A nd what of God? You pause in your work in the kitchen, replacing the paint roller in the tray and sitting back on your heels as you wonder: Where was He when Flight 1611 crashed?
The thing is, you went to Sunday school as a little boy, but by college you were no longer capable of reconciling childhood cancer, genocidal warfare, and mudslides that obliterated whole villages and buried babies alive with any kind of divine presence. Sometimes you and Emily worry that you have made a mistake not introducing your girls to any religious tradition at all-wouldn’t it at least have helped them to hone their moral compasses?-but between your travel and Emily’s work, Sundays really were nothing more than days of rest. Besides, half the time you weren’t even home on Sundays. When the girls were toddlers and Emily was alone with them, the last thing she was going to be capable of on a Sunday morning was getting them up and dressed and off to church. And certainly the geese that appeared before your windshield just above two thousand feet on August 11 have done nothing to reinvigorate your faith. Nothing at all. The thirty-nine people who died that day in the water died through no fault of their own. They were as innocent as the many millions who die every year of disease and starvation. The many millions more who have died throughout human history in war or been killed in genocidal slaughters. The casualties of fire, water, air. The victims of car accidents, train collisions, and… plane crashes.
And yet still…
Still…
Since the failed ditching in Lake Champlain, you have found yourself pausing as you gaze up at thunderheads and rainbows and at the snow that transforms these leafless trees in Bethel into skeletal sculptures of black and silver and white.
No one has brought up church here in New Hampshire. At least not yet. Everyone did back in West Chester after Flight 1611 broke apart in Lake Champlain. Maybe folks here are more circumspect. Still, it has left you surprised. Apparently, the Congregational church in the village has sparse attendance at best. You noticed few cars in the lot when you drove past it that first Sunday morning on your way to the ski resort. Maybe everyone here goes to the Catholic and Methodist churches in Littleton, or the Baptist one in Twin Mountain.
You shrug and dip the paint roller into the tray once again and resume work on the corner of the kitchen behind the pumpkin pine table and deacon’s bench. The irony that you own a piece of furniture called a deacon’s bench is not lost on you. In your old house, Desdemona would doze on it in the afternoons, when the sun would warm the long cushion. In this new house, the bench sits in a corner unlikely to see much sun, even in June and July. You wonder where the cat will doze now.
E mily drove up the long driveway that led to a house where an elderly couple named Jackson lived, the girls in the backseat behind her. She didn’t know the Jacksons, but the twins’ teacher, Mrs. Collier, wanted the girls to catch up with the rest of the class on a science project: The students were growing bean sprouts and carrot tops in glass jars, but they had started a little more than a week before the Lintons arrived in Bethel. Ginger Jackson, a retired food chemist from New Jersey, was also an avid vegetable gardener, and she had provided the class with the materials for their project. She had informed Mrs. Collier that she had extras she had started herself to follow along, and she could give them to Hallie and Garnet so they could have plants at the same stage as their peers’.
Emily felt an unexpected pang of melancholy when she reached the house, and she wondered what it was in the structure that was affecting her so. The oldest, original parts of the house dated back to 1860, Reseda had said. It was a Gothic Revival cottage, though the term cottage suggested a modesty the building had probably lacked even before two additions increased the size by roughly a thousand square feet. Now it was shaped like a rectangular U with four fireplaces, one in each of the shorter wings and two in the long center. The chimneys reminded Emily of the pictures of the funnels she had seen on massive cruise ships in port, and the house’s roofs were slate and descended gently like sand dunes. A snug and inviting bay window anchored each tip of the U, and Emily could imagine one of her daughters curled up with a book in each of the window seats.
And that, she understood suddenly, was why she was feeling a great pang of sadness. This was the sort of house she wanted-not the melancholy crypt she and Chip had bought.
“Does she know we’re coming for the plants?” Hallie asked her mother from the backseat of the car.
“I called and left a message,” Emily answered. She coasted to a stop beside the garage. “But it doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” she said, talking to herself as much as she was informing her daughters. She climbed from the Volvo and looked around. No sign of any other vehicles. She walked gingerly over the ice on the driveway and peered through one of the glass windows in the garage door. There was no car in either bay.
“I’m sorry, girls,” she said when she returned, settling back in behind the wheel. “We’ll have to try again another day.”
“Are you disappointed?” Garnet asked her.
“Oh, only for you girls,” she said, worried that her own disenchantment must have crept into her voice.
Garnet shrugged. Hallie had her chin in her hand. “We’ll probably just come back tomorrow,” she said. “Or the next day. Why not? There’s not a whole lot else to do around here.”
“Sometimes when I went to New Hampshire to visit my grandmother, I felt exactly the same way,” Emily confessed. “The stores were boring, there was no TV reception. I didn’t know the kids there so I didn’t have any friends. But the place kind of grew on me.”
“You were just visiting, Mom.”
“I know. But…” She stopped speaking when she heard Hallie’s small sniffle, and she turned her full attention on the child. The girl missed her friends in West Chester. Both twins did. “Oh, sweetie, I know it’s hard. But you’ll meet kids, I know you will. You’ll make new friends. I promise.”
Hallie nodded and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. Garnet patted her sister on the knee. And neither girl said a word. If they couldn’t put into concrete sentences the reasons why their family had moved, they understood how brittle their father had become and the need to retreat from Pennsylvania. From civilization. And they accepted that, because they were his children, this move was a part of their lot.
The notion made Emily want to cry, too.
Y ou find yourself studying the transcript of the final seconds of your final flight and hearing over and over in your head the actual recording that was played in the NTSB hearing. You sat through all three days of the investigation, you listened to the tapes, you watched the computer simulations. You were transfixed by the cell phone video made by a tourist who happened to have been eating an ice cream cone at the Burlington boathouse when you ditched your plane in the water. (She would drop the ice cream on the wooden dock when she saw the regional jet bearing down amidst the boats on the lake.) Then, those nights on the news, you watched yourself in the hearing room staring at that video or listening to testimony or-one day-testifying yourself, and you were struck both by how much your hair had thinned and by how impassive you seemed in your rolling chair beside that long mahogany table. You wore your uniform (again, a last time) when you testified.
You always sounded calm and controlled in the recording. You never raised your voice. You never panicked. Same with your first officer. Amy, like you, was a study in professionalism. Yes, she screamed reflexively when the wave careened into the wingtip of the jet and you went perpendicular to the water. But you didn’t. You didn’t curse, you didn’t cry out (though the woman recording the cell phone video certainly did, exclaiming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s flipping! It’s flipping!”). You kept your composure even then, even when death appeared imminent. There was an involuntary grunt because the sensation was not unlike being punched hard in the stomach and the chest, and the yoke slammed up into your thumbs with such force that it’s a small miracle they didn’t break. But otherwise you stayed with your controls until all control was completely out of your hands. You flew your aircraft until, pure and simple, you couldn’t.
And then, the day after the crash, you endured the interrogation by the NTSB. It was all about alcohol, sleep, and food. Thank God, you recall thinking at the time, you hadn’t had even a glass of wine the night before the plane hit the birds. And you clicked shut your hotel door that evening and fell asleep watching a Red Sox game on a hotel cable station. When you flew your three legs that day, you had been sober and well rested; you had eaten well.
People have told you that you would have had a better chance of succeeding that August afternoon in an Airbus than in a CRJ, because the Airbus uses more fly-by-wire technology: A computer prevents a pilot from flying either too fast or too slowly and assures that the aircraft’s pitch and turn angles never exceed the plane’s capabilities. But the issue wasn’t bringing the plane safely to the lake: You did that. You and Amy did that together. In the end, the issue was, son of a bitch, that wave.
