Page 6 of How to Walk Away

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 moreOut 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.”

“Butif 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-eyeview. We dipped a little lower, close enough to see little waves breaking against the shore.

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