“You know I don’t.”
“When was the last time you were on an airplane?”
“I was twenty-three. Laurence and I flew to Aruba on our honeymoon. It took three planes to get there back then.”
“Was it pleasant?”
“The honeymoon? Absolutely. But I was scared to death every moment I was in the air. Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“I don’t like that expression: scared to death.”
“It’s apt.”
“It demonstrates both fear and naivete.”
“Perhaps in my case it’s a control phobia-or the lack of control. That’s why many people dislike flying. But I think my point is still valid. Captain Linton crashed a plane into a lake.”
Reseda went to the table with the motherwort and the hypnobium. She felt Anise’s eyes on her back. Anise loved working with hypnobium. She was one of the few women who was capable of using it in food as well as in potions. She was almost able to mask its bitterness with dark chocolate and sugar; no one could hide the taste completely, but Anise was able to make it edible. “The captain had help,” Reseda reminded her. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“True. But here is what I keep thinking about: The family came to us. The girls came to us. Sheldon Carter was an old fool selling a house. He had no idea what we needed. Lord, he had no idea even what we are.”
“What you are. I wasn’t there.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t approve of us, Reseda.”
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
“My point is simply that it wasn’t you who found the family and enticed them north. They found the house on the Web and Sheldon responded.”
“That’s true.”
“And so it must mean something. You of all people should see that.”
“Perhaps,” Reseda murmured, but she didn’t turn around. She honestly couldn’t decide if it meant anything at all. The world was awash in coincidence and connection; usually, it took time to deduce which was which.***
C hip told Emily that the worst of the flashbacks were of the moment when he was upside down, disoriented, the water starting to enter the flight deck through the edges of the door to the cabin, and he suspected the plane behind him had broken apart. But he had other flashbacks, too, such as when he was pulling his first officer through the upside-down door of the flight deck and saw how deep the water already was in the fuselage. He said he didn’t recall seeing any passengers strapped in the bulkhead seats, their feet above the waterline, their heads below it, either drowning or drowned. But he knew one woman had been there. She would manage to unbuckle her seat belt, but apparently she did so before registering where the exit was and, upside down, she went to the side of the plane with the lavatory. She had been sitting right beside the exit, and yet she would drown pressed against the floor of the fuselage, which, as this piece of aircraft fell to the bottom of the lake, had become its ceiling. Chip presumed he would have seen her when he was opening the door had she remained in her seat or not swum in the wrong direction.
What would remain a mystery to Chip and Emily and everyone who investigated the ditching was why the flight attendant had unlatched himself from his harness and not tried to open the exit. He had survived the initial impact, that was clear, and yet his body would be found lodged in the third row of seats. One possibility? He, too, had been disoriented when he was upside down and underwater, and he’d simply gotten lost when he tried to find the exit. Or, perhaps, he had tried to help someone. That seemed likely to Chip. He hadn’t known Eliot Hardy well, but in the few days they had flown together before the crash, he had found him patient, firm, and good-humored-precisely the characteristics that defined a professional flight attendant. His cause of death was drowning, but based on his broken nose, there was some thought that he may have hit his head on debris or been kicked in the face by a passenger. Even if the impact hadn’t knocked him out, it may have caused him to swallow great gulps of water, and that was the beginning of the end.
But the other flashbacks that Chip described to her were equally as disturbing in Emily’s opinion, beginning with the flameout of the left engine and ending with the half dozen corpses that somehow had been flung like scarecrows and wax figurines from the wrecked aircraft and were floating around him like buoys in Lake Champlain.
In some ways, the flashbacks were all worse than the nightmares. “I seem to know when it’s a dream and I seem to know that I’m not going to die-though there are times when I think you all would have been better off if I had died,” he said.
“You don’t mean that,” Emily told him. “I wouldn’t want to live without you. Hallie and Garnet would have been devastated to lose you. We all still have a lot of years before us.”
But she had been coached well by his therapist in Philadelphia and by friends that she should expect this. It was survivor guilt. No, it was worse than that: It was survivor guilt exacerbated by the reality that he was a captain who had survived the wreck of his plane. The captain had not gone down with his ship. She could remind him that he had saved eight other lives, but it never did any good. He was focused on the thirty-nine people who had died. The fact that it wasn’t his fault may have been some consolation, though the comfort it offered wasn’t as healing as she wished it would be. He was constantly second-guessing everything he had done on that flight, constantly reliving every decision he had made and contemplating whether there was something he should have done instead or something he could have done better. Maybe he should have tried for the highway. Maybe he should have tried gliding to Plattsburgh. Maybe his pitch was a degree off. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe…
One time that winter he confessed to her that he had wondered prior to Flight 1611 if in some fashion his whole career as a pilot had been snakebitten and it was only a matter of time before he had an accident. He presumed that, by the time he was forty, he would have been flying an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737. He’d be on track to be captaining triple-seven heavies internationally, flying between Philadelphia and Rome or San Francisco and Tokyo. He had been born in 1972 and graduated from college in 1994. But it had taken him until 1998 to finish flight school, because twice he ran out of money and had to find other jobs to fund his flying: Once it was banging nails into shoddily built town houses in a development in Orlando, Florida. Next it was as a bellman at a hotel in Disney World. Anything to make some money and be near the flight school. He and Emily met his first year as a first officer, when he was flying Dash 8 turboprops between Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and by 2001 he was married and convinced his career was back on track. But advancement as a pilot is based entirely on seniority, and his airline suffered as much as any carrier after 9/11; he was among the junior pilots laid off in 2002, losing his job while Emily was beginning her third trimester with twins. He would finally latch on with another airline in early 2003, and took comfort in the idea that unemployment had meant he and Emily together had diapered and fed the twins their first few months in this world. Emily had been on maternity leave from the law firm for three months and he had been out of work nine. He had loved that period, though both he and Emily had fretted over money. But it also meant that, when he was forty years old and Flight 1611 was flipped by a wave in Lake Champlain, he was still flying regional jets.
E mily thought Chip was functioning rather well most of the time-at least on the surface, he was. Some days, it even seemed as if he were getting better. Not all of the time, of course. Far from it. But most of the time. She noted carefully, as if she were a physician or nurse, that it seemed to be the smallest of things that might set him off. After he had sent some signed documents back to the airline and the pilots’ union via Federal Express, he confessed to having had an almost disabling occurrence of heart palpitations: Federal Express meant airplanes, and there had been that Tom Hanks movie with that all too grim scene of a plane augering into a body of water-which brought back to him his own failed ditching. He said he had sat in the car for forty-five minutes after sending the papers, trying to catch his breath. He admitted that he had almost driven himself to the emergency room at the hospital in Littleton, and she had felt bad that she hadn’t been there for him.