I untie the mule from the juniper bush, but before I climb aboard, I turn to the silent airplane, the cross, the dunes of sand, and fix the scene in my memory. This was supposed to be the end of the journey, and it seems it’s only the beginning. The diary is like a hot coal in my pocket. She will live. I stick my foot in the stirrup and swing into the saddle. The book strikes my thigh. A new road stretches before me, toward some destination that is not a place but a person, a woman who’s supposed to be dead but might instead be alive, be saved, according to the orisons of a dying man, preserved in this ink and leather that beats against my leg as the mule strikes off gratefully toward Pamplona.

Because here’s what I know for certain about that pile of abandoned bones, which was once a pilot named Samuel Mallory. There was only one She.

Only one person in the world to make him invoke the name of God.

I

I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.

—Amelia Earhart

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett (excerpt)

March 1928: California

Irene surfed at dawn, when the gray light coated the water but the sun hadn’t yet crested the mountains to the east. For one thing, there were fewer people around, and for another thing, they were the right kind of people, people who didn’t want to be around other people all the time. People like her.

Like her, they arrived in darkness, driving dilapidated Tin Lizzies held together with spit and baling wire. Like her, they parked along the roadside and carried their boards in reverent silence down one of the paths that led from the cliffs into the dunes. Like her, they dressed neck-to-foot in bathing costumes of thick navy blue serge, because that Pacific current came down straight from Alaska, bearing fog and giant gray whales; like her, they waxed their boards in long, thoughtful strokes, waiting for enough light to see by. Like her, they listened to the noise of the surf, the volume and tempo of the crashing waves, the mood of the ocean this particular morning: whether she was lazy or angry, forgiving or ruthless, bitch or saint. Some unstudied combination of the above.