He shakes his head. “Not much there for me.”
Geraldine’s is halfway up a steep hill. Be in by midnight, Geraldine says, no guests, and no drinking in the house. In Marian’s room, a window frames fading twilight, a line of dark blue sea cutting across the gaps between the houses. Restless, she sits on the bed, stands at the window, sits again. A knock at the door. She opens it to Geraldine holding out a folded nightgown. “I noticed you didn’t have any luggage. I thought you might need something to sleep in.”
The gesture is simple, but Marian is not used to being cared for. “Thank you,” she says, clasping the garment to her chest. Her voice betrays her by shaking.
“It’s really nothing.” Geraldine is younger than Marian had expected, almost as blond and freckled as herself but soft and bosomy. “You all right?”
For a moment, Marian wants to tell her everything, to pour out the tale of her parents and her uncle and Barclay Macqueen and Trout. She would tell Geraldine she is only sixteen and has flown here from Montana by herself, and tomorrow she is going to fly out over the ocean just to look around, to see something. Geraldine will say she wished she were half as brave.
But instead Marian just says she’s fine, that she hadn’t been expecting to spend the night. Engine trouble is all.
In the morning, she fuels the plane and takes off, circles the field to get her nerve up. Then she follows the harbor out, passes over the strait, over Vancouver Island, and is finally, finally over the sea. Wind draws a delicate pattern on the water like the weave of linen, overlaid by shadows of clouds. Well out from shore, she longs to fly on even though the horizon will only ever recede, but she knows she has to turn around, to go home and face what must be faced. She tells herself at least she’s seen the ocean. Flying back, she turns up an inlet toward the mountains, tells herself she’s just following a whim, though it’s more like a dare.
At the end of the sound, the water is bright and milky from a river disgorging glacial meltwater, braided with pale sand. She follows it north. The mountains are more rugged than any she’s seen. All the other “x-country” entries in her logbook were only puny feints against the great immensity of the planet, but this—this—is real mountain flying. She should turn around, be on her way back to Montana, but, gunning the engine, pulling her scarf up over her mouth and nose, she ascends. Twelve thousand feet. She flies at a snow-covered saddle, crosses over it into a high bowl. Rock and blue ice loom up, hemming her in. Below, crevasses fissure an ice field. The widest looks big enough to swallow the plane whole. In places, the snow has broken through, and there is blackness underneath.
The engine catches, sputters with disapproval.
She tries to circle up and out, but the plane is sluggish, heavy. She adjusts the mix, but still the engine protests, begins to miss. Her heartbeat seems to miss, too. A stiffness creeps into her limbs. Her armpits prickle.
She circles and circles. The cold wind on her face feels as sharp and violent as glass shards. Her arms are so heavy; she can barely work her feet on the rudder. No one will ever find her. No one will even know where to look. The blackness at the bottom of the crevasse will swallow her. Snow will shroud her. But, on the other hand, then no one will know how foolish she’d been to come into these mountains. She will not give them her broken body, will not leave her teeth stuck in the dashboard of the plane. Barclay will have no recourse but to wonder. In his mind, a phantom version of herself will go on living a thousand different imagined lives in a thousand different places. He won’t be able to consign her to the past, to the ranks of the dead. The engine misses badly; the plane dips woozily.
Jamie will never know what a lonely, needless death she’s contrived for herself.
The thought of Jamie strikes her like a slapping hand. The buzzing in her head clears. No. No, she will not leave him alone in the world, will not punish him for his summer escape by vanishing forever. Willing movement into her leaden arms and legs, pressing into her own body as though shifting a heavy weight, she pushes the stick forward and dives, following the curvature of the bowl. When she is barely skimming over the ice, she pulls up. Rattling and sputtering, just barely, she clears the opposite ridge.
Descending, her face and hands thaw. Terror comes alive in her. She trembles hard enough on the controls to make the plane bobble. She turns south.
The pilots in Missoula are relieved, want to know where she’d gone. “To Vancouver and back,” she tells them, wooden. She’d had to spend another night out, sleeping in the plane in a field.