Good Things I Wish You by Manette Ansay

on. We married other people in between. The second time we divorced, you could say I did not take this so well. Friederike was ten, and I was the one who supervised her practicing, as you supervise your own daughter, yes? So you understand what this means. The time, the discipline. The commitment.”
    More thunder, sustained this time, followed by a sturdy gust of wind.
    “The court had no such understanding. The child should be with her mother. Basta. Only now the child is old enough to have her own say. So, once again, as you have seen, the topic is under discussion.” He tapped his shirt pocket, where he kept his phone, then looked up at the sky. “I’m afraid there will be no flying for you today.”
    “Too bad.”
    “You are truly disappointed?”
    “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved. But I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between how nervous I am about—well, just about everything—and the way I’ve been stuck on my book.”

    “Maybe it would help you to fly, then?”
    “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”
    He glanced at me, surprised. Pleased. “I have always found it useful to try new things,” he said, and then: “Help me with the glider, do you mind?”
    A Chopin Polonaise accompanied us as we walked past the pilots’ quarters. “Can I ask you another question?” I said.
    “Sure, sure. The answers are free.”
    “Are you really a famous eye surgeon?”
    This made him laugh. “Who is saying that?”
    “Did you invent some kind of prosthetic eye that senses light?”
    “My God, who do I look like? How do you say—the miracle man?”
    “The miracle worker?”
    “There is no such thing, Jeanette, as a prosthetic eye. Not the way you mean. None of this involves the eye, anyway. It is all about the brain.”
    But another gust of wind blew his words away, and by the time we’d rolled the ASW into the hangar, a dark wall of rain was sweeping toward us across the open field. Directly overhead, the sky lit up. The thunder was continuous, a hammering deep in my chest. Hart closed the hangar door, and when he turned to rest his fingers very lightly on my shoulders, I wondered if the regret in his face was a reflection of something he’d seen in my own. Twelve years of marriage. Richer or poorer.
    The rough kiss of his chin. The spark of his tongue.

    I’d believed we were forever, Cal and me. I’d believed only death could part us.
    We kissed until the rain overtook us, until his hand found the small of my back, guiding me toward the trailer, toward the warm yellow light that shone from the propped-open door. The ax murderer. The entrepreneur. There was no need to hurry. We were already wet to the skin. We were already moving toward where this would take us, where this was going to end.
    But for now, we’d eat dinner with the Japanese students. We’d listen to Midori perform Arabeske, and I’d play selections from Schumann’s Kinderszenen , easy pieces that have lived in my fingers for over twenty years. We’d spend a restless night in the dormitory—the next night, too—Hart on the couch in the main room, me in a twin-size cot beside Midori. And it was on this second morning, the day of my first flight, that the sentence woke me out of my sleep, warm and glowing as the beam of sunshine splashed across my face.
    That first flight was nothing like what I’d imaged. A few shuddering seconds on the tow, then the lovely, lifting feeling that means you’re in the air. The sound of the wind pouring in through the vents. The creak of the rudder, like a seagoing ship. Hart released the towline at three thousand feet, and I found I was not afraid. Suspended by physics, surrounded by space, I looked out at the world as if for the first time: bitter-burned fields and gummy-eyed sinkholes, the single gray road that had brought me here. Everything familiar. Everything changed.

    “Okay back there?” Hart called.
    “Okay.”
    “You sure?”
    But I was too happy to