She knocks on his door. “Come in,” he says at once. He is sitting on the bed, fully clothed. The bed doesn’t look slept in.
“Did you sleep?” she asks from the doorway.
“I don’t know. No. I haven’t been, much. And tonight I had a feeling. Is it time?”
“The weather’s gone right.”
He looks down at the floor, clasps and twists his big hands. “Right for now. Three hours until we leave, probably. Maybe thirteen more in the air. It could be a whiteout when we get there. It could be anything.”
She fights her impatience. Does he think she doesn’t know this? “At some point we have to leap.”
He looks up at her, wretched, supplicating. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You mean you don’t want to go?” She is astonished.
He shakes his head. “I mean I don’t know if I can find the way.”
She comes into the room, sits beside him. “If anyone can, you can.”
“That’s not much of a guarantee.”
“There never was any. Each of us had to accept that the other might fail.”
“I’ve gotten shaken up.”
“The storm?”
“That didn’t help, but it’s been more of an accumulation. I thought I’d get used to the long flights over water, but I haven’t.” He presses his fingertips gingerly to the side of his skull, and pain flickers across his face.
“Are you all right?”
“Just a headache. It’ll pass.” He takes a bottle of aspirin from his pocket, chews two.
“You did so well to Svalbard,” she says as though reminding a recalcitrant child that he had liked a certain food just yesterday.
“That was different.”
She can’t deny this. Near the North Pole, the rules of navigation changed, but still they’d had decent charts, plenty of advice, radio beams from Barrow and Thule, people waiting in Longyearbyen. They’d had the good luck of clear skies, too, unobscured stars by which Eddie could take their bearings. In the south he will have woefully patchy charts, no beacons, and no stars except the sun, which is likely to be frequently occluded by vicious, fast-changing weather.
He says, “I’ve been thinking a lot about everything that could go wrong. But I’ve also been thinking about what will happen if nothing goes wrong. Do you think about after?”
“I’m trying to take it day by day. Each leg, each landing.” She senses Eddie is in danger of coming apart but can’t gauge the seriousness of the problem, as a structural weakness in a plane may or may not spell disaster, depending on the stresses exerted. He is bent forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his big head in his big hands. She says, “Have I dragged you into this?”
“No.” He shakes his head again. “No, I chose it. I needed…I needed something, and I thought this might be it.”
“We’ve come so far,” she says quietly, pleading. “It’s just more flying. Land, water, ice—it’s all the same, really.”
This is a lie, of course. They will be flying into severe danger. He knows this as well as she does—but she doesn’t care. She almost couldn’t conceive of caring. She has hardened inside. Only flying matters.
She knows he knows she is lying, but he says, “You’re right.”
She is impatient to get to the airfield. “Are you ready?”
He lifts his head. He looks exhausted. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”
* * *
—
They take off at dawn, arc to the south, catch one last glimpse of Table Mountain in the rosy sideways spill of the rising sun. A great migration of whitecaps moves across the sea. The Peregrine bounces on the wind. Until they gain a bit of altitude, Marian is much too hot in her woolen clothes. She can’t imagine needing the reindeer parka and finnesko boots and thick socks piled in the copilot’s seat, but soon enough she won’t be able to imagine not needing them.
After two hours, a thin veil of mist materializes below, broken in places. Ahead, a wall of cloud rises up, gray and solid, too tall to climb over. They pass into pale obscurity.
From time to time, Eddie hands up a note with a course correction. She can glean nothing from his impassive expression. She tries to send him a transmission of her own, a message of faith: He can find the way. Perhaps what’s broken in him will be mended when they close the circle.
In the sixth hour, the cloud begins to lighten, thinning from above, and there comes a white jostle and rattle, the magnificent pop into the open sky, the belly of the plane skimming the white. Eddie passes a note. PNR -30. Point of no return in thirty minutes.