When she woke, Caleb was asleep in the armchair, and Ruth had gone. She wondered why he was in her room, and then she remembered, and she put out her arms first to ward off the knowledge and then for him to come to her.
The Celestial Wind
Eighteen
I climbed out of a plane and walked to where a man was waiting for me by a hangar: Barclay Macqueen, the bootlegger who would be my husband. I felt powerful and capable, in command of the whole fucking sky. He’d heard I could fly, he said. He needed a pilot.
Cut.
Hadley, go again, please.
We were filming in Alaska, which was playing not only itself in the movie but also Montana, like how theater actors play multiple parts both to save money and to show off.
I climbed out of a plane and walked to where a man was waiting for me by a hangar. He’d heard I could fly, he said. He needed a pilot. He had some—significant pause—goods needing to be picked up in Canada.
I knew he would change my life, and I was afraid. I let the fear into my eyes. There were mountains all around us, trees rusting away with autumn.
I’d thought if I played Marian Graves I’d get to be someone who wasn’t afraid, but now I knew that wasn’t the point at all. The point was to be someone who didn’t treat fear like a god to be appeased.
Because movies get shot all out of order, it was like we’d taken Marian’s life and dropped it from a great height onto something hard, and every day we picked up different pieces and pressed them into place, paving a path back to the beginning, which was Marian’s death and so also the end. It was only because of coincidence and soundstage availability that we would film the last scene—the crash—last, but I was glad. I wanted a conclusion. I wanted the end to be the end. Bart was right when he said we don’t always notice beginnings. Endings are usually easier to detect.
But the more of Marian I fit together, the more I felt the void on the other side, the empty space that held the truth but didn’t contain it. Jamie Graves had fathered a daughter, and Marian had known. This was true, but nobody knew to believe it.
My dear, you are a revelation, Hugo texted one night after watching the dailies. I can scarcely see you at all, not even when I squint.
* * *
—
When I had a morning off, I went to the Anchorage Museum. Adelaide Scott’s installation had a room to itself. A temporary exhibit, the sign said. Below was a list of patrons who had made it possible, including Carol Feiffer. In the middle of the pale wood floor under a skylight stood a huge white ceramic cylinder maybe ten feet high and twenty in diameter, its surface stippled with zillions of tiny black etched lines that, together, made an image of the sea, textured with light and current and wind. Toward the top was a horizon, gently scalloped, with suggestions of clouds and distant birds above it.
A smooth circular curtain of rigid pearly-white plastic hung suspended from the ceiling, encircling the drum, embossed with the same image, the same stippled sea. I walked around through the gap, passing between two versions of the same thing. I wanted to step back, get some vantage to take in the whole, but it was designed so you couldn’t do that. You had to be trapped in it.
* * *
—
Redwood and I sat in the bar on the top floor of a hotel in Anchorage. It was all wood and brass and windows. Below, the city’s ragged asphalt edge met a spreading broad flat of water, and on the far side of the water was a forested rise with Denali sticking up in the distance beyond, two hundred miles away but so gigantic its white top still peeped over the horizon.
“Adelaide Scott called me,” I said.
“Really? Why?”
I felt a nagging trepidation, but I forged on. “She said she has some letters from Marian I might be interested in.”
He seemed almost affronted. “You? Why you?”
Of course I’d asked myself the same question, but I bristled. “You’d have to ask her,” I said.
“What’s in them?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t get into details.” I played with the skewer of olives in my drink.
“Sorry, I just— Did it seem like there’s something in them that would change things? At dinner she was pretty adamant she didn’t know anything helpful. And now it’s a little late.”
I’d been planning to tell him about Jamie Graves being Adelaide’s father, but I found I couldn’t. I’d only be doing it for the dopamine hit, to feel important, to create a bond. As soon as I’d spoken the words, the information would be as much Redwood’s as mine and then, inevitably, Carol’s and then everyone’s. It made no sense to feel possessive about a fact that had nothing to do with me, but I did. Adelaide hadn’t forbidden me from telling. She’d said she was tired of keeping secrets, didn’t expect me to take on that role. She’d said she felt like she was playing Russian roulette by telling me, not in a bad way. I got what she meant. I’d slapped that USB drive down right in front of Gwendolyn.