And then he was gone.
*
I WAS ALONE, in a crumpled plane, breathing air thick with jet fuel fumes. The air was so sour, and toxic, and corrosive, it felt like it was melting my lungs.
“Two minutes,” I whispered until the words turned into nonsense. “Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes.”
Next, a crack of real thunder that rattled the instruments in the dash.
Then it started raining.
The drops sounded frantic against the metal shell of the plane. Chip’s door was still wide open, so the water sheeted straight in on my bare shoulders, cold and mean.
More than two minutes went by, but I can’t tell you how many. Ten? Thirty? A hundred?
I wondered if it the rain was a good thing or a bad thing. Would it prevent a fire—or make it worse? I just wanted the entire world to hold still until I was out and away and safe. It was dark in the ditch, like the rain had put out the lights, too. Soon I was shivering. The raindrops pinged like gravel hitting the metal shell of the plane. I could hear a ticking noise. I could hear my own breathing. I wondered how long before the ditch filled up with water and I died by drowning in a plane crash.
I kept trying to unwedge myself. Nothing.
I’ve felt alone plenty of times in my life—in both good ways and bad—but I have never felt alone like this. “Come back,” I whispered to Chip. “Come back.” But the words were lost in the noise of the storm.
Then, over it all, I heard the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard—before or since.
First far away, then closer: a siren.
The fire department.
Chip had not come back, but now I had something better. I was so glad I’d bought that firefighter calendar last year. Best twenty bucks I ever spent.
Just like that, almost as if it had heard them coming, too, the rain slowed and thinned out to a sprinkle.
The acoustics in the plane were pretty good. After they cut the siren, I could hear the firemen outside, maybe five or six, talking and calling orders to each other. I heard noises I couldn’t decipher: clanking, squeaking, twisting. One guy called another guy a knucklehead. Minutes passed, then more. I wondered why no one had come to get me yet.
Then I heard a new sound—something different: A whoosh. Just like when your gas stove burner finally catches and leaps up into flames.
It came half a second before the flames themselves. Just long enough for me to lean a tiny bit closer to the ground and put my arms over my face.
Then: noise, wind, heat. I kept my head down because it was the only thing to do. I felt a flash of white heat sting my neck, but then it went away. Seconds later, the fire was gone. The cockpit was smoky and smelled like barbecue and burned hair.
*
THE NEXT SOUND was the clanking and gonglike pounding of metal. I heard banging, men’s voices, a motor and a buzzing sound. Then, in what seemed like a second, the roof of the plane—which, given how we’d landed, was more like a wall—was peeled away. Kneeling next to me was a firefighter in full gear and a mask. And all behind him was snow. There was snow in the cockpit, too, now that I noticed.
He took off his mask, and he turned out to be a lady.
That struck me as very novel. A lady firefighter! She told me her name, but I have no idea what she said. Sometimes, even still, when I can’t sleep, I try to remember what it was. Karen? Laura? Jenny?
“We have a live patient,” she announced.
I wondered if I heard surprise in her voice.
She kneeled down beside me, while another two other guys continued cranking off the roof. “Tell me what hurts the most.”
“Nothing hurts,” I said, as she leaned in to check my pulse.
She looked doubtful. “Nothing at all?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just stuck.” Then I asked, “Why is it snowing?”
“It’s not snow,” she said. “It’s foam. For the fire.”
Foam! For the fire! I’d forgotten the fire for a second! Now I realized my neck and arm were stinging. “I might have some burns, actually,” I said.
She smiled at me. “You’re very lucky. The fire broke out just as we cranked up the hoses. We had it out in under a minute.”
“That does sound lucky,” I agreed.
“Plus,” she went on, waving a tiny flashlight back and forth in front of my pupils, “facedown in a ditch is the best place to be when the flames roll over.”
“So, double luck,” I said.
“Are you kidding? Quadruple. I’m amazed you’re not a charcoal briquette.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“We’re going to strap you to a short board now,” she said, “and then to a long board while we transport you to the hospital.”
“I think I’m really fine,” I said. “Just wedged.”
But now she was pulling out an oxygen mask and cupping it over my face. “We’re going to give you some vitamin O. Just to help you breathe easier.”
Vitamin O. Cute. “I’m really fine.”
“Just to be safe,” she said, winking. “Just procedure. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?”
I didn’t. Lady firefighters probably had the deck stacked against them anyway.
And so I held still, breathing in cool vitamin O while she attached me strap by painstaking strap into a state of snug immobilization. She also put me in a C-collar, even though it seemed perfectly clear to me that I didn’t need one. The last step, once I was secure, was also the longest: prying apart the crumpled front of the plane to free my legs. This project involved three different firefighters—who took their sweet time.
I was grateful for their care, though. Nobody took shortcuts. Nobody seemed eager to get off shift. They did things right. My nameless lady firefighter stayed right by me the whole time, asking me over and over to wiggle my fingers and toes and making chitchat to keep me calm. She told me if this had been a jet crash, they’d be calling in heavy rescue—but “these little planes are like tin foil.”
Before they had me out, I heard a helicopter. “There’s your ride,” my new friend said.
“I’m really fine,” I tried again.
“You’ll like it. It’s fun.”
“Where is Chip?” I asked.
“Is that your boyfriend?”
“Fiancé,” I said, for the first time ever.
“He’s back by the truck.”
“Is he hurt?”
“They’re doing an evaluation,” she said. “But I’d say there’s not a scratch on him.”
Once they finally had me out, and had loaded me onto a rolling stretcher, they wheeled me to an ambulance, where they cut off all my clothes with shears (“Life Flight likes ’em naked”) and started an IV with morphine.
The storm had blown off in another direction, and now the sky was remarkably cloudless. I could see a million stars up above, and I thanked them all. I thanked them for luck, and firefighters, and sirens, and flame retardant, and ditches, and bolt cutters, and good timing, and vitamin O, and hope, and miracles, and not being burned to a crisp.
The paramedics worked hard. Every time I told them I was fine, they shrugged and said, “Procedure.”
Another procedure: I had to ride in the ambulance two hundred feet to the Life Flight chopper. They wouldn’t let Chip come with me, either, even though there was plenty of room.
“I need you to stay with me,” I told him, as they rolled me away.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Do it anyway!”
“I’ll meet you there,” he called after us, arms at his sides.
If we were flying and he was driving, I thought, he was going to have to hurry up. But he didn’t hurry up. I grabbed one last glance of him as the team hustled my gurney into the chopper. He was still in the same spot, standing like a statue.
I could not believe all this fuss. Honestly. Over nothing.
Well, maybe not nothing. A brush with death. A worst nightmare come true. The crash, the rain, the fire. I might never stop shaking.