Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  In Adelaide’s living room, I’d first set the letters out on the floor like a huge puzzle, and then I read late into the night, fell asleep on her couch. Some had been to Marian, some from her.

  It seems an awful snare. I’ve told him I can scarcely imagine ever having one and absolutely not anytime soon, and I thought he understood, but—no, he does understand. It’s that he doesn’t care. He wants me snared.

  Please keep writing, even if my replies are as anemic as this one. I’m not myself right now.

  The doctor says I am doing well, and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I know that counts for little, but I hope my small success is more than nothing.

  I know you and Caleb had history, but I guess you did miss men, after all.

  I am writing because it has come to my attention that my late husband, Lloyd Feiffer, allowed your father to suffer a great wrong.

  Joey led me into a compact kitchen with plywood cabinets and an old beige refrigerator. “I’m just finishing making Kalani’s lunch,” he said, “and then we can talk. Can I get you anything?” He bent into the fridge. “Water, fruit punch, milk, beer?”

  “I love day beers,” I said. It wasn’t really a joke, but he laughed as he handed me a can, cracked one for himself. His laugh seemed to be always bubbling just under the surface. Kalani’s lunch was a compartmentalized plastic plate containing a sandwich cut into triangles, some baby carrots, and a dollop of something purple. Joey gave it to her and led me outside.

  The lanai had rattan furniture with faded cushions printed with big green leaves. A ceiling fan turned languidly overhead. Their small and scrubby yard was bounded by a chain-link fence grown over with some kind of vine, and a pink bike with white tires lay on its side beside a child’s playhouse in bleached pink plastic. In the corner a wet suit was draped over a hibiscus shrub. Beyond was a black rock shore, low foamy waves, an immensity of water.

  “My wife, by the way, was so sure I was getting pranked that she went to Costco. She said she didn’t want to witness my humiliation.” Joey chuckled, a sort of rumbling warning tremor before an eruption, and plopped onto a love seat. “I hope she makes it back in time to meet you or she’ll never believe me.”

  Kalani stood in the doorway, clutching her plate in two hands, still ogling me with mingled covetousness and fear, like she was Indiana Jones and I was a legendary, potentially cursed artifact. Joey patted the cushion next to him. “Kalani, come sit here by granddad. Hadley doesn’t bite.” To me, he said, “Not a lot of movie stars drop by.”

  I gave Kalani a little finger wave, and she bolted back into the house, a rain of baby carrots falling behind her. Joey nearly collapsed with mirth. “Oh man,” he said eventually. “You know, that’s probably the right response to meeting your heroes. Just run away.”

  “She lives with you?”

  “For now.” His expression turned somber. “Her parents have been having some issues.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s life. But, so, you’re in a movie about Marian Graves?”

  * * *

  —

  “Nah, Caleb never got married,” Joey said. “He wasn’t really the type. He had some nice girlfriends, though. He was dating this hippie girl Cheryl for a while who was friends with my mom, and so when I was a sophomore in high school and my mom ran off with a guy to Arizona and I started getting in trouble—this was in like ’70, ’71—Caleb and Cheryl took me in and straightened me out. They broke up after a couple years, and Cheryl left but I stayed. I’d never really had a dad, so Caleb and I had our rocky patches, but we were always like this little team, you know? I didn’t leave until I got married. Then when Caleb got sick, my wife and I and our kids moved back in with him to help out. Not like I could ever repay him.” He pointed at the ocean. “I scattered his ashes just right there.”

  “You must miss him,” I said.

  “Yeah, sometimes, even though it’s been twenty-one years. You don’t really get it before it happens—how you always miss some people, you know?”

  I thought of Mitch. “I do know.”

  He looked at me curiously. “So Adelaide Scott told you about her, um, connection to Jamie Graves.”

  I nodded. “She said she came here once.”

  “Yeah, a long time ago. She was on a big family-discovery kick. She was trying to figure some stuff out for sure.”

  “Like what?”

  “What you’d expect, I guess. Who am I? What should I do with my life? I was pretty young and not great at asking people, like, probing questions, so I didn’t really interrogate her. Plus I had a huge crush because she was really hot and scary. She seemed like such a grown-up, but she would only have been in her twenties, I think. She’s made a big success of herself, right? She’s some big artist? It was Caleb she kept in touch with more, not me. What did we really have in common, you know?”

  I couldn’t think what to ask. I sipped from my beer to cover my awkwardness. Reading those letters at Adelaide’s had felt good—exciting and revelatory, almost like desire. I guess it was desire. I wanted to know more. But now the truth about Marian seemed too big, too amorphous for me to gather. She had spread out like debris from a wreck, drifting bits and pieces that didn’t connect.

  Joey didn’t seem to notice how lost for words I was. He said, “Caleb was the best, though. Like he could be strict, and he wasn’t the kind of guy to pretend he was in a good mood when he wasn’t, but he was, you know, honorable. You could trust him. He partied a little too much sometimes, maybe, but I think he was like, I survived the war, so fuck it. He worked on a ranch until he got too old, and then he worked in the little library down the road. He liked to read. He didn’t talk much about the war, but he said it had gotten him into books. When he got sick, he’d sit out here all day, reading. Then he got too sick to read, so he’d just hold a book in his lap and look at the ocean. He wasn’t a spring chicken even back when he took me in. He must have been about the same age then that I am now.” He looked into the house, in the direction Kalani had gone. “Life’s full of surprises, though.”

  “Did he talk much about Marian Graves?”

  “You know, honestly, he wasn’t, like, chatty. He didn’t really share. But she came up sometimes, yeah. He said she was really brave and a really good pilot. I watched a TV show about her once, and I tried to read her book, but I couldn’t get into it. I’m not really a reader. Caleb was always trying to get me to read. So Marian left her personal stuff to Adelaide Scott, but she left her money—there wasn’t much—to Caleb, and then he got royalties from her book after they found it at the South Pole or whatever. That money added up. I didn’t even know how much until after he died. There was all this money in his will, and I was like, where did this come from? The lawyers told me it was the book, which I guess really had a moment back in the day. It came in handy because my son wanted to go to college on the mainland, and now we have Kalani.”

  “Did Caleb say if he and Marian were ever…involved?” I said. “Romantically?”

  Thoughtful, he puffed out his cheeks and stared up at the ceiling fan. “I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Why? Were they?”

  I explained about Adelaide’s letters. There hadn’t been many from Caleb, certainly not love letters, but I knew he’d gone to see her in Alaska, and Ruth’s letter suggested a man had come between them. Carol Feiffer had given Marian and Caleb a romance, and the Day brothers had run with it, but it seemed more like conjecture than anything. While I was talking, Kalani crept out and climbed up next to Joey without looking at me. She was fiddling with a plastic mermaid doll.

  “No kidding,” Joey said when I was done. A chuckle worked its way up from his belly. “That old dog. You know, thinking about him…he never seemed to be looking for, like, a partner. He had these relationships that went on for a year or two and w
ere sort of casual but also sort of intense, and then they’d fall apart. He’d be alone for a while, and then he’d find a new woman when he felt like it. Almost to the end he had girlfriends. They’d come and hang out and cook him dinner. So maybe this thing with Marian was more of the same. Like, if their paths crossed, then great. They’d pick up where they left off.” He pulled Kalani into his lap, said, “Or maybe she was the big one. Maybe he never settled down with anyone because he didn’t want to replace her.”

  “Seems crazy to carry a torch for someone who’s been dead for decades.”

  “I just mean maybe he didn’t stop missing her. But I did always wonder why he never settled down.”

  “You never asked him why?”

  “Nah. He would have just made some joke. I wish I could tell you more. I saved some of Caleb’s stuff, though, if you want to see it. I got it out after you emailed.” Setting Kalani on her feet, he got up and went inside, followed by the child, and came back out with an open cardboard box.

  * * *

  —

  The top layer of Joey’s box was a mess of photos in no particular order. I took them out one by one, making a stack. Sitting beside me, he pointed to a black-and-white photo of a dark-haired, vaguely Asian-looking man in an army uniform sitting on a stone wall. “That’s Caleb,” he said.

  I turned the photo over. Sicily was penciled on the back.

  “Go play, Kalani,” Joey said, nudging the girl toward the yard, where she darted into the plastic playhouse like a gopher into a hole.

  There were color photos, some faded: Caleb on a horse, his hat ringed with fuchsia flowers. Caleb with a woman at the beach, with another woman at what looked like a wedding reception, sitting with a third woman on a cement structure on a hillside, their legs dangling. “That’s Cheryl, who I talked about,” Joey said, pointing. She had long, wavy blond hair. “That’s a pillbox lookout station from the war. It’s still there.” Caleb riding a horse up to its chest in the ocean. An ancient black-and-white studio photo of a pale girl with dark, tucked-up hair in a tarnished silver frame. She wore a dress with a lace collar, and the image was ghostly and washed out with age. “I think that was his mother,” Joey said. “All he ever said about her was that she was a drunk and had bad luck.” Three children sitting unsmiling on a fence, all in overalls: Caleb with Marian and Jamie Graves. Nothing on the back. Teenage Joey grinning in a striped T-shirt, tending something on a smoking BBQ while Caleb looked on, holding a beer. Another black-and-white photo of Caleb in uniform, cigarette in one hand, leaning back in a leather booth. Cocktail glasses glinted in the flash. Marian Graves, in her blue ATA uniform, was beside him, looking away. On the back: London 1944.

  Under the photos was a bundle of letters, tied neatly together with a shoelace. Joey reached for them, embarrassed. “Those are from me, when Hanako and I did a road trip on the mainland. We were only gone for a month, but I wrote him every day.”

  Under the letters was a paper folder, soft with age. Inside were press clippings about Marian’s flight, from both before and after she went missing, haphazardly folded. “Caleb collected those,” Joey said. “I was surprised when I found them. Usually he wasn’t into saving things.”

  I started unfolding the brittle paper. “I think sometimes people hope if they amass enough scraps eventually the whole picture will become clear.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to do,” I said.

  The same photo appeared again and again in the newspapers: Marian and Eddie standing beside the Peregrine before they left Auckland, smiling, almost bashful, both with their arms folded across their chests. Later, after the reporters had dug around in Marian’s past, they ran the old photo of Addison Graves carrying the twins down the gangway of the SS Manaus. There was one of Marian in her ATA uniform, climbing into a Spitfire. And there was her wedding photo next to some fluff piece about her “colorful” life.

  I closed the folder. Underneath it in the box was a certificate of appreciation from the library where Caleb had worked and a program from his memorial service. Then came a magazine with a slip of paper marking an article about the ranch that included the photo of Caleb riding in the ocean.

  At the very bottom of the box was a white envelope addressed to Caleb and bearing several foreign stamps. The return address was a post office box in New Zealand. “Mind if I…”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve never been able to make any sense of it. For some reason it was in the lockbox where he kept his birth certificate and important stuff like that. I don’t even know why I kept it.”

  * * *

  —

  It was just a little bit of paper, another yellowed newspaper clipping, folded up small. I peeled its layers apart, pressed it flat. Bits flaked off around the edges. It was a photo from a newspaper called the Queenstown Courier. April 28, 1954. Four men in hats sat and sprawled on a grassy rise, each holding a beer bottle. In the background, sheep grazed. “High country shepherds enjoying well-earned refreshment after the muster,” read the caption. In black pen, someone had drawn an arrow to one of the men and written something in the margin. The handwriting was nearly illegible, but the specific style of its illegibility was so familiar my insides fizzed like I’d swallowed a sparkler. I squinted at the words. Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly. When I set it down, the paper lifted up and curled slowly closed along its fold lines as though alive. I smoothed it out again.

  “Sitting-in-the-Water-Grizzly,” I said to Joey. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  “No clue,” he said. “I looked it up on the internet once, and all I got was some stuff about an Indian woman who lived as a man. I don’t really remember specifics.”

  The man under the arrow was reclining on one elbow with his long thin legs stretched out, his face angled away from the camera and hidden by the shadow of his hat. I didn’t know if I should tell Joey anything, but I couldn’t help it. I took out my phone and zoomed in on a photo I’d taken of one of the letters Marian had written to Ruth. I turned it so Marian’s rows of crabbed and spiky words lined up with the scribbled note. “Check this out,” I said.

  Joey came around to stand behind me, leaned down to study my phone. “What is it?”

  “It’s a letter Marian Graves wrote.”

  “No way,” he said, getting it. “No way.”

  “It’s the same handwriting, right?” I said. “I’m not imagining things?”

  “It really looks like it.”

  “Did he get any more letters from New Zealand? Do you know?”

  “Man, he went there! He went a bunch of times! I didn’t mention it before because I thought he just liked New Zealand. People get really into that place.” Joey flopped back onto the love seat, his hands gripping the top of his head. “No way,” he said again.

  The sparks in my gut spread outward. I felt like my skeleton should be visible, glowing through my skin. “When did he go there?”

  “I don’t remember specific dates or anything, but he’d kind of usually go after breakups? Not after all of them, but like maybe every five years or so? I know he’d been a couple of times before I moved in. He never took anyone with him. He said it was his thing he liked to do alone, and, yeah, he got other letters, too, but he didn’t keep them. I think he might have actually burned them. I remember seeing bits in the coffee can he used as an ashtray and thinking it was sort of dramatic. It’s not like he burned all the mail.”

  “Did you ever ask him who was writing to him or why he kept going?”

  “He just said he had a buddy from the war down there.”

  “Do you remember anything else? Did he bring back photos?”

  “No, no photos. Let me think for a second, though.” He closed his eyes. I waited. The sun was white on the ocean. Kalani peeped at me from the playhouse
window, retreated when she saw me looking back. Finally Joey opened his eyes and shook his head. “No. Sorry. Nothing else is coming to mind. I went through all his stuff when he died, and you’ve seen pretty much everything I saved. That was more than twenty years ago, anyway. Do you really think he might have been going to see her?”

  What did I have? A photo of a faceless shepherd from sixty years ago, a scribbled reference to—maybe—a Native person who might never have existed. I will go soon, Marian had written at the end of her logbook. I. I’d never thought about how it was an I and not a we. What about Eddie? What about the plane? How could Marian have made it to New Zealand without anyone knowing? Was it even possible to pass as a man? What about Adelaide Scott? If Marian had survived, she’d chosen never to see her niece again.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said.

  The breeze in the palm trees and the sound of the waves gave the quiet a shifting, velvety texture.

  “What will you do?” Joey said.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “I don’t know, man. Say you get out there and start telling people you have this crazy theory she survived, and then what? If you’re right, and she did, she clearly didn’t want anyone to know. If you’re wrong, you look like a kook or like you just want attention or whatever. I guess my first impulse would be to let sleeping dogs lie.”

  Kalani burst from the playhouse, running to greet a small gray-haired woman in a big sun hat who was carrying a huge plastic bin of pretzels under one arm and a huge box of frozen waffles under the other. “Joey,” she called, “can you help unload, please?”

  “Okay,” he called back, “but you’ll have to entertain our guest.”

  She looked up and spotted me. Her mouth opened in shock, and I could see how truly and totally she had not believed I would be on her porch. But here I was. Joey fell apart with laughter.