“You can. You’re a navigator.”
“That’s just a job,” he says. “A task.”
She tells him she can’t fly and navigate at the same time. Not on a flight like this. She won’t make it without him. “Is that what you want?” she asks.
“It doesn’t make any difference what I want.”
“What kind of thing is that to say?”
“We won’t make it. The end is the same, but I don’t want to be in the water.”
“We will make it. We have to try. Why can’t you finish this, think things over after? You could find a piece of land somewhere and live quietly, if it’s isolation you want.”
He looks at her with sympathy. “There won’t be an after. I’m sorry, Marian, I know this is hard on you, but I’m choosing the way I go. You can choose, too. And I want to know what it’s like, being here alone. I have a yearning for it.”
This she understands—in fact, he is giving her what she thought she wanted, to fly alone—but she says, “That’s the most selfish thing I’ve ever heard.”
Maybe, he says. But in Antarctica he feels in possession of himself because there’s nothing else. Or won’t be, once Marian is gone. He’s charted the route for her; she might be able to follow it alone. But, like he’s said, he believes they are at the end of the road. She can die either in Antarctica or in the Southern Ocean. “What you do is your choice,” he says, “but I’ve made up my mind.”
She demands to know why he’d agreed to come on this trip if he was only going to abandon her, sabotage her.
Because until now, he says, he’d believed they would make it, but he’d been afraid. Now he knows they won’t, and his fears are gone. Everything has been leading up to this. He’d had to be afraid so he would notice when he wasn’t anymore.
She tells him he will get her killed with his superstitious obstinacy, that it’s fine for him to have a death wish but she wants nothing to do with it. Ruth wouldn’t want him to do this, she says. She says, her voice cracking, that he can’t just abandon her.
“No,” he says. “You’re the one who’s going to abandon me.”
* * *
—
She writes one last entry in her logbook, breathless, scrawling. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge. If she makes it to New Zealand, having left Eddie on the ice, she will have nothing to say about the flight, the finished circle, will not be able to bear anyone reading the words of a person who would do something so shameful.
She tells herself he is leaving her no choice, but she wonders if she is simply not good enough with people to figure out how to persuade him. I don’t regret anything, she writes, but I will if I let myself. I can think only about the plane, the wind, and the shore, so far away, where land begins again.
If she dies, though, she wants some version of the story to persist, fragmented and incomplete as it may be, even if the chances of anyone ever finding it are vanishingly small. We’ve fixed the leak as best we can. She hesitates, then finally writes an I, not a we. I will go soon.
Probably the ice will calve and carry Little America out to sea and her logbook with it.
What I have done is foolish; I had no choice but to do it.
Probably the snow will bury it too deeply to ever be found.
No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession.
Probably.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
She closes the book, wraps it in Eddie’s life preserver, leaves it in the bunk room of Little America III.
Until she dies, she will wonder if she could have persuaded him to come with her. Until she dies, she will remember Eddie’s small, dark figure on the ice, waving to her with both arms as she circles up. She will always be afraid that his valedictory gesture might have changed, at some moment when she was too far away to notice, into a plea for her to return.
Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly
Twenty
I knocked on the door of the blue house. Joey Kamaka opened it and burst out laughing. He laughed so hard he bent over with his hands on his thighs. “It’s really you,” he said when he’d recovered. “I thought for sure someone was messing with me.”
He was wiry and barefoot, around sixty, in board shorts and a T-shirt, with a short gray ponytail. A small girl, maybe eight, also ponytailed, had her arms locked around his waist from behind and was peeping at me with giant cartoon bunny-rabbit eyes.