Fingertips trail down her back. A weight turns over low in Marian’s belly. It has never occurred to her that a woman could summon such a feeling, yet there it is; the touch is so light, so expert, that Marian is curious to know what else might be possible. She shifts onto her back, and the gentle fingers, without hesitation, trace over her ribs. The woman’s lips touch Marian’s sternum as delicately as if meeting a porcelain teacup. Marian is wearing men’s white cotton drawers, and she lifts her hips and pushes these down.
Through the whole encounter, she does not touch the woman, or kiss her. She remains perfectly passive, not submissive, exactly, but cool, almost regal, until her thighs clasp around the woman’s head, and she shudders. After, she turns over and, removing the woman’s lingering, questioning hand from her hip, goes to sleep.
When Marian returns to Valdez, a letter from Caleb containing another letter from Barclay is waiting for her. She throws this enclosure into the fire without reading it. For a while, she thinks of the woman more than anyone else at night.
Marian hears about Kristallnacht on the radio, feels dread tempered by distance. Everything seems far away except the mountains, the mines, the glaciers.
Charles Lindbergh goes to Germany, accepts a medal from Hermann G?ring. A camera flashes.
When, in April 1939, he returns to the States, he is less a hero than before, rumblings in the press about how he’s become a mouthpiece for the Germans, an appeaser. America, Lindbergh is very certain, must not enter the war. “We must band together,” he writes in The Reader’s Digest, “to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood.”
He believes himself fair-minded, blessed with elevated logic. And if Lindbergh believes something, then, Lindbergh believes, it must be true. He starts making radio addresses, then public speeches, draws crowds, fills places like Madison Square Garden with thousands of people who simply don’t want to go to war again but also with Nazi sympathizers, fascists, and anti-Semites （whom the others are willing to overlook）。
A brief detour into the future: After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh shuts up. He tries to go to work for PanAm or Curtiss-Wright, and his offers are at first eagerly accepted then awkwardly rescinded because the White House disapproves. Eventually he persuades the marines to send him to the South Pacific as an observer, asks to go to the front lines. He flies dawn patrols and rescue missions, fires on Japanese planes though he isn’t really supposed to, figures out methods of reducing fuel consumption, which expands fighters’ ranges. He’s genuinely helpful. His reputation is rehabilitated somewhat, but he will never be as he was.
After the war, his marriage frays but endures. Anne writes books, chafes under his efforts to control her and the children when he is home, which is not often. He secretly takes up with three German women, has seven secret children with them. Does he want to repopulate the world with little Lindberghs? He tells his children again and again that they must be mindful of genetics when choosing mates.
In his sixties, he dedicates himself to advocating for endangered species and indigenous people. He is obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. He’d helped to shrink the world but wishes it had not shrunk.
When a Saturn V rocket rises from its launchpad, carrying the astronauts of Apollo 11 to the moon, Lindbergh is there in Florida, craning up at the vanishing spark. The rocket burns more fuel in the first second of its launch than the Spirit of St. Louis did getting from New York to Paris.
In 1974, on Maui, he dies. He does not want to be embalmed, chooses wool and cotton clothes and wrappings that will decay. He wants Hawaiian hymns to be sung for him. He makes sure there is room for Anne in his grave lined with lava rocks, but, almost three decades later, she will choose to be cremated, scattered elsewhere.
* * *
—
Flavian had come personally to drag Jamie out of the mountains and bring him to the prize ceremony at the Seattle Art Museum, which he had endured uneasily, unused to crowds of people and nervously vigilant for any Faheys. None had appeared, but the Turner watercolors he’d discovered in their attic had been on display, arranged in a luminous row on an otherwise empty wall with a plaque beneath: On Loan from the Fahey Collection. They are only simple washes of color on small rectangles of textured paper, and yet they seem to convey sprawling vistas of the sea and sky, infinite space.
Among the many hands he shook, one belonged to a man from the WPA. Why wasn’t Jamie working for the Federal Arts Project, he wanted to know. It was meant to keep artists in work. They needed a mural for a library in Bellingham. Would Jamie do it?