Take What You Can Carry

happen. I promise.”
The plane tilts, city lights replaced with a large patch of nothing. Mechanical trouble, she thinks. An engine. They’ve made it this far, but there’s an issue with the landing gear. “Lake Geneva. That’s water. Is that better or worse?” If the plane crashes. That last part unsaid, a tremble beneath her words.
Delan cranes his head to look but says nothing.
A grab at logic: the stewardesses have simply told them to remain in their seats and given no further instructions. No crash-landing tutorials or warnings. But with another beat, it’s the lack of information—ominous or otherwise—that looms suspicious.
Delan sits back. “My brother, Soran, when I visited him in London, he’d just started university and had this roommate from Switzerland. It was not my fault, but they both left for class and I was stoned and ate all the guy’s chocolate from home.”
“This is what you talk about when it might be the end?”
“It’s not the end.”
“And that was your fault, if you ate all his chocolate.”
“No, because before that, I found a brownie and ate it, but no one told me what was in it. And it was very strong.”
“But they didn’t give it to you. You found it.”
“I’m just saying, I have experience with Swiss people. And chocolate. That guy was okay. And my brother, you’d like him. He’s serious like you. Not much fun. Top of his class.”
The walls rattle, and the plane seems to compress with noise. Then the aisle lights flicker as her mind retrieves what he just said. “I’m not fun?”
“When you give yourself permission to be fun, you’re the best. You’re fun in a very ordered way. Like him. An architect. Did I tell you? Not even graduated and firms are after him.”
“Not fun and now ordered,” she says, knowing of course that she is. Her greatest pride and shame.
“He didn’t like it when I told him that either. Too bad he’s in England. You two could make lists of fun things for us to do.”
He’s distracting her. She sees this now, because suddenly they’re about to land. Closer and closer. Noises louder, that feeling of compression intense. A flash in her mind: the plane will tilt and the wing will catch and they will flip into a cartwheel of orange. Now her mind sees only this. Feels it. Everything gathering, drawing to that moment.
Again, lights inside the cabin flicker—until all at once, they shut off. The world gone black. There is only sound. Encompassing, gripping sound. And within her—not tied with coherent thoughts or words—is something she will later remember as a feeling of all she would trade, all she would give up. Because the only thing that matters is living and that the man beside her live as well. A split second of undefined, borderless, and desperate bargaining.
Then a shot of bright. The lights back on, the world returned. All the people are still there, faces drawn with concentration or eyes closed—but no one panicking. She wants to cry from relief, just because the lights are on.
But it’s not over. Sounds grow louder, everything gathering, collecting. Then a rumble begins. The plane shakes. She can’t remember if this is normal for a landing. A high-pitched whirring starts, then the sound of flaps rising up against an impossible wind. She realizes she’s not breathing only when she feels something on her arm and looks to see Delan with a pen, connecting three freckles above her elbow. What, she starts to say, but with a thud and a lurch, they hit the runway. The plane makes a sound like a crowd saying ooooh, and everything seems to rock back and forth but then, mercifully, straightens.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” Delan says. “A perfect triangle.”
And he’s right; there is now a triangle on her arm.
Wind pushes the walls of the plane as they taxi past stands of trees, toward a line of trucks with red and blue lights flashing. With that sight, she understands that something was very wrong, and somehow, by some miracle, they are lucky. Delan shows her the half-moon dents in his palm from her nails, and she looks up to see distant buildings that seem to float in lit-up beauty along the hills.
They are alive. But as they taxi away from the airport, not toward it, she understands something is still wrong. All at once she needs to be off the plane, to be walking—no, running—running to the airport. She’s shocked that no one else appears to feel this, and even more shocked when the line to exit the plane is peaceful—something she also will think of later, how everything was orderly and it was the Lebanese businessmen who offered to carry the sleeping children.
Lights are bold on the tarmac. As they walk toward the airport, his arm around her waist and the plane at her back, she feels an increasing happiness with every step, a severing from whatever calamity held them. When she turns back once more, she sees that all the suitcases are outside, everything being opened one by one.
“We might not get our luggage tonight,” Delan says.
Already she’s thinking of a small bottle of damask rose oil he gave her for the trip. For every big occasion, she buys a new perfume. Certain scents for certain events. The day before they left, bottle in hand, Delan had instructed her to close her eyes and then drawn the oil over her wrists and the hollow of her neck, touching it lightly with his finger, then tracing it around the Celtic tree-of-life pendant she wears as a necklace, strung on a dark leather cord. Made of copper, the tree clutches a green jasper stone, and its wavering boughs stretch and lift like lightning, appearing to connect to the heavens just as the roots connect to the world below. As Olivia inhaled the scent, Delan pushed the symbol to the side and leaned forward, placing his lips upon the spot that was lighter from lack of sun.
Now he