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was shot down in Vietnam and he parachuted into the ocean. Was there a thrill in the long ride down? It’s funny, she has never heard him talk about it. Somehow the subject of the war was one they all left alone, even though it was always there, a shadow in the background.
    The plane shakes and accelerates, and the overhead compartments creak. One of them has a rattling door that looks like it might give way at any moment. Leanne looks out the window. The sky is white, giving no clue about why the air should be so choppy. The plane seems to be descending, but there’s no ground visible beneath them, just shreds of white on top of thick white soup. She tries Kit’s approach, pressing her body back into her seat. When she was small, airplanes seemed so big. Of course, they really were more spacious then, before the airlines started cramming in as many bodies as they could. Things were more elegant, too. Leanne remembers dressing up to fly. When she was three, the family took their first trip abroad, to London. Carol bought Leanne and Margaret matching fur hats and muffs. They took a 747, and the upstairs was a piano bar. At dinnertime, an attendant came to their seats and carved a chateaubriand.
    The plane drops again, and Leanne reflexively grips her armrests. It would have been easier to die in those days, she thinks. You’d have gone out in a blaze of glamour, like Princess Diana in the backseat of the speeding limo. Now it would be like falling off a cliffin a Greyhound bus. Leanne imagines the plane ripping apart, crammed overhead compartments disgorging their cargo, passengers melding with their downsized economy seats. Pretzel bags, plastic cups, and fanny packs would fuel the fireball.
    This is always how it is in the air. Part of her believes with all her heart that these are her last moments on earth. What else is there to believe, thousands of feet in the air, powerless inside a small metal tube, tossed and jolted around like so much baggage? Every bump, every jerk, is like a message from the higher power of nature: You do not matter. You are insignificant in the greater course of things.
    And yet another part of her cannot believe that anything could possibly happen to her here. Not because of the statistical safety of airline travel, not because, as her father always told them, more people die of bee stings than plane crashes, but because this is not her life. The airplane is nowhere, merely a conduit from one part of her life to another. Cold Spring, her store, her East Coast friends: all these dwindled in significance the moment the plane rumbled into the air and turned them into tiny toylike objects. At the same time, the realities of Michigan—her family, the home she grew up in—exist only as ghosts, stored in her memory.
    This nowhere enfolds her, above and outside her real life, which will restart when she lands in Michigan with her fiancé, greets her parents, drives to Ryville, and, two days later, walks down an improvised aisle outdoors at the Green Lake Country Club to become a married person. That is her real life, opening before her like a brightly lit corridor. Even the dark spots are already visible: Margaret will inevitably find fault with some aspect of Leanne’s dress; her cousin Eddie will find the most inopportune moment to call her by her old nickname, Pester; some simmering tension between her parents will make everyone uncomfortable. These things seem so certain that there’s something exhilarating, almost glorious, in the idea that they might not occur.
    And so she sits, suspended between two certainties: the certainty of her imminent annihilation and the certainty of the life mapped out for her. She shifts in her seat.
    “Kit,” she says, “ I have to tell you something.”
    There’s a short silence before Kit’s hand finds hers. “Can it wait?” he says, his voice tight. “I’m just holding it together here.”
    “It’s important.”
    Kit closes his eyes. His fingers work