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 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.