By then it was November and soon, before Thanksgiving but after our first dusting of snow, the doctor unwound the remaining bandages on my head. Agnes and Alice were out, and after Aunt Henrietta checked on Samuel, she and I studied what I had left and then began to experiment with the scissors. A fringe seemed like the best way to conceal the hairless patch where my scalp was gone, and my aunt cut a neat straight line, just touching my eyebrows. The rest she cut level with my earlobes, the way I’ve kept it ever since. I looked different, quite modern I thought, like the two women flyers who’d passed through town the previous year and startled everyone with their cropped hair. The ends swung when I leaned forward and hid my cheeks and part of my scar, while the fringe hid the worst part of my scalp.

I decided then that when I could get up, I’d wear what a flyer would wear: men’s trousers (my aunt sometimes wore these in private, or when looking for specimens), boots, a big soft shirt, and a woolen jacket. My legs, which would be unsightly even when they began to work again, would be hidden. I wouldn’t have to worry about which scars would show in a dress, or what a man might someday think as he removed that dress.

Jasper was so busy by then at the winery that he had to stop visiting in the afternoons, but he sent Adrien Hendricks to keep me company. He came as a favor to Jasper, not to me; they’d been friends since Adrien got to town and started working with Jasper’s cousin. He might also have felt a twinge because he’d been one of Palmer and Elly’s teachers. Since the end of the flying season, he’d been sanding propellers part-time at the factory, working off the cost of the hydro-aeroplane they were building for him and trying not to envy the companions who’d gone to San Diego or Florida for the winter.

Jasper had told him that I was interested in learning more about the flying school, but as he walked up to our house, he was mostly imagining what he’d do when he could ship his hydro-aeroplane home to Friesland, where he wouldn’t be teasingly labeled the Flying Dutchman but would just be—himself, flying over the marshes to land on the dark violet surface of Lake Sneek. He might take off from the Zuyder Zee; in winter he might soar along the frozen canals as the skaters raced below. He was so deep in his daydreams, he’d tell me later, that when Alice and Agnes opened the door, he was surprised, in the corner of the dining room, by a white bier, a white vessel, a bed. A girl in the bed (that girl was me), white-faced with chopped dark hair and hyphenated eyebrows.