looked at the logbook, looked at her, took her up for a check ride, hired her on the spot.
She flies people and supplies where they need to go, learns to fly floatplanes, lands on water, lands on skis in the winter. She does most of her own maintenance, has to do emergency repairs so often she doesn’t consider much an emergency anymore. The small house she rents is on the outer fringe of town, where it’s easy to keep to herself. Was this what her father had done after he left Missoula? Slung his skills over his shoulder and set out? Sometimes she startles awake at the sound of animals outside, thinks Barclay has come for her. She keeps a rifle by the bed.
“What are you doing messing around with planes? You’re good looking enough to get a husband,” a pilot says from behind her, low and turgid, standing too close as she fills a canister with water for a plane’s radiator. “Especially here.”
“I had one, once,” she says. “He’s dead.” Her voice like a chipped blade. He steps back, waits for her to crank closed the tap.
On clear days, north across the Cook Inlet, Mount McKinley appears. If she flies in that direction, it grows and grows, white as the moon, seeming to rise as the moon does, seeming separate from the earth, too huge to be of it. To the east are the sawtoothed Chugach Mountains, the Wrangell Mountains beyond, the Alaska Range to the north. Mountains everywhere: monstrous, ice-choked cousins of the forested peaks that had encircled her as she looped and spun over Missoula. （She doesn’t dare do aerobatics in Alaska, doesn’t want word to get around of a girl with a knack for them.）