The Sky Above Us

by Natalie Lund

  He realized he was staring at her, a few inches from her face. He sat up, knocking his forehead against her chin. “Nothing,” he managed.

  “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, rubbing her chin and climbing off him.

  “No, I just—” What could he say? He was a liar. A coward. He’d knowingly ignored her at school.

  “I just thought we should go slow or whatever,” he finished. It was something he must have heard on a movie or TV show.

  Janie was silent. He couldn’t even go three minutes without hurting her.

  He scraped sand behind him into a mound and leaned back against it. “You’re going to leave,” he said; it was the only excuse he could think of that wasn’t the truth.

  She looked confused. “You mean for college?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m going to apply to a few schools with good literature and screenwriting programs out east. I miss the seasons, you know?”

  She made her own sand pile and leaned next to him. She smelled like popcorn, and his lips still buzzed from the pressure of hers.

  “Aren’t you going to leave?” she asked carefully, like she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to ask.

  I don’t deserve to go anywhere, he thought. I’ve been such a piece of shit for years.

  “I want to be up there.” Nate pointed at a star. She’d be the one person he took with him if he left and could take someone, but of course he didn’t say that out loud. And she didn’t ask.

  All Nate wanted to do was kiss Janie again and to lose his fingers in the tangle of her hair, but he knew he shouldn’t. He’d just hurt her again.

  “Nate? Nate?” Janie had turned to face him, crisscrossing her legs in front of her. The moon lit one half of her face but the other was dark. “What’s really going on?” Her hair blew into his face, tickling his nose. She brushed it away tentatively. “You’ve been, like, dropping out of yourself or something. Are you feeling depressed maybe? It’s okay if you are, you know. I could talk to my dad and see if he has suggestions of someone you could go see.”

  She’d tell her dad? He was flooded with embarrassment. “No,” Nate said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with whatever you’re feeling.”

  He stood, wincing as he put weight on his healing knee and brushed all the sand off his clothes and skin. “Let’s just go. The flies are biting.”

  “Okay.” She sounded disappointed, but she stood too, and grabbed the bag of popcorn by the neck. The bag, now choked in her fist, made him inexplicably sad: how quickly something that had seemed like a beginning could turn into just another end.

  CASS’S COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAY DRAFT

  ON JUNE 22, 2019, I made a plan to write my college application essay. My parents seemed distant more distant than ever, and I had just broken up with the love of my life my boyfriend of five years. I thought I would write the essay about how the bonds between people change, how there are phases of transition. I planned to wow you with include one long extended chemistry metaphor.

  On June 23, 2019, I witnessed a plane crash. The plane was carrying my ex-boyfriend and his best friends.

  Plans change. I can’t write that essay anymore.

  And yet, here I am, writing my personal statement because the BIG PLAN—that I will go to your college, major in biological chemistry, get a PhD, and run my own lab someday—is expected to move forward.

  Life, the endless conveyor belt. Grief, simply the grime gunking gumming up the gears. Slowing you down, but not actually stopping the momentum.

  What if grief is not supposed to be kept underneath? What if we became like the widows from centuries before and wore it everywhere we went? What if we brought it to our jobs? To school? To the grocery store? What if we allowed the BIG PLANS to change? What if we pressed pause?

  Here is the truth: I do not know anymore if I want to be a chemist. Right now I do not want to be anything.

  So I guess I should talk about college what do I want out of college? I want to better understand loss. I want to read about it. Find it in art. I want to sit in classes with people who have felt things deeply. I want to talk about what happened. I want to be heard.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CASS

  Eight days after

  I CAN TELL Izzy is pissed by the way she stares through Janie and me as though we aren’t even in the same hangar. I’ve been her friend long enough to know she’ll forget about the silent treatment soon.

  She goes straight for Brad, her finger pointing at his chest. “What exactly did the boys say when they were here?” she asks.

  Here we are, pretending to learn to fly, trying to build trust until he gives us a window to ask about them. But Izzy refuses to play by anyone else’s rules—unspoken or not.

  “I know my brother was looking for the doorway,” she says.

  I have no idea what she’s talking about, but Brad’s eyes widen with recognition. In seconds Izzy created an opening in the conversation that Janie and I were going to pay thousands of dollars to wait for.

  “She and Israel are more alike than they seem initially, aren’t they?” I ask Brad, willing my voice to sound as defiant as Izzy’s. Izzy is beside me, and I can tell by the way she squares herself and sets her jaw that my question has made her stronger.

  Brad ignores the question and turns on his heel, disappearing behind his whiteboard. “Ready for the hot seat?” he calls over his shoulder. We follow him, my heart pounding in my ears. I don’t want to be closer to the planes.

  “What is it? This doorway?” Janie sounds genuinely curious, and this stops him in his tracks. Is he curious too? We are near the back of the hangar, where flight vests, headsets, and a few sets of keys hang on pegs.

  “My brother thought he could go through it into another life,” Izzy says—more to Brad than us.

  Another life? Like a dolphin’s? It still makes no sense to me, but I know the longer we talk, the more answers we’ll get and the less time we’ll have to fly. “Does any of this sound familiar, Brad?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, turning to face us. “Maybe. I certainly never saw anything.”

  “But did they see it?” Izzy asks.

  “Once Nate was coming in too hot for a landing and he just froze up, so I had to land for him. He said he saw something that looked like a tear.”

  A tear? The skin at my hairline prickles. Could all of this be true?

  Brad pushes up the brim of his hat to wipe his forehead, and I catch the first glimpse of his eyes. They are blue and empty, like the sky in my dream. They make me want to turn and run.

  “Look, whatever the reason, they stole my plane,” he says. “I’m still fighting the insurance company about this.”

  “Can you believe he’s talking about the insurance company?” Izzy turns to me, and just like that, the silent treatment is over. Brad’s back is to the wall, and the three of us position ourselves in a semicircle. As though reading each other’s minds, we’ve blocked his escape.

  “You’re talking like you have no responsibility here,” I say.

  “What about your responsibility?” he shoots back. He reminds me of a cornered wild animal, snapping at anything that moves. But Izzy’s fury falls from her face, and I can tell his bite landed. I wonder what my own face is doing. If it’s betraying my own guilt.

  “You’re right. We’re all complicit,” Janie says. She takes a deep breath. “I didn’t get Nate help. Even though he was practically shouting at me to.”

  “I let Israel push me away even though I knew better.” This from Izzy, whose eyes have dropped to the concrete floor of the hangar.

  This is easy for me; I’ve known my failure all along. “I broke Shane’s heart,” I say. “Your turn, Brad.”


  He clears his throat and looks around like someone else might be hiding amid the planes. “Israel was the one looking for it, I think,” he says it low, practically a growl. “I only overheard them talking about it.”

  “Did you tell the police?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “So Israel was trying to find this doorway thing, and Nate and Shane were along for the ride?” Janie asks.

  “I think Nate was—” He pauses a moment and rubs his goatee. Janie folds her arms across her chest, hugging herself. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Lost,” he finishes, and I feel her shoulder sink.

  He turns toward me. “I think Shane wanted to fly. He was getting good at it.” At first I find it harder to swallow than Nate’s and Israel’s news. Some part of me can see it, though: Shane soaring above all of us, those long arms stretched, his head lifted, so that he isn’t smiling down on us, but out. Always out.

  If flying is something he wanted to do, I wasn’t the reason he climbed into the plane.

  And I won’t be the reason Izzy or Janie or anyone else does either.

  “We’re leaving,” I say.

  “But—” Izzy protests.

  “No.” I’m more sure than I’ve ever been. I look directly into her eyes when I say it, and, for the first time in our lives, Izzy backs down.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  JANIE

  Eight days after

  “HEAR ME OUT,” Izzy says, her hand pressed against the passenger door of my car so Cass can’t get in. “I think we have to go back in and finish the lesson. Just to see if we can find it. The doorway. I need to know if that’s what my brother did.”

  Nate was lost, and I knew it. Brad even knew it. Maybe he’d still be here if I’d told his parents something seemed wrong with him. Or if I’d told him sooner that our relationship made me feel like I didn’t exist. Or if I’d told him he offered me safety and peace and an escape from my home. That it wasn’t all good or bad, but that it could have been better for both of us.

  Who knows—maybe I still would have lost him.

  As my dad and that man in the bait shop said: sometimes there aren’t answers.

  Perhaps it’s a comfort to accept this.

  “Whether they transmigrated or they died, they’re gone for good, Izzy. And people are so hurt,” I say. “I think this is better left a mystery.”

  “Yeah. Going after them won’t bring them back,” Cass says. “And I think—I know—we’ll end up gone too.”

  “So you want to give up?” Izzy asks. “Stop trying to find out what really happened now? When we’re this close?”

  “Yes,” I say. It’s the most sure I’ve been in a long time.

  “I don’t know if this doorway thing is real or not, but I can’t get in that plane.” Cass’s voice cracks into a sob. It’s the messiest I’ve ever seen her—snot bubbling out of her nostrils, tears dripping off her chin. “I can’t.”

  “Cass.” Izzy grabs her hand. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to.”

  Cass’s sobs settle into soft sniffles, and Izzy opens the car door for her.

  I wait for Izzy to pull out and follow her down the dirt road. She drives slowly when we get to the highway. I’m slow too, but I easily overtake her and wave. She doesn’t seem to notice. I glance back in my rearview mirror and see her jaw working from side to side like she’s grinding her teeth. Eventually I lose sight of her altogether.

  * * *

  • • •

  My dad’s car isn’t there when I get home, so I flop onto my bed. Yes, it’s a comfort to accept that there aren’t answers to everything, but what if there are answers I’ve been hiding from, like I hid all those years from confronting Nate?

  I pull out my phone and send a text: Can we talk?

  My mom calls immediately. “Janie?” My heart still sings when she says my name. “Is everything okay? Your dad told me about the plane accident. I wanted to call but I wasn’t sure—”

  I cut her off. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think they were trying to leave,” I say carefully.

  She’s quiet, like she can sense where I’m heading with this.

  “I was so hurt when you left, Mom. And so, so angry.”

  “I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “I need to know why. I deserve to know.”

  “I thought you knew. I left that note.”

  “I shredded it.”

  This makes her laugh. It’s low and husky, a laugh I hadn’t heard in the year leading up to our move. My memory of it is older—from a day at the Ocean City boardwalk when I fed every single one of our fries to a fat pigeon I’d named Harold.

  “I probably would have too,” she says.

  “So why?”

  I can hear her take a deep breath. “Well, I didn’t feel like my life was my own anymore. I had to build something for myself.”

  This makes me think of my dad squeezing the beer can when I said it hurts not to get picked. Of Nate’s mom, barefoot at his wake. “It wasn’t just your own. None of our lives are. We can break each other.”

  “Yes, certainly, we affect each other, but I don’t know if I agree about our lives not being our own, Janie. I thought I could be a better mother if I made myself whole again. For myself.”

  I’m scared of the answer, but I ask it anyway: “Why weren’t you whole?”

  “Because I gave up my career and followed your father’s,” she says. “It had nothing to do with you,” she adds, like she knows what I’m thinking.

  “It had everything to do with me. I’m the reason you left school.”

  “Janie—”

  “Just be honest. I can take it.”

  “The truth is complicated. All these factors—my career, my dreams, your dad, you—they’re all tied together. But I didn’t leave because I didn’t want to be your mother anymore.”

  “So then why didn’t you come visit?” I ask.

  “You adamantly didn’t want to see me. I felt like—I don’t know—that was my bed to lie in because of the choice I’d made.”

  “Why didn’t you come anyway?”

  She’s silent a moment. “I guess I should have.”

  “You still can.”

  “Okay then, I will.”

  I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d let her talk to me that first year. Would I already have these answers? Would I have demanded them from Nate back then too? “I guess I shouldn’t have cut you out.”

  “I just hope that I can get a chance to show you who I’ve become,” she says.

  “You can’t just wait around hoping for chances. Things don’t just get better on their own.”

  “I know. You’re right, Janie.”

  “No, you don’t. I knew something was wrong with Nate.” Speaking the truth out loud again doesn’t make me feel any lighter. “I didn’t tell anyone because he seemed so adamant everything was fine.”

  I expect her to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but she doesn’t, and this helps somehow. “I carry a lot of regrets too. But usually, in my regrets, there’s a kernel I can find—something I’m glad for. It may not make it better, but it makes it meaningful.”

  I suppose I’m glad I confronted Nate at the party. Sure, I wish I’d said things sooner, that I’d said more, that I’d understood what he was trying to say, that our final conversation had been a happy one. But I did advocate for myself before he was gone forever, and I can close my fist around that kernel and hold it tight.

  There’s something pushing at the periphery of my thoughts, nagging me: Izzy driving slowly away from the airport, tense and upset. She said Cass wouldn’t have to go near the plane, but she didn’t say anything about herself. And, because I think I’m starting to understand Izzy, I know she won’t s
top until she has her answer.

  “Mom,” I say. “I have to go. We’ll talk again soon.”

  I don’t bother texting first. I run outside and jump back into the car. Izzy won’t be added to my list of regrets.

  AVIATION ACCIDENT PRELIMINARY REPORT

  On June 23, 2019, about 5:30 a.m. central daylight time, a Cessna 172M was destroyed when it hit the ocean after takeoff from Gerard Township Airport (T75), Gerard, Texas. The unlicensed pilot and two passengers were fatally injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed, and no flight plan was filed for the local flight. The flight originated from T75 at approximately 5:00.

  According to the owner, the plane was stored at T75 and used for flight training. Police estimate the pilot and passengers broke into the hangar between 3:30 and 4:30.

  Witnesses at County Beach report seeing a low-flying airplane that climbed in altitude over the ocean, lost velocity, and “hovered” before the nose fell toward the left wing. Witnesses report that the plane went into a spin before hitting the water nose-first with a loud “boom.”

  According to the mechanic who assisted the owner, the plane received a routine oil change the day before the accident. Examination of the airplane by an FAA inspector revealed no mechanical issues.

  The owner reported that the pilot had taken five lessons for a total of five in-flight hours. He stated that the pilot had been trained to recover from stalls and had practiced recovery at higher altitudes only.

  All three victims were under 18. The owner retained copies of parental permission forms. Parents stated that the signatures were forged.

  Based on witness accounts and interviews with family, law enforcement has preliminarily determined that the plane was stolen for a joyride. NTSB notes no conflict with this conclusion.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  ISRAEL

  One day before

  THE DREAM BEGAN as it always did, the feeling of tires as they slipped beneath him, the drumbeat of fear and adrenaline as he slid into the oncoming lane. The woman’s face and the round O of her mouth. The shock wave of the impact with her car. The explosive pain in his nose from the airbag. The searing pain in his leg and the ache across his chest from the seat belt. The brief quiet while the world righted itself. The smell of gasoline and a hissing sound. The voices outside calling to him. A loud pop followed by a whoosh. The smoke. The flames. The voices outside the car becoming more insistent, higher-pitched. The sirens. The struggle with the seat belt. The feeling that the front half of the car was folded onto his lap, pinning him so that he couldn’t feel or free his right leg. Something outside the car that sounded like a saw. The names, as they always came: Lara. Peter.