“You’ve decided, then,” he said. “You’re going to Sacramento.”

She didn’t ask how he knew. She took the coffee and drank, and when her mug was empty she washed it out and showered in Sam’s bathtub, under its rickety shower pipe. He was waiting, towel in hand, when she came out. He dried her off himself, sort of hopping about on one crutch, which made her laugh. Once he had her laughing, he set her on the edge of the chair and made love to her a final time on his knees, cushioned by the rug: an ingenious solution to the problem of the cast, which had bedeviled them all week. When they had both finished, panting like racehorses, wrung stone dry, ruined for life, she hung herself on his wet shoulders and cried a little.

Sam hobbled out to the car with her. He said he wanted to make sure she left safely, which made her eyes roll. “Sam, this is nothing. Didn’t we land that ship on Howland Island by moonlight, with one engine?”

“It’s not the big things that kill you, Irene. It’s the little things.” He raised his hand and caressed Sandy, who nestled in Irene’s arms, rubbing beneath her ears as she liked. She stretched out her chin and purred graciously. “Sure going to miss this pussy of yours,” he said.

Irene started to laugh in great whoops, so that she had to lean back against the car to keep herself steady. Sam just shook his head and kissed her, and for an instant, the great sky blue above them, the bad thing had never happened, eight years never happened, and they were just Sam and Irene who shared a single joy, a single passion, and that was enough.

“Stay out of trouble, all right?” she said, knowing it was a stupid thing to say, because he was going to Spain, of all places, and she was going to fly solo around the world, and their separate paths were strewn with trouble.

Sam didn’t even bother to answer. He grasped the door handle and opened it for her. Irene stepped inside and sat in the driver’s seat, dumped Sandy carefully into the passenger seat, and Sam leaned in to kiss her again.

“When you’re done with all this, let me know,” he said.

“Let you know? How?”

“I’ll send a postcard or something. You’ll find me.”

Irene pushed down the clutch and turned the ignition. The engine coughed once and woke. Sam stepped back and waved her off down the road. As she swept past, she heard him call something, but she couldn’t make out the words.

George called her from New York the next morning, while she was eating breakfast in her hotel room in Sacramento. The speech had gone well. She was her old self, animated, bursting with passion for this thing called flying, for the grand possibilities of human endeavor. She did something she hadn’t done before, which was to talk about the famous Australia flight: what exactly had gone wrong with the engine, how they had found Howland by moonlight, how she’d learned from Sam Mallory to remain calm at the moment of crisis, the one absolutely necessary characteristic of a great pilot. The audience—a dinner crowd—had stood and applauded for six minutes and then turned to dessert, which was pineapple upside down cake.

“Had a nice time?” George asked.

“The best.”

“Good. I thought maybe you needed a little vacation. A little lighthearted fun, for a change. You weren’t yourself.”

“Well, I’d have to say I feel like myself again.”

“And how’s Mallory feeling? Bones all healed?”

“Bones don’t heal in a week, George. But I firmly believe he’s a thousand times better than he was before I came.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Now listen to me, Miss Foster. While you’ve been resting up, I’ve been thinking. Kicking around a few ideas with the publicity fellows here. Tell me what you think.”

Irene swirled her coffee around the cup. “Think of what, George?”

“The circumnavigation. What if it’s not just you flying around the world?”

“You mean a copilot? A navigator? I’ve already done that.”

“No,” he said, and Irene could hear the excitement in his voice, a vibration she knew well. She imagined him sucking on his cigar, beaming into the telephone, while New York hustled and bustled outside his window.

“What, then?”

“A race,” he said. “A race around the world.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

November 1947

Kaiko leans on his crutches near the airplane’s left wing, looking deeply pleased with himself. I duck under the tail section and gaze at the faded letters and numbers with reverent eyes.

“Is this what I think it is?”

“If you think it’s Irene’s old airplane, the one that vanished from the face of the earth, then you would be one hundred percent correct, Sherlock.”

I walk around the fuselage in slow, small, cautious steps. The metal is dull and dirty and curiously fragile, as if you might dent it by pressing a finger against the skin. It’s also smaller than I imagined. In photographs, scale is maybe the hardest thing to convey. That’s because a camera lens sees the world in only two dimensions, while our miraculous, stereoscopic human eyes have evolved over the eons to see the world in three dimensions. When you compress every object, near and far, into a single flat plane, your eye can’t necessarily tell the difference between something giant and something tiny. You know what I mean. You’ve gone to the Grand Canyon or someplace, you’ve oohed and you’ve aahed, you’ve taken out your Brownie and filled an entire roll of film with magnificent vistas of this monumental work of nature, and you’ve bounded off to fetch the developed prints at the drugstore a week later, and what a disappointment! That’s not how you remembered the Grand Canyon at all! This is just some pretty landscape. It doesn’t stir your heart, it doesn’t make your soul grow, the way your soul grows when you actually stand on the vast rim of nature’s greatness.

Now, professional photographers have turned to various tricks and expensive equipment in order to create the illusion of what we call a depth of field, but by and large, you can’t understand how big or how small a thing might be unless you’re standing in its presence, measuring its size against your own, and I always imagined that this airplane, as legendary as it is, as capable of flying all the way around the world, was . . . well, bigger. But she is not big at all. Not an unnecessary ounce of metal encumbers her. She’s designed for utility, form following function as the modern designers insist, but what a form. The sleek lines of her, the way her nose tilts just so, the cocky angle of her tail. You can just about hear the soft whistle of the air as it whooshes along her sides. I gather my courage at last and run my fingertips along the curve of her cheek. There is not a flaw on her, not a dimple.

“How did she get here?” I ask.

“She flew in, what do you think?”

“Just flew here to Hanalei? From where?”

“Don’t you know all that already? You and Irene, you’ve been huddled up like sisters.”

I examine my fingers for dust. “We haven’t gotten to the part about the race yet.”

“No kidding?”

“You know her. If she doesn’t want to talk about something, she just stops the conversation right there. Don’t worry. I’ll get it all out of her eventually.”

I move around the nose to the wing, duck under the wing and lay my hand on the edge of the door, which is positioned near the tail.

Kaiko shifts on his crutches. “Say . . .” he mutters.

“How do you open this thing?” I ask.

“Beats me. You know something? I think we oughta—”

“Wait a second. She climbed in near the cockpit, didn’t she? There’s this photo . . .” I turn to the wing. If there’s one thing on this airplane that beats my idea of size, it’s the engine. There are two of them, large enough to hide a man inside, and the propeller blades stick from the front of this thing, long and curved and what’s the word? Deadly. I test the wing with my two hands and prepare to hoist myself up.

“Now, wait just a second!” says Kaiko.

“I won’t hurt anything, I promise. Just peek inside.”

“Hold on! I never said anything about—aw, come on, Janey—stop that, she’s gonna kill me!”

I pull the hatch open and drop myself inside. “Don’t worry! I’ll just be a minute. Take a few photos and . . . and . . .”