My Plane Went Down in the Nevada Desert With an 81-Year-Old Woman in the Passenger Seat. She Said It Was the Most Fun She’d Had in Years. We Had One Bottle of Water

We sat in the shade of the wing all afternoon.

I gave her most of the water. She argued. I won, but only because I pointed out that she was eighty-one and I was not, and she said that was rude, and I said it was true, and she laughed so hard she had to put her hand on her chest, which scared me half to death.

She was fine.

I built a signal on the playa with the seat cushions, the cargo tarp and the luggage, a giant X a hundred feet across. I took the cowling off the engine and found the problem: a cracked fuel line, probably from a bad batch of parts. I couldn’t fix it with what I had.

While I worked, Mrs. Calloway talked.

She told me about Harold. About fifty-four years of marriage. About the summers they spent out here when he was mapping the ancient shorelines of the lake that used to cover this whole desert twelve thousand years ago. About the night they’d camped on the playa in 1968 and he’d proposed with a ring made from a piece of copper wire.

She still wore it. Under her wedding band.

She told me about her children, who wanted her to move into an assisted living facility in Sacramento and sell the house in Reno.

“They took my car keys last month,” she said. “My son said my long-term care policy would cover a very nice place with a pool and a hairdresser.”

“Do you want to go?”

“I want to do something interesting before I die,” she said. “That’s why I hired you. Harold always said you only really live in the places where you could die.”

I thought about my own life. My divorce, three years ago. My daughter in Denver, who called on holidays. My little apartment above the hangar at the Reno-Stead airport, where I ate dinner standing up at the kitchen counter.

“Harold sounds like a smart man,” I said.

“He was an idiot,” she said fondly. “A wonderful idiot. You remind me of him.”

As the sun went down, it got cold. Desert cold. I wrapped her in the engine cover and my flight jacket and sat beside her against the wheel.

At two in the morning, she woke me up.

“Briar,” she whispered. “Look.”

I looked.

There was a light. Far away, low on the horizon. Moving toward us.