What I’m trying to tell you is that Lindquist allows me an entire bottle of Olle’s best Scotch whiskey—he keeps a supply in the airfield cafeteria for nervous passengers—on board the airplane, although she won’t allow me to smoke. The other terms of our arrangement aren’t worth mentioning. She drives a hard bargain, that’s all, and the next time Leo tries to tell me his stepmother’s got the kindest heart in the world, oh my, sweet as pie, wouldn’t hurt a fly, that stepmama of mine . . .

At which point I realize I’m singing these thoughts aloud, so I clam up before anything else escapes me.

“Oh, I’ve heard worse,” Lindquist says cheerfully.

Even to my inexperienced eye, this airplane isn’t exactly the raciest piece of metal aloft. It’s designed to carry tourists over the Hawaiian islands or else locals desiring a more snappy form of transportation than the ferries, and what you want for such purposes is an airplane that reassures passengers they’ll hit the ground again safely. It’s a chunky, sturdy beast of two engines and eight seats, not counting pilot and navigator, and what strikes me as I fasten the straps, taking care not to jostle the bottle in my lap, is that the pilot can’t exactly see out the cockpit window.

“Yes, I can,” says Lindquist.

“Not very well.”

“It’s better once we’re airborne, and the plane levels off.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m not complaining. The less I see the better. Are you sure I can’t have one little smoke?”

“Only if you let me take the bottle away.”

“Why am I here?” I wail. “What have you done to me?”

“I have a better question. What makes you think you can write a book about Sam Mallory without ever having flown in an airplane?”

“It is called imagination, Lindquist. You literal types wouldn’t understand.”

She puffs that away and continues doing whatever it is you do, when you’re preparing a machine to fly in the air. I hear the noise of engines like the buzz of angry insects. The air smells of gasoline and engine oil. Lindquist fiddles with her dials, scribbles something in her log, that kind of thing. I close my eyes and recall the way the water surged gently beneath my surfboard—no, hold on. That ended in disaster. Better to think of a ride that ended well, like Leo the other night. Leo before Uncle Kaiko. Leo before the fall. Leo—

The airplane moves. My eyes pop open. I suck down another mouthful of Scotch whiskey, and doesn’t it run smooth against the thump of my heart? The airplane turns. The engines spool to a roar. Build and build, until that ramshackle fuselage shakes under the pressure of so much power held in check, until the whole world rattles, something’s wrong, it’s an earthquake, it’s the end of the universe.

Then we go. Tear along at some godawful speed while the scream climbs up my lungs. No. No. NO! It’s too late, I’m strapped in this goddamn chair like an execution, I can’t get out, I can’t make her hear me through all that racket, my God, I can’t make her understand that I’ve changed my mind, I want to stop, I want to stay safe on the ground, now faster and faster, until I close my eyes again and give it all up. I say to myself, never mind, what does it matter, if I die I die, this is how Velázquez died, I will die as he died, I will know what he knew, I will feel as he felt, I will maybe see him somewhere—not in heaven, sinners as we are and unashamed, but somewhere warmer—and I’ll tell him maybe I might have married him, if he had lived, because it seems I had become a little attached to him after all, it seems I still keep the memory of him tucked deep beneath the glassy surface of that organ most people call a heart. And while I’m thinking all these thoughts, one after the other, experiencing this strange revelation, something happens.

We rise in the air.

All that rattling melts into something like peace.

And I think, Lord Almighty. I’m flying.

I lean forward and tap Lindquist on the shoulder. “Where are we going, anyhow?”

“Just a little island out to the west,” she says, “where we can be alone.”

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

August 1928: Howland Island

The island was shaped like a pickle instead of a potato chip not because of some cartographer’s error, but because it was not Baker Island. It was Howland Island, thirty-two miles to the north, and they had only just caught sight of it at the extreme southern edge of the horizon. So Sam and Irene had narrowly made landfall at all.

The Centauri wasn’t in bad shape, all things considered. There was no apparent structural damage. The engines and the wheels had come through the hard landing fine, except for a blown tire. The only destruction came to the longwave radio antenna, which had broken off, leaving them unable to communicate.

“But they know we’re here,” said Sam. “That was my last transmission, that we had sighted land and were headed down.”

“To Baker Island. And they’ll sail on over to Baker Island and find no trace of us, and they’ll think we ditched at sea and drowned.”

“Baker’s not so far away. We’ll see a ship and signal. Anyway, they’ll look for us here, if they don’t find us on Baker.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Positive.”

It was almost noon. After landing, they had crawled out of the ship and taken their bearings, had drunk some water and settled under the shelter of a wing and slept several hours, while the equatorial sun rose at last and carpeted the landscape in heat. Irene had woken first and shook Sam. Now that it was light, she saw that he had cut his forehead, which was smeared and crusted with dried blood. They had gone down to the beach and washed it with salt water, and now they were staring at the empty horizon.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Sorry for what?”

“Panicking.”

He lay back in the sand and shaded his eyes. “You did just fine.”

“But why did you make me do it? We could have been killed.”

“Because I knew you could do it. You’re a natural. Anyway, I figured you needed the practice.”

“The practice?” She hit his shoulder. “The practice?”

He opened one eye at last and squinted at her. “One day you’re going to be flying solo, and you’re going to have to crash some bird somewhere, and I want you to know how to do it. I want you to live.”

I want you to live. Irene looked up at the hot sky. She wanted to say something, but her throat was stiff and dry. Sam lay back in his flight suit, tanned and relaxed, hair damp, one blue eye squinting in her direction. As if they were on some kind of vacation! The air was hot and dry and smelled of the ocean. Irene heaved herself to her feet and strode back to the airplane.

According to the charts, Howland Island was about twice as big as Baker, a thousand acres or so, made of coral sand and surrounded by reef. Nobody lived there, except birds. You couldn’t live there. The surface was flat and nearly barren, just scrub grass and a few trees huddled atop a small rise near the middle. Irene had a dread feeling that there was no fresh water of any kind.

At least its desert qualities made it easy to land on. The Centauri had dug ruts into the sand and grass, but it hadn’t spun or crashed or been damaged by trees. Just an intact shell of an airplane with no fuel. Irene ducked under the tail and kept walking westward. The sun was high above her, beating down on the brim of her hat. The ocean rushed against the reef. The tide was low, exposing the shallows, and Irene thought they could probably catch some fish there, some crustaceans or something.

Water was a bigger problem. Irene had packed a makeshift distilling kit among her equipment, but distilling seawater was a lot of work for meager reward. Still. Enough water to keep them alive, if they needed it.

If they needed it?

My God, they were marooned! They were shipwrecked on a deserted island! They were alive. They were lost! They were not lost. They were only stuck.

She stopped and folded her arms and stared at the western shore. The waves washing up and tumbling around the coral. No surfing here. Sam came up beside her and stood too.

“You should get out of the sun,” he said.

“How long, do you think? Until we’re rescued?”

“Shouldn’t be long. A few days.”

“What if it’s longer?”

She meant survival. But as they stood there together, side by side, watching the empty ocean, gathering sunshine, nothing but grass and sand and rocks and salt water and the two of them, the question took on something else, some untoward quality. Some intimacy that answered itself.