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By Root 1212 0

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