back and smiled. She wondered if she had to go over and say hello or if she could just sit down and get lost in her music. The Bridgemans—Zach, Pamela, Peter—were now related to Carson through Willa. Seeing Zach was like seeing a distant uncle or a cousin twice removed.
She thought it was good luck when she was assigned the seat behind Zach on the plane because there would be no need for conversation. As they were boarding the plane, they exhausted their only topic of conversation—where they were going. Zach was going to an air traffic control conference at the Boston Harbor Hotel. (“Oooh,” Carson said, genuinely impressed. “Fancy.”) Carson told Zach that she was taking a bartending class and staying in Savannah’s town house on Marlborough Street. (“I should have been a bartender at some point,” Zach said. “That has always felt like something I missed.”) Carson was reminded then that Zach was friendly and kind. Carson steered clear of Pamela because she could be confrontational and negative. She likely would have told Carson to go back to school, get her degree, and make something of herself.
The plane hit weather somewhere south of Boston—Plymouth, maybe. Carson always tried to pick landmarks out on the ground to mark their progress, but all she could tell before they hit the squall was that they were somewhere over Route 3. The plane bounced around and the rain sounded like gravel hitting the window. They were “in the cotton ball”—all Carson could see out the window was dense, dark cloud. The woman sitting behind the pilot reached for her barf bag. Carson was unconcerned. It was kind of fun, actually, like an amusement-park ride.
Sure enough, the plane emerged from the clouds into clear sky, the ground once more visible beneath them. Carson saw the skyline of Boston in the distance. Everyone relaxed.
The pilot turned east, out over the water.
Carson was jolted awake when the plane slammed down so hard that Carson thought they must have landed—but no, they were still in the air, back in the cotton ball. The turbulence was unlike any Carson had ever experienced. It felt like the plane was a cup of dice God was shaking. Carson’s bag flew forward, the man to her left lost his file folders, the woman in the front seat puked again. The plane tipped sideways and went into a nosedive. They were plummeting and bouncing; Carson watched the pilot fight the wheel to raise the nose.
The plane was going down. They were going to die. She reached forward and, almost involuntarily, grabbed Zach’s hand.
“It’s okay,” he said. “He’ll get us down. And if I see him get in real trouble, I’ll assist. I can land this plane.”
Carson was only somewhat comforted by this. She bent her head forward against Zach’s seat back and let a stream of profanities fly. She thought of her mother, her father, her brother, and her poor sister, who had just miscarried for the second time. They would never recover. But that was only part of Carson’s anxiety. The real meat of her fear was that she was so young and would never get to do so many of the things she wanted to—live alone for three weeks in the city, eat at Pammy’s, get her bartending certificate so she could be a boss at the Oystercatcher the following summer. She wanted to travel to London at Christmastime, ride a motorbike across Thailand, see Serena Williams play in the Australian Open. She wanted to earn enough money to buy a little speedboat that she could take over to Coatue whenever she wanted. She had just turned twenty-one and had a lifetime of drinks to legally buy. She wanted to fall in love. Getting married and having children and sending out an annual Christmas card with her family’s names printed in script across the bottom held zero appeal, but she liked the idea that someday she would find a man to be both friend and lover. So far, her men had been either one or the other.
The plane tilted so far to the left that Carson was afraid it would start to spin.
Zach said, “We’ve caught the edge of a funnel cloud.”
“A tornado?” Carson said. She could feel how unstable the air was around them. She was holding on to Zach’s fingers so tightly that she feared she might break them, and yet she could not let go. His wedding ring, made from a dark metal, pressed into her