Lowell can hear the sound of impact, the flying glass. He remembers that in his dream he could not breathe.
Lowell thinks that his losses may have become simple at last. He thinks they may have become simple and respectable and therefore manageable. He thinks he will be able to speak of them almost lightly. My mother died in that airline disaster of ’87 when I was sixteen years old, he will be able to say, and the effect on my father was devastating. Our lives were never the same.
He tries out a version of this first with Amy and Jason three days after his father’s death, the day before he flies down for the funeral in Washington. His ex-wife has agreed to his pleas for an extra visit, “but try not to upset them,” she warns, when she drops the children off. “I mean it, Lowell.”
“I won’t,” he promises, and indeed, he has no intention of discussing dark matters, but Amy has her grandfather’s wrecked vehicle very much on her mind. From the window of her father’s apartment, she watches cars pass. “Which ones will crash into a tree?” she wants to know.
“None of them,” Lowell reassures her. “Your grandpa’s car crash,” he explains, “wasn’t an ordinary … it was a different sort of thing. It’s not the first time in our family, pun’kin. I’ve never told you how your grandma died, but she was in a terrible accident too, and that affected Grandpa, you see.”
“I don’t like cars,” Amy says. Her lips quiver. She hangs on to the sleeve of her father’s sweater with one hand. “Did Grandma’s car hit a tree too?”
“No. No, no, oh no, sweetheart, that was something totally different. Grandma was on a plane and the plane was hijacked.”
“What’s hijacked?”
“Some bad men with machine guns wouldn’t let her plane fly back to New York.”
Huge-eyed, Amy digests this information. “Where did it go?” she asks.
“Well, it went to other places where it wasn’t supposed to go, and then it landed in Germany and all the children got off the plane, because nobody, not even bad men, wants children to get hurt.”
“Did Grandma get off the plane?”
“No,” he says. “The plane took off again, and then it landed somewhere else and then it blew up and everyone was killed.”
Amy begins to cry. “But maybe Grandma wasn’t on it then,” Lowell adds hurriedly, appalled with himself. “Maybe the bad men let her get off somewhere else first, because they said they did that. They took ten hostages off the plane before they—That’s what they said on TV. So maybe your grandma—”
Amy is sobbing convulsively, gasping for air. “I want Mommy,” she says.
“Yes,” Lowell says, panicky, “right. I’ll drive you back to Mommy’s place now, okay?”
“I don’t want to go in your pickup,” Amy sobs. She seems to be choking. A thin stream of bile trickles over her chin, and when Lowell wipes her mouth with a tissue, she throws up over his hand. “I want … Mommy … to come … and get us.”
“I’ll call her, I’m calling her now,” Lowell promises. Amy’s eye sockets look dark and bruised, and there is a bluish tinge to her lips. He holds her while he dials her mother’s number.
Rowena, his former wife, is exasperated. “I was afraid of this,” she says. “I’ll be right there.” In his driveway, she says despairingly, “For God’s sake, Lowell. As if their nightmares weren’t vivid enough. You have to tell them about planes blowing up.”
“Oh God.” Lowell rakes his fingers through his hair. He knows he is incurably inept.
“They already have counseling once a week,” Rowena says. “Jason’s been wetting the bed ever since you moved out.”
“That wasn’t my choice,” Lowell reminds her.
“Especially when you are flying down for the funeral,” she says. “When they know you’ll be on a plane.”
“Rowena, couldn’t you come too? Couldn’t we bring them? Don’t you think that might—”
“Out of the question,” Rowena says. She says it quietly, more in disbelief than in anger. “Lowell, are you completely blind? Every time they’re with you, Amy runs a fever afterwards, and Jason wets the bed.”
Lowell, stricken with remorse, leans in the back window to kiss his children goodbye, but they flinch away from him slightly before submitting. He feels the pain of this like a razor blade in his heart. He is never sure which might inflict greater damage: not spending enough time with his children, or spending time with them. He is highly infectious with doom. “I’m sorry, Rowena.” It is his own desolate experience that there is nothing anyone can do. Nothing will shelter children from life. The young, the fragile, the vulnerable, all are at catastrophic risk. “I guess I thought, you know, if I told them about the hijacking, it might explain why their grandfather—”
“Call them when you get there,” Rowena says crossly. “And call them when you get back. Otherwise they will worry themselves sick.”
“Yes,” he promises.
“Oh, Lowell,” she says, not without tenderness. “You’re such a mess.”
He thinks of telling her that things might begin to improve. It could be different now.
“And you won’t do anything about it,” she says. “You’re stuck, and you don’t even try to get unstuck.”
You don’t even try. The injustice of this is so monumental that Lowell can think of nothing to say.
Rowena turns the key in the ignition. “And for heaven’s sake,” she says in parting, “when you get back, get a new muffler on your pickup. The noise scares them.”
At Logan Airport, he leaves the pickup in the long-term lot. He checks in for the Boston–Washington shuttle, leisurely, because there is time to kill, time to kill, and then he looks at his boarding pass and sees the word terminal and a panic-bird big as a bald eagle picks him up in its talons and carries him off, jerking him along corridors and up and down elevators and into restrooms and out again and into the shuttle that weaves between parking lots and then back again until it drops him abruptly and unceremoniously and he finds himself sequestered in the middle nook of a bank of Bell telephones, a cozy and semi-private and semi-safe spot. He needs to talk to his children again, he must speak with them, but when he gets Rowena’s answering machine, he hangs up without saying a word. Instead, he talks to a waitress in Starbucks. “Flying down for my father’s funeral,” he explains. “He died violently, just like my mother. I think I’ve always been waiting for it. Other shoe to fall, you know?”
Later, circling high above Boston, he tells the passenger seated next to him in the plane. He tells a cabdriver in D.C. and he tells the manager of the funeral home. He edits and fine-tunes as he goes.
“The explosion devastated him,” he says. “It was the second time my father had been widowed.”
“Sixteen years old?” The passenger next to him, a woman, touches his wrist. “It’s a terrible age to lose your mother.”
“He lived under a curse,” Lowell says.
“Shock takes people funny ways,” the D.C. taxi driver says. “Takes a long time to wear off too. You just go ahead and get it off your chest.” He eases into the Beltway traffic. “I get a lot of funeral business.” He looks at Lowell in the rearview mirror. “Arlington,” he explains. “That where yours is?”
“Yes,” Lowell says.
He has several evening