from Bridge of Sand

What next?

Even the most immobilizing loss rests on a substrata of possibility. America felt the tectonic slippage and called it moving on. Love surged from the epicenter and rigidified. The anthrax paranoia peaked and subsided. The Guardian Angels took to the sub-ways, the Senate sang God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol, the president threw out the first pitch of the World Series at Yankee Stadium and the first missiles of the war at Kabul and Kandahar.

But Dana in those first months seemed both unstable and stuck. Her fits of organization were canceled out by stretches of indifferent exhaustion—a symmetry reflected in her financial situation, where the maxed credit cards absorbed the savings, and the loans against Philadelphia Life and ING wiped out the usual windfalls of widowhood.

Phoebe urged her not to make any drastic changes—Don't sell the house or fall in love—but it wasn't that she was reckless. She couldn't seem to reconnect with her own life. She wandered through the house all day, CNN on the TV in the family room where she could tune it in and out at will—the news channel as imaginary friend. She folded Graham's shirts into plastic bags. She spent one afternoon gathering whimsical kitchenware into a whiskey carton, wondering who it was who had thumbed through catalogues and made phone calls to acquire these things. Catalogues and condolences still poured through the mail slot daily. She taped the whiskey carton closed, biting the tape with her teeth.

What, exactly, is a box cutter anyway?

You are reading your magazine, aware of only a slight disturbance—the drinks cart rattling?—and look up to see a flight attendant bleeding from the throat; she staggers toward you and collapses in the aisle. And then there are—how many minutes?—half an hour by all reports, to sit needing to pee and with some small part of your mind determined to guard against that humiliation, assessing the set of their mouths as they go about their business in the aisle. You sit rigid, the magazine still open on your lap with its bronzed blonde beckoning to some island paradise, a dull undercurrent of acceptance running in you; you say, this is it, now we are gone; and things become violently slow in the suddenly augmented light, the drops streaming almost horizontal on the little oval of light beside you . . .

Dana had argued for a country house, so what she and Graham had ended up with was in a gated suburb of the Turnpike called Bobbindale Heights, handsome neocolonials gabled and vaulted and too big for their lots, where the smokeless gas fire nevertheless blackened its limestone surround, and the heat trapped itself against the upper reaches of the plaster. Dana had annoyed her husband by referring to this living room as the vault.

In what he had called the turret she went through his papers, wondering in a desultory way whether she would turn up evidence of infidelity (as had happened to Julie Messinger and Lydia Perlewitz), but all the betrayals were of a monetary kind, and the only thing suggesting a secret life was a folder of line drawings and overexcited prose concerning something called a "BLU-114/B Soft Bomb," which was "highly classified" and about which "very little was known" except that "the Nighthawk stealth fighter carried it against Serbia in 1999." As neither Graham nor the Pennsylvania legislature had any connection with bomb manufacture or Serbia, this probably represented some boy-fantasy of prowess.

You have achieved the cockpit, the captain with his throat cut sagging into the cramped space between the seats, the copilot still breathing bubbles of blood where he slumps against the window; you have trained seven months for this; you are primed as an athlete, humming with exhilaration, honed. There is no more fear in you than in a runner with the hurdle in front of him, the hunter with the gun raised at the elephant, only a concentration so fine it is like the moment just before coitus, Allah in a fireball...