Atmosphere(69)

Vanessa took off her pants and her bra, brushed her teeth, and got into bed in her T-shirt alongside Joan, pressing her cold legs against the warmth of Joan’s body.

As they were falling asleep, Vanessa said, “I haven’t had a dream about my funeral in months.”

“Really?” Joan said. “I wonder why.”

And Vanessa, as she buried her head in Joan’s neck, said, “You.”



Joan and Vanessa were driving back from dinner in Vanessa’s convertible with the top down, the hot August wind in Joan’s hair.

Joan noticed that Vanessa had taken to driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on her knee. Sometimes, Joan would watch Vanessa do a reverse three-point turn, her palm flat as it moved against the wheel. It never failed to light something up in Joan.

Vanessa pulled into her driveway and cut the engine.

“I want to take you somewhere special,” Vanessa said.

“I’ve always wanted to go away,” Joan said, and then more quietly as she moved closer: “Somewhere far from here where no one can see us, and I can kiss you in the sunshine.”

Vanessa closed the convertible top, and they walked inside. Once the door was shut behind them, Vanessa pushed Joan against the wall and kissed her. Joan never got tired of it, being pushed and pulled like that.

“Do you know what I want?” Vanessa said. “I want to be lying on a beach where we don’t know a single soul. And you are in a bikini. And I lay out this big blanket. And everything smells like suntan oil. And there are waiters bringing us French 75s. And the water is warm.”

“And we can go into the ocean together and I can put my arms around you as the waves come and put my legs around your waist and just rest there with you.”

“And I can kiss you and no one looks, no one cares.”

“I want that, too.”

“You know, my friend Eileen has an airfield outside of Miami. Sometimes she uses her client’s Hawker 400 and takes her partner, Jacqueline, down to Costa Rica. Maybe we could do that one day. Hitch a ride with them.”

“Or borrow a plane and you can fly us.”

“Well, it’s funny you should say that . . .”

“Are you going to fly us somewhere?”

“Would you like that?”

“I want to watch you do it. I’ve never gotten to fly with you piloting before. To watch you up close. I want to see it.”

“Well, I know we don’t have enough time to take a big trip at the moment. But I had a more manageable idea.”

“Tell me.”

Vanessa smiled. “In a little over a month it’s going to be Labor Day weekend.”

Joan’s heart throbbed.

“Last year, at that time . . . we went to Rockport.”

“Yes, we did,” Joan said.

“And it was great.”

“Yes, it was.”

“And I thought maybe to commemorate that, I could take you out to dinner.”

“Okay,” Joan said. “Labor Day weekend, take me out to dinner.”

“But not just anywhere, obviously.”

Joan copied her tone, smiling at her. “Well, obviously, it’s an important dinner.”

She laughed. “What if I flew you to Glacier Park in Montana, and we ate under the stars?”

“What if we did, Vanessa Ford?” Joan said. She could not contain the smile that was erupting across her face. “What if we did!”


Vanessa flew a plane like she drove her car. Quiet, focused, and confident. There was an ease about the way she moved the controller.

They were flying over Big Bend National Park and Joan had her forehead against the window, looking at the immenseness of the mountain range below.

“I love it up here,” Joan said. “I don’t know how I spent so much of my life down there, quite frankly. What a chump I was.”

Vanessa laughed. “Sometimes, with both feet on the ground I feel lost,” she said. “Does that make any sense?”

“Of course it does,” Joan said.

“I find it easier up here. It’s quieter, there’s less people. I can be myself in a way that I’m not sure I can down there.”

Joan nodded. “That makes a lot of sense.”

“But I think I also find flying to be really . . . hopeful.”

“Hopeful?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, right now you’re in a machine that eighty years ago they said couldn’t exist. In 1903, The New York Times declared that we were still one to ten million years away from a flying machine.”

“They said ten million years?”

Vanessa nodded. “The article was called ‘Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly.’ Some of the most notable engineers in the world said it was impossible to create a flying machine heavier than air.”

“I don’t think I knew that.”

“But then sixty-nine days later, the Wright brothers did it.”

Joan laughed. And so Vanessa did, too.

“I know! It made them all look incredibly stupid. But the thing is, they had good reason to think it could never happen. So many people had failed. Samuel Langley had just crashed his Aerodrome into the Potomac. And engineers had been at it for a long time. They hadn’t been able to achieve anything approaching powered flight.”