“Do you want to fly it now?”
“I might not,” I said, “but I want to try.”
“Cool,” she said.
This time it was afternoon, and there was no marine layer, just open sky dingy with smog. Catalina wallowed offshore; the ocean horizon was soft and hazy. In every other direction, the city sprawled and sprawled. The jets sailing up from LAX, noses in the air, almost made me feel sorry for our plucky little Cessna. “Okay,” said the pilot as we churned effortfully toward Malibu, “go ahead and take the yoke. Just fly steady and level.”
* * *
—
In Hawaii, when I left Joey Kamaka’s house, I’d gone back to my hotel and flopped flat on my face on my bed and cried. I cried because Marian Graves hadn’t drowned and, to one person, hadn’t been lost. I cried because of Joey’s kindness, because I was jealous of Kalani having a childhood, because I was the kind of asshole who could be jealous of a little kid whose parents couldn’t take care of her. I cried for Mitch and for my parents. I cried because I’d gotten going and sometimes you just have to ride out the tears.
Beyond my balcony, beyond Waikiki Beach, out in the middle of the Pacific, the sun was easing down. Surfers dotted the water, sitting on their boards. Kids played in the shallows. In a movie, this would be the moment when I would rush outside and plunge cathartically into the sea. Newly whole, forever changed, I would float on my back, smiling beatifically at the sky.
Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I put on my bathing suit. I rode the mirrored elevator down to the tiki-chic lobby and jogged outside in my flip-flops and labored through the perfect, powdery sand. I dropped my hotel robe and walked into the water and dove under.
Down there, eyes closed, rocking with the swell, I imagined the sand sloping away into darkness, into submerged deserts and canyons and mountain ranges, rising again into the edges of all the continents. I thought of ships and airplanes and bones being eaten away to nothing by rust and by tiny nibbling things, grown over by coral and sponges, scuttled across by crabs. I thought of the Peregrine and how no one would ever find it. No one would ever know where to look. When I surfaced, a wave lifted me, pushed me back toward shore. I swam out again. I’d forgotten, somehow, that the sun was fire, that it was molten, until I watched it waver and redden as it slid, almost oozed, behind the sea.
The water dimmed; the clouds flushed. I didn’t know what I would do after the movie was finished. It occurred to me that I could go to New Zealand or to Antarctica, keep playing detective, but, no, I didn’t need to know the whole story. No story is ever whole. When I’d looked up Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, I’d read that he died after someone reached inside him and cut off a piece of his heart, but then his body didn’t decay, as though without his whole heart he couldn’t transform anymore, not even into dust. I hoped Marian had kept her whole heart.
* * *
—
I put my hands on the yoke. The plastic was warm from the sun, and I could feel the vibration of the engine. The pilot showed which instruments to watch, showed me what was supposed to be the horizon and what was supposed to be the wings, how to line them up. “Doing okay?” she said.
“I think so,” I said.
“If you pull back a little bit,” she said, “the nose will go up.”
I pulled back. The windshield filled slowly with sky.
Los Angeles, 2015
Twenty-Two
When the plane hits the water, the sound cuts out except for a faint ringing. Before, there’d been wind and the engines and my amplified breathing, but then, at the moment of impact, it all goes away. Seen from a distance: a massive, silent splash in an empty sea. The plane rocks in the waves. The nose dips under; the rest slides after. The ocean seals itself shut. Huge white birds glide along the waves, and you hear that high, sustained ringing, quiet enough to seem half imagined. Then we’re underwater, looking at me and Eddie in the cockpit. Bubbles rise from my nose; my cropped Marian hair wafts around my head. Eddie is unconscious, his forehead bloody. I lean forward, looking up at the receding surface, wistful but resolute. I close my eyes. Then, as though to give me privacy while I drown, we cut away to a shot of the Peregrine from above, submerged, its shape sinking into blackness.
I expect a fade to black, but instead, light seeps in through the dark, eats through it like mold, fills the screen. “That was Bart’s idea,” Redwood says, whispering even though we are the only ones in the screening room. “The white.” Music fades in. The end credits start.