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By Root 1146 0

have been better. They might have been awkward, but they would have been … present. They would have tried. One of the great sadnesses for her was always going to be that they had never gotten to meet Hallie and Garnet. She had been a first-year associate, fresh from law school, and Chip was a young first officer when they fell in love, and she anticipated that together they would build a life that was stylish and romantic and productive. Then her parents got sick, her mother from ALS and her father from colon cancer. She spent three years watching them die up close and at a distance, while she and Chip dated, got engaged, and eventually wed. She was an only child, and in those first months after Flight 1611 fell from the sky, she missed her parents as much as she had at any point in all the years they’d been gone.

The sad truth was, however, that some days it seemed to her that she was no better than everyone else when it came to knowing what to say to her husband. She hadn’t a clue. In the autumn, in the season after the accident, when the days were growing short and rainy and damp, they would walk past each other in the corridors of their Pennsylvania house like sleepwalkers and avoid eye contact over dinner as if they were travelers at an airport restaurant who spoke different languages. Even the girls would often sit silently at the table, worried and ill at ease.

One time she found Chip sobbing in Hallie’s empty bedroom while the twins were sleeping over at a friend’s house, a sight that was almost tragic in her mind since he was a man who never cried. Had been a brick as her parents deteriorated and died, supported her in every way that she needed. Had handled Garnet’s condition (somehow, she preferred that term to illness)—the strange early seizures, the batteries of tests, the diagnosis—in a fashion that was at once unflappable and sensitive. He, it seemed, had always known what to say to her. At least until the accident. Everything had been different after the accident. And it was different in ways that she didn’t like. Not one single bit.

And when something wasn’t working, you changed it. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. Wasn’t that what the legal consultant with the Armani suits and the ponytail had said to her when he was working with her Chestnut Street law firm?

Indeed. Breakdowns lead to breakthroughs.

And so here they were. In New Hampshire. Far from everything that had been her life as recently as 5:04 P.M. on the afternoon of August 11, the minute that Flight 1611 began its descent into Lake Champlain.

Chapter Four

In the days when you were a first officer, after your aircraft landed, you would meticulously go through the shutdown checklist with the captain and then walk around the plane. It was your responsibility to eyeball the aircraft and make sure that nothing was leaking or out of place. Sure enough, once you did spot a crack in the skin near the nose, and that aircraft subsequently was taken out of service. But you never spied anything leaking.

What you noticed often, however, and always on the leading edges of the plane—the wings and the nose and the vertical climb of the tail—were bits of dead birds. One time there was a dent in a wing the length of a couch cushion, likely the result of a collision with a goose. In hindsight, you can’t say whether you noticed the spots monthly or perhaps even more frequently than that. But you know the birds that brought down 1611 were certainly not the first birds to collide with an aircraft you were flying.

Some days you find yourself Googling the details of the Lockheed turboprop that was brought down by starlings at Logan Airport in 1960 when sixty-two people would perish. It fascinates you that when a pair of Airbus engines were destroyed by geese nearly five decades later, so little mention would be made of that earlier nightmare. But that was the accident that led aircraft designers to start firing birds into engines to test their capabilities and the FAA to set requirements for how many birds an engine had to be able to swallow before