Off-Season Shore

My last charter of the season dropped me in Charleston on a Thursday with no reason to fly anywhere until spring, and I did what any sane twenty-four-year-old pilot would do, which was sit in a dive bar near the airport eating fried pickles and texting my girlfriend who was two weeks into a survey on a barrier island with bad cell service.

Harper Mercer, twenty-seven, coastal surveyor for the state, out there mapping marsh erosion on the back side of Bulls Island and living in an old bunkhouse that used to belong to a rafting outfitter that went under years ago. We met two falls back when I flew a survey team out to Cape Romain and she climbed aboard my seaplane with a clipboard and a thermos and squinted at me like I was the one being studied. We started dating six months after that, which by my math means we have been together for a year and a half, circling the question of what this is without ever once saying it out loud.

So there I was, Thursday night, sending her the dumbest possible opener.

**Me:** did u make it to the island okay or did the marsh eat u

It took forty minutes for anything to come back, and when it did it was a photo. The bunkhouse door, shut but not locked, a padlock hasp hanging crooked off screws that had worked themselves half out of the frame, and wedged into the gap a seed catalog, bent double, its cover showing a tomato the size of a football.

**Harper:** lock's jammed. I'm locked out of my own cabin like an idiot. The seed catalog is doing structural work now

**Me:** is that a BRASSICA on the cover holding your house together

**Harper:** it's a tomato and it's the only thing standing between me and the raccoons

I laughed out loud at the bar and the guy next to me looked over, and I didn't care. I sent back a row of laughing faces and then, because her battery was dying and I knew it, I told her to just call me when she got the door sorted. She didn't get it sorted. At nine that night my phone buzzed with a voicemail instead.

"Hey, it's me!" Wind noise behind her voice, that flat marsh wind that never quits. "So, update from the field office. The lock is still jammed, the maintenance guy for the outfitter place is apparently a myth, and I have decided the seed catalog is load-bearing, so nobody touch the tomato." She laughed, and the laugh went on a beat too long, the way it does when somebody's winding up to say something real. "Also, and this is the real reason I'm calling, it's forty-one degrees out here and I am going to have to sleep in my coat like a sad lug, and I keep thinking about how you run hot. Like a furnace. Like a little woodstove with a pilot's license. I could really use some body heat right now is what I'm saying, and I'm mad at myself for saying it, okay, bye."

I played it twice. Then I sat there with my fried pickles getting cold and typed out the most honest thing I'd sent anybody in years, because I was two beers in and her voice had said body heat like it was a joke when we both knew it wasn't.

**Me:** ok here's what i'd do if the plane was fueled and the weather was nothing. I'd take off at dusk and fly low over the marsh, like real low, skimming, all that silver grass going by under me in the last light. I'd come around the north end hot, maybe hotter than anybody should put a floatplane down in that little tidal creek, and i'd kick it sideways and dump it on the water and not even tie the plane down because who cares. Then i'd sprint across the dunes. Full sprint. Boots off at some point, i don't know when, doesn't matter. And i'd hit that jammed door shoulder first and it would fly open and i'd pick you up off the floor of your own bunkhouse and warm you up myself, all night, no coat required

I stared at it a long time before I hit send. My phone rang eleven seconds later.

"Leela." Her voice had gone quiet, the way it gets when she's out there alone too long. "Are you drunk?"

"Two beers deep. Buzzed, not drunk. I know exactly what I'm saying."

"Okay. Good. Because I'm going to describe something and I need you to not make fun of me." There was a pause and I heard her boots crunch on shell, going somewhere. "I'm standing at the cabin window now. The one on the gable end. And I put my hands flat on the glass, both palms, and I'm pretending the glass is you. That's it. That is the entire sad show. Two hands on cold glass in the dark pretending it's my girlfriend's back."

"Harper."

"I know."

"That's the saddest, best thing anybody has ever said to me."

"Shut up." But she was half laughing, and I heard her forehead touch the window too, a soft thump, and I pressed my own palm flat against the bar top like an idiot, like I could meet her through it. "Leela. Say the thing again. The flying thing. Slower."

So I said it slower. The marsh at dusk going silver and then gray, the tidal creek that isn't really a runway, the door giving way, her face when I came through it. She didn't say anything the whole time except one small sound near the end that I memorized on the spot. When I finished, her phone beeped the low-battery beep and she swore.

"Voice memo," she said fast. "Send me a voice memo before my phone dies. Tell me the first-time story. I want to hear you tell it."

The line went dead, and I stood up from the bar and walked out to the parking lot where it was quiet and cold and leaned against my truck and recorded this, which is what you're hearing now, in case you wondered.

Okay. First time I saw you. October, two years ago, Cape Romain landing, and I want you to know I have told nobody this, not even my sister. I came in low over the water like always and there were four people on the beach waiting and three of them were watching the plane like normal people do, tracking it, and one person was not watching the plane at all. One person was standing with her back half to me, looking out at the marsh with her clipboard hanging off two fingers, squinting into the sun. Not flinching. The sun off that water in October will put a nail through your eye if you look at it wrong, and you were just standing there taking it, jaw set, hair whipping, like the sun was a coworker you'd already had an argument with and won.

And I set that plane down on water I've landed on a hundred times since and my hands were not steady. Do you understand what I'm telling you. My hands, which do not shake, were shaking on the yoke, and I taxied up thinking, oh no, oh no, this one's going to be trouble, and you