She wrote, Good idea to tell press this was test flight.

Sam replied, Live and learn and handed back his empty coffee cup. Irene filled it and passed it on, then poured herself a cup of coffee and wrapped her frozen hands around the mug. Sam had told her about the start of the Dole Derby, about Lindbergh’s flight and the chaos of departure. The throngs of press and spectators that nearly caused disaster. He’d insisted on this misdirection, and he’d been right. Why, the excitement over the supposed test flight was nutty enough; imagine if all those reporters had known they were leaving for Australia that very day! It was unnerving, the idea of all that mass attention directed on the two of them.

Irene set down the cup and leaned down to retrieve one of her maps from its case on the floor. But her hand didn’t encounter the metal edge of the map case. Instead, it sank into a nest of warm, soft fluff.

The fluff moved, jumped into Irene’s lap, and started to purr.

By now, Sandy was maybe seven or eight months old and had grown into a large cat, a diligent mouser, who considered Hangar C her personal dominion and Sam Mallory her personal servant. She looked up at Irene and stretched one lazy paw over the side of her lap. She had a narrow, pointed face and a pair of tawny eyes, which conveyed both affection for her human subjects and an insuperable right to occupy whatever space she pleased.

Irene reached for the notepaper and wrote: Stowaway. She clipped the note to the clothesline and ran it forward. Sam glanced left in surprise; the next note wasn’t due for several minutes yet. He read it, frowned, and looked back. His mouth made a round, panicked hole.

Sandy, on the other hand—Irene could have sworn the cat grinned back at him. It was a love affair between the two of them—unequal, naturally, in the face of Sandy’s obvious superiority of status—but a love affair nonetheless. From Irene’s lap, Sandy jumped to her accustomed place on Sam’s shoulders and started to lick his leather cap. Then she draped herself comfortably and went back to sleep.

As dawn approached, the clouds thinned and then disappeared altogether. The black ocean spread beneath them, split apart by a cold white moon. Irene’s head was now intolerably heavy. She thought about Lindbergh propping open his eyelids. She took her pencil and dug it into the back of her hand, just to create some sensation, any kind of stimulation to her nerves. The airplane began to dive. Irene looked at Sam and saw that Sandy was gone and Sam’s head was bent to his chest. She lunged forward and grabbed the stick.

“Wake up!” she yelled in his ear, but she couldn’t even hear herself. Still, the jostling woke him. Sam took the stick back and shook his head a little. Irene sat back in her chair and hunted for the Thermos of coffee, but it was empty. There was only one Thermos remaining. Irene opened it and poured some coffee into Sam’s cup, although it wasn’t that hot anymore, just warm. She nudged it into his hand and he drank. His eyes were wide and staring. Sandy wandered up, having completed a routine patrol of the premises, and sniffed at the box of sandwiches. Irene unwrapped one and fed the cat a few delicate bites of chicken. She poured some water into a coffee mug so that Sandy could drink.

When the cat was satisfied, Irene put her headset back on and turned the volume as high as it would go. Faintly the pings of the radio beacon came to her, just a hair off. Irene wrote a note to Sam: Adjust bearing two degrees south.

Sam nodded. The ship banked slightly and righted itself.

Irene calculated their position. They were now only three hundred and seventeen miles from Honolulu, or should be. She wrote another note.

Two and half hours left.

Then, You OK?

Sam handed back the empty coffee cup and read both notes. Sandy was back on his shoulders now, grooming her long fur in preparation for another nap, cleaning Sam’s leather cap. He glanced back to Irene and lifted his left fist, thumb pointed upward.

They raised Oahu with staggering precision, at a quarter past six in the morning. Sam saw it first. He nudged a nodding Irene in the shoulder and pointed out the cockpit window. Irene saw a smear on the horizon and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, it was still there, surrounded by the salmon-pink reflection of the sunrise behind them.

Together they stared at this miracle, this mountain rising out of the ocean. Of course, Irene could not yet confirm that this was Oahu itself, instead of one of the neighboring islands—Kauai to the north, or Molokai or even Maui to the south—but that didn’t matter. They had plenty of fuel left. They had found Hawai’i like a speck of dust on the great Pacific. When at last the distinctive shape of Diamond Head grew clear from the window, she wrote a final note to Sam: Diamond Head sighted to south-southeast. Begin approach to Rodgers Field.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

Well, I’m alive after all. Coughing and sputtering, drenched and tumbled, on my hands and knees where the foam washes up, surfboard missing, swimsuit almost torn from my body, but I guess that counts as living, since I’m aware of it. Cogito ergo sum, as the philosopher said.

My stomach heaves, and out comes about a quart of the Pacific Ocean.

A pair of long, elegant feet appear to my right, then the bottom edge of a surfboard as it plants in the sand. Dimly, I hear the laughter of children.

“Well done,” says Lindquist, without irony. “Now get out there and do it again.”

Lindquist is the kind of mother who believes in routine, which means dinner at six o’clock sharp. The children are sent to the kitchen to help Lani prepare the food and set the table. I wander into the library in search of Olle’s liquor cabinet—Lindquist, it seems, doesn’t touch alcohol—and discover several bottles of fine old Kentucky bourbon whiskey, which gives me a new affection for old Olle. While I’m savoring a sour, I hear some commotion from the driveway, the putter of a small motorcycle and Lindquist’s voice calling out to somebody, who answers back in a voice not unfamiliar to me.

I look out the back window and consider the distance to the guest cottage.

“Janey,” says Lindquist, when she appears at the library door a moment later. “Look who’s come for dinner.”

Mindful of manners, Leo’s brought a couple of bottles of wine to dinner at his stepmother’s house, even though he knows she doesn’t drink. “You and Janey can share them,” she tells him. “I’ll just stick to water.”

Naturally, the children adore him. He’s their brother, after all, and they’ve known him all their lives. They pepper him with questions about Uncle Kaiko.

“Aw, you know Uncle Kaiko,” he says. “He woulda checked right out of the hospital this morning if Dad hadn’t held him down. He likes the morphine, though.”

“I thought you were going to stay there overnight,” I say.

“I thought so too, but the fellow who was supposed to cover for me ate some bad clams at lunch, so I had to take the afternoon boat back after all.”

“What a shame.”

“I thought so too.”

“Did Olle say how much longer he means to stay in Honolulu?” asks Lindquist.

“Surgery went all right, but the doc wants Kaiko to rest up a few more days. I guess we’ll see. Dad might come back early, though, if Kaiko drives him crazy enough. But enough about all that. Kiddos? How do you like having a houseguest around here?”

Doris leaps at the opening. “We taught Janey how to surf!”

“Miss Everett,” says Lindquist.

“Oh, you can call me Janey. We’re practically related, since you just about killed me this afternoon.”

“Aw, I’ll bet you were a natural,” Leo says.

Wesley jumps from his chair. “A big wave took her under! You shoulda seen it, Leo! She about drowned!”

“Sit down, Wesley,” his mother tells him.

Wesley sits, sort of, but his arms keep demonstrating the massive arc of the wave that was nearly the death of me. “It came over like this! She missed the top and just went head over—head over—” He’s laughing too hard to go on, the little brat.

“She looked like a drowned rat,” Doris says helpfully.

Leo looks at me. “You all right?”

“Perfectly fine, thank you.”

“So?” he says to Doris. “Then what happened? Did she pick herself right back up and get back in the water?”

“Yes, she did,” I tell him.

“Only because Mama made her,” Doris says.

“Like riding a horse,” says Lindquist. “You fall off, you get straight back on again. And then she did very well. We’ll make a surfer of her yet.”