The drive to the airfield was only twenty minutes from Claire’s house. Nobody said a word for the first ten. The Lowcountry slid past. The morning was clear, a sky so blue and deep that it didn’t even look real. And they would soon be falling through it.
“I need to say something,” Harper said from the backseat. “I am afraid.”
Claire looked at her through the rearview mirror. “You’re allowed to be afraid.”
“I know I’m allowed. I’m just announcing it for the record. Harper Ellis is afraid. I want that documented.”
“It has been documented,” Nina said.
“Also, if I die, my apartment goes to Jordan. My investment portfolio goes to a scholarship fund I’ve already set up. And James gets the fiddle-leaf fig. Those are my terms.”
“You’re not going to die,” Claire said.
“Statistically, probably not, but I do like to be prepared for all outcomes.”
“Statistically, you’re more likely to die driving to the airfield than jumping out of the plane,” Nina said.
“And that is not comforting while we are currently driving to the airfield.”
The safety briefing took about forty-five minutes and covered everything Nina needed to know, along with several things she now wished she didn’t know. Their instructor was a man named Cal. He had a sunburned face and the confidence of someone who had probably jumped out of airplanes about 4,000 times and considered it a perfectly normal way to spend a Tuesday. He was maybe thirty-five, with a lean build and weathered skin.
He walked them through the equipment, the harness, the altimeter, the drogue chute that slowed the free fall, the main canopy, the reserve canopy, which existed in case the main canopy didn’t work. And Nina could have gone her whole life without knowing that it existed.
“Tandem jump,” Cal said, strapping a harness around Claire’s torso. She stood very still with an expression as if she had maybe changed her mind, but just wasn’t saying so. “You’re attached to me or one of my guys the whole time. We do all the work. You enjoy the ride.”
“Define enjoy,” Harper said, holding up her finger.
Cal looked at her. “Ma’am, in about thirty minutes, you’re gonna be 14,000 feet above the most beautiful coastline in all of America, falling at 120 miles an hour. You’re gonna see the curve of the earth. Enjoy means whatever you want it to mean.”
Harper blinked slowly. “That’s actually not a bad answer.”
“Well, I’ve had practice.”
They were assigned to their tandem partners. Claire got Cal. Harper got a woman named Dez, with a shaved head and a tattoo sleeve. She seemed to find the prospect of falling out of the sky genuinely delightful. Nina got a quiet man named Mark, with kind eyes and a very steady demeanor. He looked like he would probably be very calm during the apocalypse.
They walked to the plane. The tarmac was warm under their feet. The sky was impossibly blue, and the airfield was surrounded by the Lowcountry in every direction. On one side, the flat silver line of the Broad River off in the distance. On the other, marshland.
From up there, Nina knew the whole world would be water and green, and the coastline would curve away toward Charleston in one direction and Edisto in the other. Somewhere down there was her house and her kitchen and David’s boots sitting by the door.
She touched the napkin in her pocket.
They climbed into the plane. It was smaller than it looked, all metal and rigging, and smelled of aviation fuel and maybe leftover adrenaline from the last people who were in there. There were no real seats. They sat on a bench along one wall, strapped to their partners. The door was open, which seemed like a very wrong thing for a plane.
The engine roared, the plane taxied, and then the ground fell away.
Claire watched as the earth got smaller and smaller. She was strapped to Cal’s chest, facing the open door. The plane was climbing in a long, wide spiral, and through the door she could see the Lowcountry unfolding below her, like a map she’d been living on her whole life but had never seen from above. Rivers, marshes, bridges. She could see the barrier islands, dark green and narrow, strung along the coast like beads on a chain. Beaufort was down there somewhere. Her house, her kitchen. Greg, who was at his brother’s house right now, probably looking at his phone, scared, thinking about her for the first time in decades, with the full attention of a man who was terrified of losing something he’d stopped paying attention to.
The altimeter on Cal’s wrist read 8,000 feet, then ten, then twelve. Claire’s heart was hammering in her chest, bebopping around, skipping, pumping, beating so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Her hands were shaking. Her breath was fast. She thought about all the things she’d been afraid of in her life and realized that none of them, not a single one, had been as bad as this. Her fear of disappearing, her fear of not mattering, her fear of waking up at fifty and not knowing who she was - those fears were abstract. But this fear, a fear that had an altitude reading and an open door and a very real 14,000-foot gap between herself and the ground, that was real fear.
Cal’s voice was in her ear, calm and instructional. “Now, when we get over to that door, I want you to cross your arms over your chest. Lean back into me. I’ll do the rest. You just breathe.”
“Breathing,” Claire said. “I can do breathing. I’ve been breathing for fifty years.”
“Well, there you go.”
The plane leveled out. The altimeter read fourteen thousand. The light in the cabin changed. The open door was no longer a rectangle of sky, but an invitation, the last boundary between Claire and who she had been and the Claire she was about to become.
She looked across the cabin at Nina and Harper. Nina’s face was pale, her jaw tight, her hand pressed against her chest. Harper was sitting rigidly upright, attached to Dez, her expression the one she wore in board meetings.
