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“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’re going home. I’m going to the middle of nowhere,” Griff said. I laughed because I thought it was a joke, and he looked pleased, so I guess it was. But only in the sense that it was supposed to be funny, not that it wasn’t true. We really were going to the middle of nowhere. And it was going to be home.
Griff slept on the floor in his little shack on the airfield, and I slept in his cot. It smelled like him, like sweat and that musky smell guys get. Not bad, just strong. There wasn’t any heat, and even bundled up in blankets with two layers of socks on I didn’t sleep most of the night.
In the morning Griff poured me coffee that tasted like he’d mistaken jet fuel for Folgers, and then we loaded into his plane. I’d stopped asking questions about where we were going. It was obvious I wasn’t going to know until we got there.
“Your dad tells me your mom was a pilot,” Griff said when we got settled. “And that you’re a bit of a pilot yourself.”
“My mom was teaching me. I was working on getting my license.” I’d been looking forward to that more than getting a driver’s license. It’s not that exciting to drive when you can fly.
“Why don’t you run through the checklist for me, then?” Griff said, and handed me a clipboard.
My mom told me that checklists are why her job was so safe. Pilots don’t have to depend on memory, which will always fail sooner or later. The checklist is God. It works so well that surgeons are studying the way pilots use checklists, to eliminate mistakes when they’re operating. You have to assume that you know nothing and that you’ve forgotten something, because the moment you assume you’ve got it and don’t check, something will go wrong.
Mom was right—I should probably write one right now. Except it would fill this whole notebook. There’s always so much to do.
We went through, checking everything over as the plane came bit by bit to life. Call and response, like a ritual. Safety gear—aboard. Temperatures and pressures—in the green.
My finger trailed down the checklist Griff handed me one item at a time, and I could almost imagine it was Mom’s voice responding. That if I looked up, I’d see her as I had so many times before, mouth set in concentration, the faintest line between her eyes as she frowned her way through the safety checks. Mom flew big airliners, but she never, ever got tired of taking us up just the two of us, with nothing but a thin metal skin between us and the sky.
I used to be afraid that my mother would die in a plane crash, and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if she had time to be afraid. If she could see the ground rushing up. If she was grabbing for an oxygen mask. If she tried to comfort the passengers or if she was only focused on the instruments, on wrenching the giant metal beast back into the sky where it had finally realized it didn’t belong.
And then she died on the ground. She died in a car accident, and I was there. The other car came at us from the side, its headlights blotting out any sense of its size. She had time to say my name and fling her arm out across my body, as if that could keep me safe, and then the world ended. Only half of it came back. My half. It was full of wet cold rain and wet hot blood. Of sirens and screaming. But my mother was silent.
GRIFF AND Ididn’t talk much on the flight up. We had to yell, even over the headsets we wore, and I wasn’t much of a conversationalist. We flew over empty land and mangy trees, and then over thicker and thicker forests, and more forests, and I wondered if we would fly forever like this, time suspended around us. Lakes winked at us between the trees, and I remembered a book I’d read that was just like this. A kid going to see his father, in a tiny plane with a pilot he didn’t know. The pilot died, had a heart attack, and the kid had no choice but to crash into one of the lakes and live alone on the shore for two months before he got rescued.
That wouldn’t happen to me. If Griff had a heart attack, I’d turn the plane around, or I’d land on one of the lakes and radio for help. I’d been paying attention to our heading, and we had plenty of fuel. Griff was flying back from our destination, after all; of course there was enough fuel to get back to that airfield.
I’d never landed a float plane on the water, but I thought I could figure it out. I ran through all of that in my head, and I think it actually turned into a kind of fantasy. Not that I wanted Griff to die, but I enjoyed playing it through. How I’d turn the plane around, how I’d take control. How I’d land and call for help calmly, and when it arrived they’d all be amazed.
Look at her, they’d say. She flew the plane all by herself. And don’t you know her mother just died? And they wouldn’t feel sorry for me at all, just impressed. Except I couldn’t help picturing my mom in that crowd, too. Telling me she was proud, she knew I could do it.
Stupid.
Griff didn’t have a heart attack. We flew and flew, and then suddenly he said, “Here we are, then,” and we banked and descended. We aimed for a lake. On the north shore was a bald patch, not a clearing so much as the trees shrinking back from the water, and in the middle of that was a cabin. Despite the dread of realizing that this is what Griff meant when he said I was going home, I thought, It’s beautiful.
A man in red came out of the cabin. A dog loped along beside him, huge even from this distance. The man raised a hand, and I realized it was my father.
My belly did an odd flop. My father. I hadn’t seen him in person in years. He was around when I was born and a little while after, and for one visit when I was four. He was a stranger, and he was out here in the middle of nowhere and not where he was supposed to be.
“I can’t stay here,” I said, but the engine drowned it out. We touched down on the water, and for one horrible moment I thought we would just go straight down under it. I don’t know why I thought that, but I was so sick afraid that the fear got into everything. The lake could swallow us up. Or the dog on the shore could snarl and leap the moment we touched solid ground. And he was a fierce-looking dog, gray black and huge. His tail didn’t wag; he just watched us warily with shiny black eyes.
We climbed out of the plane and paddled to shore in a tiny little raft, and my dad and the dog walked over to us slowly. My fear became a lump in my throat like a peach pit. And
