Page 45 of Pretty Savage: Defy

Carrson’s voice comes through my headset. “Still with me?”

“Technically.”

A low laugh rumbles through the line. “You’re doing great.”

His smile reaches over to me. His hands are steady on the controls, like he has spent his whole life doing this. Maybe he has. At this point, I’m afraid to ask what other skills Carr Ashford made his son learn before he was old enough to drive.

The helicopter climbs over the hills, and the world moves farther away beneath us.

At first, New York looks crowded from above. Roads twist between neighborhoods in long gray loops. Houses cluster close together, their rooftops packed so close they overlap. Cars crawl along highways in lines so thin they could be stitches holding the whole state together.

Then Carrson turns us east.

“Look out your window,” he says.

I do.

The Atlantic stretches along the horizon, too wide to take in all at once. It isn’t the bright postcard blue I expect. From this high, it is steel and silver, dark in some places, bright in others where the lowering sun reflects in it.

“Oh,” I say, with my forehead pressed to the window.

Carrson glances at me. “Better than a mountain?”

“A little.”

He laughs again, and the helicopter tips gently toward the coast.

The shoreline transforms. Long pale strips of beach. Tiny marinas crowded with white boats. Boardwalks and beach houses and pools.

The farther south we fly, the less crowded everything becomes.

The blocks of houses loosen. Highways thin out. Fields are a patchwork quilt that disappear under forests so thick they look black from above. The coast grows wilder too. More marshland with its dark water cutting through grass. Long empty stretches where the only sign people live there is a single road, a dock, a cluster of roofs tucked into the trees.

I keep trying to guess where one state ends and another begins, but from up here the land refuses to cooperate. There are no borders visible from the sky. No lines dividing the places where people are born from the places where they die.

Carrson keeps us close enough to the ocean that I can watch the light change on it. By the time the sun sinks lower, the water has turned to a glittering gold, bright enough to make me squint. The land on our other side has deepened into a heavier green, a jungle dense and untamed. The South. It spreads all the way to the horizon, so big it dwarfs the day we’ve had.

I get why Carrson likes flying.

Up here, nothing stays trapped in one shape. Cities become grids. Houses become dots. Roads become ribbons.

Dad ran, and his past found him anyway.

Which means distance doesn’t equal freedom. It means this helicopter can’t carry us far enough to erase blood or history or the things people do to each other in the name of love.

But watching the country unfold under us, I understand why people keep trying.

Running to things.

From them.

Carrson reaches over when the helicopter levels out, brushing the back of his fingers against mine where my hand rests on the armrest.

“You okay?”

There are too many answers to that question. My dad is behind us, finally standing still enough to let his past catch up. Carr sleeps a few feet away, close enough to remind me that every beautiful thing has a shadow attached to it. The future Carrson and I talked about this morning feels farther away than the ocean.

Still, I look out at the last light spilling across the Atlantic and say the only true thing I have.