What did I have? A photo of a faceless shepherd from sixty years ago, a scribbled reference to—maybe—a Native person who might never have existed. I will go soon, Marian had written at the end of her logbook. I. I’d never thought about how it was an I and not a we. What about Eddie? What about the plane? How could Marian have made it to New Zealand without anyone knowing? Was it even possible to pass as a man? What about Adelaide Scott? If Marian had survived, she’d chosen never to see her niece again.
“I don’t know what to think,” I said.
The breeze in the palm trees and the sound of the waves gave the quiet a shifting, velvety texture.
“What will you do?” Joey said.
“What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know, man. Say you get out there and start telling people you have this crazy theory she survived, and then what? If you’re right, and she did, she clearly didn’t want anyone to know. If you’re wrong, you look like a kook or like you just want attention or whatever. I guess my first impulse would be to let sleeping dogs lie.”
Kalani burst from the playhouse, running to greet a small gray-haired woman in a big sun hat who was carrying a huge plastic bin of pretzels under one arm and a huge box of frozen waffles under the other. “Joey,” she called, “can you help unload, please?”
“Okay,” he called back, “but you’ll have to entertain our guest.”
She looked up and spotted me. Her mouth opened in shock, and I could see how truly and totally she had not believed I would be on her porch. But here I was. Joey fell apart with laughter.
The Flight
Our flight is in defiance of the sun and its daily traverse. Come west, the sun says. It tugs at us, runs off like a child trying to entice us to follow. But we must go north, leaving the light behind.
—marian graves
Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf, to Campbell Island
78°28? S, 163°51? W to 52°34? S 169°14? E
March 4, 1950
21,785 nautical miles flown
The worst of her agony, for the first hours, is that she thinks she will reach New Zealand. The day is blue and mostly clear. Eddie had given her charts he’d already marked up with bearings and angles for the sextant. He had hugged her tight and kissed her hard on the cheek, shaken her hand, sent her off to what he at least claimed to believe would be her death. He had made her promise not to send anyone for him in the unlikely event of her reaching land. He said there would be no point, that she should tell people he had fallen in a crevasse. She thinks of him lying in the snow on a clear night, waiting to die. She thinks of Barclay almost giving himself to the snow the night they met, of Caleb lost in the snowstorm as a boy. They had both almost surrendered themselves to the cold but had changed their minds. She finds herself hoping that Eddie will not change his, that the stars and the aurora will beckon him. Maybe she had left the logbook behind in order to abandon the truth along with Eddie.
She is past the PNR when her fuel begins to disappear too quickly. Vapor streams from under the left wing. At first she is aware only of relief. Eddie will avoid the fate he most feared.
A gannet plunge. She remembers what she’d written. She watches the fuel drop and decides to be true to her word. She decides, and yet she flies on. Does she understand then that she wishes to live? This memory will remain oddly blank, resisting her attempts to dredge the truth from it. Later she will conclude she’d had many contradictory wishes: to live, to die, to go back and live her life over and change everything, to live her life again and change nothing.
She doesn’t know how much time passes before she steels herself. She doesn’t think but pushes down on the yoke, dives. The engines cry out. The water rises up to meet her.
When she had thought she was going to fly a Spitfire into the sea, Jamie, already dead, had told her not to. She’d listened then. She’d seen the end of the war because of it. She’d seen rubble and rivers and elephants on red dunes. She’d seen manta rays and the polar ice caps. She’d lain in bed with Caleb on Oahu, listening to the trade winds. No voice comes now, nothing but the whining engines, the rush of wind, but she pulls up. The plane levels off not far above the waves. The great gliding birds, the huge-winged albatrosses, carve the air. She doesn’t belong among them. Up she goes, back into the sky. Her hands tremble. She pulls the charts onto her lap.
The fuel gauge doesn’t care that she has changed her mind. The needle still drops. Vapor still streams from the wing. She searches Eddie’s pencil marks on the gridded blue paper for a secret passage back into life. First she sees Macquarie Island, twenty miles long and oriented almost perfectly north-south. She knows there is a weather station there, manned year-round. But the island is well to the west, against the wind. She doesn’t have the fuel. Farther north but farther east is another speck. Campbell Island.