The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [63]
The man is a strong, well-built fellow about forty, and he, too, suffered a horrific head wound: His forehead looks as if someone drilled a hole in it the size of a flute. His biceps stretch the fabric of his green short-sleeved polo shirt. His handshake is solid.
“You’re Ashley’s dad,” you say, referring to the child with the Dora the Explorer backpack. Again, you saw a photo in the newspaper. After he releases your hand, you glance down at the drops of lake water that Ethan Stearns has left on your fingers and palm.
“That’s right.”
Ashley’s mother is alive in a suburb of Burlington, Vermont. You believe it’s called Monkton. Ashley and her parents were traveling to Florida to visit an aunt and uncle there before school resumed in September. They would have changed planes in Philadelphia. You recall the voice of Ashley’s mother as she screamed her daughter’s name in the waves and dove under the surface of Lake Champlain over and over in the seconds after the aircraft broke apart and jet fuel coated the surface like olive oil.
“I’m sorry about Ashley,” you tell him. “I’m sorry about everything,” you tell them both.
“It wasn’t your fault,” says Sandra Durant.
“We were so close to being all right,” you tell her. “You know that, don’t you?” You consider adding, It was the birds that brought us down, but it was the wake from a boat that did us in. But you will never know that for certain. What if you had kept the aircraft nose a single degree higher above the horizon? Or, perhaps, a single degree lower? Would a wave still have pitchpoled your plane and killed thirty-nine of your passengers?
The woman looks at Ethan, a little frightened. Behind you the furnace kicks on. This sudden rumbling, a reminder of the bricks and mortar and horsehair tangibility of the house, takes you back to the reality that you are standing in cold dirt and coal dust. You gaze for a moment at the splintered pieces of wood from the door that once had been sealed shut with thirty-nine carriage bolts. Thirty-nine. A day or two after you had counted them for the first time, you returned to the basement and envisioned the door was the diagram for a CRJ700, your old plane. You touched each of the bolts with the tips of your fingers. You worked your way back to the rear of the cabin, attaching names to the bolts wherever you could. When you finally smashed in the door, you wanted to be sure that you did not dislodge the bolts from their spots in the wood. If you managed to break through the barnboard without inadvertently dislodging one, you pretended, you would ditch the plane without a single casualty. Everyone would get out alive. You knew you couldn’t rewrite history this way or bring back the dead, but it wasn’t precisely a game, either.
“Ashley was smart and beautiful and she had a huge heart,” says Ethan Stearns. “She was a kid with unbelievable promise. She was a ballerina.”
“All little girls are ballerinas,” you tell him. What you meant was, I know what you mean. I have twins and they’re dancers, too. But the words hang out there wrong in the air, all wrong; they sound antagonistic, challenging—as if you are disputing this angry, grieving dead man in your basement. Impugning his lovely little girl’s talents.
“You have no idea what she would have done with her life,” he says, his tone the confrontational murmur that first drew you from sleep. His hatred for you permeates every syllable. He blames you for his child’s death. The fact that he is dead, too, is irrelevant. This is a good man, you conclude. You would be just as irate if, God forbid, something happened to either of your girls and you found yourself face-to-face with the person you held responsible for the child’s death.
“No, I don’t,” you tell him simply, and though it sounds like a confession, you do not bow your head. You meet him eye to eye.