Inside the cottage, I pour myself a glass of water from the tap and swallow a couple of aspirins. Leo was right, I can take care of myself, all right. I know what to do when I’m going to bed a little the worse for Olle’s fine Kentucky bourbon.

But I don’t hit the sack right away. Instead I light a cigarette and dig out the leather diary from its hiding place—I won’t tell you where—and flip to the last few pages. I should explain that this is not some ordinary diary. More like a journal, a bewildering mishmash of jottings and engine diagrams, telephone numbers and map directions, which takes on narrative form only at the end, in which Mallory writes of his ordeal in the Spanish badlands, the anguish of his own injuries and the infinitely worse anguish of watching Irene suffer, while helpless to save her. His devastation that he will never see his daughter again. It’s not something I enjoy reading, and yet since I first discovered the diary, these harrowing words have drawn me back to read them, over and over, until they’ve scored themselves upon my skin. I seem convinced of something essential inside them, some secret to life itself; that if I experience Mallory’s agony often enough, I’ll discover what it is he’s trying to tell me.

I come to the last line:

GM to rescue at last thank God She will live

Every story has a hero and a villain, doesn’t it, and if it doesn’t—why, we fashion them ourselves. We want to take sides. We want to pledge our allegiance to one person or the other, one cause or another; to atone for our own thousand failings by planting ourselves on the high ground of righteousness, so we can crush some other poor schmuck beneath our heels and feel we are not simply right, but good.

All along, I have figured this story has one villain, and I thought I knew who it was. But maybe I was wrong, all along. Maybe I should have learned by now that nobody is all good or all bad; that hardly any battles are fought between good and evil. There is more good and less evil, or more evil and less good, but the only time I’ve ever felt the presence of absolute evil was when we opened the gates at Dachau and saw what men had wrought. And I’ll bet even those SS guards thought they were doing the right thing at the time. The human brain is capable of all kinds of contortions, all kinds of earnest and precise blindnesses, in order to protect itself from the idea that it might have made a mistake. That it might have taken the wrong side.

That final line, the last words Sam Mallory ever wrote, as he lay injured in his airplane and waited to die: what if I’m wrong about that?

I run my fingers along the ink, where Mallory’s fingers left their mark, and tap some ash into the dish beside me.

As usual, I wake up in a sweat a few hours later. To pass the time, I reach for the newspaper clippings my old friend Bill sent me, the ones about Howland and Australia and the scandalous Honolulu photographs that apparently drove Mrs. Mallory to attempt her own life. Eventually I fall asleep again and rise at nine. Lindquist is gone. I snatch some coffee from the kitchen and bicycle down the highway, right through Hanalei, until I reach the village of Kilauea and the post office on the main road, which serves more or less the same variety of purpose here. The woman at the counter doesn’t seem to recognize me. I ask if I can send a telegram. She hands me the form, and I tap the pencil against my lips a few times before I compose the message.

BILL YOU BIG LUG STOP HOW ABOUT PULLING ALL YOU CAN FIND ON GEORGE MORROW STOP SEND TO YOURS TRULY CARE OF KILAUEA POST OFFICE STOP HAWAII BEATS ALL STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE STOP MUCH LOVE JANEY

III

Flying with me is a business. Of course I make money. I have to or I couldn’t fly. I’ve got to be self supporting or I couldn’t stay in the business.

—Amelia Earhart

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

October 1936: California

Irene had wired ahead to George:

LAND BURBANK APPROX 5PM STOP NO PRESS STOP REPEAT NO PRESS STOP LOVE ALWAYS IRENE

When the airplane rolled to a stop outside Hangar A, however, Irene looked out the cockpit window and saw four or five men in shabby blue suits gathered respectfully at the corner, holding their notebooks and their cameras. A couple of flashes went off. Landon took off his radio headset and turned to Irene. “I guess your public awaits,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I told him not to call the press.”

“No such thing as bad publicity, right?”

Irene unbuckled the safety strap and reached for her kit bag. “Thanks for the lift,” she said.

“Any time. Sorry about the race.”

“Those are the breaks. At least the ship’s not a write-off.”

“She’ll take some fixing, though.”

Irene ran a brush through her curls and dug out a tube of lipstick. “She will.”

The autumn sun was already dipping below the hills to the west. Landon opened the hatch and a couple of flashbulbs went off, a couple of voices called out in greeting. George bounded up the stairs first, tore off his hat, greeted her with an embrace and a kiss, prompting a few more flashbulbs and a photograph that would appear in the Burbank Daily Review the next morning, page four, and the Los Angeles Times, page eleven. He drew back and held her by the shoulders. His expression was one of fatigue and relief, and for a moment the exhausted Irene just absorbed the familiar air of him, hair oil and shaving soap and a distant note of cigars.

“Welcome home, darling,” said George. “How’s the arm?”

“The arm’s just fine. I thought I said no press.”

“Just a few fellows. Hardy and Patrick from the Daily Review, Rogers from the Times. Ten minutes, tops.” He kissed her forehead. “Then dinner. You must be starving.”

“More tired than hungry, actually,” said Irene, but George was already replacing his hat, lifting her kit bag, taking her hand. They descended the steps together in a routine George had choreographed so long ago, Irene didn’t have to think. The newsmen gathered around at the foot of the steps and began their questions in the usual way, to which Irene answered in the usual way.

“How’s the arm, Miss Foster?”

“It’s all right.” (Lifting her left arm.) “It’ll be in a sling for a few more days, but there’s no fracture. Nothing to worry about.”

“You must be awfully disappointed, Miss Foster. Would you care to comment on the crash in Fort Worth?”

“I wouldn’t call it a crash, really. We just had a hard landing, that’s all. When a squall moves in just as you’re approaching the airfield, you have to prepare for the worst.”

“With all due respect, Miss Foster, should you have attempted the landing at all, with weather bearing down?”

“It’s a race, Mr. Rogers. Flying the Coast-to-Coast Derby’s a different matter from making an ordinary journey from city to city, carrying passengers. If you want to win, you have to take a chance or two. You can’t let a little weather get in your way.”

“But surely it’s not worth risking your life?”

“Any kind of competitive flying carries an element of risk. That’s why we fly these races, to push the airplanes and the pilots to their utmost, to push back the frontiers of what’s possible, so that the common man can get on an airplane in full confidence that the machine and the captain will get him to his destination in safety and comfort.”

As she finished this speech, George put his hand to the small of her back and rubbed his thumb against her spine. He did this to convey approval to her during the countless times they’d stood like this over the years, at the bottom of the airplane steps, while Irene spoke to the press and George gazed at her as if she were some kind of goddess come to earth. They used to rehearse at home. George would ask questions and Irene would answer them, and George would tell her how she ought to have answered them, frankly and openly while still communicating some particular message, some theme to which she and George had agreed. Now it was second nature. Irene knew exactly what she was supposed to do. Say what you would about George—and there were plenty of mutterings by the fall of 1936, few of which ever reached Irene’s ears—he had a natural gift for publicity. A genius, really. Without George Morrow, there would have been no Irene Foster, at least as we know her today.