GRIFF AND I didn’t talk much on the flight up. We had to yell, even over the headsets we wore, and I wasn’t much of a conversationalist. We flew over empty land and mangy trees, and then over thicker and thicker forests, and more forests, and I wondered if we would fly forever like this, time suspended around us. Lakes winked at us between the trees, and I remembered a book I’d read that was just like this. A kid going to see his father, in a tiny plane with a pilot he didn’t know. The pilot died, had a heart attack, and the kid had no choice but to crash into one of the lakes and live alone on the shore for two months before he got rescued.

That wouldn’t happen to me. If Griff had a heart attack, I’d turn the plane around, or I’d land on one of the lakes and radio for help. I’d been paying attention to our heading, and we had plenty of fuel. Griff was flying back from our destination, after all; of course there was enough fuel to get back to that airfield.

I’d never landed a float plane on the water, but I thought I could figure it out. I ran through all of that in my head, and I think it actually turned into a kind of fantasy. Not that I wanted Griff to die, but I enjoyed playing it through. How I’d turn the plane around, how I’d take control. How I’d land and call for help calmly, and when it arrived they’d all be amazed.

Look at her, they’d say. She flew the plane all by herself. And don’t you know her mother just died? And they wouldn’t feel sorry for me at all, just impressed. Except I couldn’t help picturing my mom in that crowd, too. Telling me she was proud, she knew I could do it.

Stupid.

Griff didn’t have a heart attack. We flew and flew, and then suddenly he said, “Here we are, then,” and we banked and descended. We aimed for a lake. On the north shore was a bald patch, not a clearing so much as the trees shrinking back from the water, and in the middle of that was a cabin. Despite the dread of realizing that this is what Griff meant when he said I was going home, I thought, It’s beautiful.

A man in red came out of the cabin. A dog loped along beside him, huge even from this distance. The man raised a hand, and I realized it was my father.

My belly did an odd flop. My father. I hadn’t seen him in person in years. He was around when I was born and a little while after, and for one visit when I was four. He was a stranger, and he was out here in the middle of nowhere and not where he was supposed to be.

“I can’t stay here,” I said, but the engine drowned it out. We touched down on the water, and for one horrible moment I thought we would just go straight down under it. I don’t know why I thought that, but I was so sick afraid that the fear got into everything. The lake could swallow us up. Or the dog on the shore could snarl and leap the moment we touched solid ground. And he was a fierce-looking dog, gray black and huge. His tail didn’t wag; he just watched us warily with shiny black eyes.

We climbed out of the plane and paddled to shore in a tiny little raft, and my dad and the dog walked over to us slowly. My fear became a lump in my throat like a peach pit. And