“But,” I said, “maybe other people could have been more understanding, too. I feel like people might have been impulsive and might have refused to see the big picture.”
He smiled, his cheeks shining blue. “Maybe.”
I sipped from my drink. “Seems possible.”
“Maybe also some feelings have lingered more than one individual expected,” he said.
“That might sound familiar,” I said.
From there we kept on with our looping, harmless, catching-up talk, but the shields had been lowered. It’s easy sometimes to feel like audacity is its own form of protection, like recklessness somehow neutralizes danger. Sitting in our purple velvet booth, I didn’t ask him about the state of his marriage or what, specifically, his feelings about me were or anything I really wanted to know. I talked about Sir Hugo and Marian Graves, and I turned Redwood back into a dupe we were all bleeding dry before he was washed out of town on a wave of bewildered disappointment.
“Is it going to be good?” he said. “The film?”
I’d only ever asked myself that question and never answered it. Usually I was surrounded by people insisting it would be good, not letting in any doubt. “I don’t know,” I said. Suddenly everything felt as precarious as when I’d taken the Cessna’s yoke. Alexei rested his hand on my knee, steadying me.
In my room, he peeled off my dais-appropriate jeans and blazer, put his face impatiently between my legs. When we were fucking, he turned me onto my stomach, and he murmured my name in my ear while my face was in hot pillow darkness, and I found I was crying. Outside, the desert faded purple and then black while someone turned up the dial on the city, lit up that tangerine net, ready to catch some unseen circus performer falling from the sky.
* * *
—
When Alexei left, I stood in the doorway in a hotel bathrobe and kissed him beneath the glossy black bubble that hung from the ceiling like an egg laid by a sea creature, the glossy black bubble meant to make sure no intruders reached the vestibule between the elevator and the door to my suite, the glossy black bubble that concealed a camera that recorded our kiss, a camera that sent silent, time-stamped, colorless footage of our kiss to some hotel security guy who probably hated his job and hated the assholes who stayed in these suites and maybe already knew I was a scandalous little whore and wanted everyone to know the extent of my sluttiness. Anyway, that guy saw a chance to make a buck, and he took it.
The War
Valdez, Alaska
October 1941
Two years and nine months after Marian and Jamie met in Vancouver Marian had hoped the war would not find its way to Alaska, would not bother with such a place, but in 1940, someone somewhere had finally considered the strategic advantages of that gigantic cold fist of Pacific territory and the growing likelihood that any and all strategic advantages would soon be needed. Anchorage filled with soldiers. Frantic construction began on bases there and in Fairbanks and on a string of a dozen airfields running east-west from Whitehorse, in the Canadian Yukon, to Nome on the Bering Sea. Supplies and materials and people flooded in on ships, seeped north into the interior by truck, train, riverboat, airplane.
No one was going to give a government contract for supply hauling to a woman, but the pilots who did get contracts had more work than they could handle and, for once, a customer who could be trusted to pay up. Some threw jobs Marian’s way. With her share of the money from Wallace’s house she’d bought a battered twin-engine Beechcraft off a guy who was giving up and heading back to Arizona, and she rented a proper frame cottage in Fairbanks. She was known for her spooky ability to fly in bad weather, landing exactly where she intended even when the whole Territory was under one big impenetrable cloud. Some of the other pilots called her a witch. She didn’t mind. She’d told Barclay she was one because she wished she were.
Finished bases sprang up among the mountains and out on the tundra, with hangars and control towers and houses with all the modern conveniences, tidy settlements made from bits and pieces she’d helped haul up, everyone as industrious as ants. The wilderness was still mostly wilderness, but Marian felt possessive of the land, worried for it. The new military pilots coming in thought they were hot shit, but they didn’t have to learn the country. They’d only just learned to fly. They flew from one beacon to another, landed on actual runways, not in the bush. Yes, storms still came in like holy hell. Yes, planes still disappeared and were never recovered, but a pilot didn’t have to earn Alaska like before, not in her opinion.