Page 20 of Atmosphere

“If he can do it, you can do it,” Vanessa said.

Joan nodded, unsure.

When it was Joan’s turn, she took a deep breath.

“Don’t think about it,” Vanessa said. “Just go do it. And then you can tell your niece how courageous you were.”

“Frances,” Joan said.

“Yeah, you can tell Frances.”

Joan got into position. They connected her harness to the speedboat. Her heart started to race. She stood on the edge of the deck, waiting for the go-ahead. She pictured telling Frances she had parachuted into the ocean from behind a speedboat. She laughed to think of it.

Okay,she thought,here we go.

When she got the thumbs-up, she took off, running as fast as she could. She felt the catch of the air as the speedboat accelerated. For a moment, she fought against the fear in her body. But then she gave in to it. She let herself feel the horror, and then it passed through her.

In fact, for a few slow seconds, Joan could feel nothing but the ocean air on her face. The smell of the brine of the sea overtook her nose and filled her lungs.

When she looked down, she could see the expanse of the dark blue ocean, how quiet it was, how steady, cut by the strong wake behind the boat.

When they gave her the signal, she put her hand on the latch of her harness and closed her eyes.

She disconnected.

Her parachute slowed her down, softened her descent enough that it felt like being cradled more than falling. And the view of the ocean drawing nearer felt a little mesmerizing. By the time her whole body landed in the water, she’d forgotten to panic.

Suddenly she was underwater, her ears clogged, her vision cloudy, her body dragged down by the weight of everything she was tied to. Her parachute darkened the ocean above her. She managed to get herself free from it and then twisted and turned, looking for the light of the sky. Soon she found it, just to her left, the sunshine diffused across the surface. She swam for it.

When she broke out into the air, she gasped and choked on the water. But when the breath rushed into her lungs, she wondered if anything had ever felt so good as breathing.

She inflated the raft and then managed to throw one leg over the side of it.

She dragged herself onto the raft swiftly, her back soon resting against the bottom, feeling the current of the ocean. She coughed up the salt water in her nose and her throat. She pushed her hair out of her face.

And then she looked up at the clouds, raised her hand in a thumbs-up, and smiled.

My God,she thought,what else can I do?

When the T-38 assignments camein, Joan was grateful to find out she’d be flying with Hank.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a Texas accent. He’d come out of Top Gun, the naval flight school in San Diego, so he and Joan shared some of the same Southern California references. Breakfast burritos, fruit trees, how cold the Pacific was. Joan also liked his sunglasses. He wore dark-tinted aviators that made him look like a movie star.

“Come on, girl,” he said to her as they got in the jet. “Let’s go fly a plane.”

“All right,boy,let’s go,” she said.

He laughed as they got in. That was another thing she liked about him: he laughed at women’s jokes.

Joan fit tight into the backseat, the weight of her helmet and harness already bearing down on her before he’d shot them into the sky. She could swear they were perpendicular to the Earth. She tried not to focus on how sick she felt in her belly as they reached higher and higher. She did her best to ignore the force of the air in her ears. She closed her eyes, trying to ward off the intensity of the headache. It reminded her of riding the Round Up as a kid when the carnival came to town, fighting the centrifugal acceleration flattening her body.

It reached a fever pitch, and she was not sure she could withstand the pressure.

But then they leveled out above the clouds and Joan gasped. The beauty of the pale pink puffs—soft blankets against the sky—startled her into focus. The steady hum of the wind drowned out almost everything except the sound of her own voice inside her mind. Which was such a gift. She had always been her greatest friend, her greatest guide.

Up here, all she could hear was that voice. The kindest version of her.Look at the clouds, take a breath, do you see how pale the blue of the sky can be?

Suddenly Hank’s voice crackled in her helmet: “Tell me that’s not the heavens.”

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