Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  The Flight

  Our flight is in defiance of the sun and its daily traverse. Come west, the sun says. It tugs at us, runs off like a child trying to entice us to follow. But we must go north, leaving the light behind.

  —marian graves

  Little America III, Ross Ice Shelf, to Campbell Island

  78°28ʹ S, 163°51ʹ W to 52°34ʹ S 169°14ʹ E

  March 4, 1950

  21,785 nautical miles flown

  The worst of her agony, for the first hours, is that she thinks she will reach New Zealand. The day is blue and mostly clear. Eddie had given her charts he’d already marked up with bearings and angles for the sextant. He had hugged her tight and kissed her hard on the cheek, shaken her hand, sent her off to what he at least claimed to believe would be her death. He had made her promise not to send anyone for him in the unlikely event of her reaching land. He said there would be no point, that she should tell people he had fallen in a crevasse. She thinks of him lying in the snow on a clear night, waiting to die. She thinks of Barclay almost giving himself to the snow the night they met, of Caleb lost in the snowstorm as a boy. They had both almost surrendered themselves to the cold but had changed their minds. She finds herself hoping that Eddie will not change his, that the stars and the aurora will beckon him. Maybe she had left the logbook behind in order to abandon the truth along with Eddie.

  She is past the PNR when her fuel begins to disappear too quickly. Vapor streams from under the left wing. At first she is aware only of relief. Eddie will avoid the fate he most feared.

  A gannet plunge. She remembers what she’d written. She watches the fuel drop and decides to be true to her word. She decides, and yet she flies on. Does she understand then that she wishes to live? This memory will remain oddly blank, resisting her attempts to dredge the truth from it. Later she will conclude she’d had many contradictory wishes: to live, to die, to go back and live her life over and change everything, to live her life again and change nothing.

  She doesn’t know how much time passes before she steels herself. She doesn’t think but pushes down on the yoke, dives. The engines cry out. The water rises up to meet her.

  When she had thought she was going to fly a Spitfire into the sea, Jamie, already dead, had told her not to. She’d listened then. She’d seen the end of the war because of it. She’d seen rubble and rivers and elephants on red dunes. She’d seen manta rays and the polar ice caps. She’d lain in bed with Caleb on Oahu, listening to the trade winds. No voice comes now, nothing but the whining engines, the rush of wind, but she pulls up. The plane levels off not far above the waves. The great gliding birds, the huge-winged albatrosses, carve the air. She doesn’t belong among them. Up she goes, back into the sky. Her hands tremble. She pulls the charts onto her lap.

  The fuel gauge doesn’t care that she has changed her mind. The needle still drops. Vapor still streams from the wing. She searches Eddie’s pencil marks on the gridded blue paper for a secret passage back into life. First she sees Macquarie Island, twenty miles long and oriented almost perfectly north-south. She knows there is a weather station there, manned year-round. But the island is well to the west, against the wind. She doesn’t have the fuel. Farther north but farther east is another speck. Campbell Island.

  South still tugs at her compass. Empty ocean surrounds her. Finding the island would be difficult even if her navigation skills weren’t so rusty. Maybe she will fail, but she will try.

  Of the next hours, she will remember capturing the sun in the sextant, scribbling calculations, churning with internal debates. The fear in her is smothered almost to nothing by the necessity of focus, of action. She will not remember how she comes to conclude that the plane itself must be lost, sacrificed, that she must try, if she can, to keep her survival a secret, that the only way she can contend with continued life is to make a new one. These decisions will become simple facts of her past, way points at which she turned, altering her destination. Any ambivalence she feels, any counterarguments she makes to herself will be lost, erased by the immutability of what has been done.

  When, under a high overcast, the island’s silhouette breaks the horizon, she sheds her reindeer parka, gets into her parachute and Mae West. The island grows steadily nearer. She braces the steering yoke as best she can. The plane only needs to be steady enough, and only for the few minutes she requires. When land is below, she goes to the back of the fuselage, heaves open the door, and jumps.

  She has never done a parachute jump. Pridefully, she’d told herself she’d landed planes when other pilots would have jumped, but now, plummeting through space, she thinks some practice would have been useful. She pulls the rip cord. With a violent jerk, the chute opens.

  The Peregrine flies on, oblivious to its new independence, the imminence of its watery end. A pang. She looks away. Between her feet sways a grassy, tussocked mountain.

  Here is a truth: She prefers to hide, to cease being Marian Graves entirely rather than face what she has done to Eddie. She no longer cares the circle is unfinished. That causes her no shame. But she believes she brings death to those around her. Before she left, she had gone to Seattle to meet Jamie’s child. She had thought she would visit the girl from time to time after the flight, know her as she grew up, but now she is certain she would bring only misfortune. Let Adelaide be something else entirely. Let her not be a Graves.

  The wind pushes Marian out over a long and narrow inlet of black water. An albatross glides by with a whoosh, turning its head to inspect her. She had seen them nesting on the tussocked mountain as she descended: enormous, blindingly white birds settled among the windblown grass like dollops of snow. Glossy black water between her boots still. She pulls on the parachute’s handles, trying to steer, but the wind ushers her firmly out toward the mouth of the inlet, out to sea. Just off a rocky beach, not wanting to be blown farther from shore, she unclips her harness and drops.

  The cold of that water. The force of it. She makes her gannet plunge after all but feetfirst. She sees blurry darkness, a silver ceiling. Stunned as a clubbed fish, she placidly watches the surface recede until she remembers she must pull the cords of her Mae West to inflate it.

  She will remember the air and waves, the heaviness of her boots and clothes, the numbing cold, the startling nearby porpoise leap of a small penguin out of the water. Surf crashes. Black ropes of kelp long and fat as fire hoses writhe in the surge as she is dashed on the rocks—she keeps only a jagged fragment of the event: a cascade of foam, a hard impact. Her Mae West is punctured, her face badly scraped, her nose broken. A last churning tumble, and finally there is coarse sand under her fingers.

  She drags herself from the water, permits herself to lie still for a moment in her sodden clothes before her chattering teeth tell her she must walk. Dense, brittle shrubs grab at her ankles, mud sucks at her boots. (She’s been lucky with the tide. Later, when she has been on the island for a while and retraces this first walk, there will no beach at all, only a cliff.) She sits and rests many times, is stumbling and hypothermic when she reaches a hut marked by a radio mast and spinning anemometer, smoke rising from a chimney pipe. With the last of her strength, she knocks on the door.

  A Dive with Intent

  Twenty-One

  When I got back to L.A., before I had to film the crash, I took another flying lesson. This time the instructor was a woman, a no-nonsense sort of gal in Wrangler jeans with a strict bob of orange hair and aviator shades. “I took a lesson once before,” I told her as she walked me around the plane, explaining its parts, “but I freaked out when it was my turn to fly.”

  “What do you mean freaked out?” she said.

  “I just didn’t want to fly it. I let go of the controls. Like this.” I held up my hands as though someone were pointing a gun at me.

  “Do you want to fly it now?”

  “I might not,” I said, “but I want to try.”
/>   “Cool,” she said.

  This time it was afternoon, and there was no marine layer, just open sky dingy with smog. Catalina wallowed offshore; the ocean horizon was soft and hazy. In every other direction, the city sprawled and sprawled. The jets sailing up from LAX, noses in the air, almost made me feel sorry for our plucky little Cessna. “Okay,” said the pilot as we churned effortfully toward Malibu, “go ahead and take the yoke. Just fly steady and level.”

  * * *

  —

  In Hawaii, when I left Joey Kamaka’s house, I’d gone back to my hotel and flopped flat on my face on my bed and cried. I cried because Marian Graves hadn’t drowned and, to one person, hadn’t been lost. I cried because of Joey’s kindness, because I was jealous of Kalani having a childhood, because I was the kind of asshole who could be jealous of a little kid whose parents couldn’t take care of her. I cried for Mitch and for my parents. I cried because I’d gotten going and sometimes you just have to ride out the tears.

  Beyond my balcony, beyond Waikiki Beach, out in the middle of the Pacific, the sun was easing down. Surfers dotted the water, sitting on their boards. Kids played in the shallows. In a movie, this would be the moment when I would rush outside and plunge cathartically into the sea. Newly whole, forever changed, I would float on my back, smiling beatifically at the sky.

  Since I didn’t have any better ideas, I put on my bathing suit. I rode the mirrored elevator down to the tiki-chic lobby and jogged outside in my flip-flops and labored through the perfect, powdery sand. I dropped my hotel robe and walked into the water and dove under.

  Down there, eyes closed, rocking with the swell, I imagined the sand sloping away into darkness, into submerged deserts and canyons and mountain ranges, rising again into the edges of all the continents. I thought of ships and airplanes and bones being eaten away to nothing by rust and by tiny nibbling things, grown over by coral and sponges, scuttled across by crabs. I thought of the Peregrine and how no one would ever find it. No one would ever know where to look. When I surfaced, a wave lifted me, pushed me back toward shore. I swam out again. I’d forgotten, somehow, that the sun was fire, that it was molten, until I watched it waver and redden as it slid, almost oozed, behind the sea.

  The water dimmed; the clouds flushed. I didn’t know what I would do after the movie was finished. It occurred to me that I could go to New Zealand or to Antarctica, keep playing detective, but, no, I didn’t need to know the whole story. No story is ever whole. When I’d looked up Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly, I’d read that he died after someone reached inside him and cut off a piece of his heart, but then his body didn’t decay, as though without his whole heart he couldn’t transform anymore, not even into dust. I hoped Marian had kept her whole heart.

  * * *

  —

  I put my hands on the yoke. The plastic was warm from the sun, and I could feel the vibration of the engine. The pilot showed which instruments to watch, showed me what was supposed to be the horizon and what was supposed to be the wings, how to line them up. “Doing okay?” she said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “If you pull back a little bit,” she said, “the nose will go up.”

  I pulled back. The windshield filled slowly with sky.

  Los Angeles, 2015

  Twenty-Two

  When the plane hits the water, the sound cuts out except for a faint ringing. Before, there’d been wind and the engines and my amplified breathing, but then, at the moment of impact, it all goes away. Seen from a distance: a massive, silent splash in an empty sea. The plane rocks in the waves. The nose dips under; the rest slides after. The ocean seals itself shut. Huge white birds glide along the waves, and you hear that high, sustained ringing, quiet enough to seem half imagined. Then we’re underwater, looking at me and Eddie in the cockpit. Bubbles rise from my nose; my cropped Marian hair wafts around my head. Eddie is unconscious, his forehead bloody. I lean forward, looking up at the receding surface, wistful but resolute. I close my eyes. Then, as though to give me privacy while I drown, we cut away to a shot of the Peregrine from above, submerged, its shape sinking into blackness.

  I expect a fade to black, but instead, light seeps in through the dark, eats through it like mold, fills the screen. “That was Bart’s idea,” Redwood says, whispering even though we are the only ones in the screening room. “The white.” Music fades in. The end credits start.

  Redwood’s face is bright with reflected light. He points. “There!” His name is on the screen, and then it is gone.

  I don’t watch for mine. “Ready?” I say, and we get up and push out through a side door into the blinding afternoon.

  It’s not some big triumph, that I didn’t freak out when I flew the Cessna, that I made it go up and down, left and right. Mostly I felt relief. And a little hit of amazement. And then I must have slipped back into being Marian Graves because, for a second, I felt free.

  The End

  She’s in the ocean now, as she was always meant to be. Most of her has come to rest, scattered, on the cold southern seafloor, but some of her smallest, lightest fragments, floating dust, are still being carried along by the currents. Fish ate a few tiny motes of her, and a penguin ate one of those fish and regurgitated it to his chick, and some infinitesimal speck of her was back on Antarctica for a while, as guano on a nest of pebbles, until a storm washed her back out to sea.

  She dies twice, the second time forty-six years after the first. She dies in the Southern Ocean; she dies on a sheep farm in the Fjordland region of New Zealand.

  * * *

  —

  The man who opens the door to the hut on Campbell Island is called Harold, and he is, as he would say, being a practitioner of understatement, a bit surprised to find a sodden, semiconscious woman at his feet. She is mumbling, jabbering. As best he can make out, she is begging him not to tell anyone she’s there. But who are you? he asks, heaving her to her feet, bringing her inside. By then she is past being able to respond.

  There is another man on the island, John, and a border collie called Swift. The hut and a few small outbuildings had been constructed during the war to house coast-watchers, stationed there to alert the mainland if they saw enemy ships. They never did, but their meteorological observations proved so useful that, after the war, the station was kept going. A yearlong posting for a certain kind of man. A deliberate, meticulous kind of man who needed little society, who was content to perform the same tasks every day, take the same measurements, record the same data, translate that data to Morse code, and send it to some unseen recipient for use by people he will never meet, would prefer not to meet.

  It is one of the most significant waypoints of Marian’s life that Harold and John are two such men.

  She spends several days in fevered delirium. When she first starts to regain her senses, she is afraid of the quiet, bearded figures she perceives around her, thinks of what so many men, sequestered on a desolate island for months, would be likely to do with a woman. But Harold and John only ever touch her with unobtrusive concern—a hand on her forehead, a changing of the bandage on her face where the rocks had cut her, support under her neck as she sips broth—and never leer or linger, even when they have to help her pee in a bucket beside the bed. Both have wives and children in Christchurch, but over time she comes to suspect they prefer the island, are content with their barometers and whirligigs and weather balloons. When she’s regained some strength, she tells them a little bit of her story, and later all of it, because she thinks they’ll be more likely to keep her secret if they can survey the entirety of its surrounding landscape, decide for themselves her right to it. The only thing she can’t bear to tell them is that she left Eddie behind. She tells them her navigator fell into a crevasse, burns with shame instead of fever.

  They listen gravely, without comment, and retreat outside to talk between themselves. When they return,
they tell her they had received, a week before she arrived, a radio alert to report any sighting of a C-47 Dakota, feared lost. They ask who will miss her. She says, “No one.” Caleb would forgive the lie. She says she has no husband, no children, no parents, no brother. They tell her they will respect her wishes, not report her, but also that the ship that brought them will not return until January, nearly ten months. She might change her mind before then. For now they have no objection to her remaining.

  Shame again. She has invaded and disrupted their little colony of two, spoiled their peaceful year. She promises to make herself useful, and they nod, unconcerned. When she asks about food, they say there ought to be enough, plus, if need be, there are seabirds and their eggs, some cabbages they are growing, and also sheep, left over from a failed experiment in which the government leased the island to farmers. She brings no hardship, they say.

  Do they think she is wrong to try to leave herself behind? They exchange inscrutable glances. Finally, Harold says, “We reckon it’s your business.” But—she asks—what about the ship, when it comes? They will have to explain her; she will be found out, and all this trouble will be for nothing. They say that is something to be considered later. There is no hurry.

  * * *

  —

  In shape, Campbell Island resembles an oak leaf eaten away by insects, its coast indented by inlets and bays and two long, narrow harbors: Perseverance, into the mouth of which Marian splashed, and Northeast. Its slopes appear gentle, but walking is hard going because of the tussock grass and the mud and that dense shrub that John, the more botanically inclined of her companions, teaches her to call Dracophyllum longifolium. Besides the beards, as she thinks of Harold and John, and the dog Swift and herself, the island is occupied by sheep, rats, feral cats, sea lions, fur seals, elephant seals, the occasional leopard seal, a number of species of albatross, other seabirds and land birds, and two kinds of small penguins: the abundant rockhopper, which nests in the rocks, and the more secretive yellow-eyed, which nests in the bush and is usually glimpsed hurrying furtively up the beach.