“A few,” Marian says. “But not all.”
“No. Not all.”
She puts a lock on the cottage door.
* * *
—
November leans into December.
Commander Richard E. Byrd, a navigator famous for flying over the North Pole with pilot Floyd Bennett in 1926, flies over the South Pole. Eventually, after he’s dead, a consensus will emerge that he and Bennett probably hadn’t actually made it to the North Pole （erased sextant sights in Byrd’s diary, unanswerable questions about the plane’s maximum speed, the time elapsed）。 But Byrd and his crew really do fly over the gleaming white disk of the polar plateau all the way to the South Pole in a plane named for Bennett, who’s dead by then.
In Missoula, a browning and dulling, the earth waiting sullenly for snow. A dusting falls, then a thick smooth skin of white. Trees and rocks show through like abrasions.
If the cloud ceiling is too low, Trout will shake his head, send Marian away. Sometimes cloud comes when they’re already aloft, layers closing in or walls rising up, blocking the way.
“Inside there’s just gray nothing,” she tells Jamie. “Sometimes you feel like you don’t even exist, or like the world doesn’t.”
“That sounds awful,” he says.
“But when you come out the other side, everything seems brighter, like a blindfold’s been taken off.”
Sometimes when they emerge, even when she’s been concentrating on staying level, the wings are disconcertingly tilted.
“I’d know if we banked enough to matter,” Trout tells her. “You’ve got to learn the feel of it. Seat of your pants.”
But the wings tilt when he is at the controls, too. It seems to her that a malevolent force lives in the clouds, something that tips them askew just to prove it can. Also, if Trout is so confident in the seat of his pants, she wonders why, when the cloud is serious, he turns them back, lands as soon as they can.
* * *
—
Sometimes—irregularly and not often—she wakes on the sleeping porch to a dark figure standing over her, touching her shoulder. She never startles, always knows before she is even awake that it is Caleb. Does Jamie stir when she gets up and they go together to the cottage? If he does, he doesn’t let on.
“Do you do this with Barclay Macqueen?” Caleb asks in the cottage’s narrow bed. They are crowded in shoulder to shoulder, on their backs. Near the ceiling, the wings of her model airplanes are chalky with moonlight.
“I don’t do anything with him.”
“You go see him.”
“How do you know that?”
“People know.”
“I’m delivering what he orders from Stanley.”
“What does he need from Stanley? He has all the booze in the world.”
“He doesn’t even drink.”
“He’s a bootlegger who doesn’t drink?”
“He acts like its impolite to mention he’s a legger. We pretend he’s not. And we pretend he doesn’t pay for my flying.”
He puts his hand between her legs. “What would he say about this?”
Her imagination reels, returns an ominous red wash of feeling, like the glow of a forest fire over the horizon. “I’d never tell him, not for anything.”
“Do you like him?”
“What do you care?” she says. He is touching her more purposefully. He reaches for the envelope he has put on the windowsill that contains rubbers. They use them when they have them, or else he pulls out. The prospect of a baby makes them laugh with horror.
“Of course you like him. He’s the one who let you fly.”
“It’s more than that.”
“So you do like him.”
“Shhhh.”
“You like this, too, though.”
“Shhhh.”
* * *
—
In the winter, she learns to land on skis. It’s not so difficult, though judging altitude is tricky, as a snowfield looks the same from ten feet as it does from a hundred. Sometimes the moment of contact catches her by surprise. Then there is the trick of reversing the engine to stop, as the skis have no brakes.
“Sit and visit,” Barclay says. In the cold months, they sit inside at the kitchen table. She is never sure whether Sadler is somewhere in the house, though once in a while a creaking floorboard might give him away. Barclay is careful not to touch her, but, near him, her whole body is a receptor. His presence saturates her. She feels she has just emerged from cloud into a vibrant, revelatory world.