Chip angled us back to circle over the lake, brought our altitude down a bit, and maneuvered us closer to the water. I could see houses and little cars below, but it was hard to recognize anything from this bird’s-eye view. We dipped a little lower, close enough to see little waves breaking against the shore.
“Keep an eye on the beach,” he said, taking us lower still.
I peered out my window. A thin strip of sand, and people, and picnic tables on the grass nearby. Now I recognized it. The public beach on the far shore.
After a few minutes, he said, “There!” and pointed.
I looked. “Where?”
“Can you read it?” Chip asked.
“Read what?”
He peered down, out his side window. “Shit. We’re too high.”
But any lower made the towers on the radar turn red.
Chip turned my way. “There’s writing in the sand down there.”
I didn’t see anything. “What does it say?”
“It says, ‘Marry me!’”
My heart gave a little jolt, but I played it cool. “It does?” I couldn’t see any writing in the sand.
“I saw it on the news yesterday. A guy proposed by writing the words in giant letters in the sand with rocks, then taking his girlfriend for a picnic by the lake to surprise her.”
“Cool,” I said, like it was just empirically interesting. What were we talking about?
“I really wanted you to see those words.”
“You did?”
“I did.” He glanced over again. “Because I’ve been wanting to ask you the same question.”
It’s one thing to expect something to happen, or root for it, or hope—and it’s another thing entirely to live the actual moment. I put my hand to my mouth and pressed my head to the window one more time for a better look.
“And there’s something else. Open the glove box.”
Sure enough, there was a little storage compartment in front of me. Inside, I found an emerald-green velvet ring box.
I was so glad I’d forced myself into this plane. Sometimes, terrifying, nausea-inducing risks are worth it. I turned to Chip. “You’re asking me to marry you?”
His voice crackled out through the headphones. But I knew the answer was yes.
So I gave my own answer. “Yes!”
“You haven’t even opened the box.”
“I don’t need to. Just: Yes!”
Chip turned toward me with a big smile full of perfect teeth. I could see myself reflected in his sunglasses, and my hair was a mess. I fought the urge to straighten it up. I also fought the urge to climb over and kiss him. It seemed strange not to kiss at a moment like that, but no way was I unbuckling. I couldn’t even remember how to unhook the shoulder strap.
Instead, I gave him a thumbs-up.
“It’s not official till you put on the ring,” he said.
I opened the box to find a very ornate gold-and-diamond engagement ring.
“It was my grandmother’s,” he said.
I pulled it out and slid it onto my finger. It was a bit big. Big enough, actually, that when I held out my hand to admire it, the diamond slid to the side and hung upside down.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes!” I said. Not my style, but who cared?
“Are you surprised?”
Yes and no. I nodded. “Yes.”
“Are you glad you came flying with me?”
“Very,” I said. And that answer really was one hundred percent true.
For a little while longer, at least.
*
WE NEVER FOUND the letters in the sand. But it was okay. We didn’t need them.
It was about twenty minutes back to the airfield, and we filled those minutes by arguing adorably about the wedding.
We agreed we should have the ceremony on that very beach, and then started listing bridesmaids and groomsmen. Most people were shoo-ins, like his brother, and his buddies Woody, Statler, Murphy, and Harris from undergrad—but then, of course, the question of what to do about my sister, Kitty, came up and stumped us for a while.
I hadn’t seen or talked to Kitty in three years. Her choice.
“You have to invite her, though,” Chip said.
But I wasn’t sure I wanted to. When she first went away, she announced she was “taking a breather” from our family. She’d be in touch, she said. Then she never was.
We knew she wasn’t dead. Our dad had kept in occasional contact, and he could verify that she was living in New York, alive and well—just unwilling, for some reason she would not share, to come home. Even for a visit.
At first it had been a little heartbreaking, losing her like that—being rejected by her like that. But by now, after all this time, I just felt cold. She didn’t like me? Fine. I wouldn’t like her, either. She wanted to pretend like her family didn’t exist? No problem. We could pretend the same thing right back.
Chip thought we needed to invite her to the wedding, at least. If not make her the maid of honor. But I disagreed.
“First of all,” I said, “she won’t even come. And second, if she does, she’ll ruin the whole thing.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“Just her being there will ruin things for me. Just feeling weird about seeing her again will suck the joy right out of the day. Instead of looking forward to the most joyful day of my life, I’ll dread it. Because of her.”
“Maybe you could see each other beforehand and get the weirdness out of the way,” Chip said.
I was in no mood for reasonable suggestions. “Even,” I went on, “if I manage to get past the weirdness, having her there would still mean having her there. Which means a ninety percent chance of her getting drunk and climbing into the punch bowl. Or getting drunk and biting a groomsman. Or getting drunk and grabbing the microphone for an Ethel Merman impersonation.”
Chip nodded. I wasn’t hypothesizing. Kitty had actually done each of these things in the past. He shrugged. “But she’s your only sister.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“It would seem weird for her not to be there.”
I went on. “And it’s not my fault we’re not close anymore, either.”
“No argument there.”
“She created that situation.”
“I agree.”
“And now she gets to spoil the only wedding day I’ll ever have.”
My luck. I’d throw the most exquisite wedding in the history of time, and the only takeaway would be my drunk, black-sheep sister trying to ride the ice sculpture.
If she deigned to come.
Actually, that summed up our dynamic exactly. I was always trying to get things exactly right, and she was always hell-bent on getting them spectacularly wrong.
*
UP AHEAD, THE airfield came into sight.
Chip was especially good at landings, he mentioned then. He just had a knack for them, kind of the way he had a knack for parallel parking.
That said, the sky up ahead was quite different from the sky we’d seen on the flight down. Darker, stormier. “That’s unexpected,” Chip said, taking it in.
“Was it supposed to rain?”
“Not last I checked.”
“You can fly in the rain, though, right?”
“Not really. You avoid it. Or wait for it to pass.”
“I’m fine with either,” I said. So agreeable with that ring on.
“The thing is, though,” he said then, “we’re going to need to land sooner rather than later.”
“So we don’t miss our fancy dinner reservation?”
“So we don’t run out of fuel.”
I studied the horizon. The sky behind us was bright blue, but up ahead it was grayer and grayer. And a little purple. With a smidge of charcoal black.
“That’s definitely rain—but way past the airport. Right?”
He nodded. “Right.”
Off on the horizon, there was a flash of lightning.
Maybe the storm was affecting our air. The ride back had become quite a bit bumpier, and soon I was motion-sick.
As we approached, Chip called in our coordinates in that official pilot’s voice, which was a little deeper than his regular one, and then he maneuvered us into the flight pattern for landing. We pulled around to the left, then turned to run along the length of the runway, then U-turned to descend to the ground. Chip was all concentration. I felt, more than saw, the ground getting closer. A welcome idea.
And then a funny thing happened. As we were nearing the runway, the wings did a thing I can only describe as a waggle—dipping sideways a little and then popping back up—that gave me a physical sting of fear in my chest.
It was over in a second, but that second changed everything. Something was wrong.
I looked over at Chip. His face was stone still.