Page 32 of What You Left Me

Petra pilots an airplane built in the style of the Wright brothers’ initial conception. It’s rickety and old-fashioned on the outside, the color of dust. Inside, the technology is greater than ever discovered. Petra is Amelia Earhart flying a solo mission. Her innate skill for navigation makes her feel this way. Invincible. The source of legends. A hero.

Dense foliage infects the center of the landscape, a dark green cluster that could pass for mold growing on bread from this high up. It’s a bird’s eye view, yet details that should only be visible with binoculars are easily spotted, like brittle leaves on gnarled branches twisting around clapboard homes. Minuscule gaps between trees where the slightest sliver of paved roads and man-made grass can be seen.

Petra can pivot and whirl as easily as if she were controlling a video game, and she enjoys the weightless sensation akin to whizzing downhill on a roller coaster. Her bottom never touches the seat, and her stomach tilts into her skin without any of the unpleasant jerks that come at the end of a decline.

If she’s using controllers, they’re operated with her mind alone, because the ones in her hand are decorative. She clutches one for effect, but when she thinks of turning left, she does. The handles don’t move. Earth and sky alternate in view, tossing her in a washing machine of blended blue and opaque green.

She cocks her head, realizing in the midst of her intricate winding that she’s forgotten why she’s flying at all, and she hasn’t paid attention to how close she’s gotten to land. The head-whipping jolt of leveling out hits. She gets tossed into her useless navigation board. This machine she was once so in tune with has betrayed her. It’s taken her too low, skidding along the tops of leafage.

Fighting against turbulence, she pounds on buttons, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before her plane nose-dives into the great unknown, where the greenery will snarl around her as it has everything else. Rhythmic thuds rattle her as the plane bounces along. Down this far, almost inside the vegetation, she can see her parents wrapped in ivy, mere statues now, robbed of life. Her sisters Caroline and Jessica taken by the same fate. Cameron and Aminah and Daniel lie beside them, pinned to the earth by rotting branches. To her surprise, Turrey and Brooke are there too, their legs free, but their torsos tied up by vines onto something with a hint of yellow. A mailbox.

Petra gasps.

It’shermailbox.

Standing on a visible sliver of street in front of her yard, the ivy seeming to clear for him, is Ryan Hales, stretching his hands toward the plane to get Petra’s attention. He’s screaming something, his mouth making desperate shapes. But his voice can’t break through the chaos inside the airplane. Not that she needs to hear him. She already knows what he’s saying.

You’re such a dumb bitch. Useless and dumb.

She remembers that she didn’t want to see any of this. That’s why she’d flown so high before.

Now, with alarming clarity, she can not only see it, but she’s starting to feel it. The asphyxiation that took her family and friends has come for her, but there are no vines to wrap her tight. It’s all in her mind. She screams for help, a plea so disparate from any other that it’s only possible when one arrives at death’s door.

“I can’t go too!” Petra cries, thinking of how everyone she’s ever loved is now gone. “Please.”

She buries her head into her knees, imagining a world she can’t crash into, one that would be a pillow to land on. She imagines taking the breath Ryan Hales doesn’t deserve and using it for herself.

“No!” she screams, a rally cry.

Inches from the ground, darkness covering the panels of glass she once glimpsed freedom through, her plane swoops upward. A steeper incline than ninety degrees, she’s almost upside down. The angle suctions her head back into the seat. Air, pure and whole and so strong it makes her cough, fills her body.

She’s done it. She’s stopped herself from crashing.

“Hey.”

Petra turns. Martin sits next to her. “You’re here,” she says, surprised. She hadn’t realized she’d saved them both. “I’ve missed you.”

They’re headed straight toward the ceiling of the world. There is only softness around them. Airy and puffy. Swirls of clouds, like tufted cotton, decorate the pale sky. It’s a different fear now, because while Petra knows they’re going up, she can’t see anything in front of her, and the mystery of what is there waterfalls adrenaline through her system.

“Petra.” Martin says it the way people do when addressing someone for the first time, testing out the correctness of a name by whispering it. “I’m stuck.”

“You told me that before. In the pool.” The past dream springs to her mind, and with that memory comes the thought of her life outside the airplane, where Martin’s fate is not known. “Are you dead?” she asks Martin.

“No!” he says. “I’m stuck.”

She’s satisfied hearing it. She didn’t want to believe he was gone.

The plane keeps climbing.

“I think I was, though,” he tells her. “I think I—died. It was exactly like going to sleep. Instant. Empty. Uncontrollable.” He shudders. “But then, exactly like waking up, I busted back into Spitty’s dream. Now yours.” He stops and waits for her to turn. His voice is tangled and throaty. “I can’t get out. My eyes won’t open.”

“You’re not making sense,” she says. Then she realizes. “Because you’re not the real Martin.” Her waking brain is creeping in to interject rationality. She’s starting to lose a grip on this world.

Martin becomes frantic, fighting against gravity to unbuckle his seat belt. “I am! I swear!” He tries to crawl. It reminds Petra of a ride that comes to the city carnival every year, the Gravitron. It’s a circular structure that spins so fast it pulls you to the wall, and try as you might, you can’t be peeled away. But Martin works against physics, somehow winning, making his way to her.

Waking Petra has a hard time allowing this to continue, skipping back and forth between the plane and a rigid couch where she lies asleep.

The airplane starts to level with Martin’s every movement. “Listen,” he says.