How to Walk Away Read online

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  For my mom, Deborah Detering, who is my personal superhero.

  And to the memory of her brother and friend, my uncle, Herman Detering. We will always miss you, Bubsie.

  Acknowledgments

  This story required vast amounts of research, and I’m so grateful to all the people who helped me try to get it right. Hugs to friends who hooked me up with experts to answer my many questions: Vicky and Tony Estrera, Jennifer Hamilton, Eve Lapin, Mark Poag, and J.J. Spedale.

  Much gratitude to all the health care professionals who took time to help me research Margaret’s treatment. Dr. Darrell Hanson met me for coffee and walked me through exactly the injury Margaret would have had, explained in detail the surgery and recovery, and taught me the world iliopsoas. Dr. Forrest Roth walked me through the treatment of burns and skin grafts. Robert Manning, PT, kindly took a morning to show me around the ICU and rehab gym at Houston Methodist hospital. Ross LaBove and all the guys at Project Walk in Houston let me spend a day with them learning about all the creative and inspiring ways they help people work to get better.

  Thank you to Jeff Scott and Wesley Branch, who were both gracious enough to share their spinal cord–injury stories with me and to talk at length about the realities of life afterward. Also, I’m glad to have found two honest and inspiring narratives about life with spinal-cord injuries: Mark Hall’s book, Across the Street from Hell, and Pamela Henline’s book, Walk, Don’t Run. The Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation was also helpful.

  Many thanks to Mollie Gordon, who connected me with her dad, Alan Gordon—who very kindly took me up in his Cessna, flew me to Galveston and back, even let me “fly” the plane for a little while. Then, once we were safely back on the ground, showed me the best way to crash that plane. Thanks, too, to John Marino, who met me for coffee and told me of his harrowing—and yet somehow very funny—experience of surviving a plane crash.

  A quick shout-out to my friend Sam Nichols for the night at the Cherry Blossom in Fishkill, New York, when he just about killed himself eating an entire blob of wasabi on a dare.

  I’ve been inspired for many years by the resilience of my mom’s friend Jan Myers, who, with her husband, founded a summer camp for children with health needs after they lost their young son John Marc to cancer. Camp Hope in this novel—its thoughtful and whimsical design and its determination to bring joy into people’s struggles—is inspired by Camp John Marc.

  I also need to thank friends who’ve supported me, talked books with me, and gone out of their way to help me either get my writing done or get the word out about it: Brené Brown and Steve Alley, Chris and Connie Seger, Jenny Lawson, Sheryl Rapp, Vicky Wight, Faye Robeson, Andrew and Katherine Weber, Bryn Larsen, Maria Zerr, Tracy Pesikoff, and Dale Andrews. And thanks to my fun family for always being so excited about what I do: Bill Pannill and Molly Hammond, Shelley and Matt Stein (and Yazzie), Lizzie and Scott Fletcher, and Al and Ingrid Center.

  My amazing mom, Deborah Detering, and my rock-star husband, Gordon Center, always rack up a million points for helpfulness and selflessness as I try to get my writing done. (Special thanks to Gordon for mangling the French language so beautifully and inspiring the phrase “my hams exploded.”) My kids, Anna and Thomas, also get a million points. Just for being sweet-hearted and hilarious.

  Thanks, also, to all the folks at St. Martin’s Press who have supported this book and been so great to work with: Rachel Diebel, Lisa Senz, Jessica Preeg, Erica Martirano, Brant Janeway, Jordan Hanley, Olga Grlic, Elizabeth Catalano, Devan Norman, and Janna Dokos.

  Last, but not least: Heartfelt gratitude to my agent, Helen Breitwieser, who’s advocated for and stuck by me now for a solid decade. And to my editor, the brilliant Jen Enderlin, who I don’t think I can ever thank enough for taking me on. Thank you both beyond words.

  You get one life, and it only goes forward.

  —Wesley Branch

  There are all kinds of happy endings.

  —Eve Lapin

  One

  THE BIGGEST IRONY about that night is that I was always scared to fly.

  Always. Ever since I was old enough to think about it.

  It seemed counterintuitive. Even a little arrogant. Why go up when gravity clearly wanted us to stay down?

  Back in high school, my parents took my big sister, Kitty, and me to Hawaii one year. I dreaded the flight from the moment they told us until well after we were home again. The phrase “flying to Hawaii” translated in my head to “drowning in the ocean.” The week before the trip, I found myself planning out survival strategies. One night after lights out, I snuck to Kitty’s room and climbed into her bed.

  I was a freshman, and she was a senior, which gave her a lot of authority.

  “What’s the plan?” I demanded.

  Her face was half buried in the pillow. “The plan for what?”

  “For when the plane hits.”

  She opened an eye. “Hits what?”

  “The ocean. On the way to Hawaii.”

  She held my gaze for a second. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “I have a bad feeling,” I said.

  “Now you’re jinxing us.”

  “This is serious. We need a survival strategy.”

  She reached out and patted my bangs. “There is no survival strategy.”

  “There has to be.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Because if we don’t crash, we won’t need one. And if we do crash…” She paused so I could catch her drift.

  “We won’t need one?”

  A nod. “We’ll just be dead.” Then she snapped her fingers.

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “Dying is easy. It’s not dying that’s hard.”

  “Guess you have a point there.”

  She closed her eyes. “That’s why I’m the brains of the family.”

  “I thought I was the brains,” I said, nudging her.

  She rolled away. “You know you’re the beauty.”

  Impossibly, we survived that trip.

  Just as impossibly, I survived many more trips after that, never hitting anything worse than turbulence. I’d read the statistics about how flying was the safest of all the modes of transportation—from cars to trains to gondolas. I’d even once interned at an office right next to an international airport and watched planes go up and come down all day long with nary a problem. I should have been long over it.

  But I never could lose the feeling that “flying” and “crashing” were kind of the same thing.

  Now, years later, I was dating—seriously dating—a guy who was just days away from getting his pilot’s license. Dating him so seriously, in fact, that on this particular Saturday, as we headed out to celebrate my not-yet-but-almost-official new dream job, I could not shake the feeling that he was also just about to ask me to marry him. Like, any second.

  Which is why I was wearing a strapless black sundress.
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br />   If I’d thought about it, I might have paused to wonder how my boyfriend, the impossibly fit and charming Charles Philip Dunbar, could be one hundred percent perfect for me in every possible way—and also be such an air travel enthusiast. He never thought twice about flying at all—or doing anything scary, for that matter, like scuba diving or bungee jumping. He had an inherent faith in the order of the universe and the principles of physics and the right of mankind to bend those principles to its will.

  Me, I’d always suspected that chaos was stronger than order. When it was Man against Nature, my money was on Nature every time.

  “You just never paid attention in science class,” Chip always said, like I was simply under-informed.

  True enough. But that didn’t make me wrong.

  Chip believed that his learning to fly was going to cure my fears. He believed that he’d become so awesome and inspiring that I’d have no choice but to relax and enjoy it.

  On this, we had agreed to disagree.

  “I will never, ever fly with you,” I’d announced before his first lesson.

  “You think that now, but one day you’ll beg me to take you up.”

  I shook my head, like, Nope. “Not really a beggar.”

  “Not yet.”

  Now, he was almost certified. He’d done both his solo and his solo cross-country. He’d completed more than twice his required hours of flight training, just to be thorough. All that remained? His Check Ride, where a seasoned pilot would go up with him and put him in “stressful situations.”

  “Don’t tell me what they are,” I’d said.

  But he told me anyway.

  “Like, they deliberately stall the plane, and you have to cope,” he went on, very pleased at the notion of his impressive self-coping. “Or you do a short-field landing, where you don’t have enough space. And of course: night flying.”

  The Check Ride was next week. He’d be fine. Chip was the kind of guy who got calmer when things were going haywire. He’d make a perfect pilot. And I’d be perfectly happy for him to fly all he wanted. By himself.

  But first, we were getting engaged—or so I hoped. Possibly tonight. On Valentine’s.

  I can’t tell you how I knew, exactly. I’d just sensed it all day, somehow, the way you can sense it’s going to rain. By the time I buckled in beside him in his Jeep, I was certain.

  I’d known Chip a long time. We’d been dating for three years. I knew every expression in his repertoire and every angle of his body. I knew when he was faking a laugh, or when he was bullshitting. I could tell in seconds if he liked a person or not. And I certainly knew when he was hiding something—especially something he was excited about. Even though this date seemed exactly like every other date we’d ever had, I just knew something big was about to happen.

  I figured he’d take us to the Italian place with the twinkle lights where we’d had our first date. But, instead of heading for downtown, he turned toward the freeway and ramped up.

  The top was off his Jeep. I clamped my arms down over my hair. “Where are we going?” I called.

  He called back, “It’s a surprise!”

  My stomach dropped at that. Once again, I knew Chip’s intentions without his even hinting. This was kind of a problem with us. I could read him too well. He wasn’t taking me to dinner. He was taking me to the airport.

  * * *

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we had left the city of Austin far behind. He pulled up the parking brake beside an airplane hangar at a private airfield in the middle of nowhere.

  I looked around. “You can’t be serious.”

  He leaned in. “Are you surprised?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Just pretend. Just once, I’d like to surprise you.”

  “Fine. I’m shocked. I’m awed.”

  “Don’t pretend that much.”

  He came around to my side and took me by the hand, and then he pulled me behind him, bent over all sneaky, around to the far side of the hangar.

  I followed him in a state of cognitive dissonance—knowing exactly what he was doing while insisting just as clearly that he couldn’t possibly be doing it. “Are you sneaking me in here?” I whispered.

  “It’s fine. My friend Dylan did it with his girlfriend last week.”

  I tugged back against his hand. “Chip. I can’t!”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Is this—illegal?”

  “I just want to show you my plane.”

  “It’s not your plane, buddy.”

  “Close enough.”

  I had zero interest in seeing his plane. Less than zero. I was interested in wine and appetizers and candlelight. I almost had the job of my dreams! I wanted to be celebrating. I was in the mood to feel good, not bad. “Can’t we just go to dinner?”

  He peered around, then turned back to me. “Anybody can go to dinner.”

  “I’m cool with being anybody.”

  “I’m not.”

  Then, with a coast-is-clear shrug, he pulled me out across the pavement and stopped in front of a little white Cessna. It looked like the kind of plane you’d see in a cartoon—wings up high, body below, and a spinny little propeller nose. Very patriotic, too. Red, white, and blue stripes.

  “Cute,” I said with a nod, like, Great. We’re done.

  But he took my shoulders and pointed me toward the cockpit.

  I took a step back. “What are you doing?”

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  “I’m afraid to fly. Remember?”

  “Time to get over that.”

  “I’ll throw up. I’ll be motion-sick.”

  “Not with me, you won’t be.”

  “It’s not about you. It’s about flying.”

  “You just need the right pilot.”

  I was shaking my head—half disbelief, half refusal. “You’re not even certified.”

  “I’m as good as certified. I’ve done everything there is.”

  “Except take the test.”

  “But the test is just to see what you’ve already learned.”

  “Chip? No.”

  “Margaret? Yes. And right now before they catch us.”

  The force of his insistence was almost physical, like a strong wind you have to brace against. He wanted to do this. He wanted me to do this—to show faith in him, to believe in him. It wasn’t a test, exactly, but it was still something I could fail.

  I wasn’t a person who failed things.

  I was a person who aced things.

  It felt like a big moment. It felt draped in metaphorical significance about bravery, and trust, and adventurousness—like it would reveal something essential about who I was and how I’d live the rest of my whole life. Saying no to flying right now suddenly felt like saying no to every possibility forever. Did I want to be a person who let minuscule statistical risks undermine any sense of bravery? Was this a challenge I couldn’t rise to? Was I going to let fear make me small?

  I’m not sure I ever really had a choice. Chip was Chip. He was my perfect man, and I’d thought so ever since his parents moved in next door to my parents, back when we were both in college. Our mothers became best next-door-neighbor friends, drinking wine on the patio and gossiping, but I only saw him on vacations. In the summers, his dad made him mow the lawn, and I’d stand at our window and watch. One time, my mom urged me to take him out a bottle of water, and he glugged the whole thing down in one swoop. I still remember it in slow-mo.

  But I really didn’t know him at all until we both wound up at business school together back home in Austin by accident. I was team leader of our study group, and he worked under me, which was good for him.

  That’s how we fell in love.

  I’d have married him that first night we kissed, if he’d asked me. He was that kind of guy. Tall, clean-shaven, blond, all-American, high-achieving, confident. And dreamy. People did what he wanted. I felt lucky to be with him, and I’d doodled “Margaret Dunbar” more times than I’ll ever adm
it. I once Googled dog breeds for our future pet. And one night, when shopping for something else—I swear—on the Home Depot website, I clicked on a little pop-up box for wood fence pickets. Just to see how much they were.

  Now we were both out of school with our brand-new MBAs, both about to start our new jobs—Chip as an entry-level financial analyst at an investment bank, a job he found through a friend of his dad, and me as a business development manager for an oil and gas company called Simtex Petroleum. His job was good, but mine was far better, and I thought it was sporting of him, and rather gallant, to be so happy for me.

  In truth, I wasn’t even qualified for my new job. It required “five years of experience in the sector,” “advanced knowledge of bidding for commercial contracts,” and actual “international experience,” none of which I had—but my B-school mentor had gone out on a limb for me, calling in a favor from a friend and writing a stunning letter of recommendation that called me a “fiercely energetic forward thinker, a problem solver, an excellent communicator, and a team player with strong business and financial acumen.”

  I’d laughed when he’d showed me the job listing. “I’m not remotely qualified for this.”

  “People get jobs they’re not qualified for all the time.”

  I stared at the description. “They want ‘demonstrated strategic and higher operational level engagement with the logistics environment.’”

  “You’re a shoo-in.”

  “I’m a joke.”

  “Now you’re just thinking like a girl.”

  “I am a girl.”

  “We need to remedy that.”

  I gave him a look.

  “When you go to this interview, I want you to pretend to be a man.”

  I closed my eyes. “Pretend to be a man.”

  “A badass man,” he confirmed. “A man who’s not just qualified, but overqualified.”

  I shook my head at him.

  “Qualifications,” he said, “pale in the face of confidence.”

  “If you say so,” I said. Though I didn’t believe it for a second. I went into the interview that day fully expecting to be laughed out of the room. But I did what he told me to. I pretended like hell—if nothing else, to prove him wrong.