“No,” she says. “No one can.”
* * *
—
Second.
The plan is not a reaction to Trout’s death. She had been mulling it over for months, but she’d hesitated because of how worried Trout would be and because she’d feared Barclay would blame him. Now the consequences are only hers.
On a clear June morning, she takes off in the biplane, fuel tank only half full, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to draw attention. She purls up a lazy loop. When she’s leveled off again, she turns northwest, following the railroad.
Jamie has disappeared for the summer. A few weeks before, at the end of May, Wallace had found a note from him on the kitchen table that said he was going away but would come back in time for the start of school. They shouldn’t worry. Marian was hurt he had left without telling her, then envious. She might have gone with him if she’d known. Then she was hurt afresh by the thought that he hadn’t told her for exactly that reason.
A map is pinned to her knee, the route already plotted. She’d left a note of her own in the hangar: Gone x-country, back tomorrow. She knows Barclay has spies who will find it when she doesn’t come back. After that, lickety-split, he’ll have his people calling every airfield for three states in all directions, promising an irresistible reward for any information about any lone girls in Stearman biplanes. She’d left the note only because otherwise he’d have filled the sky with search and rescuers.
She turns north again, follows the Clark Fork up to Lake Pend Oreille. She sets down outside a nothing town where she’s been before, not far from a gas station she’s scouted. The owner has a fuel truck, comes out to fill her tank. A risk, but unavoidable. Off she goes. West, then north, following the Pend Oreille River. When it bends to meet the Columbia, she knows she is over Canada.
She carves her way west, low among the mountains, her wings paring air off the slopes. The weather mostly holds. For a while there is a thick, low mat of cloud, and she stays above it, tobogganing the airplane’s belly along the top, the prop half buried in the mist. This is what she has always wanted: choose a point on a map and fly to it. She thinks Jamie probably also went west, toward the sea.
Before he left, she’d woken one night to him gently shaking her.
“You were having a nightmare,” he’d said.
She’d been dreaming about Trout. She’d been with him in the Travel Air, spiraling down, and Trout was pleading with her to help him, but her controls didn’t seem to be attached to anything.
“I was dreaming about Trout.”
“I figured. You were talking.”
The spring night was rustling and chilly, and she scooted over so Jamie would slide in, head to toe with her.
She said, “Do you think Trout was afraid?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“I want to think he wouldn’t have been. But I don’t think it works that way.”
“It would have been quick, at least.”
“Even if he’d known for certain what was going to happen, I don’t think he would have stopped flying.”
“Not for his kids?”
She shook her head. “I hope he at least knew Barclay would make sure his family was all right.” They were quiet. She added, “Whatever he felt, it’s done now.”
But Jamie was asleep.
More snowcaps appear as she flies on. The country’s emptiness pleases her—she is less likely to be spotted. After some hours, she descends into a long open valley checkered with farmland. Mountains to the north. The city of Vancouver standing up to the west. Beyond, water blues the horizon. The Strait of Georgia. She wants to fly out over it, over Vancouver Island to the open ocean, but she doesn’t have enough fuel or daylight.
She chances an airfield north across the harbor from the city. When the pilots hanging around ask where she’s come from, she says Oregon. She asks where she should leave the plane for the night, where there is a cheap hotel. They look at her funny, but she stares back hard. She can’t pass for a boy anymore and has no choice but to be an odd, tall, dusty, freckled girl, racoonishly suntanned from her goggles, with short-cropped hair. A man takes a grease pencil and a notepad from the pocket of his overalls and writes down directions to a rooming house a couple of miles away. “Tell Geraldine that Sawyer sent you,” he says, tearing off the page. “She’s a nice lady. I’ll keep an eye on your plane. What’s your name?”
“Funny, my name’s Geraldine, too,” Marian says. She points to the north and the bigger mountains. “Do you ever fly up in there?”