How odd for her to feel it while she was dropping out of a plane.
She was just here, present, a woman in the sky, fifty years old, finally looking at everything with open eyes and an open heart.
This is what it feels like to stop holding your breath.
Nina jumped last.
She jumped last because she had been first many times during the year. First one to sign the napkin, first one to pick an adventure. She was even the first one to walk toward the karaoke stage. She was the first one to cry in cooking class, the first one to read her letter.
And now, at the end of this, she wanted to be the last one to close the door on the year, the last one out of the plane, the last one flying through the air, and the last one to carry the napkin through the sky.
Mark had her strapped to his chest. They waddled over to the door because there was just no graceful way to walk in tandem when you were up at 14,000 feet.
Nina looked down and saw the Lowcountry spread out like the most beautiful painting she’d ever seen. For a moment, she imagined herself going splat right onto that painting, but then she decided to wipe that image from her head because how helpful could it be to imagine yourself going splat in the first place?
She could see the coastline and the islands, and she was pretty sure she could see the dark green shape of Edisto, her island, the place David had looked at from a realtor’s kitchen window and said, “ This is it. This is where we live.”
She pressed her hand against her chest and felt the napkin crinkle under her palm. The three signatures, the three rules they’d made, the twelve months of saying yes to the things that scared them.
“David,” she whispered under her breath.
Mark, behind her, couldn’t hear. The wind was far too loud, but Nina wasn’t saying it for him.
She said it for the sky and for the earth below. She said it for the man who wasn’t in either of them anymore, but who was, she had finally learned after all this time, involved in everything she did. In the mole and the karaoke. He was in the freezing ocean. He was in the painting and the letter. And when she looked into Lucia’s eyes or Elena’s cooking pot, she saw him. When she looked at the wave tattooed on her wrist, she knew he was with her.
David was not gone.
David was the reason she was here, at the door of this yellow airplane, about to free-fall.
And then she jumped.
The fall wasn’t what she expected at all.
She’d expected abject terror. She’d braced for it the way she had braced for the karaoke or the grief retreat. She braced for it every time she did anything uncomfortable for the last twelve months.
The terror only lasted for about a second, just that first second, that moment where you step out, and the door disappears, and the plane disappears. The world tilts for a moment.
She was in the air with nothing below her and nothing above her and only a stranger holding onto her.
But after that second, the terror was replaced by something she didn’t have a name for. Something bigger than peace, bigger than joy, actually.
It was the feeling of every wall she’d built over the last two years all crumbling down at one time, dissolving.
She felt all of the emotions at once. The love. The grief. The rage. The gratitude.
She had a desperate, aching desire to be alive again, and it all poured out of her at 120 miles per hour in the sky above the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
She wasn’t numb anymore. She wasn’t living behind glass.
She was falling through the open air with the wind in her face, and now she could feel every single thing.
She could feel David.
But not his ghost. Not even his memory.
His presence.
As warm and close as it was when he stood behind her in the kitchen and wrapped his arms around her waist, when he would put his chin on her shoulder and say, look at that, mi amor, look at that bird.
