magazines and reading about famous actresses and their romances and breakups, and discussing them with Annie as though the celebrities were their friends. Bill loved to tease them about it.
He carefully watched the sky as they took off in a stiff wind, and he rose quickly to the altitude he’d been assigned by the tower. They would be landing at Westchester County Airport in roughly an hour. It was an easy flight, and he had to pay attention to the traffic around Boston. He chatted amiably with the tower several times and smiled at Jane. They’d had a nice weekend. As much as he loved them, it was nice to get away from the kids and have her to himself.
“Annie sounds serious about her new guy,” Jane reported as he laughed.
“You’re not going to be happy until you marry her off.” He knew his wife well, and they both knew he was right. “She’s still a kid, and she just started her first job.”
“I was twenty-two when I married you,” she reminded him. “Annie is twenty-six.”
“You weren’t as serious about your career as she is. Give her a chance. She’s not exactly an old maid.” There was no way she ever would be. She was young and beautiful, and men were always pursuing her. But Bill was right-Annie wanted to get her career as an architect squared away before she settled down, which sounded sensible to him. And she loved being an aunt, but wasn’t ready to have kids.
Jane noticed that Bill was looking distracted then, and concentrating on the darkening sky. The air got choppy, and Jane could see that they were heading toward a storm. She didn’t say anything to Bill, she didn’t like to bother him when he was flying, so she looked out the window and then opened her magazine and took a sip of her coffee. A moment later, it splashed in her lap as the plane started to bounce.
“What was that?”
“There’s a storm coming up,” he said, with his eyes on the dials, and he let the controller know they were hitting a lot of chop, and got clearance to drop to a lower altitude. Jane could see a big airliner flying above them on their left, probably coming in from Europe, heading to Logan or JFK.
Their plane continued to bounce even at the lower altitude, and within minutes it grew worse, and Jane saw a bolt of lightning in the sky.
“Should we land?”
“No, we’re fine,” he smiled reassuringly, as it started to rain. They were over the Connecticut coast by then, and Bill turned to say something to her just when an explosion hit their left engine like a bomb, and the plane tipped crazily, as Bill concentrated on the controls.
“Shit, what was that?” Jane said hoarsely. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and Bill’s face was tense.
“I don’t know. It could be a fuel leak. I’m not sure,” he said tersely, as his jaw clenched. He was fighting to control the plane as they lost altitude rapidly, and with that the engine caught fire, and he guided the plane down looking for a clearing to land. Jane said not a word. She just watched as Bill fought to level them out again, but he couldn’t. They were listing badly and heading down at a frightening speed as he called in to the controller and told him where he was. “We’re going down, our left wing is on fire,” he said calmly, and Jane reached out and touched his arm. He never took his hand off the controls, and he told her he loved her. They were his last words as the Cessna hit the ground and exploded in a ball of fire.
Annie’s cell phone rang again just as she was erasing a change she had spent an hour making on the plans. She didn’t like it and was delicately changing it back. She was concentrating intensely, and then glanced at her phone lying on the drafting table. It was Jane, they had obviously gotten home. She almost didn’t answer it, she didn’t want to break her concentration, and Jane always wanted to chat.
Annie tried to ignore it, but the ringing was annoying and persistent, and finally she picked it up.
“Can I call you back?” she said as she answered, and was met by a flood of Spanish. Annie recognized the voice. It was Magdalena, the Salvadoran woman who took care of Jane and Bill’s kids. She sounded frantic. Annie knew these calls well. Magdalena had her number for when Bill and Jane were away. She usually only called Annie when one of the kids got hurt, but Annie knew that her sister would be home within minutes, if she wasn’t already there. She couldn’t understand a word Magdalena said in rapid Spanish.
“They’re on their way home,” Annie reassured her. Usually it was Ted who had fallen out of a tree or off a ladder or bumped his head. He was an active boy and accident prone. The girls were a lot more sedate. Lizzie was almost a teenager, and Katie was a fireball, but she was more verbal than athletic and had never gotten hurt. “I talked to Jane two hours ago,” Annie said calmly. “They should be home any minute.”
With that, Magdalena exploded in another torrent of Spanish. She sounded as though she was crying, and the only word Annie understood was
“What about the police? Are the kids okay?” Maybe one of them really had gotten seriously injured. So far it had only been small stuff, except for Ted’s broken leg when he fell out of a tree at the Vineyard and his parents were there. “Tell me in English,” Annie insisted. “What happened? Who got hurt?”
“Your sister… the police call… the plane… ” Annie felt as though she had been shot out of a cannon and was spinning in midair. Everything was in slow motion, and she could feel herself reeling at the words.
“What did they say?” Annie managed to grind out the words through the shards of glass in her throat. Every word she formed was a physical pain. “What happened? What did the police
“I don’t know… something happen… I call her cell phone and she not answer… they say… they say… the plane catch fire. It was the police in New London.”
“I’ll call you back,” Annie said, and hung up on her. She finally got a police emergency number in New London, that referred her to another number. A voice asked her who she was, and after she told them, there was an interminable silence on the other end of the phone.
“Are you nearby?” the voice wanted to know.
“No, I’m not nearby,” Annie said, torn between a sob and an urge to shout at this unknown woman. Something terrible had happened. She was praying they were only hurt. “I’m in New York,” she explained. “What happened to the plane?” She gave them the call numbers of Bill’s plane, and a different voice came on the phone. He said he was a captain, and he told her what she didn’t want to know and never wanted to hear. He said the plane had exploded on impact and there were no survivors. He asked her if she knew who was on the plane.
“My sister and her husband,” Annie whispered, as she stared blindly into space. This hadn’t happened. It wasn’t possible. This couldn’t happen to them. But it had. She had no idea what to say next so she thanked the captain and hung up. She told him he could contact her at her sister’s home in Greenwich and gave him the number. And then she grabbed her purse and walked out of the apartment without even turning out the lights.
Later, she could not remember getting into her car or traveling to Greenwich in a driving rain. She had no memory of it whatsoever. The promised storm had hit New York. She left her car in the driveway in Greenwich and was drenched when she got to the house. Magdalena was crying in the kitchen. The kids were upstairs watching a movie, waiting for their parents to come home. And when they heard the door slam as Annie walked in, they came running to see their mom and dad, and what they saw instead was her, standing dripping in the living room, her hair plastered to her head, the tears running down her face like rain.
“Where are Mom and Dad?” Ted asked, looking confused, and Lizzie stared at her with wide eyes. The moment she saw Annie standing there, she knew, and her hand flew to her mouth.
“Mom and Dad…,” Lizzie said with a look of horror, and Annie nodded as she ran halfway up the stairs to them and put her arms around all three. They clung to her like a life raft in a stormy sea, as the realization hit Annie with the force of a wrecking ball. Now all three of them were hers.
Chapter 2
The next days were a total nightmare. She had to tell them. Lizzie was devastated. Ted hid in the garage after he heard the news. Katie cried inconsolably. And at first Annie had no idea what to do. She went to New London to speak to the police. The wreckage of Bill’s plane was charred beyond recognition. There were no bodies, they had been blown to bits.
Somehow she managed to make the “arrangements.” She held a dignified funeral for them, and half of
