“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.