Redwood’s face is bright with reflected light. He points. “There!” His name is on the screen, and then it is gone.
I don’t watch for mine. “Ready?” I say, and we get up and push out through a side door into the blinding afternoon.
It’s not some big triumph, that I didn’t freak out when I flew the Cessna, that I made it go up and down, left and right. Mostly I felt relief. And a little hit of amazement. And then I must have slipped back into being Marian Graves because, for a second, I felt free.
The End
She’s in the ocean now, as she was always meant to be. Most of her has come to rest, scattered, on the cold southern seafloor, but some of her smallest, lightest fragments, floating dust, are still being carried along by the currents. Fish ate a few tiny motes of her, and a penguin ate one of those fish and regurgitated it to his chick, and some infinitesimal speck of her was back on Antarctica for a while, as guano on a nest of pebbles, until a storm washed her back out to sea.
She dies twice, the second time forty-six years after the first. She dies in the Southern Ocean; she dies on a sheep farm in the Fjordland region of New Zealand.
* * *
—
The man who opens the door to the hut on Campbell Island is called Harold, and he is, as he would say, being a practitioner of understatement, a bit surprised to find a sodden, semiconscious woman at his feet. She is mumbling, jabbering. As best he can make out, she is begging him not to tell anyone she’s there. But who are you? he asks, heaving her to her feet, bringing her inside. By then she is past being able to respond.
There is another man on the island, John, and a border collie called Swift. The hut and a few small outbuildings had been constructed during the war to house coast-watchers, stationed there to alert the mainland if they saw enemy ships. They never did, but their meteorological observations proved so useful that, after the war, the station was kept going. A yearlong posting for a certain kind of man. A deliberate, meticulous kind of man who needed little society, who was content to perform the same tasks every day, take the same measurements, record the same data, translate that data to Morse code, and send it to some unseen recipient for use by people he will never meet, would prefer not to meet.
It is one of the most significant waypoints of Marian’s life that Harold and John are two such men.
She spends several days in fevered delirium. When she first starts to regain her senses, she is afraid of the quiet, bearded figures she perceives around her, thinks of what so many men, sequestered on a desolate island for months, would be likely to do with a woman. But Harold and John only ever touch her with unobtrusive concern—a hand on her forehead, a changing of the bandage on her face where the rocks had cut her, support under her neck as she sips broth—and never leer or linger, even when they have to help her pee in a bucket beside the bed. Both have wives and children in Christchurch, but over time she comes to suspect they prefer the island, are content with their barometers and whirligigs and weather balloons. When she’s regained some strength, she tells them a little bit of her story, and later all of it, because she thinks they’ll be more likely to keep her secret if they can survey the entirety of its surrounding landscape, decide for themselves her right to it. The only thing she can’t bear to tell them is that she left Eddie behind. She tells them her navigator fell into a crevasse, burns with shame instead of fever.
They listen gravely, without comment, and retreat outside to talk between themselves. When they return, they tell her they had received, a week before she arrived, a radio alert to report any sighting of a C-47 Dakota, feared lost. They ask who will miss her. She says, “No one.” Caleb would forgive the lie. She says she has no husband, no children, no parents, no brother. They tell her they will respect her wishes, not report her, but also that the ship that brought them will not return until January, nearly ten months. She might change her mind before then. For now they have no objection to her remaining.
Shame again. She has invaded and disrupted their little colony of two, spoiled their peaceful year. She promises to make herself useful, and they nod, unconcerned. When she asks about food, they say there ought to be enough, plus, if need be, there are seabirds and their eggs, some cabbages they are growing, and also sheep, left over from a failed experiment in which the government leased the island to farmers. She brings no hardship, they say.
Do they think she is wrong to try to leave herself behind? They exchange inscrutable glances. Finally, Harold says, “We reckon it’s your business.” But—she asks—what about the ship, when it comes? They will have to explain her; she will be found out, and all this trouble will be for nothing. They say that is something to be considered later. There is no hurry.