How to Walk Away

by Katherine Center

  Then they offered me the job. Or, at least, as the HR guy walked me to the lobby, he touched my shoulder and said, “It’s not official, but you’ve got it.”

  My starting salary was going to be 50K higher than Chip’s—but my mother told me not to tell him that. The important thing was: We were beginning our lives. Things were falling into place.

  And here, at the airfield, I didn’t want to be the only thing that didn’t.

  Chip squeezed my hands. “You trust me, right?”

  “Yes.” Sort of.

  Then he pulled me into a kiss—a manly, determined, all-this-can-be-yours kiss, digging his tongue into my mouth in a way that he clearly found powerful and erotic, but that I, given how the sheer terror of what I was about to do had iced my blood, was too numb to feel.

  Then he swatted me on the butt and said, “Climb in.”

  What can I say? I did it.

  But I’m telling you, my hands were shaking.

  As I worked on hooking the shoulder strap, I gave myself a stern talking-to: This was the right thing to do. Wasn’t that what love was, after all? Saying yes—not just when it was easy, but also when it was hard?

  Of course, any analyst worth her degree could have easily made the exact opposite argument: that I should trust my gut, and I shouldn’t let Chip push me into doing things I didn’t want to do. That his lack of respect for my genuine discomfort in the face of his Top Gun fantasies did not bode well for our long-term prospects.

  But I wasn’t going there.

  I was going flying.

  Then he was next to me, buckling up and handing me a set of black headphones. I had that feeling you get once you’ve picked a roller coaster seat and clamped yourself in.

  Chip immediately shifted into character as the pilot. He slid his aviator sunglasses on and pressed the headphone mic so close to his mouth that his lips brushed against it, and started speaking a language to the control tower so specialized, it was basically nonsense: “South Austin Clearance Delivery—Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie with information Juliet—VFR to Horseshoe Bay cruising three thousand three hundred.”

  It sounded to me like he was pretending. Who talked like that? But the tower didn’t agree. Crackling through the headphones came “Cessna Three Two Six Tango Delta Charlie—South Austin Clearance—squawk two three one four, departure frequency will be one two zero point niner.”

  Oh, shit. This was happening.

  Chip checked instruments and dials, looking them over like a pro. He looked at ease. Capable. Trustworthy. Macho, too. And, dammit, yes: super cool.

  “I already went through my safety checklist before I came to get you—twice,” he said. His voice was crackly through the headphones, but he took my hand and squeezed. “Didn’t want to give you time to change your mind.”

  Smart.

  But I was all in by this point. I’d made my choice. For better or worse, as they say.

  So Chip turned his attention to bigger things.

  Still in sexy-pilot mode, he spoke into the mic and gave another nonsense message to the tower, confirming that we were waiting for the runway. I’d never been in the cockpit of a plane before, and this plane was all cockpit. Technically, there were two seats behind us, but it felt like we were in a Matchbox car.

  Another plane had to land before we could take off, and I studied the dashboard with all its knobs and dials and ’ometers. I pointed at it. “Isn’t this kind of tall?” It was higher than my head. I could barely see over.

  He nodded. “It’s not like driving a car,” he explained, “where it’s all about what you see. Flying’s more instrument based.”

  “You don’t look out the windshield?”

  “You do, but you’re looking at the instruments and gauges just as much. It’s half looking, half math.”

  The other plane touched down, slowed, and trundled past us. See? I said to myself. They survived. We revved up, Chip announced us again over the radio, and he started working the pedals to bring us into position. The blades on the propeller spun so fast they disappeared. The plane vibrated and hummed. I sat on my cold hands so I wouldn’t squeeze them into fists.

  “Please don’t do any loop-de-loops or anything,” I said then.

  He glanced over. “Loop-de-loops?”

  “Spins or flips. Or whatever. Show-offy stuff.”

  “I don’t have to show off for you,” he said.

  “You sure don’t.”

  “You already know how awesome I am.”

  I gave a nod. “Yes. And also, I might throw up.”

  We sped up, casting ourselves forward. As we lifted off, I decided it wasn’t that different from going up in a regular plane. A little bumpier, maybe. A smidge more front-and-center. A tad more Out of Africa.

  The ground floated away beneath us. Easy.

  Chip was focused and calm, and it was so strange to think he was making it all happen. Once we were airborne, he started narrating everything he was doing, as if he were giving me a lesson. He told me the Cessna 172 was the most popular plane ever built. A classic. We would level off at 3,000 feet. We’d be traveling 125 miles an hour, speeding up as the air thinned out so we didn’t stall. He had to scan the sky for other planes, as well as watch the radar on the screen for towers.

  Then something disturbing: He mentioned that the fuel was in the wings.

  “That seems like bad engineering,” I said. “What if the wings break off? You’ll get doused in fuel.”

  “The wings don’t break off,” Chip said. “That’s not a thing.”

  “But if they did.”

  “If they did, you’ve got bigger problems than a fuel spill.”

  I put my hands in my lap and deliberately arranged them so they would not look clenched.

  The plane was loud—hence the headphones—and we vibrated more in the air than we had on the ground, especially when we passed under a cloud. Chip explained that clouds actually sit on columns of rising air, and that turbulence happens when you cut through those columns. I had never thought of clouds as sitting on anything—just floating—but once he said it, it made sense. The more sense he made, the safer I felt.

  He grinned over at me. “Awesome, huh?”

  Kind of. “Awesome.”

  “Still scared?”

  Yes. “Nope.”

  “Glad you came?”

  “I’ll be gladder once we’re back on the ground.”

  “I knew you’d enjoy it. I knew you could be brave if you tried.”

  Such an odd compliment. As if he’d never seen me be brave before. As if my capacity for bravery had been up for debate.

  But I did feel braver now, as we rose above the subdivisions laid out like a mosaic below us.

  The hardest part was over, I remember thinking.

  Before long, the suburbs beneath us thinned out, and I realized I had no idea where he was taking me.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I’m just going to show you one quick thing,” Chip said, “and then we’ll turn back around and go home.”

  I could see that up ahead, dark and jagged, was a body of water.

  “Is that Horseshoe Bay?” I asked. My grandparents had a house there. I’d been there a million times, but I’d never seen it from this angle.

  Chip nodded. “You guessed it.”

  We were approaching the far shore. “What do you want to show me?”

  “Wait and see.”

  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.r />
  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.

  “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.