Molly leaned against him, and he wrapped his arm around her as he stared at the inferno on the screen. Of course, Jonathan had been Molly’s friend too. The news shook her too. He felt the weight of Molly’s head on his shoulder, the softness of her face. Despite their troubles, her long hours, her nagging, their estrangement, they absorbed this shock together.
And yet he had to talk to Sorel. He had to be with her. He knew she needed him as well. They had been the last to see Jonathan, and Jonathan had been the first to see them together.
He remembered Jonathan’s smile at the river, his expression mischievous but forgiving, his slight shake of the head, as if to say, I won’t say anything. He remembered Jonathan’s laughter, and his aggression. The way he turned from fun-loving to steely, cold—until he switched back again, once he got his way. Be very careful, Jonathan told Orion once, and for a moment Orion had hated his old friend, but Jonathan was impossible to hate for long. Of course Orion pitied Mel, poor guy. He remembered Mel too, but in death, as in life, Jonathan was the one you couldn’t shake. He was the world beater, the history maker. He had a force field all his own. He drew you in. Oh, Emily, Orion thought. What are you feeling now? How are you getting through?
She heard on the radio just as she sat down for breakfast. She was sitting at her white table, with her bags already packed for L.A. She was bringing them to Veritech and then going to the airport straight from work. That was the plan, anyway. That had been the plan….
Breaking into Susan’s report to give you breaking news from New York City where planes, two planes, have hit both towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan—the upper floors of the World Trade Center, a hundred and ten stories high …
That’s terrible, she thought, as she sliced a banana into her cereal. The first plane is said to be a commercial airline, and the second, also thought to be a commercial jet…. Software failure? she wondered, as she began to eat. The indications are that one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center was in fact a hijacked plane. The American Airlines plane from Boston …
From Boston? she asked herself, confused. But that wasn’t Jonathan’s flight. He’d left already.
All air travel has been grounded….
She glanced at her flight bag by the front door. She couldn’t go to L.A., and Jonathan was stuck at Logan. Ironic. Typical. She called him, but he must have turned off his phone.
Her own phone began to vibrate in her hand. That would be Jonathan. But it was not Jonathan. It was Dave.
“Emily,” he said.
No one had ever spoken her name with such sadness or such dread.
“We’re in shock,” Dave said. “I am sitting here unable to …”
Today we’ve had a national tragedy, President Bush announced on the radio.
“Jonathan was on the first plane,” Dave said.
“What do you mean?” Emily challenged him, opening her laptop to check his itinerary. American Airlines …
“Flight Eleven,” said Dave.
She forced herself to swallow. That wasn’t really Jonathan’s flight. It couldn’t be.
American Airlines said that one of the aircraft that crashed into the Trade Center was American Airlines Flight Eleven, hijacked after takeoff from Boston en route to Los Angeles …
She was shaking. She was sick, vomiting cereal-banana-milk. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t listen. She felt her way into what looked like someone else’s kitchen, and she opened drawers, but she had no idea what she was looking for.
On the counter, her answering machine was pulsing, filling up with messages. Laura. Orion. Her own father.
“Emily?” Laura’s voice wavered, trailing upward, uncertain, childlike, and she seemed to be standing in a crowded room; she seemed to be speaking very quickly, asking questions.
“Are you there?” her father asked her, and his voice was furred with rust.
“Hey,” Orion began, and then he said nothing. She heard him standing there trying to think of something to say.
Shivering, she ran upstairs to her bedroom and huddled under blankets. She piled every blanket she owned onto her bed, burying herself, but she could not get warm. She closed her eyes. Sleep was the only respite from this dream.
The house was quiet when she woke. Her arms ached. Her body knew, but she lay in bed, tracing the woven leaves on her comforter, a pattern difficult to follow because the foliage was white on white. She traced each leaf and stem with her finger, and recalled the day before, the night before, the moment before she turned on the radio. She worked her way backward, from banana slicing to pouring milk, to taking out the cereal box. She was nothing if not disciplined, and she kept to her task, tracing white leaves with her finger, working her way backward through time, as though she could repair the breaking news.
She was patient, deliberate, rational. Therefore, she did not cry as she remembered her last conversation with Jonathan, when they’d fought on the phone, and he’d said, “Don’t say you miss me, when you won’t come to see me.”
“I do come. I just did!” she’d protested.
“You came in March. I’m the one dropping everything to fly out to L.A.”
“You don’t drop everything. You never drop anything,” she said. “You work me in. You schedule me in. I’m the one moving. I’m the one leaving my job to move in with you.”
“Just don’t say you miss me,” he told her, “when you won’t change your schedule for me.”
And those had been his last words. You won’t change your schedule for me. Words that would have faded, once they were together. An argument painful to remember for many reasons, but primarily because she wished their quarrel had been worse, that their bickering had escalated into a full-scale conflagration and his refusal to meet her in L.A.
Oh, but he had refused, he must have. In the end he had missed the flight on purpose. She could not let go of this idea. Jonathan had not stepped aboard that plane. In fact, she was almost convinced he’d been too angry. She would delete the messages on her machine, the panicked voices. One by one, she would erase them, because they were wrong. She knew the truth. She and Jonathan had fought. He’d skipped Tech World, and he was sulking. He wasn’t speaking to her. In fact, he had turned off his phone.
This was her delicate logic. Each idea and contingency fed the next, as in a Rube Goldberg machine. A furious little red ball collided with a green ball, which flew up on a miniature trampoline to land at the top of a chute, where it began traveling down again, gathering speed to push over the first domino in a vast array. The last of these black-and-white dominos tripped a switch, which blew a fan, which extinguished a candle. In this way, Emily put the fires out, and saved Jonathan, and the world as well.
To which end she hid in bed. She did not eat or drink or speak to anyone. Far below, she thought she heard someone at the door, but she did not venture down to answer it. She kept the faith all day, pretending nothing had happened, struggling to protect herself, building new facts by which to breathe and live, but she had competition. Working overtime, her imagination took a guilty turn, and reason followed, where it was afraid to lead.
If she had not delayed the wedding, if she had hurried east the year before to marry Jonathan, then he would not have flown out to L.A. to meet her. If she had not hesitated; if she had simply married him when he’d asked, then she would not be alone. If she had loved him as she should have loved him, without trepidation, without tests, then Jonathan would be alive.