by Daniel Riley
She rents a car at the airport in Ka’anapali and makes the thirty-minute drive to the little crescent-moon bay. It looks like every other stretch of coastline on the islands. And like so many of those, too, this one has a turnoff for lookout parking. It’s an hour out from sunset, and the bay here faces west. The sun’s dropping down right over the scene. She cuts the engine and steps outside, still in her uniform but in flatter shoes. The wind’s whipping up, a warm breeze. She feels disoriented from the nap—a heat in her cheek and forehead, like she used an iron as a pillow.
She plays it through her mind again, the way she heard it’d gone: Grace and J.P. and the pilot, up out of Ka’anapali, north first for ten minutes and then back down the coastline, all the way to Makena. And then a high turn, a showboaty turn that was actually reported to ground control at Wailea by another pilot. They steadied out low and started proceeding back to the Ka’anapali airport. But somewhere right about here they stalled out and plummeted with a dead engine. There was no weather that day, about as much wind as now. She was here in January with Wayne and Edith and Mike, but it’s different alone—such an ordinary-seeming stretch. And yet it is singular, incomparable: it has rocks that are only rocks here, its fret of coastline cut like a key to a door.
What Suzy wondered at first news was whether J.P. had been at the controls. She could imagine herself having done something like it. Up in a prop plane with a friend (or whatever they were) and a pay-per-hour pilot, and taking the controls herself if the pilot granted the opportunity, pushing it a little. Proving something, maybe, or showing off for Grace. Perhaps J.P. was at the control wheel down in Wailea, too, at the southern tip of the ride, when the plane ballooned a little too much and almost stalled out.
But what the fisherman who found them said, both to the police and to the newspapers as well as to Wayne, was that they were in the back together. He was certain it was J.P., not the pilot, seated with Grace. Plus, there was nothing showboaty, really, about what happened at the cove. Just a little plane that floated up too high and lost its pull. It went silent, like snapping the radio off, and then it free-fell backward, butt first into the water, the view out the windows nothing but sky until it was nothing but water.
Suzy’s worked her way down the side of the cliff, and she’s walking carefully out onto the rocks as the tide climbs higher. There are pools with urchins and small, bright fish. The perspective from sea level is different. It’s more menacing. The water is moving faster than it appears to from up on the cliff. The chop is a little taller, meatier, more three-dimensional. And the water is cold. Her feet get wet from the waves. And at one point, as she tries to find her way to the farthest rock out, her foot slips on some slime and dunks her knee-high into one of the pools. Her right leg is soaked. And it chills in the breeze. She imagines herself accidentally cracking her head, floating out into the same water as Grace. She thinks of Wayne and Edith: she can’t die, she reminds herself—it’s duty.
She makes it to that farthest rock and she parks herself on her ass. The skirt of her uniform soaks through. The rock’s so far out it looks unreachable during a higher tide. And it’s from there that she traces the flight in her mind, printing a copy of the reconstructed memory, the fisherman’s memory, as though it’s her own. A little buzzing bug hovering off the shore, making the sound of the biplanes that tail ads for beer, growing larger as it comes nearer. Growing larger and seemingly preparing to pass, but flying higher, too, at an aggressive angle of ascent. Pulling up and around to take another look at something—Grace wants another look. And then it’s not passing, but rather it’s overhead and the buzzing cuts out. This is the part she’s thought about most, what happens next.
It must’ve been so quiet. So shamefully silent. It must have been the sort of quiet you don’t get in life—the ceasing of forward motion, the falling back without the noise of choices and missings-out and potential lives lived. There is no opportunity in that silence other than to give yourself over to the thing that’s happening, to the inevitable conclusion of the afternoon flight and, more generally, to the lives you’ve happened to live. Suzy counts in her mind. What would it have taken—five seconds? Seven? At first there’s the long, ballooning instant at the apex, then the reversal. That might take a couple on its own. And then the acceleration, backward toward the water. How high must they have been to stall going that sort of speed? Four hundred feet? Five hundred feet? This is the physics midterm she failed. Thirty-two feet per second per second. That’s what she remembers. So, what? Long enough, she decides. Long enough to count them out: one Mississippi, two Mississippi…What does one think at two Mississippi? With the uncertainty of life remaining? Is it one more second? Is it three or five? Is there the temptation that survival is possible? There must be. Suzy had always known that there were accidents on the track. She was in plenty herself. But death was never really a possibility. It was simply a question of preparation: What would I need to do to survive this? What would be required of me to not end up dead? As in: Here comes the water, better get ready to swim. Maybe that’s what Grace was thinking: Wish I’d swum in high school like Suzy. It’s just a little plane, it’s just five hundred feet. It’s not a plummet from thirty-five thousand. Why wouldn’t we make it out of this okay?
Assuming you’re at three Mississippi, and four Mississippi is coming fast, what’s the order of people who pass through your mind? Is it immediate proximity first? J.P. and the pilot? Is it chronological, longest known? Mom and Dad and Suzy, then Mike? Why does Suzy suspect Mike didn’t receive top billing in either case? And why does Suzy suspect her own thoughts would be on the least consequential people in her life—a fixation on Pablo, the waiter at El Guincho, or Queens Cassidy? Know who else would pop up? Dave—Dave’s ragged fingernail playing with the elastic of her underwear during the graduation ceremony. A memory with a psychic sear. There’d be a final sign-off and a little signature—Thank you, Mom, thank you, Dad, thank you, Grace, for this life, for this award, thank you, Bil—and then just bang. No doubt the worst thought would be on her mind as the plane passed underwater. Is that what knocked them out? Did they hit their heads? Did all three snap their necks on impact? She’s pretty sure a two-ton plane free-falling from five hundred feet turns the surface of the water into concrete. It’d be like falling from fifty floors out of an office building and onto the street.
All she knows is that by the time the fisherman dove that final time, the cabin had filled with water. But their seat belts were still buckled, and it didn’t seem like they’d struggled any to get out. She watches the film the fisherman described: They just fell silently like snow and slapped the surface of the water. Disappearing before he could even start motoring toward the snapped wings and tail on the surface. She watches it happen in her mind over and over and over. Suzy toggles between her sister’s final thoughts and her own, the five or seven seconds distending over the course of an hour as the sun lowers as slowly as the memory of a plane. She tries to imagine a way to make it different: What would be required of me to not end up dead? She holds it in her mind and then starts speaking the words: “What would be required of me to not end up dead?” The words lose their meaning. They are sounds. They are one sentence, they are just one word: whatwouldberequiredofmetonotendupdead?
It is so dark down in the pools, and her rock is growing smaller with the rising tide. It will be difficult for Suzy to find her way back through the pools and up the cliff face without a struggle, without getting wet and scraping a knee. The salt breezes around the cove. Headlights appear to the south and then disappear over her shoulder, out of sight on account of the cliff. The sound of the water moving into the pools, moving in all around her, it is a constant, and something to hold right up in front of her mind, a sound that will never cut out like an airplane engine. It has been here since the beginning and it will be here once Suzy’s gone, a thing that will never not be: water and rocks, kshhhhhhhhh. In it, all at once, there is the sound of water, the sound of rocks, the d
eeper sound of the Hawaiian spirits, of Pele the fire goddess, creator of the islands, antidote in spiritual dexterity to the crudeness of Honeywell’s Mami. There is sound, but it disappears into its rhythm. Its constancy has defined itself as an absence: it is so present that it is hardly there. Before Suzy and after. But after’s not really an option. Whatwouldberequiredofmetonotendupdead? Wayne, Edith, Grace, Mike, Dave, Billy, Honeywell. That would be her order of thinking before she hit the water, wouldn’t it? If she could only assure herself enough time to get through the whole list, to have them right up in front, in the fingers of her mind. Wayneedithgracemikedavebillyhoneywell. She has no one to turn to. But she feels a shift in her body, a lightening, like hollow bones. There is no one left. But the resignation steadies her, readies her. Wayneedithgracemikedavebillyhoneywell. Suzy says it like a prayer and it lifts her.
The flight back to Honolulu seems even shorter than the flight that brought her to Maui. It passes in blackness, and she makes it to her hotel in what feels like a single stride. They’ve put her up at the Royal Hawaiian again. “The pink cake,” Edith called it. Suzy has zero appetite and no desire to navigate the luau hoards on the waterfront. Her last time here seems years ago, the buzz-cut grass, the blunt-edged sunlight of an afternoon burning on the beach.
In her room she pulls the pilot study guide from her bag—a mimeographed textbook they’ve been using for the flight-hours phase of licensing. She reads through the pages one by one, reviewing the cockpit diagrams and the aeronautical charts she’s already been tested on. She spends an hour in the lamplight turning over the materials and assuring herself of her proficiency. Twenty-five hours to go.
She hears the thunder, but it hasn’t started raining. She hears the faint scratch of guests moving across the grounds to beat the downpour. The soft footsteps in soft grass of the hundreds on the water. It makes her hungry for some reason, just hungry enough to step out through the sliding door and onto her porch. The grounds are stuck with palms, pricked in clusters at every turn. The nearest has been dropping coconuts, and she trots across the lawn to retrieve one. She compares three, palming them, shaking them. She picks the smallest, near spherical, brown and hairy, and returns to her room.
She’s seen them opened before, by street vendors with machetes. She knows she won’t have much luck getting to the flesh, even with a borrowed knife. And so she shuts the sliding door and locks it in place, pulls the curtain and positions herself at the edge of the wooden desk. She takes a couple practice strokes and then lowers the coconut into the corner of the desk. It’s a good hit, it leaves a nice dent. She does it again and misses the spot. Three, four, and then on five the corner rips a chunk out of the hide. Silty milk spills across the table. She feels a little guilty—it must be what it’s like to off a small animal with a rock.
She works the coconut for half an hour—pours out the milk, runs it through a coffee filter, eats the meat like it’s corn on the cob. The whole thing only makes her hungrier. But it’s full-out dumping rain now, the constant static on the window, the white noise of a tropical storm. She starts to change for bed, but she’s nowhere close to exhausted enough. She wishes she could knock herself out. She wishes she could drink or smoke herself into slumber, but she wants to be sharp for tomorrow. Tomorrow is a day for clean thinking.
So instead, she lifts the receiver from its cradle beside the bed and asks the receptionist to connect her to the mainland. All charges accepted, et cetera. The signal takes an eternity to cross the ocean, plus ring after ring. And when she’s resigned to hanging up, of course, is when he answers.
“Hello?”
“I’m breaking my promise.”
“I hoped you would,” he says. “Did everything go okay?”
“I guess so.”
“So, yes? That’s great news. That’s great news to relay.”
“You didn’t tell me what he said when you told him you were finished,” Suzy says.
“He was understanding,” Billy says. “Mostly. But wants a couple more things before he’s ready to let me go.”
“It’s going to go like that forever.”
“I don’t think so. Not this time.”
In the gap it occurs to her that she isn’t sure why she called.
“Hey,” he says, “someone at Howlers told me Mike’s been asking about me. Asked if they had a number he could call. Isn’t that bizarre? A: that he would want to talk to me at all. And B: that he wouldn’t just go through you?”
Suzy is silent. He’s really going through with it, then.
“Suzy?”
She’s never felt so knotted up, so seized in the lungs and stomach. More than any other spell of paralysis in the past. A failure to speak, caught in the insipid neutral zone between the instinct to protect herself and a desire to protect Billy. But at this point what can she do? Mike is in motion. I’m gonna do it with or without you, she hears him say again. All she’d be granting Billy is an opportunity to flee—which is no good to him anyway. For Billy, a life without Sela is worse than being blindsided.
“Don’t worry about him,” Suzy says. “He probably just wants some grass. But he can find another dealer. Just, no obligation, ’kay? If he pushes, tell him to talk to me.”
“It’s really no problem.”
“Just don’t worry about it.”
“All right, dude…,” he says.
She pivots.
“Just so you know—just so he knows—I’m coming in on the noon, into LAX probably around eight. And then I’m hand delivering.”
“You really won’t see me?”
“That part I’m sticking to.”
“But you called.”
“Just tell him so that he knows it’s coming. To show that I upheld my end. And that this is really it.”
“Well, I guess we can just talk about it later, then.”
“No, no—this is it.”
“C’mon,” he says.
“This is costing me a fortune. Just don’t call Mike back.”
“Suzy, I like you.”
“All right,” she says. She still isn’t sure why she called.
“This is important: I really like you,” he says.
She presses her eyes together tightly, forcing the sentiment back out her ears.
“It wasn’t just by chance that I picked you, you know? It wasn’t Shelly at Howlers that pointed me toward you on the beach. I’d seen you there one night, I’d asked your name, and it turned out you were just who I needed you to be. Don’t you get it? You were just the girl I needed right then. You showed up at the beach that afternoon and at the party that night—the universe was working in powerful, meaningful ways, Z.”
Fucking coconut milk everywhere.
“Just, c’mon, some sort of fresh start,” he says, “how ’bout it? Let’s just look at this all over again when you’re back.”
Suzy knows little about what has just transpired—in the preceding minute and in the preceding eight months. But what she does know is that what’s coming is so very much the end of something, not the beginning.
“Well, I’ll be back tomorrow,” she says.
“Okay.” And he sounds satisfied enough by the gap left open that Suzy feels fine hanging up.
She uses the springs in the mattress to bounce herself to her feet. She lifts her suitcase onto the bed and unzips it. On top, there’s a red skirt, a blue blouse, a pair of cotton underwear, and a change of hose. There’s also a manila envelope with $150,000. She counts it out onto the bedspread—fifteen hundred hundreds. (Thirty-two feet per second per second…) The first envelope, way back in July, contained the most money she’d ever seen at once, by an order of magnitude. Now this blows that away. She counts a stack of hundreds until she’s convinced the rest is all there.
The most interesting thing left in the suitcase, way down at the bottom of the bag, is a stewardess uniform. Her Grand Pacific uniform is hanging over the shower bar in the bathroom, dripping out into the tub from her time at the ti
de pools. The uniform in the bag is a second uniform, a uniform she’s worn only twice before—to a place and back again. Suzy’s breathing is rapid, and she feels light like she did on the rocks. It is the sensation, the tickling of skin and blood, she used to feel at the start of a race. It is the sensation she imagines she’ll feel taking off in a plane alone for the first time. She runs a sleeve of the sky-blue jacket through her fingers. It has a nice hand to it. She takes a deep breath and exhales in a short report. She picks up the jacket and presses it to her body, regards herself in the mirror. It looks just right. She turns it over in her hands, grips it tightly, admires its capacity for action. She holds it like a loaded gun.
She checks in with the Grand Pacific flight ops the next morning, and, as is often the case, she’s asked to redo her makeup. There’s always something. But only with the most disheveled stews has she ever seen the check-in women give more than a single piece of advice. “More lipstick.” “Straighten your shoulders.” “Give the eyebrows a pluck—there should be two of them.” Suzy knows that for the girls who are too lovely to be improved by a line of advice, there’s a random bag check instead. Just so flight ops can write something down next to the girl’s name on the log sheet, evidence of a job having been done.
With her makeup never quite right, though, Suzy hasn’t ever brought a bag check upon herself. And so it goes again today. She parks herself in front of a mirror in the bathroom and finds the instruments. Eyelash curler, mascara wand, lipstick tube. She reapplies her foundation. Rubs it in thickly so that her freckles disappear, like stars do over big cities. She steps out into the check-in lounge and waves to the lady in charge, making sure for certain that she’s been seen, that she’s been accounted for on her way into the airport and her way out to the concourse.
It is a sticky morning—only three hours light, but with the mature heat of late afternoon. The concourse at Honolulu is open air for stretches, and so it’s lightly peppered with myna birds and fragrant with plumerias. It occurs to her that there is no airport like it, the outside slipping in thoughtlessly like tongues of surf.