Part One: Lost Forever 


         Chapter 2


Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an
anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with
effort. When he lifted one hand from the wheel, his fingers quivered like those
of a palsied old man.

He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though
his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss.
The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him, and the tires sang against the
blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception of stability.

Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took
his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.

Horns blared and skidding tires squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden
deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared
murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words or made obscene gestures. This
was Greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom,
yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent
trespass on someone else's turf might result in a thermonuclear
response.

His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if he were
aboard a roller coaster, plunging along a precipitous length of track. Although
he was alone in the car, he heard the screams of passengers, faint at first and
then louder, not the good-humored shrieks of thrill seekers at an amusement
park, but cries of genuine anguish. 

As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering, "No, no, no,
no."

A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the pavement. The
shoulder of the freeway was narrow. He stopped as close as possible to the
guardrail, over which lush oleander bushes loomed like a great cresting green
tide.

He put the car in Park but didn't switch off the engine. Even though he was
sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of air conditioning to be
able to breathe. The pressure on his chest increased. Each stuttering inhalation
was a struggle, and each hot exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.

Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He tasted it
too: the acrid mélange of burning oil, melting plastic, smoldering
vinyl, scorched metal. 

When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red flowers of
the oleander pressing against the windows on the passenger side, his
imagination morphed them into billowing clouds of greasy smoke. The window
became a rectangular porthole with rounded corners and thick dual-pane
glass.

Joe might have thought he was losing his mind--if he hadn't suffered
similar anxiety attacks during the past year. Although sometimes as much as two
weeks passed between episodes, he often endured as many as three in one day,
each lasting between ten minutes and half an hour.

He had seen a therapist. The counseling had not helped.

His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the
prescription. He wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had.

Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove to regain
control of himself, but the catastrophe continued to unfold around him. The
sense of falling intensified. The smell of smoke thickened. The screams of
phantom passengers grew louder. 

Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls. The ceiling.
Horrendous rattling and twanging and banging and gong-like clanging accompanied
the shaking, shaking, shaking.

"Please," he pleaded.

Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face. They lay
fisted at his sides.

After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched at his
hands, and he held them tightly.

The children were not in the car, of course, but in their seats in the
doomed airliner. Joe was flashing back to the crash of Flight 353. For the
duration of this seizure, he would be in two places at once: in the real world
of the Honda and in the Nationwide Air 747 as it found its way down from the
serenity of the stratosphere, through an overcast night sky, into a meadow as
unforgiving as iron.

Michelle had been sitting between the kids. Her hands, not Joe's, were
those that Chrissie and Nina gripped in their last long minutes of unimaginable
dread. 

As the shaking grew worse, the air was filled with projectiles. Paperback
books, laptop computers, pocket calculators, flatware and dishes--because a few
passengers had not yet finished dinner when disaster struck--plastic drinking
glasses, single-serving bottles of liquor, pencils, and pens ricocheted through
the cabin.

Coughing because of the smoke, Michelle would have urged the girls to keep
their heads down. Heads down. Protect your faces. 

Such faces. Beloved faces. Seven-year-old Chrissie had her mother's high
cheekbones and clear green eyes. Joe would never forget the flush of joy that
suffused Chrissie's face when she was taking a ballet lesson, or the
squint-eyed concentration with which she approached home plate to take her turn
at bat in Little League baseball games. Nina, only four, the pug-nosed munchkin
with eyes as blue as sapphires, had a way of crinkling her sweet face in pure
delight at the sight of a dog or cat. Animals were drawn to her--and she to
them--as though she were the reincarnation of St. Francis of Assisi, which was
not a far-fetched idea when one saw her gazing with wonder and love upon even
an ugly garden lizard cupped in her small, careful hands.

Heads down. Protect your faces. 

In that advice was hope, the implication that they would all survive and
that the worst thing that might happen to them would be a face-disfiguring
encounter with a hurtling laptop or broken glass. 

The fearsome turbulence increased. The angle of descent grew more severe,
pinning Joe to his seat, so that he couldn't easily bend forward and protect
his face. 

Maybe the oxygen masks dropped from overhead, or maybe damage to the craft
had resulted in a systems failure, with the consequence that masks had not been
deployed at every seat. He didn't know if Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina had been
able to breathe or if, choking on the billowing soot, they had struggled
futilely to find fresh air.

Smoke surged more thickly through the passenger compartment. The cabin
became as claustrophobic as any coal mine deep beneath the surface of the
earth. 

In the blinding blackdamp, hidden sinuosities of fire uncoiled like snakes.
The wrenching terror of the aircraft's uncontrolled descent was equaled by the
terror of not knowing where those flames were or when they might flash with
greater vigor through the 747.

As the stress on the airliner increased to all but intolerable levels,
thunderous vibrations shuddered through the fuselage. The giant wings thrummed
as though they would tear loose. The steel frame groaned like a living beast in
mortal agony, and perhaps minor welds broke with sounds as loud and sharp as
gunshots. A few rivets sheered off, each with a piercing screeeeek. 

To Michelle and Chrissie and little Nina, perhaps it seemed that the plane
would disintegrate in flight and that they would be cast into the black sky, be
spun away from one another, plummeting in their separate seats to three
separate deaths, each abjectly alone at the instant of impact.

The huge 747-400, however, was a marvel of design and a triumph of
engineering, brilliantly conceived and soundly constructed. In spite of the
mysterious hydraulics failure that rendered the aircraft uncontrollable, the
wings did not tear loose, and the fuselage did not disintegrate. Its powerful
Pratt and Whitney engines screaming as if in defiance of gravity, Nationwide
Flight 353 held together throughout its final descent.

At some point Michelle would have realized that all hope was lost, that
they were in a dying plunge. With characteristic courage and selflessness, she
would have thought only of the children then, would have concentrated on
comforting them, distracting them as much as possible from thoughts of death.
No doubt she leaned toward Nina, pulled her close, and in spite of the
breath-stealing fumes, spoke into the girl's ear to be heard above the clamor:
It's okay, baby, we're together, I love you, hold on to Mommy, I love you,
you're the best little girl who ever was. Shaking down, down, down through the
Colorado night, her voice full of emotion but devoid of panic, she had surely
sought out Chrissie too: It's all right, I'm with you, honey, hold my hand, I
love you so much, I'm so very proud of you, we're together, it's all right,
we'll always be together. 

In the Honda alongside the freeway, Joe could hear Michelle's voice almost
as if from memory, as though he had been with her as she had comforted the
children. He wanted desperately to believe that his daughters had been able to
draw upon the strength of the exceptional woman who had been their mother. He
needed to know that the last thing the girls heard in this world was Michelle
telling them how very precious they were, how cherished.

The airliner met the meadow with such devastating impact that the sound was
heard more than twenty miles away in the rural Colorado vastness, stirring
hawks and owls and eagles out of trees and into flight, startling weary
ranchers from their armchairs and early beds.

In the Honda, Joe Carpenter let out a muffled cry. He doubled over as if he
had been struck hard in the chest.

The crash was catastrophic. Flight 353 exploded on impact and tumbled
across the meadow, disintegrating into thousands of scorched and twisted
fragments, spewing orange gouts of burning jet fuel that set fire to evergreens
at the edge of the field. Three hundred and thirty people, including passengers
and crew, perished instantly.

Michelle, who had taught Joe Carpenter most of what he knew about love and
compassion, was snuffed out in that merciless moment. Chrissie, seven-year-old
ballerina and baseball player, would never again pirouette on point or run the
bases. And if animals felt the same psychic connection with Nina that she felt
with them, then in that chilly Colorado night, the meadows and the wooded hills
had been filled with small creatures that cowered miserably in their burrows.

Of his family, Joe Carpenter was the sole survivor. 

He had not been with them on Flight 353. Every soul aboard had been
hammered into ruin against the anvil of the earth. If he had been with them,
then he too would have been identifiable only by his dental records and a
printable finger or two. 

His flashbacks to the crash were not memories but exhausting fevers of
imagination, frequently expressed in dreams and sometimes in anxiety attacks
like this one. Racked by guilt because he had not perished with his wife and
daughters, Joe tortured himself with these attempts to share the horror that
they must have experienced.

Inevitably, his imaginary journeys on the earthbound airplane failed to
bring him the healing acceptance for which he longed. Instead, each nightmare
and each waking seizure salted his wounds.

He opened his eyes and stared at the traffic speeding past him. If he chose
the right moment, he could open the door, step out of the car, walk onto the
freeway, and be struck dead by a truck.

He remained safely in the Honda, not because he was afraid to die, but for
reasons unclear even to him. Perhaps, for the time being at least, he felt the
need to punish himself with more life.

Against the passenger-side windows, the overgrown oleander bushes stirred
ceaselessly in the wind from the passing traffic. The friction of the greenery
against the glass raised an eerie whispering like lost and forlorn voices.

He was not shaking any more.

The sweat on his face began to dry in the cold air gushing from the
dashboard vents.

He was no longer plagued by a sensation of falling. He had reached
bottom.

Through the August heat and a thin haze of smog, passing cars and trucks
shimmered like mirages, trembling westward toward cleaner air and the cooling
sea. Joe waited for a break in traffic and then headed once more for the edge
of the continent.