The summer between my first and second years of college, when I had just turned eighteen years old, I worked as a secretary at a law firm in order to save money for the next year’s tuition, and there was this lawyer there who ran the place. He was handsome and authoritative, a brilliant jurist, and he was also forty-seven years old and married. He acted awfully stern with me, never stopping to banter and charm as he did with the other secretaries, as if he actively disliked me, but the sterner he was the more he occupied my thoughts. At work my fingers struck like lightning on the typewriter while my eyes wandered around the office, following him wherever he went, craving some crumb of approval, wondering what on earth I’d done to earn his displeasure.

One Friday afternoon in early July, he had made all these notes on a brief and needed them typed up, and the other two secretaries—Patty and Laura—had already gone home. He said, I guess we shall have to wait for Monday then, and I said, Oh, I’d be happy to stay and type it for you. He said it was too much trouble, and I said it was no trouble at all. An hour later I was flat on my back on the Chesterfield sofa in his private office, blouse unbuttoned, virginal navy skirt up around my hips, married lawyer rocking away on top of me, and let me tell you it hurt like the dickens in more ways than one, but I didn’t stop him. I couldn’t, even if I’d had the physical strength for it. I was miserable and ashamed, and at the same time I felt this surge of anguished joy when he shuddered and shook and shouted, begged God and his wife to forgive him, collapsed on my chest and called himself a lost man, because I thought that must mean I had won not just his approval, but his adoration. I was loved! Then he lifted himself off and said what a whore I was, I should have stopped him. He said this even as he wiped my blood from his skin with his handkerchief. He swore me to silence, swore this could never happen again.

That night when I went home, I couldn’t even look at my mother or my stepfather. I felt this stain on me. I was so ashamed I wanted to die. In the middle of the night I went to the medicine cabinet and stared at the aspirin and wondered how much it would take to kill me, and if I hadn’t been scared of my mother finding me first, I might have done it.

On Monday it happened again. He told me to bring him his morning coffee, and when I stepped into his office with the cup he closed the door and kissed me. The coffee spilled. He told me he had spent all weekend in torment, thinking about nothing but me and what we had done, drunk with love for me, how I had bewitched and seduced him, this was all my doing, all my fault. He kissed me again, and I kissed him back, because I thought I should feed this thing, this love he said he had for me, this power I thought I had over him. He unbuttoned my blouse and kissed my neck, my breasts, then turned me around and laid me over the top of his desk, so that the leather blotter pressed against my cheek. When he was finished he gave me a handkerchief and told me this was our secret, that if I said a word about this to my mother, to anybody, he would cut all ties with me and I would be disgraced as a whore in front of everybody. So I didn’t say a word. I hated what we did, hated myself for doing it, hated these physical stirrings that sometimes came with what we did, and yet I never refused him, God forgive me, never once said no to him, because despite all the shame and the revulsion I craved his love, or rather I wanted him not to stop loving me, because I thought his lust for me was a symptom of love, and if I stopped feeding that lust he would no longer love me. Nobody would love me!

Long story short, we carried on through July and August, and though I still sometimes went to the medicine cabinet in the middle of the night to stare at the aspirin bottle, I never worked up the nerve to swallow the pills. I figured if I killed myself, people might find out why, and his wife’s heart would be broken and his life ruined, and all of this would be my fault.

At last I returned to college for the autumn term. By late September I realized I was going to have a baby. Well, of course I was! We must have fucked fifty times at least; I doubt there was a moment all that summer when my fresh young womb was not teeming with that man’s sperm. I wrote a letter to my lover and asked humbly what I should do, but he never replied. I thought it would be bad form to confront him face-to-face, so I went to Mother, who promptly took me to some doctor she knew of, who solved the problem. After the thing was done, she told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson, because she and my stepfather wanted no more to do with me, and that was when I started on the road with my camera, older but wiser, armed with a few new guiding principles.

First, no matter how much you’re tempted, do not have to do with married men.

Second, never allow a male member indoors unless it’s properly dressed.

Third, you may lease your body to whomever you fancy, and insist on your pleasure as a condition of same, but whatever you do, in whatever bed or sofa or sunlit meadow, for God’s sake keep your heart to yourself.

In time, I was to break all three of those rules, although not at the same time. We are only human, and our miseries take on infinite form.

Now, why have I told you this sordid, unhappy story, this stale tale already told a million times by a million other women, when I have not told another living soul? Because I think you should know that I am not so invincible, not so hard and so careless as I sometimes seem. I have been na?ve. I have behaved stupidly, even culpably. I have sinned and repented, I have deceived others and been cruelly deceived myself. I have been wounded so deeply I wanted to die.

But I did not die. I am Perseverance, remember. I am Survival.

And I am not so callous that I don’t feel a bone-crushing remorse at the sight of that airplane wreckage and a shudder of fate repeating itself and finally a sense of loss that almost brings me to my knees, because in my grief and my outrage I’ve destroyed something important. I have caused this nightmare that is my own worst nightmare.

All these thoughts bear down on me in a series of instants, and in the next instant I leap forward to help with the water tank, because I don’t do so well with the blood, and anyway Olle seems to be performing every necessary thing.

The slender man at the caisson must possess some superhuman strength, because he’s almost reached the wreckage. In seconds, I hurtle to his side and grab the yoke and together we haul that tank the last fifty yards. The fellow drops the yoke and thanks me, reaches for the hose and tells me to man the pump, and by God I nearly lose my mind.

“You! I thought—I thought—”

“You’re an idiot, Miss Everett,” yells Mrs. Lindquist as she drags the hose from its spool. “Now pump!”

As it turns out, the pilot’s not dead at all. He has a broken ankle and a great many cuts and bruises, and Olle suspects a collapsed lung caused by a possibly broken rib. His name is Kaiko, and he’s apparently Olle’s brother-in-law. Olle was married before, it turns out, to a Hawaiian woman who died some time ago, and Kaiko is her brother. Everybody’s related to each other in Hanalei, Olle explains.

I’m in Lindquist’s yellow truck with Olle, driving back into town, because Lindquist is flying Kaiko to the hospital in Honolulu in her own private airplane. Olle doesn’t trust the tiny hospital here on Kauai. Some fellow from the junkyard on the other side of the island is coming later to pick up the remains of the machine itself, which seems precipitate to me. I ask, Don’t they want to find out what caused the accident? and Olle looks at me like I’m crazy.

“What caused the accident is that Kaiko is a terrible pilot,” he says. “He came in to land too slowly and stalled. Now he’s learned his lesson. Thank God he had no passengers.”

“Does he usually? Have passengers?”

“Sometimes. When we’re short of pilots.”

“Oh, that’s just terrific. And people wonder why I won’t get on an airplane.”

“You don’t fly?”

The wind billows in drafts through the open windows, smelling of brine, whipping my hair around my head. I make some attempt to tuck it behind my ears. “Never ever,” I tell him. “By land or by sea, that’s my motto. It takes longer, but you see more, and you generally stay in one piece.”

Olle starts to laugh. I have the feeling he’s just relieved Kaiko isn’t dead, and sometimes relief finds expression in hysterical laughter. I saw a lot of that kind of thing in Europe, believe me.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“You. Fixated on my wife, and you don’t even fly.”

“I’m not fixated on your wife. I’m fixated on Samuel Mallory. He was the better pilot, after all.”

That sobers up Olle. “He was better at some things, maybe. But which pilot is still alive?”

We reach the inn a few minutes later. Olle seems to have forgotten that he doesn’t like me, or maybe my heroic efforts at the water pump have atoned for my sins. He stops the truck and frowns at me.

“I still want you on the next boat to Oahu,” he says. “You upset Irene.”

“If I’m on the next boat to Oahu, the next boat back will be carrying several members of the press. It’s your choice.”

He bangs a hand on the steering wheel. “Why? Why did you have to find us?”

“Because I want to know, that’s all. I want to know everything. I can’t rest until I do.” I sling my pocketbook over my shoulder. “And I think your Irene wants to know too.”