“Maybe it’s performance art.”
“Ha. Well, if you’re going to Hawaii, you should look up the kid who was raised by Caleb Bitterroot. He’s old now like me, but I’m pretty sure he still lives in the same house on Oahu where Marian stayed during the flight. We send Christmas cards.” I had trouble imagining this woman sending a Christmas card. “His name’s Joey Kamaka,” she said. “I met him once, when I went to see Caleb.”
Stupidly, I repeated, “You went to see Caleb? Marian’s Caleb?”
“I went through a whole seeking phase in my twenties. I’d known my dad wasn’t my biological father since I was fourteen, but I hadn’t really tried to face it. So then I did try.”
After my uncle Mitch died, I’d come home from New York to go through his house before selling it, and I’d found a folder of letters from my father. We make each other miserable, my father had written about my mother before I was born, but we’ve decided we prefer our particular misery and the euphoria of our reconciliations to steady bovine contentment.
The letters turned even bleaker after I was born, as my father realized a baby wasn’t going to solve their problems. I don’t know why anyone thinks babies will make literally anything easier. Reading his words—hearing his voice, in a way, for the first time—I’d started wondering if my father had crashed the plane on purpose. Later, when I hired that P.I. to look into the crash, I’d asked him if he thought a murder-suicide was possible, and he’d said, sure, anything was possible. But then he added that, in his opinion, if that’s what my father had done, he’d have brought me along, too. These guys usually do the whole family, he said.
I said to Adelaide, “How did you find out that Jamie was your…”
“Biological father? My parents told me. My brothers were gone to college by then, and they just sat me down and came out with it. My dad was a doctor. He’d been a medic in Europe when I was conceived. The story wasn’t particularly dramatic. Jamie passed through Seattle during the war, and he and my mother reconnected, as they say. It was a fling. She wrote to my father as soon as she learned she was pregnant and told him everything. He was a very understanding man. He loved her, though I imagine my existence strained things. She wrote to Jamie, too, but he was already dead. So, eventually, she wrote to Marian, but the letter took a while to find her.”
I said, “I watched that documentary about your project with the sunken boats—”
“Boat-like objects.”
“Was that about Jamie?”
“I didn’t want to think so at the time. I called it Sea Change. Do you know that verse, from The Tempest? ‘Full fathom five thy father lies.’？”
I didn’t know.
“？‘Of his bones are coral made,’？” she said. “？‘Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’？” She smiled wryly. “You can’t help being seduced by the image. I think it’s less about the body and more about how our imagination does its best to contend with death, and fails.”
I thought about holding the Cessna’s yoke in my hands like it was a bomb. I thought about crashing a fake plane into a fake ocean, the fade to black. I asked, “What was Caleb like?”
“Charming, drank a little too much. I only spent a few days with him. He could be boisterous and then suddenly cloud over. He’d clearly loved Marian, but he didn’t seem like the loss had devastated him. Sometimes he even talked about her in the present tense, which made me wonder if he’d ever really internalized her death. Or maybe he’d just known so many people who died. I don’t know. He and I talked more about Jamie than Marian. Like I said, though, you should look up Joey Kamaka. He might know more.”
“I still don’t understand why me, though. Why don’t you want to do it? Why do you think I should?”
“It’s not the way I look for truth, personally, piecing information together. It depresses me. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the truth. As far as why you, I don’t know that, either. It’s just an idea that got into my head. The connections appeal to me. You playing Marian. Your parents.” She lifted the document box onto her footstool, removed the lid. “Take a look.”
“I might run to the bathroom first,” I told her. “Where is it?”
I was thinking I’d pee and then just go right out the front door, not look back, not take on the responsibility of deciding what to do with whatever was in the letters, not continue on as some pawn in Adelaide’s art installation, but when I came out of the bathroom, revving up for my escape, there on the wall staring back at me was Marian Graves, the original of the charcoal portrait I’d seen pinned up on the costume designer’s inspiration wall. Strange that it was real, an actual object in the world, something that could be framed and hung up. Her brother’s hand had made those lines, had summoned her face from a blank page.