Prologue
In the months following the accident Ruthie and Julia
imagined and discussed the last days of their parents’ lives
so often it was almost as if the girls had been there, had
accompanied them on the trip out west. Except of course they
had not. That had been the whole point of Phil and Naomi’s
vacation.
Their plane crashed at approximately 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday,
March 24, 1993, during the girls’ spring break from the
Coventry School, where Ruthie was in seventh grade, Julia a
sophomore. Most of the well-to-do families from Coventry,
which is to say most of the families, were taking vacations
together that week, to the mountains to ski, or to the beach
to relax by the ocean. Ruthie’s best friend and sometimes
nemesis, Alex, was going all the way to London with her
parents. But Phil’s caseload at the firm was especially
heavy that year, and Julia had so many late and incomplete
assignments to finish that she needed an unscheduled week at
her desk just to get caught up.
And so no trip for the Harrisons was planned, until Julia’s
theater friend Marissa Tate casually mentioned that Julia
could come with her to her family’s beach house on Pawleys
Island. Phil and Naomi made a show of extracting promises
from Julia that she would spend at least two hours a day
catching up on her assignments, but they readily agreed to
the trip. Freed of one child, and with Mother Martha—Phil’s
stepmom—willing to come stay with Ruthie, they began
thinking of a romantic destination for just the two of them.
Phil and Naomi lived for time alone with each other.
Naomi’s favorite place in the world was Paris, in the Sixth
Arrondissement, where she would sit for hours in the cafés,
drinking espressos, eating pastel-colored macaroons, and
observing the sophisticated people around her. In Paris,
unlike in Atlanta, caffeine didn’t bother her; she could
drink espresso all day and still fall asleep easily at
night. Phil’s favorite place was wherever Naomi was
happiest, but nearly equal to his love of pleasing his wife
was his love of a good bargain. And since there were no
bargain plane tickets to be found for a last-minute trip to
Paris (he checked), he booked them on a trip to Las Vegas
instead, where he got a tremendous deal on their stay at the
Mirage and secured tickets for them to watch Siegfried and
Roy tame the tigers.
They planned to stay put in Las Vegas for three days. The
city’s slightly seedy element was not a deterrent. In fact,
it added to the allure of the vacation. How much further
could they be from their mortgage-bound life of duty and
responsibility in Atlanta than to be playing craps in a
flashy casino in the middle of the day after spending the
morning in bed? On the fourth day of their vacation, they
would venture out of the city, renting a brand-new 1993
cherry red Mercedes convertible that they would use to drive
the 270 miles to the Grand Canyon, where years ago Phil and
his first wife, Beatrice, had (rather uncomfortably) camped
during a cross-country drive to visit his sister, Mimi, who
lived in San Francisco.
Naomi would be seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time.
Julia and Ruthie speculated that Phil was probably more
excited about driving that new Mercedes than he was about
any other part of the trip. Phil was a sucker for cars,
trading in his old one every couple of years for whatever
was the latest, fastest model he could acquire for a good
price. Once he took his wife to look at a BMW he had bought
for a tremendous bargain, many thousands below its Blue Book
value. It turned out that the original owner of the car had
been killed while driving it, in a multiple-car crash that
brought traffic to a stop on I-85 for hours. All his widow
wanted was to get rid of the car, fast.
Naomi told Ruthie about accompanying Phil to the body shop
to see the car while it was being repaired. Its windshield
was shattered and there was a little bit of human hair
poking out from one of the cracks. Naomi said that she could
never ride in that car without feeling queasy. It was a huge
relief, she said, when two years passed and Phil traded the
car in for another, newer one.
Phil had made other sketchy deals. Ruthie remembered a time
when Phil was late coming home from work and Naomi was
agitated because he had not phoned to inform her of the
reason for the holdup. Ruthie was already dressed for bed by
the time Phil finally pulled into the garage, driving a new
black Jaguar. He walked into the kitchen beaming, and to an
incredulous Naomi he explained: a Middle Eastern man who had
once been his client had phoned him at the office, saying
that he needed to sell the car within forty-eight hours, and
he needed to sell it for cash.
“I had the cash, babe,” said Phil, standing in his blue suit
in the red-tiled kitchen while Naomi glared at him, not even
saying a word. “You won’t believe the deal I got.”
The thing about Phil’s deals was this: they usually didn’t
save him any money. He would often end up buying even more
expensive items than he ever intended to purchase, simply
because they were offered at a price below retail value.
That was why Julia, at sixteen, was given a brand-new Saab
900. Phil had been planning to buy her one of the old Hondas
listed in the automobile section of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution when his eye hit upon the lease
deal advertised by Saab. At the astonishingly low rate of
$288.99 a month—no money down—how could Phil not lease a new
Saab for his daughter, who was actually his stepdaughter but
whom he claimed fully as his own?
Julia was embarrassed by the car, which highlighted her
self-consciousness about being a rich girl at a rich prep
school. The friends she hung out with at Coventry were
mostly boys, smart stoners who wore black and loved to make
fun of their privileged classmates. (Somehow they were able
to overlook their own privileged lives.) They had a field
day with Julia’s Saab, and when she told them to shut up and
leave her alone—she hadn’t asked for the car in the first
place—they told her to please stop with the “saab story.”
As for Phil, he proclaimed Julia a reverse snob, adding, “I
can’t wait until the day you have to support yourself. Then
you’ll really miss your old man.”
When speculating about their parents’ last days on earth,
Ruthie told Julia that she hoped they had ordered dessert
after their last dinner, the night before they drove out to
see the Grand Canyon, the night before they decided to board
that ancient Ford Trimotor—known as “The Tin Goose” to
airplane aficionados—that was supposed to fly them into the
canyon itself, revealing the canyon’s details up close.
Julia assured Ruthie that yes, dessert was ordered, for
Naomi loved chocolate above all other foods. Indeed, she was
forever breaking her diet by eating chocolate and drinking
champagne with Phil, after a dutiful dinner with the girls
of overbaked chicken and steamed broccoli, or turkey meat
loaf and a microwaved potato, or sometimes Lean Cuisine.
During the day, too, she would be diligent, drinking a
Slim-Fast for lunch, or having a fruit plate with cottage
cheese. But if Phil opened a bottle of bubbly after dinner,
she could rarely find the willpower to say no. And loosened
by the champagne, how could she refuse chocolate?
The night before they drove to the Grand Canyon, Phil and
Naomi had eaten at Kokomo’s restaurant in the Mirage Hotel.
Julia and Ruthie imagined that their mother wore the emerald
green raw silk top she had purchased from Isaacson’s in
Atlanta, that and a pair of wide-legged black satin pants
that swished when she walked. She would have worn heels, of
course. Tall ones. She always wore heels when she dressed
up, and the feet she slipped into them would have been
creamy and free of calluses, the toenails painted with Estée
Lauder Vintage Cognac. The girls both knew that Phil had a
thing for pretty hands and feet, that he encouraged his wife
to get a manicure once a week and a pedicure every other
week, and that Naomi, though she often spoke of feeling
guilty about the extravagant lifestyle Phil provided, loved
to be pampered and happily, guiltily, obliged.
Phil would have worn a dark suit and white shirt, not unlike
what he wore to the office most days. His tie was most
likely the green one with minute white polka dots that Naomi
had bought for him at Mark Shale. It would have matched
Naomi’s outfit, and the girls knew that he had that one with
him on the trip, for it was found, curled up with the
others, in one of the suitcases that were returned to their
house the week following the accident.
He would have been freshly shaved; he would have smelled
like Tsar cologne, which Julia had given him for Christmas
to replenish his supply. His glasses might have had a speck
of dust or debris or even food on them—they often did—but
Naomi would have taken out the special wipes she kept in her
purse to clean them. Before they left for the hotel
restaurant, she probably pulled out the lint roller from her
suitcase and used it on the front of his suit, too.
Phil would have been ready before Naomi, would have been
dressed and waiting to go, sitting on the hotel bed and
watching a basketball game on TV while she finished applying
her makeup, while she dabbed the hollow beneath her ear with
Chanel No. 5. Had he been waiting for her to finish getting
ready in Atlanta, Phil would have sipped from a can of beer,
from whatever brand was on sale at the grocery store. Naomi
wasn’t really a beer drinker, and so he didn’t have to suit
her tastes when he made his beer purchases. But in Las
Vegas, Julia and Ruthie were sure, Phil would have waited
until he was at the restaurant to get a drink. Phil’s
attitude toward the price of items in a minibar most clearly
resembled moral outrage.
“But don’t you think he might have bought a bottle of
champagne at the grocery store or something, and surprised
Mom with it when she came out of the bathroom?” asked
Ruthie. This was during one of their early discussions about
what happened the night before, during those first few
months when they were still living in Atlanta, supervised by
their aunt Mimi, Phil’s sister, who had moved into the house
on Wymberly Way for the time being, leaving her husband and
her interior design business unattended to in San Francisco,
just until everything got sorted out.
The girls were sitting in Julia’s room, on her queen-sized
bed with the green and pink floral coverlet.
“That’s possible,” said Julia. “Especially because the trip
was such a fuck fest for the two of them.”
“Don’t say that!” said Ruthie, hitting her sister hard on
the thigh with her open palm. Ruthie did not want to think
of her dead parents disrespectfully. Plus, she hated it when
Julia said “fuck.” There was a strong evangelical
contingency at Coventry, and Ruthie had been swayed enough
by the proselytizers to purchase a necklace with a small
silver cross dangling from it at James Avery, the Christian
jewelry store at Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, just a
mile away from their house.
It wasn’t that Ruthie believed Julia was going to hell for
saying such words, but she worried that every time Julia
cursed, God turned a little further away from her. And with
Julia on the verge of failing out of Coventry, Ruthie felt
strongly that her sister needed God on her side. Had Ruthie
expressed these thoughts to Julia, she would have snorted,
would have asked, “Where was God when Mom and Phil were on
that plane?”
Ruthie wondered the same thing.
“I’m sorry, my darling, delicate one. Sorry for springing
the ‘f’ word on you, but do you not remember the sound of
the train?”
Ruthie was ten years old the first time she heard her mom
making the train noises. Her bedtime was hours past, but she
was awake, reading the thriller Daughters of Eve by a
compact flashlight that she kept under her pillow. She could
not figure out where the high, rising sound was coming from.
She decided it must be a train barreling down the tracks
over by Ardmore Park off Collier Road. Which was strange,
considering that the park was miles away. She turned on her
side, placed her pillow on top of her exposed ear to block
out the sound, and managed to keep reading, holding the
flashlight with one hand while turning pages with the other.
Pretty soon the train noise stopped.
The next day she asked Julia if she had heard the train that
last night. Wasn’t it strange, Ruthie mused, that the noise
would travel so far, all the way from the tracks on Collier?
Julia looked at Ruthie as if she were a total idiot.
“That was Mom you were hearing, dummy. She and Dad were
having sex.”
“But the noise was so loud.”
Julia shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’ve always found
that noise during sex is optional.”
Ruthie covered her ears with her hands. “Kittens and
puppies and bunnies,” she chanted. “Kittens and puppies and
bunnies . . .”
Ruthie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at Julia’s
allusion to “the train.” Ever since the accident she did
both—laugh and cry—at unexpected moments. In the four weeks
since her parents’ death Ruthie had already been sent out of
the room for getting the giggles in the middle of Bible
class, during the discussion of The Hiding Place, a book
by Corrie ten Boom, a Christian woman who was sent to
Auschwitz after it was discovered that she and her family
had helped hide Jews.
There was nothing funny about The Hiding Place, and yet
every time someone said “Corrie ten Boom” Ruthie began to
laugh. It reminded her of something her uncle Robert once
did when she was little. Uncle Robert and Aunt Mimi were
visiting from San Francisco, during the summer. One
afternoon all of the grown-ups put on bathing suits and went
to sit by the pool. It was the first time Ruthie had ever
seen Uncle Robert with his shirt off. He had a hairy chest
and back, and his belly bulged over the waist of his swim
shorts.
“Meet my chubby hubby,” said Mimi. Robert slapped his
stomach and said, with gusto, “Ba boom!”
Corrie ten Boom, her uncle Robert’s “ba boom.” This was not
a connection Ruthie could explain to her Bible teacher. She
didn’t get in any real trouble, though. After the accident
all of her teachers were cautious around her.
Even more often than laughing at inappropriate moments,
Ruthie cried. During the dumbest times, too, when someone
sitting beside her in homeroom complained about what a bitch
her mom was, or the math teacher Mrs. Stanford used “Mom’s
meat loaf” as a subject for a word problem. Ruthie
discovered that the best way to avoid crying was to sit as
still as she possibly could and think only about immediate
things, such as: would the spider making its way across
Jason Purdy’s desk climb up onto his arm, and if it did,
would he notice? (Once a bug crawled out of his hair and
Jason seemed only pleasantly surprised.)
When Ruthie was home, finally, and alone in her room she
cried and cried, all the while trying not to make noise,
because it would have embarrassed her to have Aunt Mimi
overhear her distress. Even though Aunt Mimi was always
telling Ruthie that there was no wrong way to grieve.
Especially because Aunt Mimi was always telling her that
there was no wrong way to grieve.
Alone in her room after school, Ruthie prayed. Though she
wore the cross from James Avery around her neck, her belief
in God was not bedrock, and more often than not her prayers
to God were pleas for him to exist, for him to be real. If
he did not, if he was not, that meant that Ruthie would
never again see her parents.
Most afternoons Julia was away at play practice. She had
always been a gifted performer, but after the accident her
talent deepened, her interest intensified, and she was given
the lead in the spring play, even though the lead was
usually reserved for a senior. Julia was happiest during
rehearsal, happiest inhabiting another person’s life. She
would remain this way throughout her life, always writing
about others. Only once, in her memoir about rehab, would
she focus her gaze almost exclusively on herself. After play
practice she would often go to Steak ’n Shake or the OK Cafe
with other cast members, or meet up with her stoner friends
who wore black and avoided sanctioned extracurricular
activities.
Mimi did not keep a tight rein on Julia, and so Julia was
not usually home until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. She would have
stayed out even later had it not been for Ruthie. Sometimes
Julia would swing home after play practice, pick her little
sister up in her Saab 900, and take her out to dinner with
her friends. And somehow, even though she, too, had lost her
mother, she, too, had lost Phil (he was “only” her
stepfather, yes, but she was closer to him than she was to
her real dad), Julia was able to give Ruthie comfort.
Whether it was allowing her little sister to accompany Julia
to Mick’s for chocolate pie with her stoner friends, or
allowing her little sister to sleep in her bed at night
because it comforted both of them to be near each other,
Julia alone made Ruthie feel better. Sometimes at night
Ruthie would wake up crying and Julia, more often awake than
not, would wrap her arms around her sister, would hold her
tight, would use enough pressure to contain the radiating
loneliness Ruthie felt.
It was funny. Ruthie wasn’t used to hugging Julia. As close
as they had always been, as much as they had always relied
on each other, they had never been huggers. No one in their
family was. Even Phil and Naomi, who were so much in love,
were not big huggers. Phil always embarrassed Ruthie to
death by sensually massaging Naomi’s neck during parents’
events—award banquets and such—at Coventry, and every night
while watching TV Phil would rub Naomi’s feet, but they did
not hug good-bye in the morning before Phil left for the
office. Phil would give his wife a wet smack on the lips,
announce, “I’m off,” and be gone.
Before the accident, the only time Julia and Ruthie hugged
was while playing Egg and Biscuit. Egg and Biscuit was a
game that Julia created, and because she created it, she got
to make up all of the rules, the primary one being that
Julia was always the Egg, Ruthie was always the Biscuit.
Julia would stand on the far side of the room, looking
forlorn, casting her eyes about but never resting them on
anyone or anything until they rested on Ruthie, who stood
across the room, her back to Julia.
“B-B-Biscuit?” Julia would ask, disbelieving.
Ruthie would turn, would look at Julia, would squint her
eyes. “E-E-Egg?”
“Biscuit?” Julia would say again, hope creeping into her voice.
“Egg!?” Ruthie would ask.
“Biscuit!”
“Egg!”
Finally the two girls would run toward each other,
screaming, “Biscuit! Egg! Biscuit! Egg!” They would meet in
the middle of the room, Julia lifting Ruthie off the floor
and twirling her around and around in a hug while each of
them cried, “Oh, my yummy Egg! Oh, my fluffy Biscuit!”
They never really outgrew this game, continuing to play it
even after Julia began high school. Of course, it was a
private thing for them. Nothing they would play in front of
others.
For Ruthie, it was easier to imagine the night before the
accident rather than the day of. The night before, her
parents were still safe, still tucked inside their fancy
hotel with the glittering, flashing lobby and a myriad of
overpriced restaurants to choose from. And even though their
hotel room was on the twenty-sixth floor, they were, for all
practical purposes, grounded. They would not plummet from
the sky at the Mirage. And what they did there—the gambling
excepted—was not all that different from what they did on
Saturday nights in Atlanta. Get dressed up. Leave Ruthie at
home with a sitter. Go somewhere expensive for dinner where
Phil would order them each a glass of champagne to start and
Naomi, temporarily unburdened from her motherly
responsibilities, would lean back in her seat, would begin
to relax.
Julia was unlike Ruthie in that she obsessively imagined the
details of her parents’ final day and she seemed to relish
doing so. They did not know yet, during the months that
followed their parents’ death, that Julia would one day be a
successful writer, would indeed one day write the story of
her mother’s early adulthood: her decision to leave her
first husband, her young child—Julia!—in tow, in order to
marry Phil, the man who had captured Naomi’s heart during
their brief romance when she was a freshman at Meredith
College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he was a senior at
Duke. Phil would head to Nashville to begin law school
shortly after his graduation. And because she was angry at
Phil for dashing off to Vanderbilt without seeming to give a
speck of thought to their budding relationship, Naomi
finally agreed to go on a date with Matt Smith, a North
Carolina State sophomore who had already asked her out three
times.
It was Matt she would marry, Matt who would give her Julia,
and Matt whose heart she would eventually break when she
left him for Phil.
And so it made sense, retroactively, that Julia the writer
was able to imagine Phil and Naomi’s last day in such
unflinching detail. And while Ruthie did not want to imagine
the details herself, she allowed Julia to tell of them,
because it fixed a story to the horror, which somehow made
it less random. (Nothing chilled Ruthie more than the
possibility that the world was a random place where parents
could die for no reason.) Julia’s story, which she
embellished with details plucked from the encyclopedia about
the Ford Trimotor, was comforting—to an extent—because it
had a defined villain, Dusty Williams, the pilot. In Julia’s
version Dusty had started his day with a six-pack of beer,
followed by a little weed. In Julia’s version, Dusty’s plane
had twice failed inspection.
(In truth, Dusty had possessed a clean flying record, and
was by all accounts a model pilot. His plane had recently
been inspected. Yes, it was old, but it was in good shape.
It should not have crashed. Why it did remained a mystery.
Maybe there was a bad fuel load? Maybe Dusty had a heart
attack once the plane was up in the air, and no one else on
board knew how to fly the old Tin Goose? No one would ever
know. It wasn’t as if Dusty’s Trimotor was equipped with a
black box.)
“Well,” said Julia. “You know that they got off to an early
start. That Phil woke first and went down to the lobby to
get a cup of coffee for Mom.”
“With cream and Equal,” said Ruthie. Her mother always took
her coffee with real cream and Equal, an incongruity that
Julia and Ruthie used to tease Naomi about.
“Right. Mom would have gotten out of the bed and pulled back
the curtains, revealing a gorgeous day, the rising sun still
a little pink in the sky. She would have looked out the
window at the empty hotel pool, blue and sparkling all of
those many feet below, too cold to swim in but nice to sit
by. She might have wondered why they were leaving the hotel,
were driving so many miles only to see the canyon and return
to Las Vegas that night. She might have even considered
asking Phil to cancel the trip, telling him that she had a
headache and that the drive across the desert might make it
worse.”
“No,” interrupted Ruthie. “She was looking forward to seeing
the Grand Canyon. She told me before she left. Plus, Dad was
so excited about driving that Mercedes.”
“I know, I know,” said Julia, impatient. “I’m just thinking
that maybe that morning she had second thoughts about all of
that driving. You know how bad a driver Phil was. But then
he would have burst into the room holding her coffee in one
hand, a Danish in the other, looking so eager, so excited,
that she would have abandoned her misgivings and gotten
dressed for the trip.”
“It was a cool day,” said Ruthie. “That’s what the
newspapers said.”
“Cool but not too cold. Perfect for her brown linen pants
and crisp white sleeveless shirt that she wore with a thin
black cardigan. Phil was wearing khakis and one of those
white linen shirts Mom was always buying him, a sweater tied
around his waist.”
“Alex’s mom says you’re really not supposed to wear linen
until the summer,” said Ruthie.
“You think they gave a shit what Alex’s mom thought of them
way out in the desert?”
Ruthie shrugged. No, of course not. In Buckhead, their tony
Atlanta neighborhood, and among the other Coventry mothers,
Naomi worried about all of the rules she didn’t know, but
she wouldn’t have cared out there.
“They would have kept the windows of the convertible rolled
up, even though the top was down, so Phil’s shirt wouldn’t
get dirty from all of the dust kicked up on the drive.”
“They were on the highway,” said Ruthie. “It wasn’t like
they were driving through the desert.”
“They would have had the windows rolled up anyway. To
protect Mom’s hair from getting all windblown.”
Their mother, like Julia, had been a natural redhead,
auburn, really. But while Julia’s hair grew in loose curls,
Naomi’s was straight like Ruthie’s. Naomi, who had been
self-conscious about her looks, about her long nose and the
little gap between her front teeth, always said that her red
hair was her best feature.
“She would have wrapped a scarf around it,” said Ruthie.
“One of the silk ones she and Dad bought in Florence.”
“Right. That’s right. A Ferragamo. So they were all dressed
and ready to go—no need to pack the luggage; they were
coming back late that night—but just before they left the
room Mom suggested that they call home, just to check on
you, just to say hello.”
In fact, her parents had not called the morning of the
accident, and the possibility that Naomi had considered
doing so caused Ruthie’s throat to tighten, caused her to
have to lay her head on Julia’s bed to account for the
heaviness she suddenly felt.
“But Phil said no. If Mother Martha answered they would have
to talk with her for at least ten minutes—she was so hard to
get off the phone—and besides, they had spoken with you just
the night before. Plus, it was already nine A.M., they had a
long drive ahead of them, and they did not want to waste
away the morning in the hotel room. So Mom said fine, she’d
call tomorrow when she could tell you all about seeing the
Grand Canyon.
“Phil would have already arranged to have the rental car
dropped off at the hotel, and so they would have stepped
outside the lobby doors to find the cherry red Mercedes
convertible waiting for them, keys in the ignition, top
already down.”
“Otherwise Dad wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to
do it,” Ruthie said.
(Phil’s lack of mechanical know-how had always been a
running joke between the two girls. They used to tease him
mercilessly about his habit of watching This Old
House every Saturday afternoon.
“Do you even know how to hammer a nail?” Ruthie would ask
her father.
You had to be careful about teasing Phil, because if his
feelings were hurt he might lash out fiercely. But he always
had the same response to his daughters’ jokes about his
devotion to This Old House.
“I need to know what to look out for when I supervise the
help,” he would say, and Julia and Ruthie would groan and
roll their eyes.)
“They would climb in the car, which smelled of new leather,
and Phil would slip The Eagles—Their Greatest Hits,
brought from Atlanta, just for the occasion, into the CD
player. Mom would check and make sure he had his driving
directions with him, and he would wave away her concern but
then go ahead and pat his breast pocket to make sure the
directions were there. And then they were off.”
There was not too much they could imagine about the drive to
the Grand Canyon, besides the wind whipping around their
parents’ hair, despite the windows of the convertible being
rolled up. Neither Ruthie nor Julia had been anywhere out
west besides San Francisco, so they didn’t really know what
the scenery looked like. They imagined that the road was
empty, the sun was big, and there were cacti everywhere.
The noise from the wind would have made it too loud for
their parents to talk during the drive, but Julia imagined
that Phil slipped his hand onto Naomi’s leg once they made
their way out of the city of Las Vegas and onto the open
road. And both girls imagined that Phil drove way too fast,
for he always sped, even when his daughters were strapped
into the back of the car. Ruthie remembered one time when
they were driving to Union City, Tennessee, to attend
Naomi’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and Phil took
the car up to 100 mph. Naomi was asleep in the front seat,
her head leaning against the window, but Julia, who was
sitting behind Phil in the back, noticed where the needle on
the speedometer was and pointed it out to Ruthie, who
screamed, convinced that they were all going to die in a
fiery crash.
“Phil must have driven even faster than normal to the Grand
Canyon, because they arrived at Grand View Flights by two
P.M. And we know they stopped for lunch before doing that.”
That detail had been revealed in the front-page story about
the accident that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Metro section ran. Of course, you had to read past the jump
to learn that Phil and Naomi last dined on huevos rancheros
at a gas station in Arizona that housed within it a
breakfast counter known for good Mexican food. The owner of
the gas station, Javier Martin, a white-haired man with a
waxed mustache, said the couple stood out to him, and not
just because they were the only folks eating.
“They just seemed real in love, is all,” Javier was quoted
as saying. “Making googly eyes and touching their knees
together like they was on their honeymoon.”
To Javier Martin, Ruthie and Julia’s parents must have
seemed like a couple from a movie: Naomi with her vibrant
red hair, her silk scarf, her linen pants and crisp white
shirt; Phil with his linen shirt, Stetson hat—surely
purchased sometime during the vacation, for it was mentioned
twice in the newspaper article, but neither Ruthie nor Julia
had ever seen it—and cherry red Mercedes.
Perhaps even Phil and Naomi were aware of the cinematic
nature of their jaunt to the Grand Canyon; perhaps that was
why they readily signed the pages of release forms at Grand
View Flights, agreeing not to sue should anything happen to
them on their flight. Perhaps the whole day felt a little
unreal and so they took a risk that they might not normally
have taken, because, hell, they were on vacation, it was a
beautiful day, they were dressed so elegantly: what could
happen?
“You know Phil talked Mom into it,” said Julia. “You know
she would have been nervous about boarding that rickety old
plane, she would have suggested they just look at the canyon
through a telescope, or even ride a donkey down into it. And
Dad would have thrown his hands up in exasperation, said,
‘Naomi! You look for a snake under every rock.’”
This was something Phil often said to Naomi, who was a
worrier like Ruthie. Or he would say, “See what I have to
put up with?” when Naomi scolded him about driving too fast,
or told him Julia was absolutely too old to order off the
children’s menu, despite the deal, or refused to use the
“nearly new” Kleenex he dug out of his pocket when Naomi
sneezed, the folded halves of which were stuck suspiciously
together, even though he promised he had not used it to blow
his nose. He would grin at his daughters, repeating himself:
“See what I have to put up with?” While everyone—Phil
included—knew it was Naomi who had to put up with him.
“He might have talked her into it, but she wouldn’t have
boarded the plane if she didn’t really want to do it,” said
Ruthie. “She liked adventure.”
“And so they got in, waved to Dusty at the controls, his
headphones already on, his eyes a little bloodshot from the
six-pack of beer he had finished at his trailer earlier that
day. The plane’s interior was elegant if antiquated, its
wicker seats bolted to the floor. There was room for ten
passengers on the plane, but there was only one other couple
besides Mom and Dad on board. A childless couple in their
fifties, on vacation from Canada. The rows were only one
seat wide, so Mom and Phil had to hold hands across the
aisle. They fastened their safety belts tightly against
their laps. They waited to take off, excited. And then the
engine noises intensified, and they were moving forward,
picking up speed until the plane was going fast enough to
lift off the ground.
“Everything was so loud around them, louder even than it had
been on the convertible ride across the desert, and then
they were going up, up, up, toward the clear blue sky. And
Mom would have whispered, ‘Off we go, into the wild blue
yonder,’ because she always whispered that at takeoff on
airplanes. And her heart would have lifted at the excitement
of what she and Phil were doing, she would have felt light
and free and alive, and then she would have heard a terrible
noise and the plane would have shook—”
“Stop,” said Ruthie. “I don’t want to think about that. I
don’t want to think about the actual crash.”
But clearly Julia was feeling devilish, was feeling charged.
She wanted to finish her story; she wanted to tell all its
details, including the conclusion: the nosedive that ended
in an explosive crash against the side of the canyon, the
crash that left all five of them, the childless couple from
Canada, Dusty, Phil, and Naomi, dead. To tell the story was
to control it somehow.
“What did Mom think about during those last few seconds? Did
she think about what would happen to us? Was she furious at
Phil for pressuring her into boarding the plane? Did she try
and pretend that everything still might turn out okay, that
the plane might touch ground lightly, despite all evidence
to the contrary? Did she pray? Did she cry? Did she and Phil
kiss?”
Ruthie could not listen to her sister anymore. She banged
her fists against her sister’s chest and shoulders, yelling,
“Shut up, Julia. Just shut up!”