* * *
—
After ten months wearing clothes borrowed from the beards, it seems natural to continue dressing as a man. She feels as she had as a teenager, skulking around Missoula in overalls, hat pulled low, though now her disguise is more convincing, with her broken nose and weathered skin, her rough hands and her shoulders sturdy from shearing.
She goes north into the country around Mount Cook and gets a job as a high-country shepherd. She keeps to herself, which is easy to do, living in a hut on the side of a mountain, tending to unruly bleating masses of Merinos. They aren’t as skittish as the Campbell sheep, nor quite as hardy, but they are by no means docile. She gets better with sheepdogs, better at shearing, though she is never especially quick. She speaks little, doesn’t complain, can hold her drink, and so is respected. From the beards she’d picked up a passable Kiwi accent that gradually becomes second nature; any oddnesses she explains away by saying, truthfully, that her mother had been American. Later, some people will claim they’d had suspicions about her sex, but at the time none are voiced, not directly. Certainly she takes some ribbing for her slightness—Twig, they call her in the shearing shed—but her broken nose and her pilot’s squint and the scars on her face from frostbite and the rocky Campbell shore give her a tough look. She’s never had much in the way of a chest, nothing a hard band of elastic and a couple layers of shirts can’t hide. She calls herself Martin Wallace.
She believes she deserves to be isolated and unknown, that loneliness is a fitting punishment. But time weakens her resolve. Her self-recriminations grow softer. She has been a shepherd for three years when a photo of her （face obscured by shadow） happens to appear in a Queenstown newspaper, and on impulse she cuts it out and sends it to Caleb. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, she writes, wondering if he will remember the story he’d once told her. She can’t bring herself to write down the bald truth, prefers to leave things up to chance. She has, in some ways, begun to lose any rigid idea about what constitutes truth. She catches herself remembering Eddie falling into a crevasse, though it had not happened. Or perhaps it had, later. What she is really remembering is her own foot popping through the snow, being balanced between a white nothingness and a black one.
Caleb comes to see her for Christmas in 1954, and an aperture is opened between her two lives. When she meets his ship in Auckland, it is her first trip to the city since she’d departed for Aitutaki with Eddie, and so the circle is finally closed, without fanfare, five years after she’d begun it. With Caleb, for two weeks, she returns to her body. There is no question, as there never has been, of him staying, but there is equal certainty he will return.
She’d told him, in Hawaii, that she envied how he’d found a place that quelled his restlessness. She had not thought she would ever find such a place for herself, but in New Zealand, she does. Perhaps her peace is inherent to the land, or perhaps she has simply exhausted herself. She longs to fly an airplane again, but she doesn’t long to see over the horizon. And she feels she must make sacrifices in atonement for her survival, for leaving Eddie. She will not fly. She will not know Jamie’s daughter.
* * *
—
The presence of her own book on her shelves is a dark joke. She had never quite intended to write it, and yet there it is, in its mustard dust jacket. If she had succeeded, if all had gone according to plan and they had landed triumphantly back in Auckland, she would never have let it be published as it was. She had left it behind in Antarctica as a gesture of defiance, a marker of her existence, like a stone cairn. But then she had neither succeeded nor died.
In the years before the logbook was found, she seldom thought of it. Then there it was in a newspaper photograph in 1958, in the gloved hands of an ice scientist doing research at Little America III. She’d been shocked and frightened by the prospect of stirred-up publicity, of her photo being printed and reprinted, of everyone being reminded that Marian Graves had once existed. For years she worried that someone might recognize her after all, but, as it turned out, no one did. She was greatly changed, and also she had settled in a corner of the world where people didn’t pay much attention to things like lost American lady pilots.
When the book was found, she had wondered if Eddie would be, too. She’d wondered if there was any possibility at all he might still be alive after eight years, though surely even if he’d managed to feed and warm himself, he would have been broken by the solitude, the extremity. The question was irrelevant, though—he hadn’t wanted to survive.