Читать книгу Due Preparations for the Plague - Janette Turner Hospital - Страница 14

I spy.

With my manifold eye.

This is Salamander’s morning canticle.

He leans in close to the bathroom mirror and his words come back lush, fully orchestrated, thick with toothpaste and shower fog. He squints and sees galaxies: bright floating points, moons, multiple planetary rings. He has the eyes of a fly or a god. The things that he knows, weighty matters of life and death—not natural death, or swift death—orbit his consciousness, but he must not speak of them.

This is the way Samantha imagines him. She has constructed him, like a trick question, from undeleted half lines in documents. Morning exhausts him, she imagines. His eyes, in the bathroom mirror, would be bloodshot. Dreams, dispersing though still opaque, would cloud the room. He would not recall the dreams, though they would leave a layer of unease that he would scrub at under the shower and slough off.

In the trade, and to those who do research in previously classified files, he is known as Salamander, or S, and that—for the time being, and to Samantha’s chagrin—will have to suffice.

Salamander: a mythical creature having the power to endure fire without harm; an elemental being inhabiting flames in the theory of Paracelsus; any of numerous amphibians superficially resembling lizards but scaleless and covered with a soft moist skin and breathing by gills in the larval stage.

He is all of the above, Samantha believes, closing the dictionary. She imagines him in front of his bathroom mirror. He would watch himself without blinking as reptiles do.

Unobtrusive, soft as a snake, he slithers under and around many lives. Around Samantha’s life. Around Lowell’s. Around yours. Around mine. We deposit data ceaselessly. He gathers it: phone conversations, e-mails, airline tickets, credit card purchases, income and taxation information, websites visited, buying habits, tastes and eccentricities. He has photographs: from banks, retail stores, elevators, public bathrooms, pedestrian crossings, parking lots, airports.

Those whom he chooses to observe are known to him intimately.

Their nerve systems are digitally mapped.

As flies to wanton boys are the chosen to Salamander.

When it pleases him, he nudges them in this direction or that, according to his game plan. He makes up the rules as he goes.

Samantha is one of his subjects. In the beginning, this was inadvertent, but then he became obsessed with her and she with him.

She deposits data. He gorges on it.

She studies the patterns of his gorging, and posits him.

She posits him because her own existence requires it. Her own existence? From day to day, it feels to her an uncertain thing, without stable landmarks or fixed signs. Some days, when she watches children playing in the park, she can feel the ground giving way. You have no idea, she wants to tell the children. The swings, the sandbox: they are all illusions. You have no idea how unreliable things are, or how suddenly the sky can turn to fire. The playground dips and sways in front of her. In fog everything shifts with the light, everything floats.

On other days, in her classes at Georgetown University, she looks around the seminar table at fellow students and thinks: We live on different planets.

She is nineteen years old, majoring in American history and government, but how could she even begin to translate her life, her inner life, so that it would be intelligible to her peers? They take safety for granted, she knows, and they are certain that two and two always make four, but this could change. She thinks of it this way: that we are composed of a frail string of learned sequences (we recognize our own face in a mirror, we know our own name, we can put on our shoes without thinking, we know how to make love, and we know what to do—more or less—when we feel acute physical pain), and these pieces which make up the puzzle of the self are held together by the glue of memory. Certain solvents can dissolve this glue: a stroke, catastrophic events. Then we are forced to become scavengers of our own past, searching, finding, relearning, reassembling the self.

Samantha tracks different threads of light, painstakingly, one by one, and she follows their beams into the haze. Here and there, little by little, events can be catalogued and flagged, and eventually she hopes she will be able to recalculate the unknown quantities of herself and of Salamander who made and unmade her. She constructs him from the traces he leaves in other lives. She puts him together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to explain what happened in September 1987 and how it happened and why.

She is mapping her way out of fog.

Look at Samantha: here she is, the day the world changed, on the border between Before and After, in fading color on Kodak paper. She is six years old. She is wearing a blue woolen coat with a darker blue velvet collar and a cotton dress (it is white, prinked with forget-me-nots, and has a smocked bodice and puffed sleeves; it is visible through her unbuttoned coat). She is also wearing white lace-edged socks and black patent-leather shoes. The sign above her head says PORTE 12 because this photograph was taken at Charles de Gaulle Airport in September 1987. Framed by the doorway to the boarding tunnel, she is turning back to wave. Her left hand clutches the hand of a young man, not a good-looking man, not particularly, but a man whose skin barely seems to contain him. Even in the photograph, an aura of intensity comes off him. The man is her father, Jonathan Raleigh. A one-armed teddy bear, once Samantha’s but given to her baby brother weeks earlier, dangles from her right hand, and when she waves, the teddy bear swoops about like a flag. She is laughing, and there is a dimple just to one side of her mouth. She can feel the fire passing from her father’s hand to her own. There are high mad notes in the pressure of his fingers, messages she is picking up but cannot translate. Her father is also laughing and waving. Beside him, a woman, perhaps weary, her smile slightly tense, holds baby Matthew up to the view of those who have come to see the family off.

“Your mother made your coat,” Samantha’s aunt tells her.

“She did?”

“She made all your clothes. She was that kind of mother.”

That kind of mother. Samantha saves this phrase. She saves every fragment, every splinter of information.

“The bodice of your dress was hand-smocked,” her aunt says. “These days, you have to go to a museum to see that sort of thing.”

“I still have the dress,” Samantha says.

“Your mother was not afraid of being old-fashioned.”

Sometimes at night, when Samantha cannot sleep, she takes the dress out of its tissue paper and holds it against her cheek, but it keeps its secrets. “It’s torn,” she tells her aunt. “There’s a rip in the skirt.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“From the hem right up to the smocking on the bodice. But it’s not torn in the photograph.”

“No.”

“It must have caught on something when they put us on the escape hatch.”

“Or later, perhaps,” her aunt says.

“I can’t remember tearing it.”

“We couldn’t get that coat off you, you even wanted to sleep in it.”

“I must have taken it off, though,” Samantha says. “Eventually. My mother must have talked me into it.” She studies the woman in the photograph—her mother, Rosalie Hamilton Raleigh—with a magnifying glass. Her mother is not much more than a girl, really, twenty-six years old, at the time of the photograph. “It must have been in the overhead locker.” Samantha thinks she can remember her father putting the coat there. Sometimes she can remember. It all depends on which way she tells the story to herself. “Perhaps during the first landing,” she says.

“Morocco,” her aunt says.

“We didn’t know where we were.”

“Morocco. Every landing is imprinted on my brain, up to the final one in Iraq. They kept showing us maps and flight paths on TV.”

For some reason, this makes Samantha feel giddy. The room tilts. She closes her eyes and grips the arm of the sofa because a curving hall of mirrors seems to be sloping away from her and at the far end, very tiny, she can almost see her mother with a baby in her arms.

“It was horrible,” her aunt says. “Just watching and watching, completely helpless. It was horrible.”

“Was it?” Samantha cannot keep an edge of anger from her voice, and something else too, a low buzz of excitement which her aunt detects and which Samantha will not let go. Like a terrier, she works at her aunt’s growing agitation. “Was it, Lou?” she needles. She never says Aunt Lou, only Lou. She watches her aunt the way a cat watches: tense, ready to pounce.

“Sam,” her aunt says. She sounds very tired. “I am not trying to compete. It goes without saying that it was far, far more horrible on the plane.”

But it is the different angle of vision that excites and disturbs Samantha. If she could see the little girl in the blue coat in someone else’s frame, if she could study her, would the puzzle solve itself? “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

Lou clenches her interlocked fingers and the knuckles give off soft cracking sounds that make Samantha wince. Lou’s hands turn the color of sunburn. Then she lifts her elbows like wings and her fingers stretch and pull at each other, her hands involved in a tug-of-war. Neither hand lets go. Her elbows droop at her sides. “Sometimes, especially during the Morocco landing, the camera would zoom in close,” Lou says in a low voice, “and you could see someone’s face through a window.”

“It was very hot,” Samantha says. She undoes several buttons at the neck of her cotton dress. “People were fainting from the heat, I remember that.” She remembers, across the aisle, a tiny woman with gray hair. I have a granddaughter who’s just your size, the little gray-haired woman told Samantha. That was before anything unusual had happened. The woman was wearing a black dress. Later, when the plane was on the ground again, when it grew hotter and hotter, Samantha remembers that the gray-haired woman reached over and tugged at her sleeve. Water, the woman said, water, water, although she did not make any sound. It was the shape of the words that Samantha heard. “My teddy’s thirsty too,” Samantha told her, and the tiny woman opened her mouth and then she went soft and slithered down to the floor like a towel falling into a pool and Samantha’s mother said, Heat prostration, and Sam, if you don’t take off your coat, and she took it off then, she thinks, and maybe her father put it up in the overhead locker or maybe Sam kicked it under the seat. Wherever it was, the coat remained on the plane. It did not slide down the escape hatch with Sam.

More than thirteen years later, the lost coat still gnaws at her days and her nights. It has eaten her. In dreams, she looks under the seat and she opens the overhead locker, but her coat has gone, and a salamander with sluglike skin and a smell of blocked drainpipe slithers out. Its eyes are bloodshot. How much do you know? its eyes ask.

I know more than you think, Samantha tells the bloodshot eyes, and what I don’t know yet, I’ll find out.

“For days, I never turned the TV off,” her aunt says.

“You’ve never told me this before.”

“You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

“Now I do,” Samantha says. “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

“I didn’t sleep. I ate in front of the set. But I never saw you. I never saw any of you; at least, not while you were on the plane. When the children were being off-loaded, I watched for you like a hawk. You were almost last. I was afraid you weren’t going to get off.”

“I didn’t want to. They had to push me.”

“The camera got you in close-up at the top of the chute. I’ll never forget your eyes.” Lou touches her niece’s cheek and then throws her arms around Sam and hugs her tightly. “I’d been so afraid,” she says. “I burst into tears when I saw you. I couldn’t stop.”

Samantha disengages herself and moves away. “It was so hot on the plane. It was so hot. We couldn’t breathe.” She feels feverish. “Do you have something cold? Iced tea or something?” She fans herself with one of her aunt’s magazines. The paper feels damp. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?”

Her aunt is startled. In October? she does not say. “I’ve got the heat set low, Sam, because we’re supposed to be conserving energy, but I can turn it right off, if you like. The mayor will thank me. In Manhattan, there’s always risk of outages.”

Samantha feels faint from the heat, but when Lou lowers the thermostat, she starts to shiver. “Can you turn it up again?” she asks. She can hear a baby crying fretfully. “Doesn’t that get on your nerves?” she asks. “Is it from next door?”

“I can’t hear anything,” Lou says.

“It sounds like Matthew.” On the plane, her baby brother’s crying went on and on and on. Her mother crooned to him and put her lips against his burning cheeks, but he wouldn’t stop. “He had a heat rash,” Samantha says. “He’d drunk all his formula and they wouldn’t give us any—”

“Don’t,” her aunt says. “Samantha, please don’t.”

Don’t worry, there’s a blind curve just ahead, Samantha could have told her. She cannot finish any of her stories, they are full of holes. As for the connecting tissue: she cannot tell if she remembers the thing itself, or the newsreel clips, or the events as she has pored over them in previously classified documents, obtained through much diligence and cunning on her part. A lot of the past comes back at her in print, with lines and half lines and whole paragraphs blocked out.

Approximate time frame known XXXXXXXXXXXX anticipated strike at major airport XXXXXXXXXX Paris or London XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX flight bound for New York City, passengers Americans and Jews XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXX codes broken, connections engineered XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX sting operation, code name Black Death, controlled damage XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX Salamander in charge of operations XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXX

That is where she met Salamander. In a document. It was a case of obsession at first sight.

But Salamander’s number is unlisted.

Your call cannot go through as dialed, the recordings say. Please check your information and try again. This is the answering service, a voice advises. Please leave a message and we will get back to you. That is not our department, people say. That person is no longer with us. That happened before our time. All matters falling within the purview of national security are beyond the scope of our … We have no records, we are unable to confirm, we cannot release that information, we cannot be answerable for acts of God, acts of terrorism, acts of double agents, acts of rogue elements of foreign powers, acts of war.

Rogue agent, she reads in other documents, following Salamander’s trail. Salamander to negotiate with Sirocco XXXXXXXXXXXX arrangements for payment to be made in XXXXXXXXXXXX Sirocco dangerous and unreliable but usable XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use for Black Death XXXXXXXXXX backstairs contacts in the palaces and has usable information on the princes that not even XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Sometimes people Samantha is talking to thin out into block capitals and blacked-out spaces before her eyes. At other times, images with torn edges, scraps of them, flicker without warning across the screen of her mind: butt of machine gun, severed arm, child on inflatable slide, gas masks (bug-eyed), breathing snouts. She slaps at them feverishly, she brushes them away, but they dart and sting. Her dream-films are always jump-cut. They do not add up. When she and Jacob—with whom she first collided at the bottom of an airplane chute, with whom she huddled on a camp cot in Germany—when she and Jacob find someone, when they track down some new link, they treat the pieces like chips from a precious mosaic—from Byzantium say, or Pompeii or Ravenna—from some lost world, fabulous and perhaps impossible to reconstruct. Samantha searches for fragments of cobalt, hunting for the child in the forget-me-not outfit, but the blue notes always disappear. She and Jacob piece together faces but their edges are never sharp and they drift into fog. The task gives them vertigo.

They are inside us, Jacob tells her. We could find them if we concentrated long enough. The brain is a massive retrieval system, he insists, a mainframe of electronic impulses. Everything is there, he assures her, if we could nudge the right nerve ends. He rakes his fingers through his hair and across his skull. He clasps hanks of his curls and pulls as though pulling will give relief. I have a crowd in my head, he says.

“I can’t put my baby brother’s face back together,” Sam tells her aunt. “I’ve tried. I can feel him in my arms. I have certain kinds of physical memory that are quite intense, but not a visual one. I can remember the weight of him, and the sound of his crying, and the fever coming off him, and the way his skin felt bumpy like a plastic bubble-sheet used for packing, but when I look, he doesn’t have a face.”

Her aunt straightens a photograph in the album. “Please don’t do this, Sam.”

“Believe me,” Sam tells her, “I’m working on improving the ending. We’re all working on it. Jacob’s migraines are getting so bad, the medication can’t help him anymore.”

“Who is Jacob?”

“Jacob Levinstein. He’s one of us.”

“One of …?” Lou’s eyes widen. She closes the photo album. She seems distressed. She seems angry. She moves away from Sam as though Sam might be infectious. “I would have thought,” Lou says in a strained voice, “that contact … that it would exacerbate …” She hugs the album to her chest. “I read somewhere,” she says reproachfully, “that survivors of the Titanic avoided each other. Reporters tried to arrange reunions, but survivors resisted. I found that easy to understand.”

It is easy to understand, Samantha thinks, especially for the survivors, especially for the children of Air France 64, but the kind of intense connection that her lot shares—physical proximity is irrelevant—is not something Sam is likely to discuss. “We don’t care to be circus acts for the media,” she tells her aunt. “But we tend to link up. There’s a website now, and we find each other. We need to do it, the same way that war vets do.”

“A website.” Lou paces from one window to another, the photo album pressed against her chest like a shield. “This is amazing to me, Samantha. Of course I can see … when I think about it, I can see how necessary, how inevitable …”

“It’s just that there are things I don’t know,” Samantha pleads, “and they drive me …” You have to be extremely careful, Jacob warns, about what you reveal. “The gaps keep me awake sometimes,” she says. “That’s all. Well, they keep me awake a lot, actually. I hoped you might fill in some blanks.”

Lou’s hand is shaking. Lou is Samantha’s mother’s sister and Sam knows everything and nothing about her.

“For me, Samantha …” Lou says, but her sentence peters out.

“Can I see the photograph again?”

“This is hard for me.”

Samantha pulls the photograph album from her aunt’s hands.

“It’s not what I was expecting,” Lou says in a low voice. “When you called. After such a long time.”

“What were you expecting?”

Lou turns away and makes a dismissive gesture which Sam translates as: That’s of no consequence now. She leaves the room so abruptly, she trips on the rug and almost falls into the hall. Sam hears her locking herself in the bathroom. She decides to wait.

There is turbulent history between Lou and Sam. There is something more complex and more volatile than aunt and niece, and how could it not be so? When Lou came to collect Sam from the warehouse of camp cots and frightened children in Germany, Sam kicked her simply because she was Lou. She was not Sam’s mother. This is not something that Sam has ever let her aunt forget, not in principals’ offices nor counselors’ rooms, not in police stations, and not when teachers came to call. “Lou is my legal guardian,” Samantha would say, sulky. She would roll her eyes. “But she thinks she’s my mother.” Her aunt’s tolerance has been without limit. It is as though her aunt has worn Sam’s labels as penance: runaway, disturbed child, troubled teen.

Ten minutes pass, fifteen, and then Sam knocks on the bathroom door. “Lou?” she says. “Are you all right in there?”

Silence.

“Lou?”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Lou says, though her voice sounds strange.

In the living room, she speaks quite calmly again. “Would you like more tea?”

“I have to relive it all the time,” Samantha says, defensive.

“I know that, Sam. Whereas I try not to. I try to stay back here in the photo album, before it happened.” The muscles in Lou’s shoulders and back are taut. “Two different ways of coping, that’s all.”

“You have more before than I have,” Sam accuses.

Lou breathes slowly. Samantha can see her counting silently to keep her agitation in check. “Sam, don’t you think this is pointless? You’ve already won the gold medal for suffering—I’ll sign a certificate if you like—and I’m not even a runner-up. Nothing we do will change the past, will it?”

“I would just like to have a past.”

Samantha’s aunt presses her fingertips against her brows, the way Jacob does when his migraines come. She pushes hard at the edge of her skull. She presses the pads of her thumbs against her temples. She speaks so quietly, Sam has to lean forward to hear. “I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what more I can tell you. I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want.”

“Won’t, you mean.”

“The truth is, I don’t see you for six months at a time, I miss you, I feel so happy when you call to say you’ll come by, and then it takes me weeks to recover when you do.”

“Okay, then I won’t visit anymore.”

“I think that would be best,” Lou says, and Samantha feels a small lurch of panic.

“Fine,” she says bitterly. “I’ll head for the escape hatch, then.”

“Sam, Sam.”

Even Sam is embarrassed by herself, though she does feel queasy. She can see the dark nothing below the hatch, before she was pushed from the plane. “I’m sorry. That was cheap. I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t. I’ll try, Sam. What exactly did you want to know this time?”

“What were we all doing in Paris? I’ve never known that.”

“You never let me talk about it.”

“Now I’m letting you. Why were we there?”

“You were there because I was,” Lou sighs. “Officially I was studying French painting.”

“We were there because you were. All these years and you never once said.”

“You always storm out before I get to that.” Lou goes to her shelves and takes down books on the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, large heavy tomes of colored plates. “I was twenty-four. When you’re twenty-four, you think living in Paris will be the most glamorous thing you’ll ever do. You think you’ll be in seventh heaven, and in fact you live in some miserable little studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement where it’s cheap, and you have to share it with someone you don’t much like, and you’re so lonely you’d take the next plane home except your pride and your scholarship won’t let you.” She stares for a long time at Manet’s White Peonies with Secateurs. “My roommate was a French girl and we didn’t like each other much. She was moody and strange and she despised Americans.”

“Why?”

“She had an American father, she said. I guess she didn’t think much of him, but he wasn’t around, so she took it out on me.”

“And that’s why you were miserable.”

“Françoise didn’t help, but it wasn’t her fault.” Lou traces Manet’s secateurs with a fingertip. Only the black blades are visible; the handles are outside the frame. “I was depressed when I went and I got into one of those—”

“Depressed.”

“—downward spirals …”

“Why were you depressed?”

Lou studies Sam without speaking for some time, and her melancholy eyes irritate her niece. “I’d really gone away to get over someone,” she says.

“Oh. A broken heart.” Sam gives the statement a sardonic edge.

“Yes.”

In the page of text opposite the peonies, Samantha manages to read: Manet’s “Olympia” caused a tremendous scandal in 1865 because of its subversive reinterpretation of the past and its almost satirical echo of Titian’s—Her aunt turns the page. There is a double spread of Olympia, the center fold passing through the creamy thighs of the woman lounging on satin sheets. “When you’re desperate,” Lou says, “you do things that you—”

“I know about desperate.”

“I suppose you do, Sam.” But Lou is lost in the desolation of thirteen years ago in Paris.

“So what did you do?” Sam demands.

Lou turns away and presses her forehead against Manet’s brushstrokes, but Samantha does not relent. “What did you do?” she prods.

“I gave in and called my big sister.”

Big sister. A rush of excitement seizes Samantha: a new angle; another puzzle piece; something that might jar a two-dimensional image into life.

“You were close.” Samantha keeps her voice neutral. “You and my mother.”

“Of course we were. We used to be so close that you couldn’t have put—”

“Used to be.”

“Before you came along. Before she got married.”

“You resented me.” Samantha pounces on an undernote and will not let go. “You resented my father and me.”

“Nothing’s that simple, Sam.” Lou studies her niece, deciding what to tell. “I needed to see you again so badly—”

“Me?” Samantha says, startled.

“All of you, I mean. When your mother had Matthew, I went into a tailspin. I can’t explain. I just had to—Rosalie and you, and the new baby, and Jonathan, before you all dis—” Lou’s hand flies to her mouth. “It had been so long.”

“You were going to say disappeared.” Samantha is watching Lou closely, riveted. She does not believe in chance or coincidence. Every thread, in her experience, leads into the knot.

“I was going to say: disappeared into terminal respectability. You wouldn’t understand.”

A word comes back to Samantha from nowhere. Disreputable. Your sister is so disreputable.

“Were you disreputable, Lou?”

Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”

“My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”

Lou looks as though Samantha has struck her. She stretches her fingers out flat and covers Olympia with them. Her veins crisscross the backs of her hands like string. She picks up the photo album and turns the pages. She stops. She points to a photograph. Sam’s mother and Sam’s aunt, her father between them—a happy threesome—are ankle-deep in white sand. All three are in swimsuits. Sam’s mother wears a one-piece suit, demure; her aunt is in a bikini and has a flower in her hair. Her father, in the middle, has his arms around them both. “The good sister and the disreputable sister on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” Sam’s aunt says in a sardonic tone. “The summer after my high school graduation. Rosalie and Jonathan were engaged already. Look, you can see her ring in the photograph. And I was supposed to be getting ready for the College of Charleston in the fall, but I ran away to New York instead.”

She points to another photograph. Lou must be about eighteen, Rosalie twenty. They are standing in front of a church. “Someone else’s wedding,” Lou says. “Later that same summer.” In the photograph, Lou has bright red bad-girl lips and wears an off-the-shoulder dress. Her eyes are outlined in kohl. Sam’s mother looks sweet and shy. “The disreputable one,” Sam’s aunt says, tapping her own image on the head. “And you’re in the photograph too, though nobody knows it yet, not even your mother. Did you know your parents had to get married sooner than planned?”

Samantha closes her eyes for a moment, the better to rehear the pinprick of malice.

“I figured it out,” she says. “So what? Is that a big deal?”

“It was, back then. In Charleston, South Carolina, believe me, that sort of thing was still a very big deal. At least, in the best families it was. When she found out about the pregnancy, your grandmother was distraught. She was actually hospitalized with ‘nervous prostration’.”

“Is that why I was born in New York?”

“Yes. And that’s why your mother had to give up her Charleston wedding, which broke your grandmother’s heart. That’s why your parents were married in a registry office in Manhattan, and why they moved to Atlanta immediately afterwards, and why I stayed in New York.”

“Hurricane Sam, that’s me,” Samantha jokes, to hide her disturbance. “Cause of wholesale evacuation of Charleston”—and perhaps, she has always irrationally feared, of her parents’ deaths.

“That’s pretty much the way it was,” her aunt says. “Certainly as far as our parents—your grandparents—were concerned.”

Samantha studies the three people in the photograph, her mother Rosalie and her aunt Lou and her own invisible self.

“Who’s this?” she asks, pointing to a photograph of her aunt and another woman in front of the Tour Eiffel. The woman is frowning.

“That’s Françoise. The one I shared the apartment with.”

“She looks pretty glum.”

“I put up with her because I only had to pay a pittance for rent. She paid most of it, and she paid all utilities. Of course there was a downside. Sometimes her boyfriend would show up and I’d have to find somewhere else for the night.”

“Françoise,” Samantha says. “That’s a funny coincidence. There’s a Françoise who just contacted me through the website, the Flight 64 website. She lives in Paris.”

“It’s a very common name.”

“Did I meet her? Your roommate? Did we visit your apartment?”

“No, you stayed in a hotel.”

“Would she have known—your Françoise—that you had relatives on the flight?”

“It was her TV set that I was glued to for days, but then I moved out anyway to collect you in Germany.”

“And then we flew back to Charleston,” Sam says.

“You remember that?”

Sam remembers verandas, porch swings, jasmine. She remembers planes that exploded every night. She remembers tantrums. She remembers throwing things at her grandparents and at her aunt. “I remember we didn’t last long in Charleston.”

“No.”

“And then you and Grandma Hamilton had a big fight, and you brought me here to New York.”

“Yes,” Lou says sadly.

“You should have known it would never work,” Samantha says.

She remembers years of shuttling between her aunt Lou in New York and her grandparents in Charleston, fighting with all of them, always moody, always in trouble at school, until her grandparents paid for a boarding school in Vermont, which seemed to them an institution both sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently far away, and there Samantha discovered American history and American government, and then she discovered obsession. She became obsessed with the politics of hijacked planes and with the capacity of press and public for quick forgetting, and with the quiet erasure of events from government records. She decided that Washington, D.C., was where she needed to be, and she applied to Georgetown University and was accepted.

Samantha holds the magnifying glass again to the shot of the family boarding the plane. “Why is my father watching you like that?”

“I had the camera,” her aunt says.

“Why is my mother watching my father like that? She’s worried about something. What is she worried about?”

“Your mother never liked traveling much,” her aunt says.

Samantha jumps up and walks out to Lou’s kitchen and looks in her fridge and rummages there as though a different possible past is hidden somewhere behind the milk carton. Her head is deep inside the white-enameled cold. “If she hadn’t begged them to come to Paris, we would never have been on that flight,” Samantha says in a low voice to the back wall of the refrigerator, trying out the words. They bounce back from a tub of butter. She shuts the fridge door. She goes back into the living room and picks up the photo album and puts it down and goes out to the kitchen again. She goes to the sink. She turns on the cold tap, then the hot. She lets both of them run full blast. She watches her life running down the drain.

Her aunt follows and puts her hands on Samantha’s shoulders. Samantha has a sudden violent wish to push Lou’s hands into the Cuisinart and turn it on. “Grandma Hamilton calls you the black sheep of the family,” she says, wanting to draw blood. “You slept around.” The tap water is plunging ferociously down the drain. “There would even have been a baby, Grandma says, if the family hadn’t taken care of the matter.”

Sam can see the sudden pain in Lou’s eyes, but nevertheless the eyes rest on her niece’s face, calm and assessing, disappointed perhaps. Is she embarrassed for me? Sam asks herself. This makes her furious. She puts her head under the rush of water and hears chance. It roars like Niagara. She can see the fog, angry-colored, that hangs over Porte 12, between her aunt’s camera and herself. There is something about the camera that sends rockets of anger scudding under the surface of Sam’s skin. This anger beats in and out like a bass drum in her ears and it signals war, but the truth is, she does not really understand why she is so furiously angry with her aunt and the awkwardness of being in the wrong makes her angrier.

“Let it go, Sam,” Lou says. “Let them be. Let them rest in peace.”

“I can’t,” Samantha says.

She wants to show the world photographs that don’t exist. Look at this, she wants to say: my mother’s eyes. These are my mother’s eyes at the moment when Matthew finally stopped crying altogether. And here is something else, she wants to say: here are the eyes of the children all around me, some time later (days later, airports later, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines later) when we huddled together watching TV—we were crowded on makeshift cots in some vast room, I think it was a high school gym, I know it was somewhere in Germany—forty pairs of eyes, opened wide, unblinking, watching the fate of their parents on one small screen. The plane, before it turned into an underwater sun, before it branched into red and orange coral, seemed to swim in blue haze like a fish. We knew we had been dropped like tiny eggs from its belly, we were vague about when. Pow, pow, one little boy said, pointing his fingers at the screen. No one cried then. All the eyes were so dry, they prickled. There was an eerie silence in the room.

Here is a photograph, Samantha wants to say to the world. Here is a photograph, never taken, which I would like you to see: the eyes of forty frightened children as they step off the lip of an abyss.