In the Unlikely Event (32 page)

Phil Stein

Phil was walking Fred before hitting the sack. School tomorrow, then a day off for Lincoln’s birthday. Usually when he kept Fred overnight Fred did his stuff, and that was it until morning. But tonight Fred broke away, dragging his leash behind him, racing in and out of hedges. Phil chased him, catching glimpses of his red and yellow doggie sweater, as Fred jumped over low shrubs, scooting in and out of yards. What was wrong with that dog? “Damn it, Fred! Come back here.” Phil heard a terrible noise, so loud his hands went to his ears. He looked up and saw a plane.
Not again, please, God, not again
.
A loud explosion. The flames shot up.
What are you doing to us, God?
“Fred…Fred!” Phil cried, terrified that he’d lost the dog, terrified of what was happening. All at once the neighbors were out of their houses, coats thrown over their nightgowns and pajamas. Everyone was running, running toward the burning, mangled mess. He caught a glimpse of his parents. Until then he’d never seen his mother run. Didn’t know she could. He gave one more anguished cry. “Fred!”

Miri

Miri awakened to the sound of thunder, but thunder in February? She ran into Rusty’s room, gently shook her. “Mom…did you hear that? What was it?”

“What?” Rusty said, taking off her sleep mask, pulling out her earplugs. “Hear what?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like thunder.”

“It’s nothing, honey. Go back to sleep.”

Miri padded down the hall to her bedroom, telling herself it was nothing. She was safe, Rusty and Irene and Uncle Henry were safe. Mason was safe. Safe from his crazy father, who’d chased him with an ax. At the sound of a car starting up, Miri pulled back the curtain of her front window in time to see Henry peeling out of the driveway, taking the corner so fast he skidded, the tires screeching. Something wasn’t right. She felt it in her gut.

She picked up the kaleidoscope from the top of her dresser and got back into bed, holding it first to her right eye, then to her left. Was there a difference? Not really. It was beautiful and calming either way.

Mason

Mason sat on his bed, facing the windows of the senior boys’ dorm, thinking about Miri. He’d had an early supper with Jack. Burgers at Mother Hubbard’s, then apple pie. Jack wanted to know about him and Miri. Wanted to make sure he wasn’t moving too fast, that he knew the rules.

He more or less told him he’d never known anyone like her, so sweet, so trusting. He didn’t say anything about their game of Trust. That was private, between him and Miri. He still couldn’t believe he’d told her about his mother and about his father chasing him with an ax. Until now, only Jack knew. But it was his idea to play Trust, wasn’t it? He must have known he’d tell her, must have wanted to tell her, to prove he trusted her, the way she trusted him. And now, as he sat at his window in the dorm at Janet, that was what was killing him. Because all the time he was living a lie. What if she found out about Polina? What was he supposed to do then?

Polina had volunteered to keep Fred overnight back in September, before he’d ever met Miri. She took him and Fred home with her to the two rooms on Williamson Street where she lived with her three-year-old kid, saying Fred could stay there. She unbuttoned her dress, showed him her breasts.
You like?
she asked.
You think I’m pretty?

Yeah, and yeah.

You like to touch?

Oh, yeah. Keep asking. Please don’t stop.

But she stopped when the kid came in and Fred barked. And the kid, who hardly spoke English, laughed.
Doggy?

No, that’s a story he’d never tell. A story that has no end, because every week he’d gone to her place until the crash destroyed their house. Every week. And sometimes he was thinking of Miri when he did it. And sometimes he wasn’t thinking at all—he was just pumping her and it felt so good. She didn’t want anything from him, only that, only to say she was pretty and he liked her. Easy to say because it was true. He was careful. He got a package of rubbers. He wasn’t taking any chances. She was his first and she was a good teacher. She didn’t have to say much. Just took his hand and put it where she wanted it. Took his dick and guided it where she wanted it, which was where he wanted it, too.

—

AS HE STARTED
getting ready for bed, he felt the house shake, then heard the earsplitting roar of a plane. A few of the other boys woke up and ran to the window. In the clear moonlit night, they saw it
heading straight for them. He and the other boys fell to the floor, flattened and braced themselves. Mason made it partway under his bed. But instead of smashing into Janet, the plane must have hit something else and seconds later it crashed into their playing field, taking down the swings, the softball backboard. One explosion followed another. Mason didn’t stop to think—he raced outside in an adrenaline rush and charged across the field to what was left of the plane, its fuselage ripped apart. Three of the other boys followed. He pulled out a young woman hanging upside down in her seat. “I’m the stewardess,” she cried. “I have to help.”

“Okay, sure,” Mason told her, “but first we have to get you out of here.” He carried her in his arms while she kept insisting, “I have to help…” He got her out just before another explosion, handed her over to one of the other boys, then rushed back to the plane. He freed a girl trapped under her seat, and threw her over his shoulder. “My husband,” she cried. “I’m not leaving without my husband. We just got married.” Mason handed her down to another of the boys, then went back to find the husband buried under debris, and barely alive, if that. They were working as a team now. The boys from Janet and the other rescuers, police, firemen, nurses. He pulled out another victim, and another. An arm came off a corpse. A baby was charred and dead.

Then he was being restrained, held so tight he had to fight to free himself. “Let go!” he shouted.

“No, no more,” Jack told him.

But Mason wouldn’t listen. He broke away from Jack, with Jack following, in time to help Mason pull out a little girl, alive but in shock. “Mommy…” she cried again and again. Jack handed her over to a fireman, who carried her to an ambulance, then passed her to a nurse, who rode with her to the hospital. Mason was on his way back to the plane when an explosion sent him flying. Jack dragged him away from the plane. When he looked up he saw bodies, still strapped into their seats, hanging from trees like puppets in some kind of sick show. By then the field had turned into a muddy, bloodstained junkyard.

Christina

In the middle of the field Christina bent over a woman on the ground. “Please, girly, loosen my girdle. I can’t breathe.”

Christina knew exactly how to do it—the hooks up the side, the stays. “My mother runs a girdle shop on Broad Street,” she told the woman. “Nia’s Lingerie—maybe you know it?” Why was she making small talk while the woman moaned?

“My chest hurts. My legs are cold. Am I gonna die?”

“No.” Christina tried to reassure her. She took off her coat and draped it over the woman, but when her eyes closed, when she lay so still Christina didn’t know if she was unconscious or dead, she ran for help and led back a fireman, who checked the woman’s pulse. “She’s alive,” he told Christina. “We’ll get her to the hospital.” He called for a stretcher and the woman was carried away, still draped in Christina’s winter coat.

A small dog ran in circles, barking. “Fred?” Dear god, it was Fred, wearing the sweater she’d knitted for him! In all the horror, in all the chaos, Fred, the miracle dog, survived. She shivered in her clingy red top and held Fred tight to her chest, running with him to the Red Cross house across the street, slipping once, turning her ankle, getting wet and muddied. A miracle, too, that the Red Cross house wasn’t hit. Christina had to call her mother, who would be worrying, who wouldn’t know what was going on. Someone gave her a nickel for the phone booth. Someone else took Fred and handed her a blanket to drape over her shoulders.

“I’ve been worried sick,” Mama said. “Where are you?”

“Another plane crashed.”

“What?”

“On Westminster Avenue.”

“Come home right now, Christina!”

“No, I’m not coming home. They need help here. It’s terrible.”

She heard whispering, then Baba got on the line. “We’re coming,” he told her.

At the sound of her father’s voice, she choked up. “I’ll meet you at
the Red Cross house. Ask Mama to bring my winter jacket, dungarees, a sweater, socks and boots.”

Baba came with meats and cheeses and loaves of bread, huge jars of mayo, mustard, pickles and sweets from Three Brothers. Mama came with him, carrying a bag from Nia’s filled with Christina’s warm clothes. Christina fell into their arms. “Baba…Mama!” There was no time to ask who Christina had been with or how she had wound up here, or what she was doing out so late on a Sunday night in the first place. She was safe. For now, that was all they cared about.

Christina helped them set up tables. “We’ll make sandwiches,” her mother said, more to herself than Christina. “Sandwiches for the rescue crews and the families who will come once they hear. But first, wash your hands,” Mama ordered. “Use plenty of soap. Hot water.”

Life is short
, Christina told herself while scrubbing her hands. At least she wouldn’t die a virgin.

Miri

In the morning Miri snapped on her radio, but instead of jokey morning banter and pop tunes, she heard the news that a third plane had crashed in Elizabeth. She’d been right about last night, about the terrible feeling in her gut. When she learned it had crashed in the field behind Janet Memorial, she threw her coat over her flannel pajamas, pulled on boots and ran the mile to the site.

Breathing hard, rushing by the scene of devastation, she banged on the front door of Janet with both fists, and shouted for someone, anyone. When the door was flung open Miri nearly fell inside. “Look at you,” a woman said, helping Miri regain her balance. “You’re half frozen. Come in, child.”

“My friend lives here.”

“All the children are safe, dear. Which one is your friend?”

“Mason McKittrick.”

“Well, now—Mason McKittrick is quite the hero. Rescued I don’t know how many last night. The stewardess, too, I hear. Pulled
them out of the burning plane. The lucky ones are alive because of him and three of our other boys.”

Miri felt such relief she began to cry. The woman put her arms around her. “Now, now…it’s all right. Come along, the children are at breakfast. Polina’s in the kitchen making pancakes.” She led Miri into the dining room, where the younger children were sitting around a table.

“Can I see Mason?”

“Not now, dear. He’s asleep. Those boys worked all night, fell into bed at dawn.” Her voice went quiet, to almost a whisper. “He’s got his dog with him.”

“Fred!” Miri said. “Fred is here?”

“We bent the rules, just for the night. A brave boy deserves to have his dog.”

Polina came in from the kitchen carrying a platter of pancakes. Miri almost didn’t recognize her in a blue hairnet, an apron over her plain dress, sturdy shoes, no makeup. She looked younger, softer, than the day they’d met at Dr. O’s office.

“Polina, this is a friend of Mason’s.”

Miri didn’t think Polina recognized her and she didn’t feel like reminding her they’d already met.

“What a boy!” Polina sang.

“What a boy!” the children repeated, reminding Miri of the way Penny and Betsy liked to imitate their parents.
Let’s go, Jo!
But thinking of Penny and Betsy made her too sad.

“I didn’t catch your name, dear…” the woman said.

“Miri.”

“I’m Mrs. Traynor. Sit right down here”—she pulled out a chair at the table—“and let Polina bring you a nice hot cup of cocoa.”

“Thank you,” she said to Mrs. Traynor, “but I have to go. My grandmother will be wondering where I am.”

“Not even one pancake?” Mrs. Traynor asked.

“No. Really. I have to go home and get ready for school.”

“I’ll tell Mason you stopped by.”

“Thank you.”

Elizabeth Daily Post

Special Edition

UMBRELLA OF DEATH HAS CLOSED

FEB. 11—Just hours after the crash last night of a National Airlines DC-6 into the field behind the Janet Memorial Home, the third such disaster in eight weeks, the Port Authority closed down Newark Airport “pending further investigation,” and Mayor Kirk has promised it will be shut indefinitely. “The chaos, the horror, the terror is over,” he said. “The Umbrella of Death has closed.”

In Washington, E. S. Hensley, director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s office of aviation safety, could offer no explanation why three major crashes have occurred in the same place within less than 60 days. “It could just as easily have been San Francisco, Timbuktu, or Saskatchewan,” Hensley said. “Why the Lord let it happen at Elizabeth I cannot guess. There is no earthly reason.”

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Miri