One pillar to the right was a rich thick green granite stone. Swirls of light and dark green meandered through the stone with thin rivulets of black and grey separating one swirl from another. To Hail, it looked like a mint milkshake that had been locked in time after only a few seconds of mixing. Green had nothing to do with the doomed Mexico City International to Miami International flight, except the Mexican flag did have some green in it. The Boeing 737 had 190 passengers that were obliterated only two thousand feet off the ground. The American Airlines flight 264 had lasted less than thirty seconds before the 9K333 Verba Russia man-portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile had taken it down.
Hail spent more time at the big green rock then he had at the others. Not because the names or the stone or the flight or the deaths interested him more than any of the others. He stayed there because he didn’t want to move to the next stone, the last stone in the line. He sensed that his heart-rate was increasing. He felt his heart push and strain to pump his thick lifeless blood through veins he now cared little about. A rush of anxiety coursed through him as he left the green stone and approached the black obelisk to his right.
It was called Taurus Black, a limestone from Turkey; black as Hail’s mood with lightning bolts of white that danced on the surface and then tunneled deep into the hard stone. He looked up at the top of the rock, afraid to look at the 210 names that were forever associated with this one stone. He looked up higher, past the top of the stone, past the haze that held in the city and on upward toward somewhere beyond, somewhere where life made sense and death never existed. He longed to go there. He wanted to hear his wife’s laugh. He wanted to hear the word Papa being said from thin lips suspended on tiny dainty voices. He wanted to smell strawberry shampoo in clean blond hair and sing stupid songs and read silly books and do all that stuff he had taken for granted.
Then he lowered his eyes and right in front of him were those special names.
Madalyn Hail, his wife’s name came first. Without giving it a conscious thought, Hail reached out and began running his finger through her name, tracing her lines, feeling the sharp edges of the stone press against his trembling hand. His wife’s name was on the rock and his wife had been a rock. All the moves, all the crazy business ideas, all the locations and customers and distance and months of separation, but she had kept it all together. She had kept everything running. She was a rock who had determined that the family came first, even if it meant that the girls would be tutored wherever they happened to be and that their education and happiness always came first. She was a great woman and Hail knew she was irreplaceable. There was no other woman on the planet for him and he would we be alone until one day he found her again; high above the five stones, somewhere in paradise.
His finger now fell to the name below.
Tabitha Hail, one of his twin daughters. She was the one who had always called him at work, the one who had always run to meet him with a hug at the door when he came home. His finger worked through her name as if he were perfecting a cut that was already flawless. “Hi Papa, did you have a good day at work?” he could hear her tiny voice say.
Tears leaked irrepressibly from Hail’s eyes and dripped from his chin to the black slate below.
Now his finger was tracing the name of Courtney Hail. She did not meet him at the door when he came home or call him on the phone at work to see if he was going to be late. Courtney prided herself on being more grown up than her sister, even though she was only five minutes older. But when the lights went off, Courtney was the one who got scared and came to her parent’s bed and squeezed into the middle and snuggled up close. Hail would give her a kiss on her smooth forehead and tell her there was nothing to be scared about. Then they would all fall asleep knowing that the boogeymen had been thwarted for yet another night in the Hail house.
Hail’s memories jumped back to the last time he had seen them in Istanbul at the Sabiha Gokcen International airport. It had been a long summer. A long fun summer. The family had hitched a ride on the Hail Proton cargo ship, leaving out of the port at Norfolk Virginia and taking the thirty-day voyage to the massive port in Kandla, India. It took almost a month to make the passage, but the Proton had all the same luxuries as the Nucleus. There was the pool, the sports, the movies, the simulators, the games and the great food. It was as much fun as a family could have when surrounded by 12,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste. Once docked in India, Hail and his family forgot about the business and started having more fun.
Hail’s wife, Madalyn, had printed off a website called 52 Places to Visit in India Before You Turn 30.
Their daughters were eight, so that excluded them from the extremes of The Frozen River Trek at Chadar and the Backpack Across Northeast, as well as the Cycling in Nilgiris and a dozen other crazy-hard outings. But Hail’s family did visit the Living Root Bridges at Cherrapunji, drove through the forest of Bandipur, visited the temples and boulders at Hampi, saw the lighted Dasara in Mysore and visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, along with about a dozen other adventures. The entire summer that year was spent in India learning about another culture.
Then the summer had ended. It was time for the family to go back to America and time for Marshall to go back to work. He would finish up overseeing the installation of three Hail wave reactors in India, before taking the Proton back to the United States.
But school was starting next week and his wife and the girls had to leave.
It was United 9257 operated by Lufthansa, flying out of Instanbul to a connecting flight in Duesseldorf at Duesseldorf International. It was a Boeing 737. There were 210 passengers aboard and Hail didn’t give a damn about two-hundred and seven of them. He only cared about three of them; the three that were hidden under both of his hands that were pressed to the black limestone. He was certain that the other people who were in pain over their loved ones didn’t give a damn about his special three names either. He found that all the love that was left in his empty heart could only be spent on those three names. He didn’t have any love left over for anyone else, including himself.
“Is this a bad time?” he heard someone say.
At first he wasn’t aware that the voice was real. It had been so quiet and he had been so absorbed in his grief that the voice didn’t even register.
Hail looked to his right and removed one arm from the stone and wiped his tears on the sleeve of his suit coat. He then looked at it, making sure it didn’t leave a stain, realizing he was supposed to wear this suit to have lunch with the President.
His blurry eyes cleared and he saw a familiar face ten feet from him.
“I take it, this is a bad time,” Trevor Rogers said softly.
“How did you know I was here?” Hail asked his old friend.
“Well, the Marine guys were pretty upset and they ratted you out to the President. I was in the other room and overheard the hubbub. It’s not a long walk from the Whitehouse to here.”
“You’re getting some grey hair, there, Trev,” Hail said, taking his other hand off the obelisk and walking over to stand next to Rogers.
“Yeah, it’s a family thing. If you remember, my Dad was grey as a goose by the time he was forty.”
“I remember. My Dad use to give him shit about it,” Hail said.
“And you look like you put on a few pounds,” Rogers scored back at Hail. “You were in better shape the last time I saw you at the…” Rogers’s voice trailed off into an uncomfortable silence.