“You won’t kill us,” he assured me. “My controls double yours, remember? If you make a mistake, I’ll pull us out. Just do what I say, and you’ll be flying. First, for safety, we have to make sure only one of us is trying to fly this thing at a time. I’m transferring control to you. I say, ‘Your airplane.’ You say, ‘My airplane.’”
“My airplane,” I whispered.
“Press your right foot pedal—gently first, to get the feel of it. That will turn us.”
I did what he said. The plane veered away from the beach. I was flying. I was seeing everything for the first time and maybe the last. All of it at once was overwhelming. I stole a look back over my shoulder at the ocean, fascinated by this beautiful piece of the Earth that everyone else enjoyed and that was so close to where I lived, yet completely out of my reach.
We flew—I flew—over the high school, and the discount store out on the highway. They looked exactly alike, just a flat black roof, a huge rectangle with smaller squares hanging off here and there for the gym or the garden department, and silver cubes of industrial air conditioners on top. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the school and the store apart if it hadn’t been for their huge signs out front, which from the air were tiny.
Since Mr. Hall had told me to head back inland, I’d been afraid the flight was about to end. But now he instructed me to point the plane back east toward the ocean, then north. We flew up the coast to little beach towns where I’d never been. Civilization petered out and nature preserves took over, with wide rivers snaking through swamps to the sea. We flew all the way to Cape Fear in North Carolina—my first time out of South Carolina, ever. The buildings of downtown Wilmington were visible on the horizon when Mr. Hall said, “We could land and see my boys, but I don’t think they’d appreciate that. We’d better go back. I can fly in the dark, but you can’t. That’s a lesson way down the road.”
I followed his instructions and turned the airplane around, probably the widest turn possible for this small plane. When I was flying straight back down the coast again and relaxing my death grip on the yoke, I asked him, “Why don’t you see your sons more?”
“I was just kidding about that,” he grumbled. “Alec and Grayson live with their mother, and Jake is in college.”
The roar of the engine filled the cabin while I thought about what I was really trying to ask him. Finally I said, “It seems like they would be in Heaven Beach every chance they got, wanting to fly with you.”
“That’s my fault,” Mr. Hall said shortly. “I made a mistake.”
I shouldn’t have asked, and now our conversation had gone awkward. I racked my brain for something to say, some question to ask about flying or the airport or anything except his sons.
“A very, very bad mistake,” he said. “I’ve been trying to make up for it, but some things you can’t make up for.” He shifted in his seat and stretched his arms above him, which for him might have meant he was trying to escape whatever bad memories haunted him, but for me meant he was nowhere near saving us if I moved the yoke the wrong way, and I had better keep the airplane steady.
“Man,” he exclaimed, “what a pretty day to fly.”
I flew us all the way back to Heaven Beach. Then he made me say, “Your airplane,” and he took over. But he talked me through the landing, telling me every move he made and why. The plane touched down so smoothly that I knew we were on the ground only because I heard a new noise, the wheels on the runway. He let me drive the plane to Hall Aviation—taxi it, rather—and showed me how to power it down. We pushed it back into its place in the hangar.
As I was hauling the big metal door closed, I heard him say, “Well, hey there.” A middle-aged lady slipped through the side door. She was dressed in a trim jacket and wore a carefully teased hairdo, heavy makeup, and flowery perfume, like she’d just gotten off work. He kissed her on the cheek and led her by the hand over to me.
“This is Sofie,” he told me. “Sofie, meet my new student, Leah.”
“Hello, Leah.” Sofie held out her hand with glossy red nails.
I wasn’t sure what to do. My only experience with polite adults was working for them in the office for the past month, and they hadn’t held their hands out to me. I guessed I was supposed to shake her hand, which I did.
She let me go and grinned at me. “Look at that big smile! You had fun up there.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Funny—people commented on my face a lot. I was pretty, apparently. I could also pull off a very convincing go-to-hell expression. But nobody ever said anything about my smile.
“Same time next week?” Mr. Hall asked me.
I felt my smile melt away. “Uh.” I wanted so badly to fly again next week. If he’d let me, I would have flown again tomorrow. Better yet, right now. But saving the money for a second lesson would take me more than a week.
Almost immediately he said, “We’re in the off-season and business is down. I’m running a two-for-one special. Next week is free.”
“Cool.” This was charity, I knew. I took it without arguing.
“We’re headed to dinner,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Want to come with us?”
I glanced at Sofie, who still grinned at me. She didn’t mind me tagging along on their date. I minded, though. I’d blown almost all my money on the lesson, and I couldn’t let them pay for my food. That was too much charity at once. “Thanks so much,” I said, “but my mom probably has dinner on the table waiting for me by now.” I almost laughed at my biggest lie of the day—further from the truth than my boyfriend Grayson, more outrageous than a forgery—and hurried out the side door.
On the sunset walk home, I stopped to unlock the office and snag my bottle of water from the reception counter. I’d never understood why someone would pay soda price for water. Or for soda, for that matter. I bought one bottle of water, took it home with me each night and washed it and refilled it, and replaced it only when the peeling label threatened to give away my secret. But not today. I did buy a pack of crackers from the machine in the break room. Sometimes when my mother appeared at the trailer, she stocked the refrigerator for me. I doubted she’d done that today, since she was out of money and she’d been so focused on the TV. My stomach rumbled at the thought of the real dinner I’d passed up with Mr. Hall.
As I walked past the dark Simon Air Agriculture hangar, I popped the first cracker into my mouth. I craved a cigarette instead. But I had become a pilot today, and now I had something real to look forward to.
two
Three years later
December
My afternoon behind the counter at the airport office had been eerily quiet. Suddenly I jumped and the pages of my newspaper went flying. The weather app on the office’s cell phone beeped crazily. With a glance at the phone, and a glance outside at the sky, I shut off the noise and speed-dialed Hall Aviation.
Mr. Hall answered, “Merry Christmas, Leah.”
The bad news I’d been about to give him stopped in my mouth. He was still my flight instructor, and starting next April he would be my boss. We were all business. But Grayson and Alec were visiting him over Christmas break, and Jake was home on leave from Afghanistan. When I’d walked over to Hall Aviation to fly practice runs in the past week, the hangar had been full of boys teasing and shoving each other, and warmth. I heard the same uncharacteristic warmth in Mr. Hall’s voice now.
I hated to tell him. “The weather service just issued a wind advisory. A storm’s coming in. Isn’t Grayson still up? You need to get him down.”
The phone beeped. Mr. Hall had hung up on me.
I used the phone to navigate to the weather forecast. The radar showed a wide, wicked storm moving in fast from the Atlantic.
Setting the phone aside, I glanced toward the big windows facing the runway. Grayson, Alec, and I had all turned eighteen and earned our commercial licenses in the past few months, so Mr. Hall could finally employ us instead of random college-age pilots over spring break and d
uring the summer. For days we’d taken turns flying the ancient planes as Mr. Hall taught us how to snag the long advertising banners and fly them down the beach and back. I’d gone up on my lunch hour from the airport office, and Grayson had climbed into the plane after I’d climbed out. From here behind the reception counter, I’d watched him take off. I hadn’t seen him land.
Judging from Mr. Hall’s rude ending to our call, I’d been right. Grayson was still up.
I swallowed my heart, then gathered the scattered pages and went back to reading the newspaper, a delicious luxury I swiped daily from the waiting area and examined between odd jobs if I’d already digested the month’s Plane & Pilot cover to cover. In the past couple of years, I’d made friends with a newcomer at school named Molly. The great thing about Molly was that she wasn’t embarrassed to be seen with me, so she saved me from being a complete outcast. The bad thing about her was that she was a normal girl in a normal home with a normal family. By comparison, she made me more aware of how far I was out of the mainstream. Through my friendship with her, gradually I was finding out exactly how much my life differed from hers, Grayson’s, the life of almost anybody who was my age. My mom had never subscribed to any magazine or newspaper. I turned the newspaper page to the obituaries.
Something flashed past the windows. I sighed with relief. Grayson was landing. I hadn’t heard his engine because small planes were hard to hear indoors, at this distance from the runway.
But when I put down the newspaper and walked to the window to make sure he’d landed okay, I saw it wasn’t a plane at all. The flash I’d seen was Alec and Jake running past the office, closer to the end of the runway where Grayson would land. Mr. Hall chugged more slowly behind them.
This was not a good sign. When one of us hooked a banner, someone else watched to make sure the rope and banner unfurled correctly, nothing got tangled, and no parts fell off the airplane. But we didn’t regularly watch each other take off or land. If even Mr. Hall was hurrying down the runway for Grayson’s approach, Grayson was in trouble.
I adjusted a dial in the wall so the common traffic advisory frequency would play on the speakers outside. When Grayson announced over the radio that he was getting close, we would hear him. Then I zipped my thin jacket, the only coat I owned. It wouldn’t protect me from today’s cold, but I had to see what was going on. I pocketed the office phone and stepped through the door outside.
The icy wind hit me in the face and blew my curls into my eyes as if the elastic holding them in a ponytail weren’t even there. The blue sky was still visible, but a bank of ominous gray clouds swirled over the trees. A few puffs scuttled overhead, their shadows racing along the ground faster than a plane. On one side of the office, the rope clanged against the flagpole over and over in the breeze, a strike and a hollow reverberation like a church bell. I should lower the flag for the day before the storm came. The orange windsock high on its pole stood straight out, perpendicular to the runway. The crosswind was strong and frightening.
Several yards away, the Halls stood in a line, each squinting at the sky in a different direction, looking for Grayson. I’d seen Alec and Jake often in the past few days, but never standing together, and I was struck by how much alike they looked now that Alec was eighteen, even though Jake was five years older. Same muscular build and bright blond hair, except Jake’s hair was cut ultrashort for the military. Same open, friendly face and easy stance in old jeans and sweatshirts and bulky hiking coats, hands on hips, model-handsome without trying at all. In the face, they looked like a picture Mr. Hall had shown me of their mom.
Self-conscious to the point of blushing, I walked over to stand beside Mr. Hall. Alec was my age and I should want to stand next to him, not his middle-aged father. The truth was, after three years at the airport, I still didn’t know Alec, Jake, or Grayson very well. They came to Heaven Beach only for summers and holidays and occasional weekends. I knew them mostly by watching them while I sat on the front porch of the office and they loitered outside the Hall Aviation hangar. They competed with each other and insulted each other. Fights broke out occasionally, with one of the boys throwing a punch at another before the third brother shouted for their dad and pulled them apart. The glimpses I got of them filled my mind for days afterward. I would have given anything to join them and feel like part of their gruff, dramatic family. But there was a standoffishness about them, like they resented me for butting in.
Then, around this time last year, right before Jake deployed to Afghanistan, Mr. Hall had told me to come over for my flying lesson as usual. As I’d crossed the asphalt and approached the door in the side of the hangar, I’d heard the boys’ voices echoing inside. I didn’t want to anger them by interrupting them, but I thought it was best to walk in like I belonged, just as I always did. So I pushed the door without knocking.
As the door was opening, I couldn’t see them, but I recognized Alec’s voice. “Do you think he’s doing her?”
“Good God, no,” Jake said.
“Of course he is,” Grayson said. “Why else would that stingy bastard give away flying lessons for free?”
The door swung all the way open and banged against the metal wall like a gunshot. All three of them jumped and then turned to stare at me: Alec sprawled in a lawn chair, Jake leaning against the nose of the red Piper, Grayson with both hands in the engine.
I stood there for a moment more, processing, trying not to jump to conclusions. Maybe they hadn’t meant what I thought they’d meant. Maybe they hadn’t meant Mr. Hall. Maybe they hadn’t meant me.
Yes, they had, I saw in the next instant. Jake looked at the cement floor and shook his head like it was a damn shame I’d heard them, but he didn’t really care. Alec, wide eyes on me, started to get up from his chair. Grayson kept staring at me across the airplane engine, gaze cold, daring me to deny it.
I had not denied it. I’d turned away from the open door, never looking back even when I reached the airport office. I’d told Leon that he could go back to his regular job because I didn’t have a flying lesson that day after all.
In the year since then, I’d never skipped another lesson. Flying was too precious. But I’d avoided Mr. Hall’s sons every other way I could. They hadn’t acted differently toward me. Jake had been in Afghanistan. Alec and Grayson had given me a polite hello when they absolutely had to, and had held open the door of the airport office for me when I was carrying a box of files, like southern gentlemen, or southern boys whose father had threatened them within an inch of their lives if they didn’t act like gentlemen, same as always. Maybe they had wanted to apologize but had missed the moment, and now bringing it up would be even more awkward than letting it lie. It didn’t matter, anyway, when we didn’t matter to each other.
But they mattered to me, I realized as Jake and Alec scanned the sky. They viewed me as a stranger, but I viewed them as my heroes in a one-sided relationship, like a television drama I looked forward to every week and pined for when my mom pawned the TV.
My heart pounded at the thought that one of them was about to attempt a very ugly landing.
“I can’t believe this,” Mr. Hall muttered beside me.
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve been checking the weather all day. I wouldn’t have sent him up if I’d seen this coming in so fast.”
“We’re on the ocean in the winter,” I reminded him. “Storms are going to blow in that you don’t see coming.” Whatever happened to Grayson—my stomach twisted—I didn’t want Mr. Hall to blame himself. Though he would.
“That’s right, Leah.” Mr. Hall nodded. “That’s good. You have to be better than me.”
You have to be better than me was one of his favorite lines and the most often repeated by his sons when they imitated him behind his back. I hoped Grayson really was better than his dad, and better than me too. I doubted I could have landed in that wind.
Static sounded over the loudspeaker, then Grayson’s dead calm voice, unflappable as Chuck Yeage
r, announcing his intention to drop his banner.
Mr. Hall must be so proud of Grayson right now, but he didn’t show it. He just crossed his arms and scanned the sky.
“There he is.” Alec pointed. Now we could see the plane, a tiny dot above the trees, and hear it, a low buzz underneath the wind.
Mr. Hall’s handheld radio crackled down by his side. Then came Grayson’s smooth voice again. “Is the crosswind still bad?” Even though this wasn’t the airport’s frequency but the one Hall Aviation used to communicate with its pilots, it was still public, and Grayson still had to stay calm. In his natural state, he was nothing like Alec and Jake, not calm at all. I imagined every curse word that filled the cockpit when he turned the radio off.
Either that, or he enjoyed the danger, the rush. Grayson was like that.
Mr. Hall glanced at the wind sock, then brought the radio to his mouth. “Affirmative, it’s still bad.”
Long minutes passed while we watched the dot make its way down the length of the runway, the banner now visible as a streak behind the dot. He reached the base of the runway and announced himself smoothly over the loudspeaker, then turned to make his final approach and announced himself again, exactly as Mr. Hall had taught us. The plane descended, roaring closer.
After three years of watching countless banner pickups and drops from the airport office, I still found the sight shocking: how tiny the plane was, how long the banner, how tall and vivid the red letters. The banner he was towing, which he and Alec and I had been taking turns towing all week, was left over from the summer: SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS. I’d been worried Beachcomber’s would blame us when customers asked for a special that the restaurant hadn’t run since last September. But there were no customers in December, at least none who would see the banner from the deserted beach on a blustery day.
SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS came closer and closer to us, dwarfing the plane. Grayson didn’t have to land. He only needed to get near enough to the ground to drop the banner safely, but he was having trouble even with that. The nose of the plane pointed diagonally toward us, rather than straight down the runway, to combat the wind. The left wing rolled up suddenly as Grayson lost control. All four of us watching made a noise.