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with her eyes closed. She doesn’t have to look out the window at the New York skyline minus the Towers, a sight that, almost a year later, still makes her stomach lurch with shock. She concentrates on how good it feels to do nothing. The last few days have been a frenzy of annoying preparations, with multiple phone calls to Michigan to confirm details with her mother. The country club is booked, the caterers confirmed, last-minute changes to the luncheon menu have been approved, the photographer and church have received their deposits. It’s a June wedding, but not a traditional one. She wanted something simple and short, even declining to have a wedding party: Margaret will stand up with Leanne, and her cousin Eddie will stand up for Kit, who has no male relatives of his own.
    The plane inches forward. She can’t talk to Kit while the plane is on the ground, she decides, because if something happens and they don’t take off, it will seem as though fate has ordered them not to marry. And all of a sudden she does want to marry him. She wants to tell him everything and, in telling it, have it disappear, so he can understand why she can’t come to Mexico, and then they can go forward from there. She’ll tell him when they’re in the air. She has always liked being in airplanes. They’re a place where time hasstopped, where you’re not home nor yet away, but suspended, you and the small world around you. It’s the closest thing there is to being nowhere.
    “We should have gone by Greyhound,” Kit murmurs next to her. “At least then we’d be in the bus lane.”
    Leanne wakes up when someone screams. Her head has been leaning sideways, and her neck is so sore she holds it still, avoiding any quick movement. As she reaches a hand up to massage it slowly back into place, the plane pitches violently to the left and snaps her upright.
    She leans out into the aisle. Everyone else in the cabin looks frozen, some sleeping or feigning sleep, others simply holding still. The only movement is the synchronous bobbing of heads as the plane commences a strange, shuddery wobbling. There’s another stomach-churning jolt, and Leanne turns to Kit. He has his hands clenched together in front of his stomach and is holding himself in an oddly tight way. His face is pale, but he smiles at her. Her heart jumps with concern, and in that moment, it’s clear to her that she loves him. She reaches a hand out and touches her fingertips to his balled fists. Because of the plane’s wobble, they tap up and down on the back of his hand, as if she’s trying to wake him up.
    “What’s going on?” she whispers.
    “Turbulence,” he says. She notices that his knuckles are stretched thin and white with tension.
    “Someone screamed.”
    It takes him a moment to reply. “ Bad turbulence,” he says. He takes a deep breath, and Leanne realizes that his tight posture and pale countenance are the result not of fear but of nausea. She leans forward and paws through her seat-back magazine compartment. There’s an in-flight magazine, an in-flight catalog, an in-flight entertainment guide, and a couple of crumpled napkins. Don’t airlines provide airsickness bags anymore? Or were they somehow a security problem, too?
    “I’ll be okay,” Kit says, his voice slightly strained. He watches her with a worried expression, as if afraid she will produce what she’s searching for and that will push him over the edge. “I almost never get motion-sick.”
    “I heard it helps if you use the pressure points on your wrists.” Leanne holds out a forearm and encircles one wrist with her other hand, pressing her thumb down where it’s supposed to help.
    Kit looks as amused as a nauseated man possibly can. “My God, why didn’t I think of that,” he says.
    The plane drops what feels like fifty feet. The falling sensation is scary, but there’s a deep throb of pleasure in it, too. Leanne thinks of her father. He fell from the sky once, when his fighter jet