So there it was, Irene’s future turning on the malfunction of a single spark plug. You could say it was luck, or you could judge the hand of fate at work, or God, or whatever you believed in. The airfield turned out to be in Burbank, half an hour away on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, but Irene didn’t mind. She sat next to Sam Mallory in his yellow Nash while the sun rose to her right and the hills rolled all around, briefly green after a spell of spring rain. Above them, the sky was untainted blue, a thing Irene took for granted. Soon she would learn that most skies were not so blue; that in most places, the daytime temperature didn’t hover blissfully around seventy-six dry, placid degrees Fahrenheit for much of the year. For now, all Irene knew was the coast of California.

Unlike Irene’s Ford, the Nash was only a few years old and had an electric ignition, a three-speed transmission, a dry clutch, a brake pedal. Why, compared to the old Tin Lizzie, it practically drove itself. It stopped on command, it unleashed what seemed like a vast amount of power whenever Mr. Mallory pressed his foot on the gas pedal. They rolled the windows down and the wind scattered her hair every which way. Irene didn’t mind. She never took much care of her hair anyway.

At one point, winding north through Laurel Canyon, Irene stroked around Sandy’s ears and asked Mr. Mallory how he got the scar on his nose.

He fingered across the ridge and back again. “Crackup last summer.”

“Crackup? You mean a car accident?”

“No, an airplane. We call ’em crackups, it sounds better.” Mr. Mallory was smoking a cigarette, which he held in the hand nearest the window. He took a quick drag and said, “I guess you might have heard about that one.”

“Only me and the whole world. Aren’t you just a little crazy, going back up in an airplane after an accident like that?”

“Sure, I’m crazy. We’re all crazy, us pilots.” He stubbed out his cigarette against the side of the car. “But it’s freedom up there, Miss Foster. You and the blue sky. It’s the future, it’s the whole damned universe, right there before you, wide open and beautiful to take your breath away. It’s worth a broken nose or two. It’s worth whatever price God asks of you.”

Of course Irene had heard of Sam Mallory. By the spring of 1928, everyone in California had heard of him. In fact, if you lived anywhere in the world and possessed a radio or a newspaper subscription, you had probably—like Irene—spent a certain portion of the past August attached to both, desperate to discover whether Sam Mallory was somehow miraculously alive on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, or heroically dead on the bottom of same.

Irene’s father did not own a radio. He claimed it was because he opposed such modern contraptions on principle, but really it was because he couldn’t afford one. Irene remembered listening to the radio in the drugstore instead. Of course, the place was packed that first morning, cheek by jowl with eager listeners. The press had been talking up the Dole Derby for weeks. It was the Pacific’s answer to Lindbergh mania, a contest sponsored by the Dole Pineapple Company, in which pilots from around the country took off from San Francisco Bay one fine summer morning and raced each other all the way to Honolulu, Hawai’i. First prize, twenty-five thousand dollars. Second prize, ten thousand dollars. As it turned out, there was no need for a third prize, because only two airplanes taking off that day actually made it to paradise, or at least the earthly kind.

And Sam Mallory was not one of them.

Irene didn’t remember all the details. She didn’t know what type of airplane Sam Mallory had been flying or why exactly he had been forced to ditch the machine in the ocean, several hundred miles short of Hawai’i, in the dark of night. Something about a faulty fuel line. All she remembered was that he and his copilot—Irene didn’t recall the name—had been reported far ahead of his nearest competitor when she went to sleep that night, and when she woke the news was everywhere, in thick black headlines, in chattering radio receivers:

GOEBEL AND DAVIS WIN DOLE DERBY

Smith Second; Three Airplanes Lost at Sea

Naturally, the press was not going to let this terrible disaster go to waste. Day after day, the radios and newspapers reported back from the frantic search for the downed airplanes. They found the first one fairly quickly. But the fate of the Miss Doran and the rather foolishly named Icarus—Mr. Mallory’s airplane—remained unknown. Irene would stop by the drugstore on her way home from work to listen to the latest bulletins, delivered in breathless yet stalwart tones by Mr. Floyd Gibbons of the National Broadcasting Corporation. How much food and water the pilots had carried with them. The shifting weather patterns. The dimensions and capabilities of the emergency rafts carried aboard. (As it turned out, Sam Mallory’s airplane had not carried a raft at all, on account of the extra weight.) The concentration of man-eating sharks in that area of the Pacific Ocean from where the lost airplanes had issued their last transmissions.

Seven days passed, eight, nine. Irene no longer stopped by the drugstore after work; it was simply too heart-wrenching to listen to Mr. Gibbons, in a voice of attempted cheer, lay out various scenarios by which either of the two airplanes might have survived. He had discussed Mr. Mallory’s history as a stunt pilot—The man known in Hollywood for his willingness to attempt any proposed maneuver, no matter how perilous or technically impossible, even the deliberate crash of an airplane—and before all that, his years as a barnstormer, hopscotching the country to perform for crowds of amazed corn pokes. Before even that, his stint in the Army Air Service, dogfighting above the bloody French battlefields. For some reason, Mr. Gibbons—a celebrated war hero himself—considered that this checkered history of death-defying subsistence, hairline survival, and crackerjack piloting had perfectly prepared Mr. Mallory for his present ordeal. Irene couldn’t stand his optimism. It seemed na?ve to her, almost disrespectful, when the man and his copilot had obviously made a meal for the sharks by now.

And then came the morning—Irene remembered it perfectly—when she arrived home from the beach to a newspaper headline so incredible, so almost hysterically jubilant, the words seemed to overflow and run off the page.

MALLORY FOUND ALIVE!!

Astonishing Rescue off Coast of Maui; Story of Survival Against Odds on Wing of Airplane in Open Ocean

Copilot Perished; Pilot Starving, Sunburnt, and Dehydrated but Otherwise in Good Health

(When Irene read that last part, she had to wonder whether the copy editor at the Los Angeles Times was a man of irony or had simply lost his head.) Anyway, you heard about nothing else for weeks afterward, the interviews and the celebratory dinners; the Sunday prayers of thanksgiving in churches around the country; President Coolidge’s radio address hailing the whole affair as an inspiring example of the very best of American manhood; Mr. Mallory’s arrival back in San Francisco by commercial steamer, aboard which the occupant of the best first-class suite had gallantly insisted on switching accommodation with the hero of the day; the parades in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles.

Then August died into September, and the ballyhoo faded into nothing as it always did, and the American man went back to his work and his home and waited for the next thrill to smack him upside the head, from the ball field or the mountaintop or the clear blue sky.

Now Irene wound around the curves of Laurel Canyon in Sam Mallory’s speedy yellow Nash, approaching the crest of the ridge where the horizon was nothing but sky. She traced the arms and the delicate paws of Mr. Mallory’s newfound kitten with her finger and fastened on two details about the 1927 Dole Derby that she hadn’t troubled to notice much before.

The first was the Miss Doran, and how nobody seemed to have found any trace of her or her pilots, at least that Irene could remember. They were just forgotten in the ballyhoo.

The second was Mrs. Sam Mallory, who had made such brave, beautiful speeches during the whole ordeal about her love for her husband and her faith that he would return home safely to his wife and little daughter.

On Irene’s lap, the kitten stirred, raised its head, stretched its paw, went back to sleep. Irene realized she was holding her breath. They turned the last corner and the valley tumbled into view, Burbank and the hills behind it, and the ocean to the left, all of it bathed in the clear, pale, fragile light of early morning. Irene exhaled at last. They cruised down the hill through the draft, and Irene thought she would always remember this moment, this sensation of speed and freedom.

“It’s like flying,” she shouted.

Mr. Mallory laughed and changed gears. “Not even close.”

The airfield sat on the corner of Lankershim Boulevard and Vanowen, and stretched into a grassy infinity. Mr. Mallory turned the Nash down a gravel driveway toward a cluster of large white sheds. The one at the end of the drive bore the name rofrano in black letters.

“What’s Rofrano?” asked Irene.