“Hello?” The sound of your own voice surprises you. You hear a slight tremor in it, an uncharacteristic hitch in those two syllables. This is not the tone that told passengers cruising altitudes or directed them to gaze out their windows at the majesty of the Manhattan skyline and New York Harbor or the unexpected expanse of Lake Michigan. This is not the voice that one time (and one time only) told them to brace for impact. Instantly the discussion in the basement grows quiet. “Hello?” you call again, a little louder, a little more confident. Still, there is nothing but silence. You beam the light down the stairs at the stones in the wall at the bottom, at the coils of hose the moving men happened to dump just to the side of the banister. At the wooden pallets you rounded up the other day and on which you have stacked great jugs of cat sand and cases of soda and juice you bought at the warehouse store in Littleton. You feel for the switch at the top of the stairs that flips on the two naked, sixty-watt bulbs in the basement ceiling-really just pillows of insulation amidst thick wooden beams-and, after the basement is awash in the dim half-light, you start down, your feet still bare. You wish you had thought to put on your slippers. Then again, perhaps not. You can clean your feet under the spigot in the bathtub before climbing back into bed. The slippers would have to go into the wash. You never go into the basement without the sorts of shoes you are likely to wear only outdoors.
At the bottom of the stairs you pause, the flashlight at your side, and then turn slowly toward the pile of coal and the doorway behind which you found the bones. Instantly you recognize the pair of adults standing between the doorway and the coal, and you go to them, switching the flashlight from your right to your left hand so you can shake their wet hands if they choose to extend their wet arms to you. And the man does, even though it is painfully clear that you have interrupted a fight he has been having with the woman. A squabble. You wonder: Perhaps you were mistaken; perhaps you were not supposed to hear them.
“Captain,” the man says, but the woman only gazes at you with a worried look in her eyes. A chasmlike gash disfigures the right side of her face, and blood is pooling on the shoulder of her blouse. She is fortunate that she wasn’t one of the three passengers on the plane who were decapitated. Her name is Sandra Durant, though her hair-which was honey in the snapshot photos you saw in the newspaper-has been darkened by lake water and muddied by blood: thirty-two years old, a single woman who you learned in the weeks after the disaster had been on your plane because she had just interviewed for a job in Vermont. She worked at a computer company in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and was considering a job at IBM’s Essex Junction facility. She was a public relations manager. Had a boyfriend, parents, two brothers. A cat named Ozzie.
The man is a strong, well-built fellow about forty, and he, too, suffered a horrific head wound: His forehead looks as if someone drilled a hole in it the size of a flute. His biceps stretch the fabric of his green short-sleeved polo shirt. His handshake is solid.
“You’re Ashley’s dad,” you say, referring to the child with the Dora the Explorer backpack. Again, you saw a photo in the newspaper. After he releases your hand, you glance down at the drops of lake water that Ethan Stearns has left on your fingers and palm.
“That’s right.”
Ashley’s mother is alive in a suburb of Burlington, Vermont. You believe it’s called Monkton. Ashley and her parents were traveling to Florida to visit an aunt and uncle there before school resumed in September. They would have changed planes in Philadelphia. You recall the voice of Ashley’s mother as she screamed her daughter’s name in the waves and dove under the surface of Lake Champlain over and over in the seconds after the aircraft broke apart and jet fuel coated the surface like olive oil.
“I’m sorry about Ashley,” you tell him. “I’m sorry about everything,” you tell them both.
“It wasn’t your fault,” says Sandra Durant.
“We were so close to being all right,” you tell her. “You know that, don’t you?” You consider adding, It was the birds that brought us down, but it was the wake from a boat that did us in. But you will never know that for certain. What if you had kept the aircraft nose a single degree higher above the horizon? Or, perhaps, a single degree lower? Would a wave still have pitchpoled your plane and killed thirty-nine of your passengers?
The woman looks at Ethan, a little frightened. Behind you the furnace kicks on. This sudden rumbling, a reminder of the bricks and mortar and horsehair tangibility of the house, takes you back to the reality that you are standing in cold dirt and coal dust. You gaze for a moment at the splintered pieces of wood from the door that once had been sealed shut with thirty-nine carriage bolts. Thirty-nine. A day or two after you had counted them for the first time, you returned to the basement and envisioned the door was the diagram for a CRJ700, your old plane. You touched each of the bolts with the tips of your fingers. You worked your way back to the rear of the cabin, attaching names to the bolts wherever you could. When you finally smashed in the door, you wanted to be sure that you did not dislodge the bolts from their spots in the wood. If you managed to break through the barnboard without inadvertently dislodging one, you pretended, you would ditch the plane without a single casualty. Everyone would get out alive. You knew you couldn’t rewrite history this way or bring back the dead, but it wasn’t precisely a game, either.
“Ashley was smart and beautiful and she had a huge heart,” says Ethan Stearns. “She was a kid with unbelievable promise. She was a ballerina.”
“All little girls are ballerinas,” you tell him. What you meant was, I know what you mean. I have twins and they’re dancers, too. But the words hang out there wrong in the air, all wrong; they sound antagonistic, challenging-as if you are disputing this angry, grieving dead man in your basement. Impugning his lovely little girl’s talents.
“You have no idea what she would have done with her life,” he says, his tone the confrontational murmur that first drew you from sleep. His hatred for you permeates every syllable. He blames you for his child’s death. The fact that he is dead, too, is irrelevant. This is a good man, you conclude. You would be just as irate if, God forbid, something happened to either of your girls and you found yourself face-to-face with the person you held responsible for the child’s death.
“No, I don’t,” you tell him simply, and though it sounds like a confession, you do not bow your head. You meet him eye to eye. Father to father.
“But it’s not just all that potential that’s gone,” he says. He takes a deep breath and exhales through his nose. The steam rises like mist in the chill of the basement. “It’s that she has no one her age. She has-”
“Ethan, stop it,” says Sandra Durant, her tone at once determined and pleading. How is it, you wonder, that she hasn’t yet finished bleeding out? Her blouse and her skirt have become indistinguishable, one long, saturated tunic the color of those wines Peyton kept opening earlier that evening.
“I won’t,” Ethan insists. “I want my daughter to have friends again. I want her to have little girls to play with.”
“That’s cruel!”
“That’s fair! She deserves friends!” he snaps back. And that’s when you first understand what this pair has been fighting about. They have been arguing over your girls. Hallie and Garnet, the two of them asleep right now in their rooms on the third floor. Ethan holds you responsible for the death of his daughter. For killing Ashley and leaving her with no one to play with. You know you would feel precisely the same way.
“Would you like me to introduce my girls to Ashley?” you ask this father, this man just like you. “They seem to be a little older, but they’re good girls, Ethan. Very good girls. Very kind, both of them. They’d be good playmates-and role models.”