Jamie was dead. In the cockpit, she screamed. The plane did not fall out of the sky, back into the cloud, though it should have. Flight itself should have been revealed to be an illusion. But the plane continued on, its big Merlin engine droning indifferently. She turned hard to the west, the wings going perpendicular to the cloud, then flipped back level. She pushed up the throttle until a whine pierced the drone. The only impulse she could identify was to be drowned in the ocean. Before, when she had flown too high or too far, she had not really believed she could cause her own death, but now she sensed the presence of a border in the sky, a line over which she could pass and never return.
No gaps appeared in the cloud. She had no way of knowing if she was over land or water. It didn’t matter. Eventually she would be over the Atlantic. Flying west had felt like the natural choice. Montana was west. Alaska was west. Jamie in the Pacific was west, almost exactly on the opposite side of the world. Then again, all those things were east, too. The water was what she sought, the expanse and oblivion. Maybe she would go down not too far from the Josephina. She and Jamie had always been meant to wind up in the ocean together.
Don’t.
As clear as if there were no engine noise whatsoever, only the silence of the atmosphere. Jamie’s voice, unmistakably.
Go back.
“I don’t want to,” she said aloud.
Turn around.
She was over the crevasse again. Her body condensed back into itself, surpassed her actual density, became heavy, full of dread. She was heavier than a mountain, heavier than all the water in the ocean. Though something so heavy should not be able to move, she pushed—so slowly—on the stick, pressed on the rudder as though her leg were the heaviest and slowest of pistons. The plane turned.
* * *
—
There was still the matter of finding a place to land. When her fuel gauge was showing nearly empty, a dark stain appeared on the northern horizon where the solid cloud had pulled apart like cotton wool. She dropped through into hillocked countryside, lightly dusted with snow. In the low sun, streams and ponds shone blinding yellow as though a sheet of gold leaf had been imperfectly torn away. She saw a farm with a flat open field, no cows or sheep in it, and she set the plane down, switched off the engine. She opened the canopy to the evening, and though there was only cold air above her, she felt the pressure of thousands of feet of water.
Glints
Seventeen
Adelaide Scott finally called. I’d just gotten cut off with Siobhan and assumed she was calling back from some other line, so when a voice said, “This is Adelaide Scott,” I said, “Who?”
“We met at dinner at Redwood Feiffer’s. I’m the artist. Apparently I didn’t make much of an impression.” She’d meant to call sooner, she said, but, well, she hadn’t. She’d been uncertain. “But then my assistants told me about your…about your being in the news lately, and I decided to call.”
“Right. Okay. Yeah, I was wondering why you wanted my number.”
“Understandable. Well, here it is: I have some letters that belonged to Marian Graves, letters to her and also ones she wrote, and I thought you might be interested in them.”
The moment when I’d been intrigued by the artist lady with intel about Marian Graves felt like a different life. “Honestly I’m not sure what I’d do with them,” I said. “The movie is pretty set in stone at this point.”
“I imagine so,” she said. “That’s not the point, though, I don’t think. I’m not sure why I have an urge to show them to you. You—this will sound strange, but you represent something to me. I’m not sure what yet. You’re a stand-in of some kind. Not for her but for something more abstract, something about the way people think about her.”
After Adelaide had accosted me outside Redwood’s powder room, I’d gone home and watched a grainy old documentary on YouTube about a sculptural series she’d made in the eighties of “boat-like objects,” ramshackle wooden assemblages designed to sink, sometimes on their own, sometimes after she set them on fire. She’d launched them from different places along the California coast and every year for ten years she dove down and filmed them. Each object was titled just with a roman numeral, I through X. I watched the younger, wet-suited version of Adelaide heave on an air tank, plug her mouth with a regulator, roll backward into the water. She’d had long hair then. Gradually the wrecked objects were obscured by coral and sponges, encrusted with tiny creatures. Towers of kelp waved gently above VII and IX like the limbs of drowned monsters.