back from the lip of depression. Two in two days might be precisely the sort of push that would send her spiraling over the edge.
Y ou may be kidding yourself, but you have always presumed that your passengers that August afternoon weren’t quite as terrified in their last moments of life as other people who died in other plane crashes. This assumption is based on the reality that they knew an awful lot about the miracle on the Hudson, too. They had seen the color photographs of the passengers as they stood in the icy water on the Airbus wings. They had seen the way the great plane had floated long enough for 155 people to exit the aircraft. And so as your CRJ was gliding-though inexorably descending-toward Lake Champlain, they must have clung to the hope that they, too, would survive; that they, too, would exit the cabin in an orderly fashion and slide into the life rafts or wait for their rescue on the wings. Or, perhaps, tread water for a few brief moments until a boat picked them up, because this was August and the lake would be warm.
And, indeed, this view has been partially corroborated by the statements of at least two of the passengers who survived. Behind you, as you struggled to bring the crippled jet safely back to earth, the cabin was calm. Yes, there were people praying. There were people who were texting what they thought might be their final messages to spouses and parents and children. But some of the passengers were coolly reaching for the life jackets under their seats and pulling them over their summer shirts. Some, inevitably, inflated them inside the cabin, which they weren’t supposed to do, and which might have hastened their death when the water rushed in and they were unable to dive under the surface and swim to the holes in the jet. But they weren’t panicked.
Yes, they were scared. But unlike you, they were largely oblivious to the stories of the water ditchings that were disasters. None, for example, had watched the absolutely horrific video of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a Boeing 767 that attempted to land in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros in 1996. The plane had been hijacked and had, finally, run out of fuel. Its left wing slammed into the water first, no more than a few hundred yards from the beach, and the aircraft broke into thousands of pieces. As you watched the video, you found it amazing that only 125 of the 175 people onboard died. You would have expected everyone to have been killed.
The truth is that airlines don’t have pilots practice water landings on their simulators. The reason? There is so little data about how a plane performs when it hits the water that it’s difficult to program the simulation. Besides, what’s the point? Why waste precious training and practice time on an eventuality that’s so very rare?
And yet, thanks to Sully Sullenberger, many of your passengers that August afternoon probably believed they were going to survive what is, the vast majority of the time, an absolutely unsurvivable event.
Heads down, heads down, heads down!
Then, that new voice: She deserves friends.
You sip your soda and stare at the door, unsure which of the voices are real and which are only in your head. You rub your aching neck and the top of your skull: phantom pains. Nothing more. Nothing to do with the shoveling. Really, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.
H allie watched Mrs. Collier lean against the wall beside the chalkboard, her checkered smock dress a little white with dust. The woman’s eyes scanned the students, and Hallie knew they were going to pause when they reached her. This was part intuition and part experiential knowledge. Hallie could tell Mrs. Collier had decided pretty quickly that she liked her and had figured out that she would give a pretty good answer to whatever question had been posed. And, sure enough, the teacher spotted her at her table-the classroom had five tables, each with four or five children, because Mrs. Collier preferred communal tables to neat rows of individual desks- and pushed a stray lock of her sandy brown hair away from her eyes and behind her ear. Then she said in that breathy voice she used whenever she spoke her name, “Hallie, what do you think?” They were discussing what effect having so many rivers and lakes had had on the early settlement patterns in Vermont and New Hampshire. One wall was filled with postcards the class had collected of Squam, Sunapee, Winnipesaukee, and Umbagog. There were two of Lake Champlain (the name of which alone made Hallie uncomfortable) and Lake Memphremagog. New Hampshire’s nearby Echo and Profile lakes were tiny compared to most of the other ones they had looked at in northern New England, but they were still of great interest to the class and there were postcards of each of them, too. Echo was located right beside the ski resort, and sometimes people were allowed to ski off the trail and onto the ice. And Profile was underneath a ledge where a rock formation called the Old Man of the Mountain used to be. Apparently, the Old Man was a cliffside made of granite that once had resembled the face of a cranky-looking old man. In 2003 it had fallen apart, and the pieces had plummeted thirteen hundred feet to the ground. Hallie was fascinated by the way New Hampshire used it on their quarter and on stamps and in all kinds of literature. She wished it were still up there above Profile Lake. She would have liked to have seen it for real.
Now she looked up at Mrs. Collier and answered that she thought the rivers had been more important than the lakes, because the rivers could power mills and help people get around. The teacher nodded and proceeded to compare the Connecticut River, which flowed north-south along the Vermont-New Hampshire border, to the interstate highway that these days ran parallel to it. After that, the class might have moved on with the lesson in how geography affected development, but Hallie noticed that the boy beside her, a rail of a child with a mop of dark hair that curled in great, swooping tendrils, was drawing a picture of an airplane dropping like an arrow toward a lake. His name was Dwight. He was using a yellow Ticonderoga pencil and a sheet of three-hole loose- leaf paper, and coloring in the water as she watched. The pine trees along the shore and the plane already were in place. There was smoke coming from at least one of the aircraft’s two engines.
It surprised her that, despite all of their discussions of lakes throughout the week, someone hadn’t thought of her father sooner. She was relieved that Garnet sat at a different table, because she feared her sister would find the drawing far more upsetting. That was just how Garnet was wired. Whenever they talked of the plane crash, Garnet would wind up sad or scared or strangely distant. These were not the neurological seizures that looked to most of the world like trances-there she was, just staring at the same page in a book or at the same Web site on the computer or at something outside the window only she seemed to see-though at first Hallie and her mother had feared that they were. (Hallie recalled now how one time the previous autumn Garnet had spent so long on the window seat in her old bedroom in West Chester, her knees at her chest and her arms around her knees, her eyes open but not seeing, that Hallie had had to rush downstairs and bring their dad upstairs to her sister. See if he could snap her out of the seizure. He had. Sort of. The girl made eye contact with him and nodded that she was okay, they didn’t need to go to a doctor. But it was another ten minutes before she was off the window seat and back at the computer they shared.) Still, Garnet would retreat to someplace in her mind and sometimes not say a word for a minute or two. She would ignore everyone, her eyes morose. These were not the ten- or fifteen- or even twenty-minute trances that marked the seizures. But they were nonetheless worrisome. Consequently, Hallie tried not to bring up the plane crash-which, she guessed now, might explain why today’s classroom discussion of lakes hadn’t made her think of Flight 1611 until she noticed the drawing.
Abruptly Mrs. Collier was at her table, standing right between her and Dwight and exuding anger and pain. Fiercely she grabbed the piece of paper with the sketch of the plane from the tabletop and stared at it. Then she glowered at the boy and said, her voice only barely controlled, “Did you hear one single word I was saying? Or one single word your classmates were saying?”
The boy looked terrified. His hands were buried in his lap, and his head and shoulders had gone limp like wilting flowers. Hallie didn’t think he had meant anything by the drawing. He knew about her father-everyone knew about her father-but she didn’t believe that he had been trying to frighten her or tease her in some fashion. He was just a boy, and boys seemed to like drawing airplanes-and, sometimes, those planes seemed to crash.
“Uh-huh,” he murmured finally.
“Uh-huh, what?” Mrs. Collier pressed.
“I was listening.”
“What was the last thing I said?”
Hallie knew it was the comparison of the river to a highway, but it was painfully clear that Dwight had indeed been in his own world and hadn’t a clue. The duration of the silence grew excruciating as Mrs. Collier waited for an answer she was never going to get.
And that’s when it happened. Abruptly Garnet was on her feet, too, and she was crossing the classroom to their table and standing beside their teacher and Dwight. Reflexively Mrs. Collier started to pull the paper toward her chest, crinkling it into a ball, but Garnet was too fast for her. She had an edge of the drawing in her fingers
