South still tugs at her compass. Empty ocean surrounds her. Finding the island would be difficult even if her navigation skills weren’t so rusty. Maybe she will fail, but she will try.
Of the next hours, she will remember capturing the sun in the sextant, scribbling calculations, churning with internal debates. The fear in her is smothered almost to nothing by the necessity of focus, of action. She will not remember how she comes to conclude that the plane itself must be lost, sacrificed, that she must try, if she can, to keep her survival a secret, that the only way she can contend with continued life is to make a new one. These decisions will become simple facts of her past, way points at which she turned, altering her destination. Any ambivalence she feels, any counterarguments she makes to herself will be lost, erased by the immutability of what has been done.
When, under a high overcast, the island’s silhouette breaks the horizon, she sheds her reindeer parka, gets into her parachute and Mae West. The island grows steadily nearer. She braces the steering yoke as best she can. The plane only needs to be steady enough, and only for the few minutes she requires. When land is below, she goes to the back of the fuselage, heaves open the door, and jumps.
She has never done a parachute jump. Pridefully, she’d told herself she’d landed planes when other pilots would have jumped, but now, plummeting through space, she thinks some practice would have been useful. She pulls the rip cord. With a violent jerk, the chute opens.
The Peregrine flies on, oblivious to its new independence, the imminence of its watery end. A pang. She looks away. Between her feet sways a grassy, tussocked mountain.
Here is a truth: She prefers to hide, to cease being Marian Graves entirely rather than face what she has done to Eddie. She no longer cares the circle is unfinished. That causes her no shame. But she believes she brings death to those around her. Before she left, she had gone to Seattle to meet Jamie’s child. She had thought she would visit the girl from time to time after the flight, know her as she grew up, but now she is certain she would bring only misfortune. Let Adelaide be something else entirely. Let her not be a Graves.
The wind pushes Marian out over a long and narrow inlet of black water. An albatross glides by with a whoosh, turning its head to inspect her. She had seen them nesting on the tussocked mountain as she descended: enormous, blindingly white birds settled among the windblown grass like dollops of snow. Glossy black water between her boots still. She pulls on the parachute’s handles, trying to steer, but the wind ushers her firmly out toward the mouth of the inlet, out to sea. Just off a rocky beach, not wanting to be blown farther from shore, she unclips her harness and drops.
The cold of that water. The force of it. She makes her gannet plunge after all but feetfirst. She sees blurry darkness, a silver ceiling. Stunned as a clubbed fish, she placidly watches the surface recede until she remembers she must pull the cords of her Mae West to inflate it.
She will remember the air and waves, the heaviness of her boots and clothes, the numbing cold, the startling nearby porpoise leap of a small penguin out of the water. Surf crashes. Black ropes of kelp long and fat as fire hoses writhe in the surge as she is dashed on the rocks—she keeps only a jagged fragment of the event: a cascade of foam, a hard impact. Her Mae West is punctured, her face badly scraped, her nose broken. A last churning tumble, and finally there is coarse sand under her fingers.
She drags herself from the water, permits herself to lie still for a moment in her sodden clothes before her chattering teeth tell her she must walk. Dense, brittle shrubs grab at her ankles, mud sucks at her boots. （She’s been lucky with the tide. Later, when she has been on the island for a while and retraces this first walk, there will no beach at all, only a cliff.） She sits and rests many times, is stumbling and hypothermic when she reaches a hut marked by a radio mast and spinning anemometer, smoke rising from a chimney pipe. With the last of her strength, she knocks on the door.
A Dive with Intent
Twenty-One
When I got back to L.A., before I had to film the crash, I took another flying lesson. This time the instructor was a woman, a no-nonsense sort of gal in Wrangler jeans with a strict bob of orange hair and aviator shades. “I took a lesson once before,” I told her as she walked me around the plane, explaining its parts, “but I freaked out when it was my turn to fly.”
“What do you mean freaked out?” she said.
“I just didn’t want to fly it. I let go of the controls. Like this.” I held up my hands as though someone were pointing a gun at me.