Were my parents bones? Or were their bones gone? Was their plane encrusted with tiny mussels, furred with algae? In the last scene of Peregrine, I was going to sit in the cockpit of a plane and gaze up at the receding light as I sank to the bottom of the ocean. I would make Marian be the way I needed to imagine my parents had been: not fearful, not struggling.
“What are the letters about?” I asked Adelaide.
“Different things. They span decades. I didn’t show them to Carol Feiffer when she was researching her book because—well, Carol already seemed to know what story she wanted to tell, and I suppose I didn’t want to derail her, or maybe, really, I didn’t trust her to manage their complexities. She seems to want things to be always neatly tied up. The letters hint at some complex relationships…” She trailed off. Then: “Carol’s a perfectly nice woman, but she’s not Proust.”
“I’m not Proust, either,” I said.
“So you don’t want to see them?”
Did I? Or was I just flattered she’d singled me out? I said, “I’m going to Alaska tomorrow for five weeks. Could you send them to me? Scan them or something?”
“I’d rather not. You couldn’t come today, could you?”
“Today’s nuts.”
“Well. When you’re back, then. You have my number now.” She still sounded imperious, though maybe a little deflated. “Will you be in Anchorage?”
“Off and on.”
“A piece of mine is on display in the city museum. You could go see it.”
I was about to say okay and goodbye and hang up with no real plans either to go see her art or to get in touch when I got back, but something odd occurred to me. I said, “Why do you have Marian’s letters?”
“She left quite a few things to me. Paintings and family heirlooms. Some baker in Missoula had been storing stuff in his basement as a favor to her before she disappeared. The lawyers told him to ship it all to my mother. These were in the jumble. It might have been a mistake. She might not have meant to include them.”
I was still missing something. “But why did she leave you anything?”
Adelaide was quiet for so long I checked to make sure we were still connected. Finally she said, “I’d ask you to keep this to yourself for now, although I suppose it doesn’t matter so much, really, but Jamie Graves was my biological father.”
The War
England
December 1943
The next day
The farmer’s field where Marian had landed turned out to be only thirty miles from the No. 2 ferry pool at Whitchurch. She thought she had enough fuel. If not, she’d find another field. She spent the night on a chilly floor in the farmer’s kitchen, regarded with suspicion by his wife, and in the morning managed to get the Spit off the ground, managed to get to Whitchurch to refuel and on to Cosford to deliver the plane. Weather, she told them in the ops office by way of explanation. The plane was in one piece, so she was scolded only perfunctorily, told she’d be written up. Fine, she said. By the time she got back to Hamble in a taxi Anson, twilight had fallen. Numbly she climbed astride her motorbike, groped for the ignition. Without thinking, without quite knowing what she was doing, she rode toward Caleb’s camp, ran out of gas two miles out, walked the rest of the way.
At the gate, she calmly repeated over and over that she needed to see Caleb Bitterroot until the MP gave up trying to tell her she couldn’t just show up, that the camp was closed, that whatever her beef was with this Bitterroot person it wasn’t the United States Army’s problem, that she was trespassing on military property, miss, and would be prosecuted. Finally, he told her to sit and wait and he’d see what he could do.
Time was behaving strangely. She seemed to step out of it, only came back when Caleb was crouching beside her in the gatehouse. He understood Jamie was dead. He’d only had to look at her. She was grateful she wouldn’t have to say the words. Once she started crying, she couldn’t stop.
Another man appeared—a medic, she thought. He gave her two tablets and a paper cup of water.
After that, time stopped and started again, stuttered as though it were yet another machine running out of fuel. There were oncoming blinkered headlights and shadowed stone walls between moonlit fields and ancient trees making tunnels of darkness over the road and the hard bounce of a jeep. Somehow she directed the driver to her motorbike, and he and Caleb wedged it into the jeep’s little flatbed. Then there was the revolving door of the Polygon, Caleb’s arm around her shoulders, the yellow light of the lobby beyond the blackout curtains, and there was Ruth waiting slumped in a wingback chair in her ATA blues, standing as they came in, asking what had happened, asking Caleb who he was, demanding to be told what was going on. Marian wondered how Ruth could be so cruel as to ask, to make her say it. She remembered being in the elevator with each of them supporting one side of her. Ruth undressing her, Caleb putting her in bed. Her own voice, harsh, telling Ruth to leave, that she only wanted Caleb.