I close my eyes, feel the press of darkness—gravity pinning me tightly to the bed. The thrumming of machines is like small panting breaths. I can’t help but think of Tilton, so easily breathless. Is she alone in the house? Or has she made her way next door to Mrs. Gottleib’s? I do not trust Mrs. Gottleib, who promised years ago to help in times of need, but what choice do I have?
Tilton was a peaked little girl with fine white hair that wisped down over her ears. She is still a pale, wheezy-chested asthmatic who bruises easily and is prone to allergies, dizzy spells, shortsightedness, car sickness, and mysterious fevers. I prided myself on diagnosing her lactose intolerance before ever hearing the term. She’s so sensitive to the sun. I kept her coated in lotion as a child so that all summer she seemed to shine like she’d been freshly lacquered. I protected her from her food allergies—nuts, strawberries. She’s prone to hives. If she’s stung by an insect—not even a bee, mind you—her skin bloats around the bite and is tender to the touch. The mosquitoes love her. In addition to the lotion, I had to add bug-repellent spray—which gave her skin the feel of a thin, brittle exoskeleton. It got so it was easier to keep her on screened-in porches when she needed airing.
And then there’s her mind, a strange and distant world beyond anyone’s grasp. She isn’t interested in anything whole. The world is made of small parts of machinery—flowers, birds, toaster ovens.
Despite all of her weaknesses and needs—and, moreover, because of them—I love her mightily.
We all have our own weaknesses, needs, and tragedies, thank you very much, so Opal Harper can keep hers! I bear the stony tragedy of my childhood—the blank stare of fatherlessness. It wasn’t called a tragedy because my mother refused to talk about my father, who had to have existed at some point. And so I could never claim the tragedy for what it was.
I vowed not to let that silence happen to my own daughters. When our tragedy struck, I seized it. I turned it into a bedtime story, our sole bedtime story, one I’ve told so many times over the years that it’s taken on the feeling of something more marbled—its own monument. I told my daughters, “Human beings are shaped by tragedy and this one’s ours.”
And, just like that, the story lights my mind as if winding through a projector in a dark room. Without the words themselves to control the story, it begins to lose all sense of myth. I can feel it detaching, fluttering up wildly. Memory is nearly impossible to contain. There is the lit cigar, the plane engine steaming in the road, the suitcase handle on the ground. Even with the medications to lull my heart, my chest lurches, but my mind soldiers on.
I see myself as a young mother with large stiff brown hair and oversized glasses, sitting in the middle of the backseat, balancing on my knees the casserole dish, weighted with leftovers from a potluck dinner. The dinner was in Elkton, Maryland, one town away from where we lived in Newark, Delaware. The road connecting the two small towns was straight and flat. On one side of me, Tilton—baby Tilton—was strapped into a homemade car seat, a kind of crib with bars that I’d double-padded by hand. And Ruthie, a seven-year-old, was buckled on the other side of me, wearing George’s old football helmet, with extra padding to make it fit in case of an accident, when she might strike her head against the door or window.
George, behind the wheel, sat alone in the front seat. He’d cracked the window, at my urging, and was blowing his cigar smoke into the cold rainy night air when Ruthie’s voice rose up like a kettle whistle, inconsolable.
“It’s that helmet,” George shouted. He hated the helmet. He felt that I smothered the children, in general. Was he jealous? When we were dating, had I doted on him too much? Maybe the shift after Ruthie’s birth was too jarring. The cigar, just a nub now, was crammed into one corner of his mouth, so George shouted from the other corner. “I can’t take that kid’s noise!”
The chill draft was putting Tilton’s frail respiratory system at risk. I fit my hand through the crib bars and pulled the blanket up to her small knob of a chin. “Ruthie isn’t crying about the helmet,” I said. “She’s crying about the cigar smoke! It stunts the lungs of small children!” It was pollution, clearly, each smoker a factory. I tried to reason with Ruthie, shouting over her sharp-pitched cry, “What if we wrecked, Ruthie? And you cracked your head open on the window and died? You don’t want that, do you?”
Ruthie quieted and then, always contrary, she nodded, the oversized helmet jostling on her head. “Yes!” she screamed. She would prefer to die. She glared at me—her eyes hooded by her thick bangs—and then arched in her seat and cried louder.
There was nothing I could do. She was a fretful soul, a born bully who, from birth, tried to make me her first victim. I had to watch her every time I said no, because she would run to the bathroom and pee on the pink mats next to the commode. She was George’s child. The two of them would do me in—I could feel it. And what did I want? Only to protect my family from the world’s dangers, to keep them out of the view of death’s greedy watchful eye.
“Isn’t that cigar smoked out yet?” I shouted.
George pinched it between his fingers and flicked it out the window. “There! Happy? Is someone in this car happy?”
Tilton was happy, I thought. Tilton was always happy with me. Her cry was only a little whimpery thing that was easily extinguished. I remember the soft tissue of her ears, so fine and thinly veined, how they perched like pink gargoyles on either side of her head, how they glowed when lit from behind, and the crusty spots on her scalp that I oiled up and picked off. Tilton, toothless, grinning—she loved me, unconditionally. I was unaccustomed to it. It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me unconditionally. She did. But it was sometimes as if my mother was searching me for something—an unnameable trait—that I simply did not possess. My mother loved me despite something. I could never figure out what, exactly.
The evening had been defeating. I could smell the acrid tang of sour cream and onion soup mix from the spinach casserole on my lap. Why had everyone just picked at mine politely? Because they didn’t like me. I was sure of it. Women punish one another this way—expressing disdain via casseroles. I’ve never quite gotten along in chummy groups like that. I wanted to exchange information on rashes, on poisonous household items, on the arsenic contents of apple seeds, for example. But they seemed to have no interest in such matters, were too interested in delighting in their children—as if it were a friendly game, a cute endeavor, something to put in a rosy frame and sigh over in their dotage. They all seemed to be constantly singing in their heads the same chorus to some cheery song. Even their complaints were laced with unwieldy joy. It was as if childhood were a sing-along, and I didn’t know any of the words or even how the bouncy tune went. Really, I felt like I was always fighting the urge to grab the other mothers by their shoulders and shake them angrily, shouting, “Don’t you know what’s at stake here? There’s nothing cute about this! It’s life or death!”
And so the party was abysmal. While Ruthie dogged her father everywhere, I drifted to the patio, holding Tilton, saying that she needed some fresh air. I was sure that she was allergic to smoke and nearly everyone smoked—a roomful of dirty factories. I didn’t keep her outside long, though. She was as frail physically as she would turn out to be mentally. I carried her into the bathroom, where I peeked at her diaper and washed my hands with dubious soaps cut into flower shapes, heavily perfumed. Tilton and I lurked around the food table and watched people cough on the hors d’oeuvres. I sipped alcoholic drinks because at least perhaps the alcohol worked as a purifier. Maybe I was a bit tipsy. Maybe that was why I was letting myself fight with George on the drive home. I usually tried not to.
He started fiddling with the radio stations, impatiently flipping before I could even recognize a song. The rain was coming down so hard now that it was drowning out Ruthie’s fit. But George hadn’t upped the speed on the windshield wipers or bothered to slow down. He cut off the radio angrily.
“Slow down, George! It’s raining like mad! Ca
n you see anything out of that windshield?” I was going to tell the story of a recent car wreck I’d read about in the papers. But I didn’t get the chance.
A streak of lightning scissored across the sky and ended in an explosion. For one blazing moment, the sky seemed to be on fire. Even though I didn’t see it happen—as George said he did and recounted later—it was there in my memory: a plane buzzing through dark clouds struck by an infinitely bright bolt.
“Shit! Goddamn it!” George shouted. He hit the brakes. The tires caught a scrim of water, and the car seemed to be weightless, floating. I turned and somehow grabbed Ruthie by the wrist while throwing myself onto Tilton’s crib. The casserole flipped off my knees.
A massive hunk of burning metal was falling toward us. An enormous fiery engine, perhaps not so much falling as being hurled at us. It landed with a deafening thud in the middle of the highway, and the road cratered around it.
The tires caught, mercifully, and the car skidded to a stop. How far were we from the crater’s lip? Were we nose to nose with the engine? That’s the way I recalled it. There was such detail—the heat, the engine’s innards loosely exposed, the rain snapping at it, the steam lifting. It was like eyeing a beast—something that seemed alive—a heavily breathing bull.
I scrambled to get Tilton out of her crib. I unbuckled Ruthie and, while urging her out of the car, lifted Tilton to my chest. “Out, out!” I was shouting. “Before someone comes along and rams us!”
George opened his door and walked to the engine. His shirt was quickly splotched with rain. He turned slowly and looked across the cornfield at a small house surrounded by trees. The airplane’s severed wing had landed on the house’s garage.
An old man ran out of the house, wearing a raincoat over pajamas, and staggered around in his yard. He was wobbly, bowlegged, his arms spread wide, as if looking for someone to embrace.
George and I stepped onto the muddy cornfield. Although I had already wrapped Tilton in a blanket, I tucked her under my coat, a winter coat that beaded rain. Ruthie wriggled her hand loose from my grip and ran to her daddy, grabbing his arm.
It was quiet now. Oddly so. A white kite drifted down and settled in the upper reaches of a distant tree. A kite? It seemed like an odd moment for a kite.
The old man shouted to us, “Did you see it? Did you see it?”
But I looked down at Tilton’s face—her wet mouth, her round eyes, the small soft cloud of her breath. The scene was slowly gathering meaning. This was a disaster. But we were alive. We were safe and alive.
And then I lifted my eyes. That’s when I saw the handle of a suitcase—not attached to a suitcase at all. It sat there on the earth as if the suitcase were buried below it, as if it were the handle to a trap door. It seemed like it belonged in one of my mother’s novels—a handle in the earth that would open a door to a different world for Weldon and Daisy to enter. It didn’t have any logical meaning.
And then, not far from the suitcase handle, something shiny glinted. I leaned toward it and squinted—a jewel-studded buckle.
“Look, George,” I said.
And he turned. “No, Eleanor,” he said to me. His voice was gentle—a softness that I hadn’t heard from him in a very long time.
It must have surprised Ruthie too. She said “Daddy?” as if suddenly she wasn’t sure that it was him at all.
The buckle, I realized, was still attached to a woman’s shoe. A modest high heel, black and shiny, it had at first blended into the mud, as had the dark-stockinged foot within the shoe, and the leg that ended abruptly just above the knee in bloody flesh with an exposed bone.
I pulled my hand to my chest and gripped Tilton tightly. Now, as I ran my eyes over the field, the scattered remains of other body parts were clear. Most startling was a hand, not five feet away, that seemed to be resting on the surface of a dark lake. I tore my gaze away and stared up into the tree—at the kite. It wasn’t a kite at all. It was a man’s dress shirt that had, most likely, popped from a suitcase in the cargo hold. The shirt sagged, wet and weighted with rain.
Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars began to arrive. Reporters—rumpled and darty-eyed—showed up shortly thereafter. A young but jowly cop named Stevenson ushered me, along with Ruthie and Tilton, across the field into the old man’s living room, which was opposite the side that had been flattened by the plane’s wing. Another policeman, tougher and older, took George and the old man to his cop car for questioning. Stevenson asked me a few questions, and then joined the other men in the field. I sat on the plaid sofa. Tilton fell asleep on my shoulder, and Ruthie put her head in my lap and picked at the sofa’s nubby fabric while she kicked the armrest.
The cornfield was flooded with the swirling lights of cop cars. Men trudged around, pointing, jotting notes. There were soldiers with torches. Unmistakable torches! I felt forgotten. Ruthie fell asleep too, and I was pinned by the children, unable to twist into a comfortable position—not that I would have been able to sleep. The old man had a large collection of decoy ducks, wood-carved and nicely painted. They sat on shelves, each casting an eye on the room.
Finally, a woman knocked on the front door and walked in. She was tall and stalwart, with a hefty chest.
“Red Cross,” she said, as if that were her name, and she extended her hand.
I shook it while remaining as still as possible so as not to wake the children.
“You’re doing okay?” the woman asked. She clearly wanted the answer to be affirmative, and so I nodded. “Well, the victims’ families will be notified. They’ll want to come and identify…” She didn’t finish the phrase. We both understood. “And we’ll be looking for volunteers to house them during that process. They’ll be grieving and tired. It’s been my experience that those who’ve been involved, well, they want to help.”
Involved? It made it seem like this was my fault somehow. I wanted to clarify. “We were driving home from a potluck.”
The Red Cross woman looked at me, momentarily confused, and then she glanced at the children as if noticing them for the first time. “What I’m saying,” she went on, “is that sometimes it’s part of your healing process too—being of use.”
I wanted to explain that the image of the woman’s foot inside the jewel-buckled high heel reared up in my mind every few moments and my goal was to erase it as soon as possible with the familiar—my toaster’s yellow quilted cover, the salty belches of Tilton’s humidifier, the nylon of my favorite nightgown. George and the kids and I, we were involved only in the sense that we hadn’t been crushed to death by a plane engine. I was feeling an intense desire to insulate everyone.
“I’d be happy to do what I can to help,” I told the woman. “But we don’t have a big house, and we do have a growing family, so…”
The Red Cross woman nodded but still took down my name and address. I assumed this was for some kind of follow-up—maybe counseling for victims of a disaster. The Tarkingtons were victims too, I thought to myself. Let’s not forget that.
But then the woman seemed to betray me. “Thank you,” she said. “I think you’ll see that this kind of generosity pays you back, threefold.” She put her hand on her heart, a sweet gesture that didn’t belong to her at all. I was sure she’d been taught to do it and had practiced it, but still didn’t have it right.
I suddenly wanted to stand up and slap her. In fact, in my mind’s eye, I did just that, so quickly and sharply that the woman spat blood. I have imagined the slap so clearly over the years that sometimes I can feel the rubbery contact of my hand with her flesh. But in reality I didn’t move an inch—afraid of stirring the children. I only smiled tightly, thinking, Stupid woman! I said no! No, no, no!
My daughters grew up with this story. Was that wise, especially in Tilton’s case? She’d interrupt the story only to clarify that she’d been the baby in the blanket.
“Yes,” I’d say. “Yes, you were.”
Ruthie, on the other hand, openly hated the story. She said she could s
till remember the stink of the helmet. By fifteen, she referred to it as “that shitty helmet,” and I would suspend the story to correct her language. “Language, please!” I’d say, and Ruthie would snap back, “Oh, you want more of it? Hell, damn, cocksucker. Or would you like it in French or Spanish? Merde! Is that better?”
In the months before Ruthie left home, when she was sixteen, it became impossible to tell the story with her in the room. When I tried to press on through with something simple, like “They came with torches to search for bodies,” Ruthie would interrupt. “Why didn’t they come with flashlights? Flashlights were invented back then, right?”
“I don’t know why. Was I in the Red Cross? Was I a soldier?”
It was around this time that I realized I might lose both of my daughters, that they would slip off into the wide world just as their father had. I explained that they were shaped by this tragedy and that they were fated to become poets to express this tragedy. Although I had no deep appreciation for literature, I knew well enough that poets, with so few options, often remain at home. “The world doesn’t necessarily love poets,” I said, “but mothers do.”
Ruthie refused to write poems, on principle. “You can force someone to be an accountant,” she said, “but not a poet.”
After Ruthie left, Tilton longed for her sister and this was when her sensitivities bloomed into allergies, and then became chronic, ongoing conditions. It grew dangerous for her to be outside for long—she could go nowhere beyond the gate. Although I had always made sure that Tilton socialized with a few handpicked playmates, they trudged into the house with too many germs. And how could I allow Tilton to be herded into stuffy classrooms where the kids traded childhood diseases like baseball cards? Besides, school had always been a struggle. The teachers didn’t know how to reach Tilton in her miraculously fractured world anyway. Tilton needed to be home. I told myself I had no choice but to relent. My mother and Ruthie were gone, and so Tilton and I stayed home, together.