“Any good?” one asks, perplexed by her flatness.
“It was all right.” Why hadn’t Trout told her about the blackness that lived in the depths of ice?
“Macqueen is fit to be tied,” another says. “He was around all morning, looking up at the sky like he was about to go up there and tear down the whole damn thing.”
* * *
—
She’s only been home an hour before Barclay shows up, driven in his long black Pierce-Arrow by Sadler. At the door, Wallace asks feebly what he wants.
“I want a word with Marian.”
Marian is listening from the stairs. “It’s all right, Wallace,” she says, coming down. Without protest, her uncle shrinks back into the house. Marian leads Barclay to the cottage.
He shuts the door behind them. His anger makes his freckles stand out; his eyes are almost black. In a quiet voice, he asks how she could have betrayed him so spitefully. She is stupid, foolish, selfish, and he never should have trusted her. Of course it had been a mistake to allow her to fly. “I should have known,” he says, “that you’d take everything I’ve given you and throw it back in my face.”
Marian stands and listens without flinching, and when he is done, all she can do is cry. She bends like a willow in the gusts of her own sorrow. He will think guilt is what wracks her, won’t guess it is grief—grief for Trout, but also for the idea she’d had of herself as fearless in the air, of the sky as an ally rather than an indifferent immensity full of ungovernable forces.
The fury goes out of him. “Don’t cry,” he says. “Please, Marian. I was only angry because I was afraid I’d lost you.” He gathers her against himself. “Why did you do it?” he asks in a fervent murmur. “Why would you run away like that?”
“I wasn’t running. I wanted to go somewhere. Like I’ve been telling you.” When she feels him start to pull away, she holds on, says, “I wanted to see the ocean.”
“And did you?”
“Only the edge.”
“It all looks the same.”
She wants to explain the crevasse to him, how she had not crashed into it but had been swallowed nonetheless, but she only says, “I had a fright in the mountains.” Hurriedly, she adds, “I went up a little too high, that’s all. I learned a lesson.”
His arms tighten around her. “Sometimes you seem so wise and sometimes very foolish.” The warmth of his body intervenes between her and the ice, the blackness. She would have told Jamie about the crevasse if she could have, if he were there, and then she would have been fortified in her dealings with Barclay. But Jamie had left her behind. And Caleb had cut her loose.
She presses her face into Barclay’s neck. He goes very still. She says, “I’ve been having nightmares about Trout.”
Again she thinks he will tell her not to fly, even forbid it, but he says, “Don’t expect yourself not to be troubled, Marian. Something would be wrong if you weren’t.”
His kindness, as Geraldine’s had, makes her cry. But her tears are gentler now, a slow seep from under her lids, a fluttering in her abdomen. He kisses her just under her ear.
Does she regret the flight? She decides she doesn’t. She would have peered out of the cockpit and into something bottomless and unfathomable sooner or later. At some point she would have found the edge of her own courage. There is nothing for it but to adjust, be humbled. So she is not exactly who she had thought. So what. She will be someone different.
Barclay has one hand around her shoulders and the other lifting underneath her backside, hoisting her against him. Barclay is pressing her backward like a dance partner, guiding her toward the narrow bed. They are lying down. He has her trousers undone, his hand inside. She pushes back against him, slides her hips. His eyes are glassy, his expression slack. She keeps moving, holding his gaze.
Outside, Sadler coughs.
The sound is so clear, as though Sadler were sitting in the armchair a few feet away. Barclay snaps out of his reverie, removes his hand. Immediately it seems impossible that they had, seconds before, been doing what they’d been doing.
He stands up quickly. “I’m sorry.”
She fastens her trousers. “For starting or for stopping?”
“Starting,” he says as though it should be obvious.
“Didn’t you like it?”
“Too much.”
“Then why did you stop?”
“I have no right to compromise you like that.” She turns her head to the wall, waiting for him to leave, but he sits on the edge of the bed. “You’re upset.”