“Chip?” I said.
“The wind’s shifted,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Is that bad?”
“It’s a crosswind now” was all he answered.
A crosswind? What was a crosswind? It didn’t sound good. Chip was checking dials, and working the pedals with his feet. His face was expressionless.
He seemed to be holding us fairly steady. I kept quiet, concentrating on willing us some good luck.
We were maybe twenty feet above the runway now, coming in straight. And then, suddenly, the tarmac just slid off to the side. It was below us, and then it shifted away, like someone had tried to do a tablecloth trick—and failed—putting a grove of trees in front of us instead.
“Shit!” Chip said, and he hunched closer to the yoke.
He maneuvered us back into position, lined up over the runway again.
“Chip?”
But he was talking to the radio tower. “Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie. Failed approach, strong crosswind.” Then his pilot-speak seemed to fail him, and he fell back into plain English. “Pulling up to try the approach again.”
A blast of static on the headphones. “Roger that, Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie, proceed on course.”
And then the earth dropped away from us again. The engine sounded suddenly extra loud, like a lawn mower on steroids. We rose up in the air and repositioned to start the descent pattern over. To the south, blue skies. To the north, purple. Another flash of lightning.
“Is the crosswind because of the storm?” I asked.
Chip didn’t answer. A bead of sweat ran down behind his ear and soaked into his T-shirt collar.
For the second try, he started farther down the runway, as if giving himself room to course-correct if he needed to. Which he did. Twice the runway beneath us rotated out to the side, and twice Chip manhandled the plane into lining up over it again.
“Nice!” I said, wanting to encourage him, hoping like hell he didn’t pull up again and make us start all over. It was the least of my worries at this point, I guess, but I was right on the edge of throwing up.
I wanted nothing more than to touch down on that concrete.
It felt like the longest descent in the history of flight. Chip made one more course correction, and then we were lowering closer, and closer. I could see the concrete of the runway welcoming us down. I willed us to touch.
Then we came to a section of the runway with an airplane hangar right beside it. The size and width of that hangar seemed to provide a little windbreak. We were maybe ten feet above the runway as we passed the hangar—so close—and I could feel the wind ease off as we moved into its shadow. Everything seemed calmer somehow. Even the engine sounded quieter. Chip eased off his struggle with the controls. The ground was so close.
We made it, I thought.
And then we passed out of the wind block, past the corner of the hangar, back into open air again, and as we did, a blast of wind hit, so concentrated and fierce that it scooped up under the wing on my side and punched us into a type of spin that folks in aviation call “cartwheeling.”
I remember it in slow motion. I remember slamming hard against my seat belt—so hard, it felt like a wooden post—as my wing jerked up and the plane rotated on the tip of the other. I remember that wing scraping the tarmac with an eardrum-ripping, metal-against-concrete shriek. I remember Chip’s shocked voice shouting, “Hold on!” though I had no idea what to hold on to. I remember screaming so hard I felt like nothing but the scream—and Chip doing it, too—the two of us holding each other’s shocked gazes, like, This can’t be happening. I remember some tiny tendril of my consciousness veering off to a funny little philosophical moment in the center of it all—marveling at the pointlessness of the screaming since we were so clearly beyond help—before arriving at the bigger, more salient picture: This was the moment of our death.
There was no arguing with what was happening, and there was certainly nothing either of us could do about it. We were the very definition of helpless, and as I realized that, it also hit me that everything I’d been looking forward to was over before it even began. Chip and me—and the lakeside wedding we’d never have, and the rescue beagle we’d never adopt, and the valedictorian babies we’d never make. They say your life flashes before your eyes, but it wasn’t my life as I’d lived it that I saw. It was the life I’d been waiting for. The one I’d never get a chance to live.
My future slid past my fingers as I fumbled for it—and missed.
I felt suddenly coated with anger like I’d been dunked in it. I didn’t think about my parents in that moment, or my friends, or how hard my death would be on anyone else. I thought only of myself—and how I just couldn’t fucking believe this was all the time I got.
I couldn’t tell you how many full rotations we completed as we blew across that runway like somebody’s lost kite, but there’s a reason they call it cartwheeling. The wings were the spokes of a giant wheel, and we were the axle in the middle on a spinning carnival ride from hell. At a certain point, I lost all sense of spatial orientation, and it stopped feeling like we were spinning—more like rocking back and forth. I remember focusing all my energy on not barfing because there was nothing else to even hope to control.
I was maybe three seconds from spewing vomit like in The Exorcist when the passenger-side wing mercifully broke off with an unearthly, bone-rattling crack. A spray of jet fuel hit the windshield with a clomp sound like we were at a drive-through car wash, and we collapsed at last in a ditch, with my side—the passenger side—wedged down in it, and Chip’s side angled up at the sky.
We stopped.
Everything was still.
Then I vomited onto the window below me.
Two
A THOUSAND YEARS later, I heard Chip, out of breath: “Margaret? Are you okay?”
“I threw up,” I said, not quite catching his urgency.
“Margaret—the fuel—we have to get out. Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
Chip was moving around unhooking and unbuckling and trying to work his door open like a hatch. His side didn’t seem to be crumpled like mine was. It was stuck for a second, so he had to brace against his seat to kick it, but then it popped easily out with a satisfying ka-chunk and fell open wide, squeaking at the hinges for a second as it bounced.
He climbed up and out, then reached back down for me. “Come on!”
I hadn’t even unbuckled yet. Everything seemed to be moving in slo-mo and time-lapse all at once. My hands didn’t seem like they even belonged to me. I watched them reach to unhook the shoulder strap, and that’s when I realized that it was already unhooked. Next, I tried for the lap belt, and discovered that, in ironic contrast, it was jammed.
It might not have mattered anyway. My side of the plane was crumpled. I was not exactly sitting in my seat anymore—more like sandwiched in between it and the dash.
I tried to wriggle out, but I was wedged in. I tried to move my legs, but they were pinned and didn’t budge.
Chip was up on the outside now, peering down through his window like a hatch. “Come on! Margaret! Now!”
“I can’t!” I said. “I’m stuck!”
He reached his arm down for me to grab. “I’ll pull you.”
“I can’t. My legs are pinned.”
Chip was silent for somewhere between one second and one hour—hard to tell. Then he said, “I’m going for help.”
For the first time, at the prospect of being alone, I felt afraid. “No! Don’t leave me!”
“This thing could blow at any minute!”
“I don’t want to die alone!”
“We need the fire department!”
“Call them on your cell phone!”
Chip’s voice was high and strange with panic. “I don’t know where it is!”
“Don’t go, Chip! Don’t go! Don’t go!” My voice, too, sounded odd—like someone else, someone I might not even like or feel sympathy for. Some screaming, hysterical, pathetic woman.
Chip was still leaving. “I have to get help. Just hold on. I’ll be back in two minutes.”