Oxygen masks sprang from the ceiling panel and swung in front of our faces. I caught mine and helped the cellist with hers. The plastic was the color of buttercups.

She took the belt off her cello and unfastened the buckles.

Help me! she screamed through her mask. She was in a sudden rush, fumbling, standing, a flight attendant shouting for her to sit. I helped her prop open the shiny plastic case and saw inside the instrument—amber-toned, varnish gleaming, the grain a fine and lustrous brown. In its capsule of red velvet it looked like a nesting doll. She slipped a finger in through the F-hole and touched the sound post and closed her eyes. The instrument was humming a sympathetic vibration.

It’s the D, she whispered.

It’ll be safer with the case closed, I said.

She leaned over and kissed the cello’s neck and let the cover drop.

The cabin rattled. The bulkheads shook. The overhead bins popped open. Bags, briefcases, satchels rained down. The cellist clenched her eyes. I felt her fingers tightened on mine—but it was Ana I felt beside me.

We broke cloud cover and dropped into a pool of dark. The bones around my cheeks pressed into my skull. I saw the sheet music flattened like a stamp on the ceiling. The metamorphoses. I couldn’t tell which way was up and which was down and out the window a green light stood on the top of the world, a lighthouse spun above us, a brief flame somewhere in the night.

Did I feel it then, the beginning of this pilgrimage, from air to thinner air, from body to body, before the impact? Was it then or after or in between, before the seat belts locked our pelvises in place and unleashed the rest of us. The ilium. Why is it the same name for Troy? Ana once asked, tracing the upper bone of my hip with her finger. Because it’s a basin, I said, and told her the Latin word ilia. More like wings, she said and climbed above me and laid the two points of her hips on top of mine. Our bones tapped together, like spoons.

The cabin burst into light, sunbright, dazzling, an orange edging around it. I could see the bones beneath my flesh like pieces of pottery. And then we were entering the sea.

Two

The sunset over Trachis Bay had been brilliant, and now the ocean lay pewter in the lingering dusk. It was the perfect end to the final Sunday of the season; families lingered on the beaches until the last possible moment, dragging children—red-faced, reluctant—into vans, locking up cottages, stuffing suitcases, shutting hot water heaters for the summer. They crammed into the last ferry and headed back to the mainland and the cities. It was the middle of September. They wouldn’t be back until Christmas—or more likely the following spring.