In the Unlikely Event

—

SUZANNE, in her yellow rain slicker and white rubber boots, was waiting on the front steps of Miri’s house, a polka-dot umbrella opened over her head though it was hardly raining by the time Miri got home. “Where were you?” Suzanne asked.

“At Natalie’s.”

“Did you hear?”

“Yes, it’s horrible.”

“I know, but at least they say Betsy is still alive and so is Mrs. Foster. They’re both at Saint Elizabeth’s. My mother’s on duty this afternoon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The crash. It hit the apartment building next to the Fosters’ and set their house on fire. Penny…she didn’t get out. Mrs. Foster tried, but the fire…”

Miri slumped to the porch steps, her hand over her mouth. She tasted bile coming up.

“Mother of god…you didn’t know?”

Miri shook her head. It wasn’t possible. It had to be a mistake. But even as she thought it, wished it, she knew it was true.

—

“BAD THINGS HAPPEN in threes,” Irene said that night, doling out homemade vegetable soup and passing around warm bread—not that anyone was hungry, but Irene knew how to tempt them.

“Stop it, Mama,” Rusty said. “You’re scaring Miri.”

“Darling,” Irene said to Miri, “am I scaring you?”

“No!” Miri said defiantly. But she’d never get Irene’s superstitions out of her head.

Later Suzanne came by again, to go with Miri to the site of the crash, even though Rusty objected. “There’s no reason in hell for you to go there. You’ve seen one plane crash. Why do you have to see another?”

“Because the Fosters lived in that house,” Miri argued. “Because a week ago we were babysitting Betsy and Penny and now Penny is dead and Betsy is burned.” Her voice caught, thinking of how Penny always folded her little eyeglasses and placed them on her bedside table before she went to sleep. And Betsy’s tiny pink toenails, newly polished, making her toes look like little shrimp. Maybe Mrs. Foster knew to worry. Maybe she’d had a sixth sense about an impending disaster. She’d heard mothers know these things instinctively.

“There’s nothing to see,” Rusty told them. “Just rubble and burned buildings.”

“We have to go,” Suzanne said.

Rusty pursed her lips, closed her eyes, took a deep breath and reconsidered. “Just don’t be too long. I want a promise on that.”

“Okay,” Miri said.

“Be back before eight o’clock.”

Suzanne said, “I promised my mother the same.”

Rusty nodded. “And take an umbrella.”

—

A CHILL WIND SWEPT the open corner of South and Williamson streets. At the site, floodlights, combined with the fog and the light rain, sent up an eerie glow. Miri and Suzanne stood close. There was nothing to say. Nothing that would make sense of this.

On the ground floor of the Fosters’ house there used to be a candy store, popular with the St. Mary’s kids. Now there was a burned-out shell with no roof, and piles of rubble. There was no sign that it was hit by a plane. It could have been any kind of explosion. Except for the piece of the tail. Not that Miri could see it, but everyone said it was there. Somewhere.

“They say she had to choose between her children,” a woman said to her companion. “She couldn’t save them both. Can you imagine?” Was she talking about Mrs. Foster or someone else? Miri didn’t want to think of Mrs. Foster trying to decide—eeny, meeny, miney, moe…

Suddenly Mason was behind her, his hands on her shoulders. “Hey…”

She whipped around. She’d thought he was at work.

“I have a friend who lived in that house,” he said quietly. “The one that’s gone now.”

Miri and Suzanne both looked at him.

“Polina,” he said. “She works at Janet. She has a little boy. Sometimes she kept Fred overnight.”

“Are they okay?”

He shrugged. “They lost all their stuff. They have no place to live but they weren’t home when the plane crashed, so I guess you could say they’re okay.”

Miri didn’t know how to reply except to squeeze his hand to acknowledge his feelings. She wondered if Polina knew the Fosters.

“If only Penny and Betsy hadn’t been home,” Suzanne said. “If only Mrs. Foster had taken them someplace, to the library, maybe, or to a friend’s house to play, a friend who lived in another neighborhood. If only…”

“If onlys don’t work,” Mason said.

A policeman moved through the crowd. “Go on now,” he told them. “Time to get home.”

—

THEY TOOK the bus back, got off at Suzanne’s corner then walked to Miri’s, where she kissed Mason goodnight at the front door, hiding Fred inside her jacket. Upstairs, Henry was sitting at Rusty’s kitchen table, mopping up what was left of Irene’s vegetable soup with a thick slice of bread.

“I shouldn’t have let you go,” Rusty said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“It was an accident,” Henry assured her. “A tragic accident.”

“Twice in a row?”

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” Henry said, “but I’m asking you to believe me.” He got up from the table and wrapped his arms around her. “Terrible things can happen, Miri. I’m so sorry about those little girls.”

Miri dissolved when he said that, and when she did, Fred whimpered in sympathy. She unzipped her jacket. Fred cocked his head and looked around. “He can’t stay at the Steins’,” she told Rusty. “Phil’s cousin was on that plane. And he can’t stay with Mason’s friend Polina, because she lived in the house the plane slammed into.” She didn’t wait for Rusty to give her permission. She grabbed a copy of the Daily Post from the pile on the table, went to her room and closed the door.

It didn’t take long for Rusty to knock. “Miri…” The door opened. “It’s okay for Fred to stay tonight. Just not in your bed.”

But Miri had every intention of having Fred in her bed.

Elizabeth Daily Post

Special Edition

ANOTHER PLANE FALLS

Raging Inferno Destroys Block of Williamson Street

By Henry Ammerman

JAN. 22—It was a horrific scene of suffering and destruction, with bodies buried in the rubble that covered the wreckage of an American Airlines Convair en route to Newark Airport from upstate New York. The plane crashed today at 3:45 p.m. in heavy fog and driving rain, plowing into a block of houses on Williamson Street before exploding into an inferno.

Residents of the houses fled, some with their clothes aflame. Every available police and fire resource in the city was summoned to the struggle, but it would be hours before the search for bodies could even begin.

Ultimate Horror Only Feet Away

Students at Battin High School, across the street from the crash site, saw the plane skim the rooftop of their school just before the fatal crash. St. Mary’s High School, catercorner from Battin, escaped destruction, but an after-school crowd of its students were gathered at a confectionery on the ground floor of 310 Williamson St. Knocked down by the initial explosion, they managed to escape before it burst into flames.

Dead and Missing

Six residents, including three young children, are missing and feared dead, along with all 23 aboard the plane. Among the passengers on the plane were Robert Patterson, former Secretary of War under President Truman, and four students at Syracuse University.

Less than six weeks ago, and one mile away, a Miami Airlines C-46 crashed into a warehouse of the Elizabethtown Water Company, landing belly up in the frozen bed of the Elizabeth River. That crash killed all 56 on board but spared those on the ground.

15

Distraction

This time Miri read Henry’s story all the way through. After that she couldn’t fall asleep, even with Fred gently snoring beside her. She thumbed through the paper until she came to the entertainment section, where the stories never made her sad. Gene Kelly had his appendix removed in Paris and was recuperating in Switzerland. Audrey Hepburn, twenty-one years old, opened in Gigi on Broadway, signed with Paramount Pictures and was engaged to be married. There was a pinup picture of Peggy Dow in a long gown. The caption read, NOW STARRING OPPOSITE ARTHUR KENNEDY IN BRIGHT VICTORY, PLAYING AT THE BRANFORD THEATRE IN NEWARK. The movie the Fosters went to see last Sunday night. Or didn’t see. Miri wondered now if they went to a motel, like Suzanne said. If they did she hoped they had a good time because she couldn’t imagine them ever having a good time again. She realized she’d been wrong. Even stories in this section of the paper could make her sad.

Rumors

At school the rumors were flying.

PETE WOLF: What did I tell you? This proves it! Some alien thing is trying to take over Earth.

ANGELO VENETTI: UFO’s—they’ve been sighted in New Mexico. The Martians want to turn us into zombies so they can control our planet.

DERISH GRAY: They want to take dead children to the past, or the future, to show what life was like in the mid-twentieth century on a planet called Earth.

Miri tried not to listen, tried to believe what Henry had told her—that both crashes were accidents. But she wasn’t convinced. That wouldn’t explain why three schools were almost hit, first Hamilton, and now Battin and St. Mary’s. And she remembered Leah telling them how close the first plane had come to the Elks Club on the day one hundred little kids were at a holiday party. But why would Martians come to Elizabeth, New Jersey? What was so special about them that made these creatures from outer space come here? Or was it a mistake? Did they mean to land in New York? Were they after only dead children to carry back in their spaceships or did they want living children, too? Is that what they were going to do with Penny, who liked to dress up in her pink ballet slippers and leotard, showing Miri and Suzanne what she’d learned in dance class that week—were they going to turn her into a zombie? She wasn’t even sure what a zombie was. Something undead. Something that feasted on human brains.