How to Walk Away Page 3

  “Nice!” I said, wanting to encourage him, hoping like hell he didn’t pull up again and make us start all over. It was the least of my worries at this point, I guess, but I was right on the edge of throwing up.

  I wanted nothing more than to touch down on that concrete.

  It felt like the longest descent in the history of flight. Chip made one more course correction, and then we were lowering closer, and closer. I could see the concrete of the runway welcoming us down. I willed us to touch.

  Then we came to a section of the runway with an airplane hangar right beside it. The size and width of that hangar seemed to provide a little windbreak. We were maybe ten feet above the runway as we passed the hangar—so close—and I could feel the wind ease off as we moved into its shadow. Everything seemed calmer somehow. Even the engine sounded quieter. Chip eased off his struggle with the controls. The ground was so close.

  We made it, I thought.

  And then we passed out of the wind block, past the corner of the hangar, back into open air again, and as we did, a blast of wind hit, so concentrated and fierce that it scooped up under the wing on my side and punched us into a type of spin that folks in aviation call “cartwheeling.”

  I remember it in slow motion. I remember slamming hard against my seat belt—so hard, it felt like a wooden post—as my wing jerked up and the plane rotated on the tip of the other. I remember that wing scraping the tarmac with an eardrum-ripping, metal-against-concrete shriek. I remember Chip’s shocked voice shouting, “Hold on!” though I had no idea what to hold on to. I remember screaming so hard I felt like nothing but the scream—and Chip doing it, too—the two of us holding each other’s shocked gazes, like, This can’t be happening. I remember some tiny tendril of my consciousness veering off to a funny little philosophical moment in the center of it all—marveling at the pointlessness of the screaming since we were so clearly beyond help—before arriving at the bigger, more salient picture:

  This was the moment of our death.

  There was no arguing with what was happening, and there was certainly nothing either of us could do about it. We were the very definition of helpless, and as I realized that, it also hit me that everything I’d been looking forward to was over before it even began. Chip and me—and the lakeside wedding we’d never have, and the rescue beagle we’d never adopt, and the valedictorian babies we’d never make. They say your life flashes before your eyes, but it wasn’t my life as I’d lived it that I saw. It was the life I’d been waiting for. The one I’d never get a chance to live.

  My future slid past my fingers as I fumbled for it—and missed.

  I felt suddenly coated with anger like I’d been dunked in it. I didn’t think about my parents in that moment, or my friends, or how hard my death would be on anyone else. I thought only of myself—and how I just couldn’t fucking believe this was all the time I got.

  I couldn’t tell you how many full rotations we completed as we blew across that runway like somebody’s lost kite, but there’s a reason they call it cartwheeling. The wings were the spokes of a giant wheel, and we were the axle in the middle on a spinning carnival ride from hell. At a certain point, I lost all sense of spatial orientation, and it stopped feeling like we were spinning—more like rocking back and forth. I remember focusing all my energy on not barfing because there was nothing else to even hope to control.

  I was maybe three seconds from spewing vomit like in The Exorcist when the passenger-side wing mercifully broke off with an unearthly, bone-rattling crack. A spray of jet fuel hit the windshield with a clomp sound like we were at a drive-through car wash, and we collapsed at last in a ditch, with my side—the passenger side—wedged down in it, and Chip’s side angled up at the sky.

  We stopped.

  Everything was still.

  Then I vomited onto the window below me.

  Two

  A THOUSAND YEARS later, I heard Chip, out of breath: “Margaret? Are you okay?”

  “I threw up,” I said, not quite catching his urgency.

  “Margaret—the fuel—we have to get out. Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Chip was moving around unhooking and unbuckling and trying to work his door open like a hatch. His side didn’t seem to be crumpled like mine was. It was stuck for a second, so he had to brace against his seat to kick it, but then it popped easily out with a satisfying ka-chunk and fell open wide, squeaking at the hinges for a second as it bounced.

  He climbed up and out, then reached back down for me. “Come on!”

  I hadn’t even unbuckled yet. Everything seemed to be moving in slo-mo and time-lapse all at once. My hands didn’t seem like they even belonged to me. I watched them reach to unhook the shoulder strap, and that’s when I realized that it was already unhooked. Next, I tried for the lap belt, and discovered that, in ironic contrast, it was jammed.

  It might not have mattered anyway. My side of the plane was crumpled. I was not exactly sitting in my seat anymore—more like sandwiched in between it and the dash.

  I tried to wriggle out, but I was wedged in. I tried to move my legs, but they were pinned and didn’t budge.

  Chip was up on the outside now, peering down through his window like a hatch. “Come on! Margaret! Now!”

  “I can’t!” I said. “I’m stuck!”

  He reached his arm down for me to grab. “I’ll pull you.”

  “I can’t. My legs are pinned.”

  Chip was silent for somewhere between one second and one hour—hard to tell. Then he said, “I’m going for help.”

  For the first time, at the prospect of being alone, I felt afraid. “No! Don’t leave me!”

  “This thing could blow at any minute!”

  “I don’t want to die alone!”

  “We need the fire department!”

  “Call them on your cell phone!”

  Chip’s voice was high and strange with panic. “I don’t know where it is!”

  “Don’t go, Chip! Don’t go! Don’t go!” My voice, too, sounded odd—like someone else, someone I might not even like or feel sympathy for. Some screaming, hysterical, pathetic woman.

  Chip was still leaving. “I have to get help. Just hold on. I’ll be back in two minutes.”

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  I WAS ALONE, in a crumpled plane, breathing air thick with jet fuel fumes. The air was so sour, and toxic, and corrosive, it felt like it was melting my lungs.

  “Two minutes,” I whispered until the words turned into nonsense. “Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes.”

  Next, a crack of real thunder that rattled the instruments in the dash.

  Then it started raining.

  The drops sounded frantic against the metal shell of the plane. Chip’s door was still wide open, so the water sheeted straight in on my bare shoulders, cold and mean.

  More than two minutes went by, but I can’t tell you how many. Ten? Thirty? A hundred?

  I wondered if it the rain was a good thing or a bad thing. Would it prevent a fire—or make it worse? I just wanted the entire world to hold still until I was out and away and safe. It was dark in the ditch, like the rain had put out the lights, too. Soon I was shivering. The raindrops pinged like gravel hitting the metal shell of the plane. I could hear a ticking noise. I could hear my own breathing. I wondered how long before the ditch filled up with water and I died by drowning in a plane crash.

  I kept trying to unwedge myself. Nothing.

  I’ve felt alone plenty of times in my life—in both good ways and bad—but I have never felt alone like this. “Come back,” I whispered to Chip. “Come back.” But the words were lost in the noise of the storm.

  Then, over it all, I heard the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard—before or since.

  First far away, then closer: a siren.

  The fire department.

  Chip had not come back, but now I had something better. I was so glad I’d bought that firefighter cal
endar last year. Best twenty bucks I ever spent.

  Just like that, almost as if it had heard them coming, too, the rain slowed and thinned out to a sprinkle.

  The acoustics in the plane were pretty good. After they cut the siren, I could hear the firemen outside, maybe five or six, talking and calling orders to each other. I heard noises I couldn’t decipher: clanking, squeaking, twisting. One guy called another guy a knucklehead. Minutes passed, then more. I wondered why no one had come to get me yet.

  Then I heard a new sound—something different: A whoosh. Just like when your gas stove burner finally catches and leaps up into flames.

  It came half a second before the flames themselves. Just long enough for me to lean a tiny bit closer to the ground and put my arms over my face.

  Then: noise, wind, heat. I kept my head down because it was the only thing to do. I felt a flash of white heat sting my neck, but then it went away. Seconds later, the fire was gone. The cockpit was smoky and smelled like barbecue and burned hair.

  * * *

  THE NEXT SOUND was the clanking and gonglike pounding of metal. I heard banging, men’s voices, a motor and a buzzing sound. Then, in what seemed like a second, the roof of the plane—which, given how we’d landed, was more like a wall—was peeled away. Kneeling next to me was a firefighter in full gear and a mask. And all behind him was snow. There was snow in the cockpit, too, now that I noticed.

  He took off his mask, and he turned out to be a lady.

  That struck me as very novel. A lady firefighter! She told me her name, but I have no idea what she said. Sometimes, even still, when I can’t sleep, I try to remember what it was. Karen? Laura? Jenny?

  “We have a live patient,” she announced.

  I wondered if I heard surprise in her voice.

  She kneeled down beside me, while another two other guys continued cranking off the roof. “Tell me what hurts the most.”

  “Nothing hurts,” I said, as she leaned in to check my pulse.

  She looked doubtful. “Nothing at all?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just stuck.” Then I asked, “Why is it snowing?”

  “It’s not snow,” she said. “It’s foam. For the fire.”

  Foam! For the fire! I’d forgotten the fire for a second! Now I realized my neck and arm were stinging. “I might have some burns, actually,” I said.

  She smiled at me. “You’re very lucky. The fire broke out just as we cranked up the hoses. We had it out in under a minute.”

  “That does sound lucky,” I agreed.

  “Plus,” she went on, waving a tiny flashlight back and forth in front of my pupils, “facedown in a ditch is the best place to be when the flames roll over.”

  “So, double luck,” I said.

  “Are you kidding? Quadruple. I’m amazed you’re not a charcoal briquette.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “We’re going to strap you to a short board now,” she said, “and then to a long board while we transport you to the hospital.”

  “I think I’m really fine,” I said. “Just wedged.”

  But now she was pulling out an oxygen mask and cupping it over my face. “We’re going to give you some vitamin O. Just to help you breathe easier.”

  Vitamin O. Cute. “I’m really fine.”

  “Just to be safe,” she said, winking. “Just procedure. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?”

  I didn’t. Lady firefighters probably had the deck stacked against them anyway.

  And so I held still, breathing in cool vitamin O while she attached me strap by painstaking strap into a state of snug immobilization. She also put me in a C-collar, even though it seemed perfectly clear to me that I didn’t need one. The last step, once I was secure, was also the longest: prying apart the crumpled front of the plane to free my legs. This project involved three different firefighters—who took their sweet time.

  I was grateful for their care, though. Nobody took shortcuts. Nobody seemed eager to get off shift. They did things right. My nameless lady firefighter stayed right by me the whole time, asking me over and over to wiggle my fingers and toes and making chitchat to keep me calm. She told me if this had been a jet crash, they’d be calling in heavy rescue—but “these little planes are like tin foil.”

  Before they had me out, I heard a helicopter. “There’s your ride,” my new friend said.

  “I’m really fine,” I tried again.

  “You’ll like it. It’s fun.”

  “Where is Chip?” I asked.

  “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “Fiancé,” I said, for the first time ever.

  “He’s back by the truck.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “They’re doing an evaluation,” she said. “But I’d say there’s not a scratch on him.”

  Once they finally had me out, and had loaded me onto a rolling stretcher, they wheeled me to an ambulance, where they cut off all my clothes with shears (“Life Flight likes ’em naked”) and started an IV with morphine.

  The storm had blown off in another direction, and now the sky was remarkably cloudless. I could see a million stars up above, and I thanked them all. I thanked them for luck, and firefighters, and sirens, and flame retardant, and ditches, and bolt cutters, and good timing, and vitamin O, and hope, and miracles, and not being burned to a crisp.

  The paramedics worked hard. Every time I told them I was fine, they shrugged and said, “Procedure.”

  Another procedure: I had to ride in the ambulance two hundred feet to the Life Flight chopper. They wouldn’t let Chip come with me, either, even though there was plenty of room.

  “I need you to stay with me,” I told him, as they rolled me away.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “Do it anyway!”

  “I’ll meet you there,” he called after us, arms at his sides.

  If we were flying and he was driving, I thought, he was going to have to hurry up. But he didn’t hurry up. I grabbed one last glance of him as the team hustled my gurney into the chopper. He was still in the same spot, standing like a statue.

  I could not believe all this fuss. Honestly. Over nothing.

  Well, maybe not nothing. A brush with death. A worst nightmare come true. The crash, the rain, the fire. I might never stop shaking.

  But we’d survived.

  By the time I was loaded, I was pretty sleepy, though. I wondered if being afraid could do that. Or maybe it was the morphine. Or maybe just too much vitamin O. The last thing I remember before conking out was wondering if I’d have to spend the night in the hospital. I hoped not. If I could get out early enough, maybe Chip and I could still make it to a late dinner.

  Crash or no crash, we still had a lot to celebrate.

  Three

  I WOKE UP as all hell was breaking loose in the trauma bay—but that’s not the first thing I noticed. The first thing I noticed was my back hurt like fire. And as soon as I noticed it hurting, I realized it had been hurting all along—since back at the crash site, even.

  It sounds completely crazy, I know, but it wasn’t until I noticed the pain that I remembered it.

  “My back hurts,” I said, to no one in particular—and I wouldn’t have even known who to say it to because there were at least twenty people moving in and out of my peripheral vision in utter chaos, calling to each other in words so fast they just sounded like noise. I recall sounds and sights in little pinpricks of memory from that room—noises and images I can’t even put into the right order. People in aqua scrubs moving with purpose, arms and bodies in motion, machines beeping. An unearthly light rained down from the fluorescent fixture above and blurred out the edges of my vision. Someone changed my IV fluids. Someone else asked for a catheter. I heard the words “x-ray” and “CT scan.”

  My neck was uncomfortable in the collar, and I asked a plump male nurse with a kind face if we could take it off.

  “Not until the C-spine is cleared” came a voice across the room.


  “A little longer, sweetheart,” the nurse said.

  Was I allergic to medications? No. Did I have any preexisting conditions they should be aware of? No. Was I pregnant? God, I hoped not.

  “Healthy as a horse,” I said.

  A guy I later came to recognize as the neurosurgeon paused to tell me that they were evaluating me for pressure and sensation with pinprick tests, and they were starting me on a steroid to prevent swelling because the benefits of its use outweighed the complications.

  “Okay,” I said. But it didn’t occur to me until after he’d stepped away to ask, “Swelling of what?”

  I said it to the room, but I got no reply.

  After the evaluation and CT scan, the neurosurgeon popped into view again and began to talk nonsense. “Your scans reveal a burst fracture to your L1. We’re sending you to surgery to clear out debris. Your evaluation shows some deficits, but there appears to be some sacral sparing. The good news is that your iliopsoas seems to be functioning, and we believe at this time it’s an incomplete injury. Of course, we’ll know a lot more once we get in there.”

  “Incomplete injury of what?” I asked at last.

  He blinked, like he thought I already knew. “Your spinal cord.”

  I held my breath a second. “Is that why my back hurts?”

  But he’d turned away to a nurse with a question. When he turned back, he said, “You’re lucky. The L1 was good and crushed, but it didn’t sever the cord. Now we just need to get in there to stabilize and clean up.”

  “Now?” I asked.

  He nodded. “We’re heading to surgery. And while you’re there, we’ll have a plastic surgeon evaluate your face and neck and the area above your trapezius—maybe debride what he can. But that’ll be a second surgery. After you’ve stabilized. First things first.”

  “What will be a second surgery?”

  “The skin grafts. For the burns.”

  The skin grafts. For the burns.

  The surgeon was ready to get moving. “Do you have any questions for me?”

  I wanted to nod, but I couldn’t. Yes, I had questions for him. A thousand, at least. I just couldn’t figure out what they were.