Sunshine and Brown and I talked about flying once—the topic was the first time each of us had ever been on a plane—in another of those long get-to-know-one-another conversations our first year of college. Sunshine had been seven, an unaccompanied minor going to visit her grandparents in Florida. Brown had been a baby, moving from Missouri to Boston with his parents. I listened to them talk about those first flights and all the myriad flights they had been on since, to the Caribbean, to Europe, Brown to Africa and Sunshine to Japan, which airlines were best, which had direct flights where, which logo looked coolest painted on the side of the plane. How Sunshine always had to remember to book her flights now under her legal name, which was Samantha; otherwise it was no end of trouble at security.
I said nothing.
I had been on one flight in my life at that point, when a college in Ohio that liked my early test scores flew me out to visit in the late spring of my junior year at Sterns High School. Tamar had made me go, despite the fact that I had told her I would not go farther than a half-hour drive from Asa, who had graduated the year before. She drove me to the Syracuse airport and parked in short-term parking and she waited with me at the gate—this was before the Twin Towers—until I was onboard and looking out the tiny oval window, trying but unable to find her through the huge glass window of the concourse. Where was my mother? Had she left the minute I headed down the passenger ramp? Was she already in the station wagon, hauling exact change for the thruway toll out of the glove compartment? Or was she still there, in the terminal, waiting to make sure the plane that I was on took off safely and made it up into the clouds before she relinquished her hold and turned to leave?
I was seventeen years old.
I stared out the tiny oval window and watched the ground crew load the suitcases and duffels into the belly of the plane I was sitting in. I fastened my seat belt when the flight attendant told me to. A boy with big orange ear protectors waved the plane away from the terminal. The runway markings rolled beneath my window as we lumbered our way to the line of planes waiting at the end of the runway. It was just like waiting at an intersection for the light to change, I remembered thinking.
Then it was our turn. The engines groaned and roared as they revved up, and the plane rattled and rumbled and then smoothed out as we gathered speed down the runway. At a certain point, when I sensed we were about to leave the earth, the earth that I had never left before, the earth that I had always been firmly attached to, I held my breath for luck. And then the snub nose of the plane pointed skyward and we were borne aloft.
Helpless.
That was how it felt to me. I was a passenger on an airplane made of aluminum and rubber and steel, and the only thing that nonpilot I could do was sit with my seat belt on and look out the window. Everything was out of my hands and nothing, nothing in that world was under my control and because of that, everything felt sacred.
The plastic soda cup, the square of paper napkin that the flight attendant handed me, the barf bag that I saved to bring back to Tamar because it would make her laugh, the button that, when pressed, reclined the seat I sat in, the SkyMall catalog that I read cover to cover as if it were a magazine, every page filled with things I had never known I wanted or needed, things that existed in this world but had been unknown to me until just now: all of it, full of wonder.
I took my eyes away from the window, on that first flight, and searched for someone. Anyone. But they were reading their newspapers, or listening to their headphones, or their heads were tilted back in sleep and snores. The flight attendant was busy at the front of the cabin, her back to me. I turned my head halfway and met a middle-aged man’s eyes. He was two rows behind, sitting on the aisle. I wanted to tell him—what? Something. Something that meant something. Something about this flight, the fact that we were two human beings breathing and thinking and living at this very moment, so high in the sky. I looked at him helplessly.
“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” he said to me.
Those were his exact words. You might think, he was two rows behind her and across the aisle, the plane’s engines were no doubt roaring, what makes her think he was talking to her, there is no way she could have heard what he was saying. You would be wrong. We were kindred spirits, that man in his business suit and me in my jeans, filled with a helpless wonder.
Sometimes still, when I drove the curves and hills and hollows of the land where I grew up, or when my fingers remembered the hours of music they had brought forth from that winged instrument in the basement practice room, back when I was just learning to play the piano, or when I sat in my chair on the porch and the fireflies, those miraculous creatures thought by some to live on air—air—were floating about me, I thought of that man in that suit on that plane. I saw his eyes, those eyes that had met mine, and I heard his words again.
Did he ever think of me? The girl I used to be, turning around in her seat looking for someone, anyone, who wasn’t asleep, someone who knew how she felt.
* * *
There are people in this world who instinctively know how you feel. Even if they don’t know you, they sense what is happening inside you. The man on the plane was like that, and so was Asa, Asa who came back to me still, unbidden.
Something about Blue Mountain’s eyes when he looked down at me, lying on the floor of the arts center waiting for my heart to calm down, reminded me of Asa. I didn’t know Asa when he was little, but maybe he was like that, skinless, growing up in that house of chronic tension. Martha Chamberlain with the suspicious eyes and the ready anger, Eli with the smile that came to his face every time he looked at his son.
Or when he looked at me. Eli was not stingy with love.
Asa grew up allowing others in, especially kids. I pictured him the way he used to be at Camp. Camp wasn’t a summer camp the way they were now, with classrooms and learning goals and measurable outcomes, and it must have had a different name, an actual name, but all the kids called it Camp, and we did too. Asa and a few others ran it themselves at the elementary school, under the semi-supervision of a fifth grade teacher who needed extra money. Someone was in charge of snacks and Band-Aids, someone else was in charge of story time, and Asa cheered the kids on at the playground. That was it. That was Camp.