“I have free will. I didn’t have to come.”
“But—” She doesn’t know if she wants him to exonerate her or confirm her guilt. “After what happened to Ruth…”
She wants to say she couldn’t bear it if something happened to him, too, but of course their fates will be hitched together. If something happens to him, she probably won’t have to bear it because she will also be gone.
He sets down his drink. “Let’s say this right now and then leave it as an established, mutually understood fact. We can’t have it hanging over us, and, anyway, this is the truth. Marian, Ruth’s death wasn’t your fault. I’m not saying this to be kind. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve even let myself blame you at times, but the blame wouldn’t stick.”
“If she’d stayed in England—”
“She might have crashed a different plane or died in a car accident or gotten hit by a buzz bomb. Plenty of people did that last year. You can’t know what would have happened. Look, she was a grown woman. She made her own choices. If you thought you might cause a death every time you disappointed another person, you’d be paralyzed. Do you know how many men accidentally got their friends killed in the war? How many people died because of random, casual choices?” She is looking across the patchy little lawn. Everything seems unnaturally still in the fog. Eddie says, “I’m going to make it a condition of my services as a navigator that you take my line on this. I loved her, too. And I’m telling you to let it go. Okay? Say okay, and we won’t talk about this anymore.”
Marian understands that no one can ever absolve her. She says okay.
It was a simple thing, in the end, to begin.
—marian graves
Whenuapai Aerodrome, Auckland, New Zealand, to Aitutaki, Cook Islands
36°48? S, 174°38? E to 18°49? S, 159°45? W
December 31, 1949
1,752 nautical miles flown
The slow predawn glug of fuel into the tanks, the walkaround, the checking of checklists, the coughing start of one engine and then the other, the roaring run-up, the heavy acceleration into lift. A circle over the aerodrome’s intersecting triangles of runways and taxiways, dipping the wings. Matilda Feiffer on the hangar’s apron, waving with both arms beside the gaggle of newspaper reporters and photographers she’s summoned, shrinking to nothing. She’d appeared one day without warning as Marian and Eddie returned from a test flight, was waiting at the aerodrome with a cameraman to document their landing, drum up some newsreel publicity. They’d stood grinning awkwardly beside the plane while the camera rolled, then Matilda had taken them to dinner at her hotel in Auckland.
The city spreads to the south as they rise; bays and inlets eat away at the long northern finger of the North Island. Farms gridded off by belts of alders and eucalypts pass below, low green mountains, the shore with its wide ruffles of surf. Then water, only water.
They leave on New Year’s Day, but they will cross the dateline on the way to the Cook Islands, returning them to 1949. They each bring only a small valise, soft-sided to save weight. Eddie will get winter things in Alaska, and additional Antarctic gear has been shipped ahead to South Africa. Marian’s reindeer suit is stuffed behind one of the auxiliary fuel tanks that occupy the fuselage.
The plane is silver now, its jungle-green paint stripped away to save five hundred pounds of weight, its glass windows switched out for Plexi, its artificial rubber fittings swapped for natural, which won’t crack as easily in the cold. A hundred other changes. （“It’s really very chic,” Matilda Feiffer had pronounced upon seeing the plane’s polished silver skin.）
Light winds. Harmless clouds strewn loosely as spilled popcorn. Eddie moves between his desk and the cockpit and the Plexiglas astrodome, taking his sights and making his calculations with the leisurely assurance of a tennis pro lobbing balls. He traps the sun in the sextant, hands up notes with course adjustments, plucking first Norfolk Island out of the empty blue, then Nadi in Fiji, then Apia in Samoa. Lagoons like turquoise amoebas. The bits of land scattered across the Pacific are so sparse that the existence of each island seems startling, perplexing, almost worrisome. How did this wind up here all alone? What will become of it?
They had done an earlier shake-out flight to the Cooks, and he knows this tract of ocean already, has a feel for it that runs deeper than the course plotted on his chart in pencil. He knows the airplane and its deafening drone and its gasoline reek. He knows the shape of Marian’s elbow and knee visible through the cockpit doorway. He pencils his neat log of figures, updating the distance they’ve covered, the time they will arrive. Distance equals speed multiplied by time. Time equals distance divided by speed. He feels the lines of latitude sliding underneath like the rungs of a ladder, watches the whitecaps through the drift meter, measuring the difference between where they are going and where they mean to go. That’s where life is, that wedge of discrepancy.