“I’m curious.”
“No, you’re not. You think you’d look good in comparison. You think no one could measure up to you.”
She felt him smile against her temple. “That too.”
When the song was over, she started to move away, but he pulled her back. He pulled her back, but she was the one who kissed him. Bound up in him, feeling his need through the strength of his grip, she had a sudden flash of Barclay, of being engulfed and erased, compressed down to nothing. The difference was that Caleb felt her panic, released her. She fled, pushing through the crowd. Caleb let her go.
* * *
—
On Boxing Day, some words came through the telephone in the ferry pool office, and after Marian had absorbed the sense of them, that Jamie had been killed, her first reaction was fear. What a terrifying idea that Jamie should be dead. Why had such a horrible hypothetical event been phrased as fact? If such a thing were to happen, if Jamie were to be killed, she would not be able to bear it. She recoiled from the idea.
But there was Jackie Cochran’s voice again, all the way from across the Atlantic. “Marian? Marian? Did you hear me?”
“Why would you say that?” Marian said. “That’s impossible. He’s an artist, not a soldier. He’s painting the war.”
There was a silence in which Jackie must have been gathering her excuses for making such a bad joke, readying her apology. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Jackie said, and for an instant Marian was relieved. “But I’m afraid it’s true. His ship was sunk.”
Marian set down the receiver.
Someone rapped on the phone-box door. Marian jumped, startled. A man was there, another ATA pilot. He drew back at the sight of her. “Sorry,” he said. “I was only wondering if you were done in there.”
She felt her lips move, but nothing came out. She pushed at the door, couldn’t make it open because her body had turned to vapor.
“Are you all right?” the man said, opening the door.
She brushed past him, perhaps through him, like a ghost.
They’d been grounded all morning because of weather. She went to the ready room and pulled on her heavy flying suit and fur-lined boots anyway, picked up her bag and parachute. She drifted out to the Spit she was meant to deliver to Cosford, climbed in and took off without going through her checks, noticing in an abstract way that the lights at the end of the runway were red, not green. Immediately she was in cloud. The murk pulsed with circles of light like those that appeared when she pressed on her closed eyelids. Presently she noticed her eyes were indeed closed. She opened them. The air remained resolutely gray. Was she right side up or upside down? Did it matter? She had no sense of where she was, no interest in what she might be about to crash into. In another moment she punched through and was between a blue dome and an unbroken layer of fleecy white.
Jamie was dead. In the cockpit, she screamed. The plane did not fall out of the sky, back into the cloud, though it should have. Flight itself should have been revealed to be an illusion. But the plane continued on, its big Merlin engine droning indifferently. She turned hard to the west, the wings going perpendicular to the cloud, then flipped back level. She pushed up the throttle until a whine pierced the drone. The only impulse she could identify was to be drowned in the ocean. Before, when she had flown too high or too far, she had not really believed she could cause her own death, but now she sensed the presence of a border in the sky, a line over which she could pass and never return.
No gaps appeared in the cloud. She had no way of knowing if she was over land or water. It didn’t matter. Eventually she would be over the Atlantic. Flying west had felt like the natural choice. Montana was west. Alaska was west. Jamie in the Pacific was west, almost exactly on the opposite side of the world. Then again, all those things were east, too. The water was what she sought, the expanse and oblivion. Maybe she would go down not too far from the Josephina. She and Jamie had always been meant to wind up in the ocean together.
Don’t.
As clear as if there were no engine noise whatsoever, only the silence of the atmosphere. Jamie’s voice, unmistakably.
Go back.
“I don’t want to,” she said aloud.
Turn around.
She was over the crevasse again. Her body condensed back into itself, surpassed her actual density, became heavy, full of dread. She was heavier than a mountain, heavier than all the water in the ocean. Though something so heavy should not be able to move, she pushed—so slowly—on the stick, pressed on the rudder as though her leg were the heaviest and slowest of pistons. The plane turned.
* * *
—
There was still the matter of finding a place to land. When her fuel gauge was showing nearly empty, a dark stain appeared on the northern horizon where the solid cloud had pulled apart like cotton wool. She dropped through into hillocked countryside, lightly dusted with snow. In the low sun, streams and ponds shone blinding yellow as though a sheet of gold leaf had been imperfectly torn away. She saw a farm with a flat open field, no cows or sheep in it, and she set the plane down, switched off the engine. She opened the canopy to the evening, and though there was only cold air above her, she felt the pressure of thousands of feet of water.
Glints
Seventeen
Adelaide Scott finally called. I’d just gotten cut off with Siobhan and assumed she was calling back from some other line, so when a voice said, “This is Adelaide Scott,” I said, “Who?”
“We met at dinner at Redwood Feiffer’s. I’m the artist. Apparently I didn’t make much of an impression.” She’d meant to call sooner, she said, but, well, she hadn’t. She’d been uncertain. “But then my assistants told me about your…about your being in the news lately, and I decided to call.”
“Right. Okay. Yeah, I was wondering why you wanted my number.”
“Understandable. Well, here it is: I have some letters that belonged to Marian Graves, letters to her and also ones she wrote, and I thought you might be interested in them.”
The moment when I’d been intrigued by the artist lady with intel about Marian Graves felt like a different life. “Honestly I’m not sure what I’d do with them,” I said. “The movie is pretty set in stone at this point.”
“I imagine so,” she said. “That’s not the point, though, I don’t think. I’m not sure why I have an urge to show them to you. You—this will sound strange, but you represent something to me. I’m not sure what yet. You’re a stand-in of some kind. Not for her but for something more abstract, something about the way people think about her.”
After Adelaide had accosted me outside Redwood’s powder room, I’d gone home and watched a grainy old documentary on YouTube about a sculptural series she’d made in the eighties of “boat-like objects,” ramshackle wooden assemblages designed to sink, sometimes on their own, sometimes after she set them on fire. She’d launched them from different places along the California coast and every year for ten years she dove down and filmed them. Each object was titled just with a roman numeral, I through X. I watched the younger, wet-suited version of Adelaide heave on an air tank, plug her mouth with a regulator, roll backward into the water. She’d had long hair then. Gradually the wrecked objects were obscured by coral and sponges, encrusted with tiny creatures. Towers of kelp waved gently above VII and IX like the limbs of drowned monsters.
Were my parents bones? Or were their bones gone? Was their plane encrusted with tiny mussels, furred with algae? In the last scene of Peregrine, I was going to sit in the cockpit of a plane and gaze up at the receding light as I sank to the bottom of the ocean. I would make Marian be the way I needed to imagine my parents had been: not fearful, not struggling.
“What are the letters about?” I asked Adelaide.
“Different things. They span decades. I didn’t show them to Carol Feiffer when she was researching her book beca
use—well, Carol already seemed to know what story she wanted to tell, and I suppose I didn’t want to derail her, or maybe, really, I didn’t trust her to manage their complexities. She seems to want things to be always neatly tied up. The letters hint at some complex relationships…” She trailed off. Then: “Carol’s a perfectly nice woman, but she’s not Proust.”
“I’m not Proust, either,” I said.
“So you don’t want to see them?”
Did I? Or was I just flattered she’d singled me out? I said, “I’m going to Alaska tomorrow for five weeks. Could you send them to me? Scan them or something?”
“I’d rather not. You couldn’t come today, could you?”
“Today’s nuts.”
“Well. When you’re back, then. You have my number now.” She still sounded imperious, though maybe a little deflated. “Will you be in Anchorage?”
“Off and on.”
“A piece of mine is on display in the city museum. You could go see it.”
I was about to say okay and goodbye and hang up with no real plans either to go see her art or to get in touch when I got back, but something odd occurred to me. I said, “Why do you have Marian’s letters?”
“She left quite a few things to me. Paintings and family heirlooms. Some baker in Missoula had been storing stuff in his basement as a favor to her before she disappeared. The lawyers told him to ship it all to my mother. These were in the jumble. It might have been a mistake. She might not have meant to include them.”
I was still missing something. “But why did she leave you anything?”
Adelaide was quiet for so long I checked to make sure we were still connected. Finally she said, “I’d ask you to keep this to yourself for now, although I suppose it doesn’t matter so much, really, but Jamie Graves was my biological father.”
The War
England
December 1943
The next day
The farmer’s field where Marian had landed turned out to be only thirty miles from the No. 2 ferry pool at Whitchurch. She thought she had enough fuel. If not, she’d find another field. She spent the night on a chilly floor in the farmer’s kitchen, regarded with suspicion by his wife, and in the morning managed to get the Spit off the ground, managed to get to Whitchurch to refuel and on to Cosford to deliver the plane. Weather, she told them in the ops office by way of explanation. The plane was in one piece, so she was scolded only perfunctorily, told she’d be written up. Fine, she said. By the time she got back to Hamble in a taxi Anson, twilight had fallen. Numbly she climbed astride her motorbike, groped for the ignition. Without thinking, without quite knowing what she was doing, she rode toward Caleb’s camp, ran out of gas two miles out, walked the rest of the way.
At the gate, she calmly repeated over and over that she needed to see Caleb Bitterroot until the MP gave up trying to tell her she couldn’t just show up, that the camp was closed, that whatever her beef was with this Bitterroot person it wasn’t the United States Army’s problem, that she was trespassing on military property, miss, and would be prosecuted. Finally, he told her to sit and wait and he’d see what he could do.
Time was behaving strangely. She seemed to step out of it, only came back when Caleb was crouching beside her in the gatehouse. He understood Jamie was dead. He’d only had to look at her. She was grateful she wouldn’t have to say the words. Once she started crying, she couldn’t stop.
Another man appeared—a medic, she thought. He gave her two tablets and a paper cup of water.
After that, time stopped and started again, stuttered as though it were yet another machine running out of fuel. There were oncoming blinkered headlights and shadowed stone walls between moonlit fields and ancient trees making tunnels of darkness over the road and the hard bounce of a jeep. Somehow she directed the driver to her motorbike, and he and Caleb wedged it into the jeep’s little flatbed. Then there was the revolving door of the Polygon, Caleb’s arm around her shoulders, the yellow light of the lobby beyond the blackout curtains, and there was Ruth waiting slumped in a wingback chair in her ATA blues, standing as they came in, asking what had happened, asking Caleb who he was, demanding to be told what was going on. Marian wondered how Ruth could be so cruel as to ask, to make her say it. She remembered being in the elevator with each of them supporting one side of her. Ruth undressing her, Caleb putting her in bed. Her own voice, harsh, telling Ruth to leave, that she only wanted Caleb.
When she woke, Caleb was asleep in the armchair, and Ruth had gone. She wondered why he was in her room, and then she remembered, and she put out her arms first to ward off the knowledge and then for him to come to her.
The Celestial Wind
Eighteen
I climbed out of a plane and walked to where a man was waiting for me by a hangar: Barclay Macqueen, the bootlegger who would be my husband. I felt powerful and capable, in command of the whole fucking sky. He’d heard I could fly, he said. He needed a pilot.
Cut.
Hadley, go again, please.
We were filming in Alaska, which was playing not only itself in the movie but also Montana, like how theater actors play multiple parts both to save money and to show off.
I climbed out of a plane and walked to where a man was waiting for me by a hangar. He’d heard I could fly, he said. He needed a pilot. He had some—significant pause—goods needing to be picked up in Canada.
I knew he would change my life, and I was afraid. I let the fear into my eyes. There were mountains all around us, trees rusting away with autumn.
I’d thought if I played Marian Graves I’d get to be someone who wasn’t afraid, but now I knew that wasn’t the point at all. The point was to be someone who didn’t treat fear like a god to be appeased.
Because movies get shot all out of order, it was like we’d taken Marian’s life and dropped it from a great height onto something hard, and every day we picked up different pieces and pressed them into place, paving a path back to the beginning, which was Marian’s death and so also the end. It was only because of coincidence and soundstage availability that we would film the last scene—the crash—last, but I was glad. I wanted a conclusion. I wanted the end to be the end. Bart was right when he said we don’t always notice beginnings. Endings are usually easier to detect.
But the more of Marian I fit together, the more I felt the void on the other side, the empty space that held the truth but didn’t contain it. Jamie Graves had fathered a daughter, and Marian had known. This was true, but nobody knew to believe it.
My dear, you are a revelation, Hugo texted one night after watching the dailies. I can scarcely see you at all, not even when I squint.
* * *
—
When I had a morning off, I went to the Anchorage Museum. Adelaide Scott’s installation had a room to itself. A temporary exhibit, the sign said. Below was a list of patrons who had made it possible, including Carol Feiffer. In the middle of the pale wood floor under a skylight stood a huge white ceramic cylinder maybe ten feet high and twenty in diameter, its surface stippled with zillions of tiny black etched lines that, together, made an image of the sea, textured with light and current and wind. Toward the top was a horizon, gently scalloped, with suggestions of clouds and distant birds above it.
A smooth circular curtain of rigid pearly-white plastic hung suspended from the ceiling, encircling the drum, embossed with the same image, the same stippled sea. I walked around through the gap, passing between two versions of the same thing. I wanted to step back, get some vantage to take in the whole, but it was designed so you couldn’t do that. You had to be trapped in it.
* * *
—
Redwood and I sat in the bar on the top floor of a hotel in Anchorage. It was all wood and brass and windows. Below, the city’s ragged asphalt edge met a spreading broad flat of water, and on the far side of the
water was a forested rise with Denali sticking up in the distance beyond, two hundred miles away but so gigantic its white top still peeped over the horizon.
“Adelaide Scott called me,” I said.
“Really? Why?”
I felt a nagging trepidation, but I forged on. “She said she has some letters from Marian I might be interested in.”
He seemed almost affronted. “You? Why you?”
Of course I’d asked myself the same question, but I bristled. “You’d have to ask her,” I said.
“What’s in them?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t get into details.” I played with the skewer of olives in my drink.
“Sorry, I just— Did it seem like there’s something in them that would change things? At dinner she was pretty adamant she didn’t know anything helpful. And now it’s a little late.”
I’d been planning to tell him about Jamie Graves being Adelaide’s father, but I found I couldn’t. I’d only be doing it for the dopamine hit, to feel important, to create a bond. As soon as I’d spoken the words, the information would be as much Redwood’s as mine and then, inevitably, Carol’s and then everyone’s. It made no sense to feel possessive about a fact that had nothing to do with me, but I did. Adelaide hadn’t forbidden me from telling. She’d said she was tired of keeping secrets, didn’t expect me to take on that role. She’d said she felt like she was playing Russian roulette by telling me, not in a bad way. I got what she meant. I’d slapped that USB drive down right in front of Gwendolyn.
“I don’t think my mother knows Adelaide has a stash of letters,” Redwood said, agitated. “Does anyone know? We should know for the movie. Why didn’t she tell us? She really didn’t say anything about what’s in them?”
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