“Smart enough to be whatever you wanted to be, I bet.”
“Well, dumb enough to think I could be anyway.”
“You have sisters?”
“A ton of them.”
“What?”
“A lot. Eight kids total.”
“Eight? Wow. You’re kidding?”
“Would I kid you at a time like this, Mason?”
He was smiling steadily, tugging her closer, keeping eye contact. He really did have the deepest blue eyes. His sperm donor must have been something.
“What was it like growing up with so many kids?”
Answering that could at least take up the rest of the time here. But she couldn’t find her usual longwinded, many-faceted response to that inevitable question and just said, “Crowded!”
“What number are you in the birth order?”
She shut her eyes tightly, trying to transport herself out of where she was. To put herself in that big house in Detroit with her six sisters and her little brother. “Seventh. I was seventh. Youngest of seven girls. I had a—I mean have a—”
The plane took a bump so hard her luggage tumbled down from the overhead compartment, barely missing them, and the cabinet where she’d gotten her scotch came unlatched from whatever held it to the wall and started careening up and down the aisle, crashing with her carry-on.
Oh God, she could not do this. She thought about something her mother had once said about childbirth, a subject about which the poor woman understandably knew volumes. There’s a moment in the delivery room, she had said, where there’s all this pain and you have a panicked feeling that you can’t get out of it. That you just have to do it.
And then, she had followed up with a beatific smile, you go right through it and everything is okay and they hand you this beautiful baby.
She couldn’t die. She just couldn’t.
And she had always wanted children, she thought suddenly. She’d never known it, but right now she did. She knew it.
And it was never going to happen.
“Open your eyes, Camilla,” Mason barked, shaking her to bring her back to him. “We’re going to land. That’s all. You have a what? Tell me!”
“A little brother.”
She whispered it, but he heard, or else he could read lips.
“One boy and seven girls? Jesus, he must be spoiled.”
“He’s great. Joey is so great.”
And she started to cry.
The wings clipped something solid in terrifying bites as they descended, tipping sharply one way and then the other to avoid it, like a drowning person gasping for air, and the plane came down in one bone-crunching move that keeping her jaw locked had not spared her. Suddenly, they were skidding along whatever surface they were on, going so fast on the ground that if there were even the slightest tree or pole in their path they would surely get their fiery death. Maybe watery would have been better.
And she and Mason held on to each other for dear life, their eyes locked in a desperate closeness as the world shattered around them. They clung to one another as if not a breath should try to come between them, not knowing or caring where one of them began and the other ended. Whether it was advisable or not, whether they would have been better served by cradling their heads low between their knees or reaching for the oxygen masks, which had come down at some point, or whatever, they didn’t do any of the things flight attendants had warned them to do in the event of disaster on every single airplane they’d ever been on. Instead they held tightly, fiercely, to each other.
Holding on to each other felt so much more reassuring.
By the time the plane jolted to a stop, hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and the blood coursed through her veins like never before.
She took an impossibly deep breath. The plane had stopped. They were alive.
The cockpit door burst open just as they loosened their hold on each other, and both pilots came out, drenched in sweat and beaming.
“We made it!” one of them said.
“Fucking amazing!” the other one chimed in.
Camilla sat up, away from Mason, wiping the moisture from her face with her sleeve, feeling disoriented. When he went to unsnap her belt, she brushed his hands away and did it herself. He did the same, still seeming calm and self-possessed, looking over her shoulder. “This doesn’t look like Halifax.”
When she recovered enough to peer out the window, through the sheets of rain and unnatural darkness that came with a storm rather than nightfall, all she could see were rows of trees, branches whipping around in the wind, so dense in their green that they barely provided a pause in the otherwise black around them.
“We didn’t make it to Halifax.” The pilots looked out the window of the door to the plane, turning various knobs, pulling back latches. “We were flying blind, the fuel gage plunged, and we had to land. Thank God, this was here.”