Another silence, something carefully stretched between them to test its strength. Matilda nods. “All right.”
Marian looks at her questioningly.
“Let’s get a plane,” Matilda says.
They talk for another hour, form the beginnings of a plan, poke around the edges of a formidable list of tasks. When Marian stands to leave, Matilda rises, too, hands her a canvas-bound book.
Marian flips through the blank pages. Yellow paper gridded with pale blue squares. “What’s this?”
“It’s for you to write in.”
“Write what in?”
“Write about the flight.”
Marian closes the book, holds it out. “I already have a logbook.”
“Call it whatever you want. A journal, a diary. Call it The Enchanted Chronicles of Marian Almighty for all I care. Don’t tie yourself in knots over it. Just write down what happens, and you can decide later what to do with it.” She surprises herself with her own earnestness as she reaches up to grip Marian’s shoulders, shakes her gently as she says, “You must do everything you can to remember. Not just what you see, but what it means. To you.”
Skip Notes
* From The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between: The Lost Logbook of Marian Graves. Published by D. Wenceslas & Sons, New York, 1959.
Why go at all? I have no answer beyond my certainty that I must.
—marian graves
Long Beach, California
33°47? N, 118°07? W
June 30, 1949
0 nautical miles flown
The fleeting golden moment between afternoon and evening. The sun hanging peaceably in the western sky, warming the broad pale beach and the wooden roller coaster and palm-lined promenade, the tidy ranks of small houses stretching inland among green-crowned trees, the sprawled figure of Marian Graves lying on her back in the overgrown grass behind her rented bungalow. A book rests open and facedown on her belly; it is the blank journal Matilda Feiffer had given her a year ago. A breeze ruffles her close cap of hair, soft and fine and so pale it is almost greenish, like the fluff inside an artichoke.
She checks her watch, holding her wrist above her face. Six-seventeen. Eddie had said he would drive himself from Florida. He was in the mood for a journey. You’d better be, Marian had replied over the crackling long-distance line. The flight would be twenty-three thousand nautical miles, give or take.
In a letter now three weeks old, he’d told her that he would arrive on this day, June 30th, at six-thirty in the evening, and, as he is a navigator, she’d taken him at his word.
She rolls onto her side, smooths the book flat, takes up the pen. She writes only rarely, and tentatively when she does, letting stray thoughts catch in the pages like crumbs. She’s surprised she writes at all. She can’t imagine her little scribbles （and they are scribbles—her handwriting is awful） ever making a real book, but some inconsistent, unplumbable impulse keeps nudging her to pick up the pen.
I’ve thought more than I should about whether it would be possible to do the flight alone. It’s an absurd idea, but I still pick at the question until reason puts its foot down and says, no, you cannot.
I mean no insult to Eddie; no person in the world would be fully welcome. The idea of going alone should terrify me, because going alone would mean death, but when I imagine it I feel no fear, only wistful longing. Does that mean I wish to die? I don’t think I do. But the pure and absolute solitude in which we leave the world exerts a pull. I suppose I think a solo flight would be the purest possible attempt. But why? There is Matilda’s question again. The reason sits there like a pebble just out of reach, inert and nondescript and insignificant, interesting only in its inaccessibility.
Or maybe the problem is that I want no navigator but Eddie, and also I never want to face Eddie.
A car horn sounds three times, quick and bright.
* * *
—
What had been her last words to Ruth at the Polygon Hotel? She doesn’t remember clearly—the sedative pills from the medic at Caleb’s camp had been powerful—but she has a horrible dread they had been Go away. Grief had made her cruel. She’d needed to hurt Ruth, to make her see she wanted Caleb instead, to drive her off. Jamie’s death had seemed like direct punishment for her having been foolish and selfish enough to enjoy her corner of the war, her freedom in it, and Ruth could never be disentangled from that.
Marian had written back to Ruth’s letter, but she’d taken too long. The envelope was returned. In September 1944, in North Carolina, Ruth’s plane had caught fire on takeoff and crashed. She died, Zip told Marian in Hamble. I’m sorry. I know you two were close.