Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  “I’m sure you’ve done your research and know about my parents,” I said. “I’ve always been interested in disappearance. A lot of the time—maybe most of the time—when people disappear it’s actually, literally death, but it’s not perceived that way. There’s an escape hatch built into disappearance. It is an escape hatch. Marian gets framed in the context of what really happened, like her never coming back is some unsolved mystery, but even if she turned into a yeti and roamed Antarctica for fifty years, there’s really only one upshot at this point. She’d be a hundred years old now. Disappearance comes for us all, you know? I used to wonder if my parents might be alive, like if somehow they’d faked their own deaths. You can’t help picking at things. A couple of years ago I even hired an investigator, but he didn’t find anything. He said he didn’t think there was anything to find. Just a really big lake. Anyway, if they were alive, that would have meant they went to great lengths to abandon me.”

  The writer blinked. She said, “What do you think now?”

  “Now it seems like they never existed at all.”

  She nodded slowly, leaned even farther forward, asked, “Are you a searcher, Hadley?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let me put it this way. I think of a seeker as someone looking for enlightenment. I mean searcher as something more open-ended, someone who’s actively trying to find their way.”

  I looked out the window at Mark trailing his hand in the water. “Maybe I am,” I said, “but not a good one because I always seem to be a little bit lost.” That was a nice pull quote for her, I always seem to be a little bit lost, something to superimpose in big italics over a photo of me styled to look rebellious but also waify: leather jacket with no shirt underneath, heavy eyeliner, forlorn expression.

  She said, “And what about love? Are you searching for that, too?”

  “I’m probably more likely to find enlightenment.”

  “Is it possible they’re the same thing?”

  “No,” I said, “I think they’re opposites.”

  * * *

  —

  After the table read was over, after the assistant director had read “Fade to black” into the mic as Marian sank into the depths, when everyone was milling around congratulating each other, I sought out Redwood while pretending I wasn’t.

  “Hey,” I said, feigning surprise when we came face-to-face. “You do exist. I thought maybe I’d hallucinated you.”

  He laughed nervously and tucked his hair behind his ears. “FYI, all those pink elephants were real, too,” he said.

  “We could just pretend it was a normal business lunch and not an intergalactic journey, if you want.”

  Quietly, glancing around, he said, “After you get drunk or high with someone, do you ever wonder if you made a total idiot out of yourself?”

  “No,” I said. “I assume I did.”

  He smiled, relieved. “You didn’t at all. But maybe I did?”

  “To be honest, I don’t totally remember what we said.”

  “Yeah, to me, that always feels like part of the problem.”

  “Just assume everything you said was brilliant.”

  “What if I have a nagging feeling most of it was ridiculous?”

  “Maybe we could do it again,” I ventured, “and just stick to wine?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “For sure.” And he was about to say something else, but someone called him away.

  Lodgings

  British Columbia

  June 1932

  Three months after Marian visited Missoula

  The Stearman crossed into Canada. Below, the world was green with new growth, and the wind blew easterly through the bright morning, rutting the sky and bouncing the plane. Marian banked west.

  Jamie was hunkered down in the front cockpit with his valise and his box of paints and brushes. Cases of whiskey would occupy that space on the way back; Marian would blame engine trouble for her delayed return, say she’d had to put down in the wilderness, fix the plane herself. Barclay might not believe her, but at least by then her task will be done.

  Caleb had written to tell her that Jamie had not improved, that he kept talking about her taking him somewhere as though his departure was imminent. Might it be worth a try? Caleb thought he knew someone to rent the house, care for the dogs and Fiddler.

  Caleb never wrote unless it was important.

  Marian had told Barclay she forgave him, let him fuck her, willed her womb closed. She started flying across the line again, mailed two letters from a nowhere town. One was to Jamie, telling him to be ready, that she would come get him soon and without warning. The other was a query, though an unanswerable one because she instructed the recipient not to write back. She didn’t want Barclay to see any letters coming from Vancouver.

  The only clouds were sparse and stringy, like shreds of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire. The propeller was a circular smudge, a transparent disturbance. Barclay had known what the price of forgiveness (even feigned) would be. Flight, of course. He gave it grudgingly, suspiciously, knew each trip she made over the line was a pantomime of escape.

  * * *

  —

  In the front cockpit, Jamie gazed blearily down. He’d gulped a good amount of moon before they left, a last drink, he’d told himself, proud about recognizing his need to take a break from booze, smug about resisting the urge to smuggle a bottle along for the flight. If only Sarah could be in the plane, too. He imagined her interest, her delight in the landscape below. When he’d first returned to Missoula, after Wallace left for Denver and Marian for Barclay, he’d missed Sarah so badly and so persistently that the sensation had scared him, and he’d fled into his work and into booze like a panicked elk fleeing into a lake to escape swarming flies. With his painting, he could summon her image. With his painting, he could show her, though he still didn’t know what exactly. After nearly a year, thoughts of her no longer distressed him but offered something like companionship, especially when he drank. He imagined long, rambling conversations with her, peppered her with questions she never answered.

  Marian descended into a long valley. Raw country turned into farmland that turned into neighborhoods, a city sprawled out under transiting cloud shadows, ending at the sea. As she bore to the north, across the harbor from downtown, Jamie picked out the small airfield that was the center of the circle around which they had begun revolving, drawing closer and closer as though a tether were being reeled in.

  * * *

  —

  “If you’d have let me write back, I would have warned you I only have my smallest room free.”

  Geraldine was for the most part as Marian remembered, fair and soft and bosomy in a way that seemed maternal, reassuring, though her manner was more brisk and her gaze more skeptical.

  “That’s fine,” Marian said.

  “Is it fine with you?” Geraldine said to Jamie. “You’re the one staying.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “You might want to look first.”

  He’d been quiet in the taxi from the airfield. Marian imagined he’d been feeling the beginnings of a hangover months in the making, or maybe absorbing the unfamiliarity of the place, the difficulty of starting over. “Go look,” she told him, though she knew he would not refuse the room.

  While Geraldine took him upstairs, she waited at the kitchen table. She had last sat there only a year ago, the morning of the day she flew over the crevasse. Jamie and Geraldine were gone longer than she expected. The house seemed quiet; the other boarders must be out. She looked at her watch, thinking about how far she could get from Vancouver before sunset, where she might manage to spend the night without word getting back to Barclay.

  Laughter and footsteps. Creaking stairs. When they came back into the kitchen, both of them seemed lighter and brighter th
an before, pinker. “Is it all right?” she asked Jamie.

  “A palace,” he said cheerfully.

  “No guests,” Geraldine said, suddenly stern, her brightness snuffed out. “Be in by midnight. And no drinking in the house.”

  “All right,” Jamie said.

  “Go unpack, then,” Marian said. “I’ll wait here.”

  When he was gone, Marian stood. “Will you tell him I said goodbye?” she said to Geraldine.

  “You won’t stay the night?”

  “I can’t. My husband is expecting me.”

  “Not even a cup of tea?”

  “I can’t.”

  Geraldine looked at her with concern that was more practical than sentimental. “Why couldn’t I write back to your letter? Is your brother in some kind of trouble? You ought to tell me if he is.”

  “No. Or, nothing a change of scene won’t fix.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “About what?”

  Marian had been moving toward the door, with Geraldine following. “My husband, mostly.”

  “Ah.” The woman nodded, her mouth in a twist that suggested she knew a thing or two about husbands.

  “I don’t like goodbyes,” Marian said at the door. “Jamie knows that. He won’t be surprised.”

  “I don’t mind goodbyes,” Geraldine said. “I’ll pass along yours.”

  An Incomplete History of the Graves Family

  1932–1935

  In May 1932, Amelia Earhart flies a Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland to Northern Ireland, alone. The first solo Atlantic crossing since Lindbergh. A difficult flight, stormy and almost fifteen hours long. Ice builds up on the wings. The plane spins down three thousand feet. When she regains control, she is low over the whitecaps. She might have disappeared then, in a cold place without islands or atolls, where people couldn’t dream her back to life, make her a castaway. They would have looked for her and found only water, as they did anyway, later. Probably she would have become just another dead pilot, briefly famous, lost in pursuit of a dream, now forgotten.

  Night in Hopewell, New Jersey. A baby’s empty crib. A ransom note on the windowsill. Charles Lindbergh’s first child, a son, twenty months old, is gone.

  Chaos. Uproar. Headlines as big as they go. Everyone’s a sleuth. Everyone wants a piece of the action. From prison, even Al Capone offers to help.

  After ten weeks and a thousand false leads, after Lindbergh pays ransom to a man who promises his son is safe on a boat that turns out not to exist, the baby is found four miles from the Lindbergh house, skull fractured, badly decomposed, dead since the night he was taken. Lindbergh has always been quiet, truthfully pretty weird. (Once, as a prank, he filled a friend’s water pitcher with kerosene, watched him drink. Lindberg laughed until he cried; the friend went to the hospital.) He turns further inward, peers out of himself through a narrow chink, a gap in the curtains. His wife, Anne, never sees him cry.

  Amy Johnson of Britain-to-Australia fame flies from London to Cape Town in a de Havilland Puss Moth named Desert Cloud, beating the solo record set by her own husband—Jim Mollison, a drunken lout and relentless philanderer but a good pilot. The Saharan dunes ripple silver under a full moon.

  In August, Barclay finds Marian’s replacement diaphragm. Lately he’s been penetrating her without fanfare, like an animal obligated to breed, but one night, trying to elicit pleasure, to make her respond to him as she used to, he puts his fingers in her, feels the rubber rim. He strikes her across the face with an open hand, and she hits him back, fist closed. “If you go up in that plane again,” he says, one hand over his watering eye, “I’ll pour gasoline on it and light a match.”

  “Then I’ll do the same to myself.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Where did you get it?”

  She won’t say. His sister is no ally, but Marian won’t betray her. He throws the diaphragm on the fire.

  After that she is kept to the ground, where the air feels thick and heavy, her movements sluggish. Barclay mates with her grimly, daily. She doesn’t think he makes her suffer out of hate. She thinks he believes pregnancy will come as a kind of cure, convert her entirely and immediately into the woman he thinks she should be, prove he’s been right all along. He believes she will love him for his rightness. Sometimes he rages at her for lying there like a corpse, trying to make me feel wrong about it. He insists she has been with other men, makes insinuations about Caleb, about lovers scattered as widely across Canada as his caches of booze. He gets better at catching her wrists, dodging her blows. Her self, her interior habitat, once full of purpose, has become hollow and inert and uncanny, as though she is a hermit crab who has somehow mistakenly shed the inner animal instead of the shell. Her body grows hard, bony, thinner than she’s ever been. He is heavy on her; the air is heavy on her; weight and oppression are constant, uniform.

  Still she is not pregnant.

  “I’m a witch,” she tells him when he demands to know her trick. She sees he almost believes her, in spite of himself.

  When she took him to Vancouver, she had told Jamie to send letters to the post office of a town she could visit between deliveries. But now, since she can’t fly, she can’t pick up her letters, and she doesn’t dare write to him. She doesn’t want Barclay to know where he is.

  One day in the fall, she walks far from the house. Clouds of round gold leaves shimmer on the aspen trees like a suspended rain of coins. A whistle, high and sharp. Caleb comes striding through the forest, the shimmer. He is as he always is: hair braided down his back, barrel of his rifle sticking up over his shoulder. He glints with humor, with the presumption of her love. In a rush, she realizes how lonely she’s been.

  She wraps her arms around his waist. He curves a hand over her nape. She knows he is noticing, as her former barber, the raggedness of her hair. Barclay had wanted her to grow it long, so instead she’d cut it herself, badly, with Mother Macqueen’s sewing scissors.

  She is talking into Caleb’s chest: What are you doing here? How are you here? Why are you here?

  “Jamie said he hadn’t heard from you.”

  “I haven’t written. I couldn’t. How is he?”

  “He seems better. He’s painting. I think he’s bedding his landlady. Here. See for yourself.” He pulls an envelope from inside his jacket. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “You didn’t walk all the way from Missoula, did you?”

  “Not all the way, but maybe you and Jamie could look into more efficient ways to correspond. I’ve heard there’s a postal service.”

  “You have to be careful not to be seen. Really, Caleb. Not by anyone. Barclay won’t like it. He’s already taken away my plane.”

  “He’s locked you up.”

  “Do you see me in chains?” She doesn’t know why she has the impulse to defend Barclay. “It’s not forever.”

  “It is unless you leave him.”

  “He’ll cool off.”

  Gently, he says, “I used to think my mother would get better.”

  “That’s different.” She looks away, scanning the trees for spies. “I’m sorry you had to come all this way just to deliver a letter.”

  “It wasn’t just for the letter. I wanted to see you. I was worried.” He studies her. “You’re too thin.”

  She bristles, then subsides, feeling he has broken a promise to her by worrying, insulted her judgment and competence, but knowing, too, that she has given him good cause.

  He adds, “I’m always out wandering around. It’s not a hardship to wander in this direction.”

  “I envy your wandering.”

  “Come with me, then. Leave.”

  There is no reason for her not to go except the impossibility of it. “If I slink
off, I’ll feel like a coward.”

  “Marian.”

  “I need him to let me go.”

  “He’ll never do it.”

  “Or else nothing will ever be resolved. I need a real end to it, an agreement of some kind. I can’t feel as though I owe him anything.”

  “You think he doesn’t know how to make you always think you owe something? Your marriage is a contest to him, and if he lets you go, he’ll lose.”

  Heat rises in her. She can’t tell fear from anger anymore. “Don’t argue, please. I can’t bear it.”

  He yields. “At least read the letter. I brought a pencil and paper so you can write back.” A twist of a smile. “You’d think I don’t have anything better to do than be your personal courier.”

  * * *

  —

  In his letter, Jamie had thanked Marian for bringing him to Vancouver. He’d tried to reassure her that he was better, that the dark enchantment of Wallace’s house had been broken. He expressed mortification for how low he’d sunk, for the state in which she’d seen him. I let myself lose track of things. He told her he’d gone to meetings of a local group of artists, the Boar Bristle Club, named for the hog hairs used to make certain paintbrushes. They’d included a few of his paintings in one of their exhibitions, and he’d sold one, not for much. On the weekends he peddled portraits in the city parks like he had in Seattle, and he’d gotten a job in an art supply store, and he’d placed an ad in the newspaper offering drawing lessons. The only fly in the ointment is that I don’t hear from you and don’t know how you are. And, he added, he and Geraldine had become good friends.

  The truth: Jamie is in love. Or—not quite. He wants to be in love, because without question he is in lust, and not to love the first woman he sleeps with strikes him as impolite, even seedy. And why shouldn’t he love the soft, welcoming body he is permitted to touch with his hands and his mouth, to rest his weight on, to venture inside? Why shouldn’t he love the good woman who inhabits it, who has, through sheer carnal force, finally displaced Sarah Fahey from the center of his thoughts? There is no reason not to love Geraldine, and yet he doesn’t. Not quite. But he feels affection for her and, whenever he is not in her bed, an eagerness to return to it.