Flights by Jim Shepard Page A

as if searching for evidence of the marvelous skill underneath. Carver was introduced to everyone and seemed polite and noticeably impatient. He was visibly unhappy about Kristi, and Biddy wondered guiltily if his father had even mentioned her. She’d sit in her mother’s lap, next to Biddy in the back.
    The Cessna seemed a tiny car with wings. The cockpit was cramped. Biddy pressed his face to the glass, unable to completely believe this machine and that man would take them off the face of the earth.
    From the back seat he asked a series of questions. Because of the weather they’d be flying VFR, navigating visually, Mr. Carver related. What he was doing at this point was the preflight checklist. It was no more difficult than it seemed, he said. Biddy sat back, bewildered by the simplicity of the process. Carver went on explaining, but his words were lost in the roar as the engine kicked over.
    They took off slowly, banking sharply around to the left toward the Sound, Biddy feeling a shock and excitement as the wheels left the ground and his neighborhood and street swept away and below. Everyone looked out windows, and he waited for the plane to sideslip abruptly and smash into the ground after a fluttering spin. The reeds of the salt marsh flashed by below and then the thin stretch of beach, and then they were over the ocean, blue and choppy. No one spoke. Mr. Carver said something to his father now and then.
    Biddy watched the man’s hands on the controls. It seemed inexpressibly marvelous that a human being could do this. Carver seemed to be paying no more attention than his father did when he drove. Like the car, the Cessna seemed to need only an occasional gentle correction.
    The diminutive East Hampton Airport was in the middle of nowhere, a flat tan strip surrounded by the dark green of a pine forest. As they banked around to their approach pattern he could make out a path through the pines leading away from the runway they’d be coming in on. He could see children on bicycles riding along it toward a connecting road before the gray of the runway abruptly swung up to meet them and he had a sense of hurtling onto a paved strip with only Mr. Carver to deliver them. The gray swept past them and they touched down, Carver steady and unperturbed at the controls, the pavement reeling past the wing hypnotically as he watched.
    They drove to a house off the road and hidden by bushes and trees, a big yellow irregular box that looked as if they could work on it for weeks, painting, fixing screen doors, and refastening gutters, and still have much to do. The Carvers had no children, so Biddy and Kristi would sleep on cots in the spare room upstairs. From the window he could see the farmland bordering the backyard, neatly arranged in huge mosaics almost all the way down to the water, a half mile away.
    Everything went well. They drove up to Sag Harbor Saturday morning, following the black two-lane road to the end of the North Haven peninsula and taking the short ferry ride to Shelter Island. They played golf at Gardiners Bay, Biddy and Kristi trooping along behind the adults over the beautiful misty fairways, hacking away at their golf balls, delighting in the springy feel of the greens beneath their feet. Afterward, they drove along Ram Island Drive with the windows open, the sea smell filling the car and the bay quiet and wide and huge to the west. They stopped along docks at the water’s edge, nosing around dingy small boats tied nearby. Mr. Carver talked of the islands to the east, Plum Island and Great Gull Island and others, and of their beauty and solitude. The quality of the light conferred a special clarity on the land and sea in the distance, making the water fresh and blue. Gulls’ cries echoed over the surface and the boats quietly thumped one another with the arrival of an occasional wave from a far-off speedboat. They bought dinner in a seafood restaurant with nets hanging over the tables.