“Don’t I know it.”

Something brushed against Irene’s foot, her leg, winding its way upward. A cat’s fur, clean and fluffy. Irene reached down to pet her, but Sandy had already disappeared to transfer her caresses to Sam. She climbed onto his chest and started her rasping purr. Sam stroked her back and said, “I come up to visit her and Pixie, and there’s bottles in the trash, empty bottles in the cabinets, behind the books in the bookshelf.”

“What about your daughter?”

“Oh, she takes good care of Pixie, all right. If she didn’t, now . . . if she laid a hand on my girl . . .”

Sandy was now purring like a propeller engine under his hand, almost delirious. Because the moon was still low in the sky, somewhere behind them, it didn’t yet illuminate much, just the outline of Sam’s head and Sandy’s fur.

“You have to understand,” he said. “When we met, Bertha and me, I was a kid. War’d just ended. Everyone else who started out in my squadron got killed, except me and Rofrano. So I came out west. Picked up an old Jenny and started barnstorming to make some dough. Then I remembered about Bertha. Her first husband, he was in the squadron, got shot down a month before the Armistice. Good fellow, friend of mine. I knew he’d lived in Oakland. So I thought I should look her up and pay a duty visit. See if there was anything I could do for her. And she—well, I can’t even say how it happened. I didn’t come for that, I swear. I wasn’t in love with her or anything; I didn’t even like her that much. She was just there, is all. She didn’t ask for anything back, just me coming by to—to keep her company. We hardly even talked. I didn’t know much about women. I was in the middle of it before I realized what she was up to. Stupid kid that I was. Then she told me she was having Pixie.”

“And that’s when you got married?”

“We got married real quick, ten-minute ceremony at the registry office, just the two of us and some witness from the building permit office upstairs. Nice lady, curly hair, spectacles. I had the sense she felt a little sorry for me. Afterward, we went straight home to Bertha’s place in Oakland and set up housekeeping. Painted the nursery myself. And Bertha set about trying to domesticate me.”

“You can’t blame her for that, though.”

“No, I can’t. Can’t blame her for wanting a nice tame husband. She said I should quit all the barnstorming and find a real job in an office someplace, and maybe she was right. She had this idea that she could make me into an accountant or something. That’s what she wanted, to be an accountant’s wife with a fancy house and a daily maid and a nice piece of tin parked out front. And I wasn’t that man.”

“No, you’re not. Not a bit.”

“I tried, Irene. Honest, I did. But you know how it is. Flying’s what I do, it’s my blood and heart, the only thing keeping me sane, the only thing I can do better than the other man. Better than just about anybody. You understand, don’t you? How you feel when you’re up in the air, and the earth’s laid out below you, and nothing to tie you down.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Well, Bertha didn’t. She hated it. She hated that I cared about airplanes more than I cared about her; she couldn’t understand why I needed to fly. Especially once Pixie was born. She started having these rages. Then the drinking. She’d always liked the bottle, sure, but it got to be a habit. She’d get a couple of different doctors to prescribe the booze for her nerves or something, buy it all at the drugstore in town that looked the other way. Made everything worse. She’d hit me, throw things, break the dishes, enough to make you think those drys are maybe on to something. Later, she’d calm down and explain how very sorry she was, but I had driven her to it, I’d made her do all that. It was all my fault.” He stroked Sandy for a minute. “One night—must’ve been about a year ago—I figured I’d had enough. Said if she kept on like this, I’d leave for good, I’d take Pixie with me and go.”

Sandy got up suddenly and nipped Sam’s nose. Ouch, he said, laughing, and Irene sat up a little and took the cat in her arms and buried her nose in the clean-smelling fur. “So what happened? Did you leave?”

“Leave? Nah. I was just trying to shape her up. I didn’t want a divorce. I couldn’t do that to Pixie, take her away from her mother. But I swear to God, I never figured Bertha’d do what she did.”

Sandy jumped from Irene’s lap and stalked off into the darkness. The whites of her, enamored of moonlight, vanished last. Irene realized her palms were damp, her heart was thumping. She said daringly, “Well, what did she do?”

Sam sat up and took out another cigarette, and while he was lighting it, while he held the cigarette in one corner of his mouth and snicked the flame from the lighter, he spoke from the other corner of his mouth. “I had a show down in Vacaville the next day. I drove there, checked into this motor inn, like I always do. Got up in the morning, did some flying, had some dinner with a friend or two, came back in the evening. Manager said there was a parcel for me.”

The cigarette was now lit. He stuck the lighter back in the pocket of his flight suit and removed the cigarette from his mouth and just sat there, dropping ash into the sand, staring at the salt froth that shimmered atop the reef.

Irene sat up next to him and gathered her knees in her arms. “So?”

“She’d cut off her pinky toe—the left one—and sent it to me in a brown cardboard box, lined with tissue. And a note saying she’d slit her throat if I didn’t come back.”

The next morning, Irene got up early and did the next best thing to taking a bath. She went swimming in the clear, salty water of the island’s leeward shore. The reef dropped off quickly, so she stayed close to the island’s edge, stroking back and forth as the sun rose from the opposite horizon. Then she plunged underwater and opened her eyes. She had seen pictures of coral reefs, but nothing could prepare you for the reality, for the colorful, intricate explosion of life. When she came up gasping, the barrenness of dry land amazed her.

There was no sign of Sam. The airplane had come to rest on the other side of the rise at the center of the island, and he was probably still sleeping under the shelter of the right wing. Irene crawled onto the beach and let the warm air dry her skin. When she rose and put her clothes on, she thought she saw a flash of movement in the grass, which might have been a bird or might not. Otherwise, the world was still, and for the first time Irene felt the enormity of those hundreds of miles of ocean surrounding them on all sides, those billions of cubic feet of salt water. The insignificance of this speck of land on which they had perched.

She headed back to the airplane.

Sam wasn’t in the hollow where he had slept. Irene rummaged in her kit bag until she found her tortoiseshell comb and sat on a rock to untangle her wet hair. As she sat there, swearing, Sam sauntered up from the north, wearing nothing but a pair of khaki trousers, shaking the droplets from his hair.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“My damned hair!”

He cocked his head to one side. “Why don’t you cut it?”

“My mother always said—before she died—” She stopped short.

“And how long ago was that?” Sam asked.

“When I was eleven.”

Sam nodded. “That’s an awful long time ago, though.”

He held his crumpled shirt in one hand and seemed unaware that his chest remained bare, unaware that Irene was aware. She kept her gaze on his face, but the chest remained at the periphery, pale to the neck, ridged on each side with hungry ribs. When they were little, Irene and her cousins used to swim all the time in the pond at her grandparents’ house, and she hadn’t paid any attention to the boys’ chests, except to envy them for their shirtlessness. Now she tried to summon the old nonchalance.

“I don’t have any scissors,” she said.

“I’ve got a pair in the toolkit.”

She set down the comb. “All right.”

Sam went to fetch the scissors from the toolkit. Sandy stalked up from nowhere and licked her paws with an air of worldliness. Irene peered closer and saw a smear of blood on the white fur of the cat’s chin, and she thought about the large black rat she’d seen scurrying between some clumps of seagrass yesterday afternoon.

Sam returned with the scissors and held them out to her. Irene looped her fingers through the handle and seized a fistful of hair, matted and wet from the swim, uncombed since the morning they left Honolulu.

“Well?” said Sam. “Go on.”

She handed back the scissors. “You do it. I don’t have a mirror.”

“I’ve never cut a woman’s hair before.”

“Neither have I, and at least you can see what you’re doing.”

“All right. Turn around.”

Irene turned around on her rock, and Sam went down on one knee and looked this way and that around her hair, brow furrowed. Well? she said, and he replied that it was an awful lot of hair, and how much did she want cut off, anyway?