Zariah looked at the reporter, considered the question with the same seriousness she gave all questions. "I just flew the plane," she said, and she turned back to her coffee.
Three days later, Zariah came home.
The apartment looked the same: the kitchen with the parking lot view, the hallway with the overhead light that needed a new bulb, the door to her room that never quite closed flush because the frame had shifted in the summer heat two years ago and nobody had gotten around to fixing it.
She dropped her bag on her bed, sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment. The room was quiet in the particular way of rooms that had been empty for a few days: a held-breath quality, waiting. She looked at her desk: the three monitors, the yoke, the throttle quadrant, the rudder pedals, the small stack of aviation books in the corner, the photograph underneath them.
She got up and crossed the room and sat down at the simulator.
She didn't load a scenario right away. She sat in front of the dark screens and put her hands on the yoke and felt the familiar weight and resistance of it. She thought about the moment the main gear had touched the runway at Harlow Field—the feeling that had come through the seat frame and up her spine and into her hands: real, undeniable, the full weight of the aircraft and everyone in it passing through the contact point between metal and asphalt.
Nothing in the simulator had ever felt like that; nothing in the simulator ever would. But the simulator had gotten her there. Every hour in this chair had been a deposit against a moment she hadn't known was coming. Her father had started that account; she had kept adding to it faithfully every evening because she hadn't been able to do anything else with the love she had for him and nowhere to put it.
She reached under the stack of books and took out the photograph. He looked happy. He was exactly where he wanted to be. She propped the photograph against the base of the center monitor.
Then she reached into the inner pocket of her hoodie and took out a folded piece of paper: a copy of the contact information for the FAA investigator she'd spoken with at Harlow Field—the investigator who had, at the end of their conversation, said, "Your father's case has been reopened as of this afternoon. We're going to need everything he left behind."
She set the paper next to the photograph.
Then she powered on the monitors, loaded the flight simulator, and started building a new scenario. She wasn't running it to escape; she wasn't running it because it was the only thing that made sense. She was running it because she had work to do, and this was where the work happened, and the work was not finished. It had just found its shape.
The screens came to life. The instruments populated. The familiar landscape of an aircraft cockpit spread across the three monitors, waiting.
She put on her headset. She took the controls.
I didn't just fly the plane, she thought as the engines spooled up on the screen. I finished what he started.