In the Unlikely Event

She stays up too late that night, watching A Place in the Sun on TV. She’d seen it with Rusty at the Regent movie theater that winter, the year it won six Academy Awards. They’d each gone through two handkerchiefs, bawling over the young Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Rusty planned to come with her to Elizabeth for tomorrow’s commemorative event, but Dr. O’s health is too fragile, even though Fern is a doctor and offered to stay at the house.

—

THEY GATHER the next morning at the site of the third crash, in the field behind Janet Memorial. The old home is in disrepair, no longer used to house children in need, children without parents or family to care for them. She wonders where those children go now. It’s a bright, sunny day, mild compared to the bitterly cold winter of 1952.

Miri stands between Christina and Henry, oversize sunglasses covering half her face, a cashmere shawl thrown over her new suit.

She and Christina had gone shopping for today’s event. They’d each bought a designer suit with big shoulders, right out of Dynasty. They’d laughed their heads off in the dressing room. Christina is the best friend Miri always wanted. The real deal. When it comes to dynasties, Christina and Jack have their own. Irish Jack, that’s what they called him in the early days. He’d built his dynasty slowly, shrewdly—though he swears he didn’t have a clue back then, just knew he wanted to work hard and be successful for Christina and their girls. An understatement, if ever there was one. Went from being an electrician to an electrical contractor to a general contractor to owning one of the biggest commercial construction companies in the West, with IRISH JACK lettered on the side of his plane.

—

THE MAYOR, Thomas Dunn, who was a Sixth Ward councilman that winter, speaks from a platform. “The fifty-eight-day period that ended here on February eleventh, 1952, at twelve-twenty a.m., was the most memorable of my life, outside of World War Two. Our mayor at the time called it ‘The Umbrella of Death.’ Others referred to our town as ‘Plane Crash City.’ But we know better. We know our city survived the American Revolution. George Washington slept here, as we learned as schoolchildren. We have been and always will be a proud revolutionary city, a welcoming city to immigrants from all over the world, where your parents and grandparents and even great-grandparents settled. Today I welcome all of you and ask that you bow your heads in remembrance of those we lost, both on the ground and from the air. One hundred sixteen died in that fifty-eight-day period, senselessly, needlessly, randomly. It could have been any of us.”

Already, Miri feels herself choking up.

Three clergymen take turns reading out the names of the dead, beginning with the first crash. Miri waits for the familiar names. Ruby Granik, twenty-two, Estelle Sapphire, fifty-nine. Then the second crash. Kathy Stein, eighteen. Penny Foster, seven. She lets out a small, unexpected cry when Penny’s name is read. Henry reaches for her hand. Christina passes her a packet of Kleenex. She wipes her eyes, glad she didn’t use mascara, and blows her nose. When all the names have been read, a children’s chorus sings a medley—“April Showers,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “Keep on Smiling.” Someone with style has orchestrated this day of events.

After, they form a circle and toss flowers into the center. Most of them have daffodils or tulips but Miri special-ordered a dozen sunflowers through a local florist. Penny loved sunflowers, was always drawing pictures of the sunflowers in the print hanging over her family’s fireplace. Then they join hands and close their eyes for a silent prayer.

The ceremony lasts just half an hour. Their personal remarks are to be saved for the luncheon to follow at the Elizabeth Carteret hotel. The mayor makes an announcement that the lunch will be hosted by Natalie Renso, who will be signing books following the program.

Miri looks around the circle but can’t find Natalie. She thought Natalie might show up to honor Ruby. Instead, she spots Gaby Wenders, the stewardess, in her old uniform. She must be in good shape, Miri thinks, to fit into that uniform thirty-five years later. And next to Gaby, the boy who rescued her, the boy who saved her life. Miri half expects to see the boy he was then. The boy she loved. Instead, she sees a grown man. Still, her knees grow weak. For god’s sake, she thinks, trying to remember what her yoga teacher has taught her about breathing in stressful situations.

He makes the first move, walking briskly across the field to where she is standing. “Miri,” he says. “Jesus…Miri…” He wraps his arms around her. Now she can’t breathe at all. When he lets go, she pushes her sunglasses up so she can get a look at him. Did she hope he wouldn’t be attractive?

He grabs her hand. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“I’m glad to see you, too.” The voice that comes out doesn’t sound like hers.

“Can I give you a ride to the lunch?” he asks.

Christina and Jack have a car, so do Henry and Leah, but Miri says, “Sure,” and walks with Mason around the block to his red Mazda RX-7. She almost laughs because Andy drives the same car.

“I’d know you anywhere,” he says, “even with the hair.”

“I’d know you, too, even without it.” He’s not really without it, just has less on his head, more on his face.

He laughs. And just like that, she’s fifteen again. Except she’s not.

—

THEY’RE SEATED at different tables at lunch. She’s with Christina and Jack, Henry and Leah, four others. He’s across the room with Gaby and her handsome husband, their grown children and young grandchildren, and two men who were boys at Janet then, boys who helped rescue the trapped passengers.

None of her old crowd is here. Suzanne lives in Seattle, married to a neurosurgeon. Miri tries to see her every year. Robo is divorced and has a gift shop in Westfield. Aside from two years at Boston U, she’s never left New Jersey. Eleanor is a professor of mathematics at Purdue, married to an economist. She hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and didn’t laugh when, a few years ago, Miri mentioned the possibility. Some things aren’t funny, Eleanor told her.

Miri and Mason steal looks at one another through lunch. Miri doesn’t blush the way Rusty does, but she feels her cheeks flush. She drinks two glasses of wine, too fast. It goes straight to her head. You go to my head…

She must have sung that line out loud because the woman next to her, a daughter of the Secretary of War who was killed when the second plane crashed, says, “What?”

Miri knows she sometimes sings a line from a song out loud when she means to sing it only inside her head. “I was just thinking of an old song,” she says.

“Don’t you love the old songs?”

“I do,” Miri says. “My daughter finds me hopeless that way.”

“Mine finds me hopeless in every way.”

“Yes, that, too.” They laugh.

“My father was a wonderful person,” she tells Miri. “I’ve never stopped missing him.”

“My uncle, Henry Ammerman, wrote about your family,” Miri says.

“The young reporter?” the woman asks, eyeing Henry, who is seated on Miri’s other side. “I remember him. I was at the apartment the day he came to talk to my mother.”

“Henry talked to everyone after the crashes. Everything I know about writing I learned from him.”

“You’re a writer?”

“Reporter, now columnist, for the Las Vegas Sun.”

“Las Vegas…” she says, in a tone Miri has heard a million times, as if ordinary people can’t possibly live there.

The program begins as dessert is served, plates of cookies and some kind of mousse that Miri pushes away. The mayor introduces Henry Ammerman. Oh, god, it’s going to be in alphabetical order? She’s going to be next? She doesn’t want to go next. Doesn’t want to get up in front of these people at all, especially not in front of Mason.

“He was a young reporter for the Daily Post then,” the mayor says. “Today, he’s a prizewinning journalist for The Washington Post. Ladies and gentleman, Henry Ammerman.” Enthusiastic applause.

Henry speaks well, painting a picture of Elizabeth at that time—the fear, the chaos, the adolescent rumors involving spaceships, zombies, sabotage, ultimately of a community coming together. Miri is as proud of him today as she was then. She smiles at Leah. Miri has never been as close to Leah as she’d once hoped. She supposes it has to do with the distance between them, which has become more than geographical. Leah was maternal to her during her college years, when she chose American University, with a major in journalism. But Miri was into trying her wings when she came to Washington, and Leah wanted to clip them. The last thing Miri needed was another mother. She offered to babysit her little cousins once a month, more if she found she had a free weekend. She’d had plenty of experience by then with her brothers, William and Stuart, born a year apart. She’d spent her high school years surrounded by babies and toddlers.

By senior year Leah was lobbying for her to stay in D.C. “There’s not one good reason for you to go back to that ridiculous town.”

“There’s my family,” Miri said. “And a job offer from the Sun.”