“I didn’t have anywhere better to be.”
“Come on.”
“It’s the truth. First I tried going home to Michigan, then I tried Chicago, then I went down to Miami. Nothing’s been quite right.” He splashes more gin into her glass, then his. “Maybe I’m just restless. Don’t tell me you got back from the war and settled right in.”
“No, I wouldn’t say so.”
* * *
—
In a way, she had deserted. Two months after V-E Day, in the summer of 1945, she’d ferried a plane to France, and instead of hopping a taxi plane back to Britain, she’d hitched a ride into Paris, gone on from there. The ATA didn’t need her anymore, anyway. She’d brought her little nest egg from saving and smuggling, the bills hidden in her rucksack and about her person. She drifted east into Germany, walked and hitched through pulverized areas populated by scarecrow people and the charred corpses of tanks and trucks, through towns and villages, even cities, that appeared untouched. Soldiers in tattered uniforms walked along roadsides and families carting all their possessions. The zones of occupation had yet to harden, and she went all the way to Berlin, watched kerchiefed women clearing rubble.
From Germany she’d gone to Switzerland, idyllic in its undisturbed neutrality, resplendent by then in autumn colors. She’d spent the winter in Italy, crossed the Mediterranean, spent a year making her way down the length of Africa through deserts and jungles, along wide, muddy rivers.
She took up with a man in Bechuanaland. One evening, in the Namib Desert, they watched a line of desert elephants walk along the rim of a sand dune. The animals and the sky behind them were red with dust. Marian found herself relishing the prospect of making camp, having a drink and a fire, going to bed with the man. From the sweetness that ran through her, she knew she had emerged from the war. She wasn’t free of it, but she never would be.
She made her way to Cape Town, caught a ship for New York. When they sailed, she stood on deck looking to the south, in the direction of Antarctica, marveling that the only thing between it and her was water.
* * *
—
“It took me a long time to come back,” she says to Eddie, “but that’s another story. When I finally did, I went to Missoula to look for a friend, and instead I found Matilda’s letters. They’d kept them at the post office.” There had been a letter from Sarah in Seattle, too. After she’d read that Jamie had a daughter, she’d folded the papers up again and pushed them away, shocked by the force of her grief. She’d been in Caleb’s cabin. He was, of course, the friend she’d come looking for, but he’d been gone to Hawaii for months. No one knew if he planned to return.
“So your body came back,” Eddie said, “but your mind was already running away again.”
“I don’t know if I’d call this running away.”
“What is it, then? Why do the flight?”
“Everyone wants to know why. I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
If they are extraordinarily lucky and also don’t make anything except the best possible decisions at all times, they will complete what they are setting out to do. Or they will fail. Or they will die, which is different from failure. There will be a last smashup against some mountain somewhere or a hard flat of sand or a cracked and jumbled glacier or, most likely, the surface of the ocean that kills with its hardness and then softens and swallows, hiding the evidence. Sometimes she thinks she has invented the flight as an elaborate suicide. Sometimes she thinks she is immortal.
She drinks. “All right. Here’s the best I can do. When Matilda asked what I wanted, the first thing that came into my head was this…vision of flying over the poles. Every time I thought of it, I felt a burst of nerves, like there was a live wire I kept touching. But—and I’ll only ever admit this to you—when I wrote and told her what I wanted, I never expected her to agree. And now I actually have to do it.”
Carefully, he says, “You don’t, though. Not really. You could change your mind.”
“No, I can’t. You could—and I would understand, truly. But I can’t.”
“You can. Matilda could sell the plane.”
“I’m not worried about Matilda. It’s the live wire. It’s still there. Maybe it’s more like a cattle prod. I want to do the flight, but I dread it. I’m always thinking about what could go wrong. So much could go wrong, and now I’ve roped you in, too.”