Page 139 of Meant to Be

CHAPTER 33

Joe

Everyone wanted to know what I was thinking in those final moments before we smashed into the Chesapeake Bay.What went through your mind?That’s how people usually worded the question, and by the looks on their faces, I think they were hoping for some sort of deep existential answer.

The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of life—and I never contemplated the possibility of death. There were no prayers of any kind. God didn’t enter my mind at all. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in Him—because I did and do—but there wasn’t time for that. Instead, I focused on my training, trying to remember everything I had been taught about ditching an airplane in an emergency landing.Touch down at the slowest possible speed, at the lowest possible rate of descent…. Keep the wings trimmed to the surface of the water rather than the horizon…. If two swells differ in height, land on the higher one…. Ditch into the wind…. The more whitecaps, the greater the wind…. It’s easy to misjudge altitude by up to fifty feet, especially at twilight…. Avoid the face of the swell at any cost.

Beyond those basics, I was only worried about Cate. She couldn’t swim that well, and the water was going to be freezingcold, and we wouldn’t have long to get to safety. I wanted to hit the pause button and reassure her that everything was going to be okay. We were going to be fine. I was going to protect her at any cost.

The funny thing is, all my thoughts and optimism would have been exactly the same had we both been killed. I would’ve been wrong, of course, but I would never haveknownthat I was wrong. In a strange way, that realization, one that first came to me in the morning, when I was still in the hospital, brought me closer to my father. I tried to tell myself that his final human emotion wasn’t fear, but some variation of the same gritty faith that I’d felt. I told myself that I was more like him than I thought.

In my wildest dreams, though, I never would have imagined the turn things would take. That I would hit my head and be knocked unconscious. That Cate would be on her own. That she would have to find the superhuman strength and courage and wherewithal to get us out of that broken plane before it sank to the bottom of the bay. That she’d then have to keep my head above the water, somehow get us both over to the wing—when she could barely swim in the best conditions—and hold on for dear life, fighting exhaustion and hypothermia. In other words, I never fathomed thatCatewould have to saveme.

It makes me almost cry every time I think about it. How scared and alone she must have felt in that dark, cold water without any help from the person who got her into the situation, the man who was supposed to protect her.

“I’m so sorry,” I told Cate in the early morning hours after the accident, crying as I held her in my arms. We’d both been treated, and a nurse, along with my mother, had wheeled her into my room, so we could talk alone. “I’ll never forgive myself for letting this happen to you.”

“Oh, Joe. It’s okay, honey. I’m fine,” she said, crying, too. “We’re both fine. We made it, baby.”

“I know. But I left you all alone,” I said, wiping away tears.

“But I wasn’t alone,” she whispered, holding me so tight, the two of us lying side by side in my bed. “I was with you. I held on because ofyou. I wasn’t going to let you go.”

“God,Cate,” I said under my breath, thinking that I’d never felt so loved in my whole life.

I also felt a fresh wave of faith, just like the feeling I had when I was trying to land that plane. This time, though, it was about Cate and me. And I just knew we were going to be okay. No matter what the future held, we were going to be okay.

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