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.”