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 during 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.<
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“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 Yeager, 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.
He straightened the plane as it roared even with us. He was close enough that I could make out the straw cowboy hat he always wore, but nothing else through the windows reflecting the clouds.
“Drop drop drop,” Mr. Hall shouted, not into his radio but into the wind.
On cue, the plane pitched up, climbing to a safer altitude. The banner hung in midair for a moment, then drifted slowly toward Earth. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. The four of us realized at the same time that it was coming toward us, just as Grayson commented over Mr. Hall’s radio, “Maybe y’all should move.”
Alec and Jake dashed one way around the airport office. I ran and Mr. Hall jogged the other way. The seven-foot-tall banner rippled toward us like a snake, impossibly fast for its size, and smack, the metal pole at one end hit the office’s glass door.
Wincing, I rounded the building to the front again and examined the glass. Amazingly, the pole hadn’t broken it. Now the pole scraped along the concrete floor of the porch, dragged by the banner going wild in the wind. Alec and Jake were rolling up the banner from the other end, which had wrapped itself around the far side of the building.
“That’s some wind,” Jake shouted. I’d known Grayson was in trouble when I saw the Halls running. But if I’d had any lingering doubts, this sealed the deal: the fighter pilot home on leave after a year flying dangerous missions in Afghanistan, worried about the wind.
“He could land at another airport,” Alec called to his dad.
“I looked up the storm on radar,” I told Mr. Hall. “It’s a monster. Grayson won’t be able to fly past it. To do him any good, the runway would need a different heading.” That way, he could land into the wind, rather than the wind blowing across the airplane and tossing it off course. Community airports flashed through my mind, airfields up and down the coast where I’d practiced touch-and-go’s, landing and taking off repeatedly.
“Florence,” Mr. Hall and I said at the same time. He brought the radio to his mouth again. “Florence has a couple of strips with different headings. Why don’t you fly on over there? We’ll come pick you up, and tomorrow we’ll go back and get the plane.”
“Florence is seventy miles away,” came Grayson’s voice. “I don’t have enough gas to make it.”
“Roger,” Mr. Hall told the radio. He glanced at the wind sock again.
Alec and Jake had wrestled the unwieldy banner into a big, sloppy roll and plopped it on the porch, behind a rocking chair and against the wall, where it wouldn’t blow away. We all walked out to stand on the tarmac again and watch the plane fly parallel to the runway, then turn. Grayson would go through the same motions as on his first pass, but this time he would land.
Or try.
It wasn’t right that he fought through this alone. He and I had no bond, but I would have been the one in the plane instead of him if I hadn’t taken my turn first. Raising my voice over the wind, I told Mr. Hall, “Seems like there’s some advice you could give him.”
Mr. Hall shook his head. “I’ve taught all of you correctly. Whether you learned it correctly or not, I don’t know. That kid never had the sense God gave a goat. He probably thinks this is fun.”
True, Grayson was the live wire in the family, the adrenaline junkie who would do anything on a dare, who’d gotten in trouble in the past year for smoking, drinking, weed, speeding, skipping school—Mr. Hall had spilled it all to me while we were flying. Mr. Hall worried constantly that his ex-wife couldn’t handle raising Grayson on her own. Alec got in trouble only for refusing to rat Grayson out. But I doubted even Grayson enjoyed trying to land the plane in this windstorm.
Worried as I was, what Alec was going through must have been ten times worse. Grayson and he looked nothing alike, and they’d never seemed close. Alec was closer with Jake, glomming onto Jake really, and Grayson was off by himself, getting into trouble. But Grayson and Alec were still brothers, and twins. I wasn’t surprised when Alec crossed one arm on his chest, propped his other elbow on that arm, and put his hand over his mouth.
What did surprise me was that Jake put his arm around Alec’s shoulders.
Over the loudspeaker, Grayson calmly announced his approach. The red plane dropped out of the sky, skimming twenty feet above the runway, then ten.
I squinted and struggled to stand against a cold blast of wind. On that gust, the sound of the tiny engine drifted across the field to us. The motor suddenly roared in a higher pitch as the plane jerked to the left. Grayson was using the stick and the rudder pedals to fight the wind. I was fighting it too, sympathetically, my hands balled into fists, arms tense, toes curling in my shoes. And holding my breath.
The plane made several more agonizing darts this way and that, wings jerking up and leveling off. Finally he was one foot off the runway, inches, then none. The plane landed as straight and level as if the wind were calm.
Mr. Hall said, “Perfect.”
The plane was still rolling fast when the wind swept under it and tipped one wing up to the sky, the other down to scrape the asphalt.
“Damn it,” Mr. Hall barked. I made a noise too, something between a yelp and a scream, and Jake pressed one hand against Alec’s chest to keep him from running across the field. There was nothing we could do for Grayson, and nothing he could do either. Hel
pless, while someone chanted “No no no no no,” we watched the wing tilt as far up as it could go without the plane turning upside down. The plane seemed to be sinking then, the wind tiring.
That’s when a gust caught the tail instead and spun the still-rolling plane all the way around backward in a ground loop, exactly what we’d all been afraid of and exactly why most people didn’t fly these old-fashioned planes anymore. The wind spun the plane all the way forward again, then lobbed it at the trees.
Now we were running. Jake and Alec shot past me. I hoped they knew how to help Grayson when they reached him. All I could see was the bright red plane propped at an odd angle against the dark tree line. I concentrated on the tarmac under my feet, then the uneven ground where the grass hadn’t been cut since October, then the runway, with my usual bottle of water sloshing hard in my jacket pocket the whole way. As I got close, I remembered I had the phone in my other pocket. I pulled it out to dial 911.
But all three of the boys emerged from underneath the wing: Jake first, then Alec, then Grayson. They were laughing.
I stopped on the asphalt. My lungs burned so painfully that I almost bent over and braced my hands on my knees, but I didn’t want to do that where the boys could see me.
I turned to yell back to Mr. Hall that Grayson was okay. He saw the boys too and slowed from a jog to a walk. He put his hand over his heart.
As I walked down the short, grassy slope to where the airplane was lodged and the boys stood, Jake said, “I wish the Admiral had seen it. He would have recommended you for an aircraft carrier.” Jake worshipped the Admiral for his combat record.
Grayson knew how special this compliment was. It showed in his grin. “Oh, pshaw, it was nothing.” Even his eyes laughed, which looked strange to me. I rarely saw Grayson without his aviator shades and his straw cowboy hat. They must be lost in the cockpit.
“I wish we’d filmed it,” Alec said. “I wish you could have seen it yourself, Grayson. It seriously looked like you were about to lose it, what, three, four times?”