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By Root 1128 0

time before he had an accident. He presumed that, by the time he was forty, he would have been flying an Airbus 320 or a Boeing 737. He’d be on track to be captaining triple-seven heavies internationally, flying between Philadelphia and Rome or San Francisco and Tokyo. He had been born in 1972 and graduated from college in 1994. But it had taken him until 1998 to finish flight school, because twice he ran out of money and had to find other jobs to fund his flying: Once it was banging nails into shoddily built town houses in a development in Orlando, Florida. Next it was as a bellman at a hotel in Disney World. Anything to make some money and be near the flight school. He and Emily met his first year as a first officer, when he was flying Dash 8 turboprops between Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and by 2001 he was married and convinced his career was back on track. But advancement as a pilot is based entirely on seniority, and his airline suffered as much as any carrier after 9/11; he was among the junior pilots laid off in 2002, losing his job while Emily was beginning her third trimester with twins. He would finally latch on with another airline in early 2003, and took comfort in the idea that unemployment had meant he and Emily together had diapered and fed the twins their first few months in this world. Emily had been on maternity leave from the law firm for three months and he had been out of work nine. He had loved that period, though both he and Emily had fretted over money. But it also meant that, when he was forty years old and Flight 1611 was flipped by a wave in Lake Champlain, he was still flying regional jets.

Emily thought Chip was functioning rather well most of the time—at least on the surface, he was. Some days, it even seemed as if he were getting better. Not all of the time, of course. Far from it. But most of the time. She noted carefully, as if she were a physician or nurse, that it seemed to be the smallest of things that might set him off. After he had sent some signed documents back to the airline and the pilots’ union via Federal Express, he confessed to having had an almost disabling occurrence of heart palpitations: Federal Express meant airplanes, and there had been that Tom Hanks movie with that all too grim scene of a plane augering into a body of water—which brought back to him his own failed ditching. He said he had sat in the car for forty-five minutes after sending the papers, trying to catch his breath. He admitted that he had almost driven himself to the emergency room at the hospital in Littleton, and she had felt bad that she hadn’t been there for him.

Actually, she felt a little guilty that she wasn’t with him most days as he worked all alone in their new house, tackling the small and large projects. She encouraged him to take time off and drive into town to join her for lunch, but always he passed. One morning she suggested, her voice as offhand and casual as she could make it, that he visit a career counselor to see what else he might want to do with his life—but only, of course, when he was ready. She tried to respect his fragility and his need to withdraw from the world. She only nodded when he said he was fine—absolutely fine—at home.

Home. She understood this Victorian on a hill in a distant corner of the White Mountains was now their home, but in her office in Littleton she felt a distance from it that transcended the buyer’s remorse she had anticipated. There was a randomness to the house that originally had seemed quaint, as if an eccentric old aunt rather than a trained architect had designed it, but now seemed at once useless and disturbing. Why was the third-floor attic inaccessible from the two third-floor bedrooms? What really was the purpose of those rickety stairs that ran from a kitchen nook to a shadowy corner of the second floor? And then there was the Dunmores’ absolutely horrific taste in wallpaper: Had they chosen it consciously to terrify their two sons? Good Lord, Emily feared she might have killed herself, too, if she’d had to grow up near the