Easy, Girl

You didn't call Callaway. You told yourself it was because it was late. It was because you were scared.

At 4:50 a.m. the crew room is half empty and Captain Trevelyan is already there, at the same table, with the same squared hat and a printout of the Jackson Hole weather that he slides across to you before you've put your bag down.

"Read it to me."

"Snow showers, visibility varying two to five miles. Wind two-four-zero at fifteen gusting twenty-eight. Pilot reports of moderate turbulence and loss of fifteen knots on final to runway one-niner." You look up. "Wind shear."

"And?"

"And Jackson is surrounded by mountains, the runway's at sixty-four hundred feet, and if we lose airspeed close in, there's nowhere to put it."

"So who's flying it?"

He asks the way a cat asks a mouse what it's having for lunch.

"I am," you say.

He leans back. "You are."

"You told me yesterday Aspen isn't a place to learn. Jackson is where I show you I don't need to."

For a second you think he'll take the leg away from you on principle. Instead he picks up his coffee.

"Your airplane," he says. "Don't make me regret it."

The first hour is easy. Clear air over Wyoming, the Wind River Range white and enormous off the left wing, the sun coming up pink on the snowfields. You fly by hand for a while because you like it and because he's watching to see if you'll use the autopilot as a crutch. You don't.

Chidi brings coffee forward and sets yours in the cup holder with a wink. "From the back of the bus, Ava," he says. "They're all praying for you."

"Very funny."

"I'm serious, Ava. Mrs. Kilgallen in 4A has a rosary."

Captain Trevelyan doesn't laugh. You catch his reflection in the side window and his mouth is doing the thing again, almost, and then not.

Then the descent, and the weather.

It comes up over the Tetons like a wall. Gray and churning, the peaks gone into it, snow streaking past the windscreen in long white lines. The jet starts to buck. You feel it in your seat and your hands before the instruments show it.

"Cordillera fifty-one twelve, Salt Lake Center, Jackson reporting wind two-five-zero at eighteen gusting thirty-one, a regional jet ahead reported plus and minus twenty knots at five hundred feet."

"Copy, Cordillera fifty-one twelve," you answer, and keep flying.

You brief it out loud the way he'll want. Your approach speed. Your additives. The go-around. The wind shear escape. You add five knots to your approach speed above what the book calls for, because of what's coming off those ridges, and you say so.

He looks at you. He doesn't say anything. You know he's writing it down in his head.

At a thousand feet the runway appears out of the snow, a dark stripe with white edges, and you are in it now, the jet sliding and kicking, the airspeed needle jumping. You are dancing with it. Little hands. Little feet. Ahead of it, not behind.

At six hundred feet, the bottom falls out.

The airspeed drops like a stone. Ten knots. Fifteen. The jet sinks, and the synthetic voice of the warning system shouts into the cockpit:

"WINDSHEAR. WINDSHEAR. WINDSHEAR."

You don't think. You've done this a hundred times in a simulator and twice for real in airplanes that weren't on any public list.

"Wind shear escape," you say, and your hands are already moving. Thrust levers full forward. Autopilot off, it was off already. Pitch up toward the red line, hold it there, don't chase the stick shaker, don't change the configuration. Let the engines pull you out.

The jet shudders and climbs. The mountains on either side are close enough to see trees. The airspeed comes back. Twenty knots. Thirty. You hold your pitch steady and your voice calm and say, under your breath, to the airplane, the way you always have:

"Easy, girl. Easy."

Beside you, Captain Trevelyan goes completely still.

It's only for a second. You notice it the way you'd notice a change in engine sound. Then he's calling out the altitudes and the climb, and you're clear of the shear, and you're climbing into gray, and he's on the radio telling Salt Lake Center what happened in a voice so level it could be reading the weather to a child.

"Second approach," he says. "Same plan?"

"Same plan."

"Your airplane."

You fly it again. This time the air is merely terrible instead of lethal. At two hundred feet the runway is right where you left it, and you put the jet down on the centerline, firm and straight, the way you're supposed to on a short runway in snow. The reversers roar. The jet slows. The snow keeps coming.

You exhale for what feels like the first time since Wyoming.

He doesn't say anything on the taxi in. He doesn't say anything at the gate while the passengers unload, Mrs. Kilgallen from 4A stopping at the cockpit door to pat your arm and tell you that you have very good hands, dear.

When she's gone he finally turns in his seat.

"Don't talk to my airplane," he says.

You blink. "Excuse me?"

"'Easy, girl.'" His face is stony. "It's not a horse. It doesn't need encouragement. It needs procedure. Which, to be fair, you followed."

"To be fair."

"The book flew that escape, Truett. You executed the book. That's what I expect. I don't hand out medals for meeting the standard." He picks up his tablet. "We'll debrief the approach speed later."

And that's it. He walks off the jet.

You sit in the right seat and stare out at the snow, and you aren't sure if you want to laugh or cry or follow him up the jet bridge and shove him into a snowbank.

The layover hotel in Jackson is an airport place with a fake-rustic lobby, an elk head over the fireplace and a hot tub nobody uses in March. Chidi drags you to the bar for dinner and orders for both of you without asking.

"You're having the bison burger, because you earned it," he says. "I'm having the salad, because my husband Ikenna is a pastry chef and I'm in a long-term war with my waistband."

"Is he always like that? Trevelyan?"

"Always." Chidi steals one of your fries. "He's the golden boy. Youngest captain in the company's history. Did the Cheyenne save six years ago, nose gear jammed sideways, he put a full airplane down on the mains and held the nose off until it was barely moving. Not a scratch. They put him on a poster, and he's been impossible ever since."

"Is he married?"

Chidi's eyebrows go up so high they nearly leave his face.

"It's a professional question," you say. "I need to know if someone loves him. For my own sanity."

"Single. Rich. Tragic." Chidi leans in. "He's got a brother he'd die for and a secret nobody knows. The girls in base gossip about it all the time. Something about an old accident. He doesn't talk about it."

You think of the way he went still.

"Anyway, Ava," says Chidi. "Here's what I came to say. Harker's office, that's VP of Flight Ops, wanted you gone before you even got here. Trevelyan's the guy they send when they want a new hire to fail. So whatever you're doing, keep doing it."

You walk back to your room at nine-thirty full of bison and warning. You shower. You put on the old Air Force sweatpants you swore you'd throw out.

At ten o'clock, someone knocks.

You open the door. Captain Zane Trevelyan is standing in the hallway in a gray T-shirt and jeans, his hair damp, his tablet in one hand, looking like the poster if the poster had gone running and come back angry.

"We need to talk," he says, "about your landing."