This happened in 1899, when the century was about to turn, twenty-five years after the city of Forge was incorporated and named after its founder and first family, twenty-five years after Richard Forge Sr. had pooled resources with the wheat farmers in the area, all the big landowners, to found the Bank of Forge.  Wheat prices had been falling throughout that summer.  On a trading floor in Chicago, men who had never seen the Central Valley of California shouted the prices that would be paid, and the falling prices were reported in the Forge Argus, and in the Stockton Bee, and in the newspapers that came in by train from San Francisco.  The out of town papers also reported a bank failure in the town of Lux, a cotton town to the south.  And a rumor grew that when the crops were sold, and the crop loans couldn’t be met, the bank would fail.

Richard Forge had been a young man when the bank was founded, a young man among the other young men in the region who had broken ground and found it good for wheat, and a leader among them.  He had been the one to direct and order the town’s incorporation, the one to lay out the streets on a grid, the one to foresee the need for a bank.  But he had not foreseen that some of his friends, the original investors in the bank, would begin quietly to withdraw funds when rumors started.  And he had not foreseen that the wires requesting capital through Western Union would be read by the operators, and be repeated, and feed the rumors.

By mid-morning on a Friday in August, a Friday that had begun like any other, the cool, marble-floored lobby of the bank began to fill with people, all come to withdraw their savings. When someone finished a transaction at one of the eight brass-barred teller windows, people surged toward that window, and some began to shout and push.  In his office, Richard Forge heard that customers were all making withdrawals, and he came into the lobby.  He had talked to the ruined bank president from Lux, who told him that once the line reached into the street where it could be seen by all and become a mock and a show, the run was unstoppable.  Once that happened, the president said, the bank run would grow monstrous, and swallow the bank.

He asked everyone waiting to form a line that doubled back on itself, but by noon the bank lobby was full, and the line for withdrawals grew out through the doors, out onto the hot and narrow sidewalk.  Men and women stood in the line, faces drawn and anxious, passbooks curled and damp in their sweated hands.  They clung to the storefronts on the west side of Central, leaned into the thin cliff of shade, shuffled forward a step at a time.  When the end of the line reached the barbershop, the barber finished the man in the chair, and turned his sign to Closed, and joined the line himself.

Then Richard Forge hoped only to get to five o’clock before the bank ran out of funds.  He told his tellers to count out money two or three times, to slow withdrawals.  He had back room employees stand in line to ask for their money in pennies.  Anything to slow the run, so that the brass teller windows could shut, and the tall bronze doors between the granite columns could close, and the weekend intervene – anything to make time enough for rumors to calm, trust recover.  He left the bank once for Western Union to send a wire, to again plead for funds, and returning he paused at the top of the broad stairs leading to the bank’s entrance.  The line of people extended down Central Street, past all the small, glass-windowed shops – past Fabian’s General Merchandise, and the Forge Saloon, and Ludwig’s Cigar Store, the Oddfellow’s Lodge, Gullo’s Groceries, Andersen’s Plumbing and Hardware, past the offices of the Argus, crossing streets and ending finally just south of the railroad tracks.  Hundreds of people.

At quarter to five, Forge stood in his office and smoothed down his blue, Brooks Brothers suit.  He adjusted his tie in the collar of his white shirt – one of the white shirts laundered and starched for him by the dozens several times a month – and made sure his diamond stickpin was in place.  He shot his cuffs, checked the gold cufflinks monogrammed with an F.  Then he took his hat from the rack and strode out into the lobby.

They were all men and women he knew, all residents of the small city or the surrounding farms.  He had opened accounts for them, given them loans, taken their deposits, made their payrolls.  These were farmers, engineers and firemen and conductors and mechanics, the barber and the blacksmith and the schoolteacher, saloonkeepers and maids and haulers, and the plain, firm-chinned ladies in high collars and white gloves who ran their households with strict budgets.

He walked along them, all the faces he knew, and nodded and smiled.  Most refused to meet his eyes, looked down, muttered.  Some looked past him at the large grandfather clock, looked at the line ahead, tightened their mouths.  He smiled and began to talk to no one in particular, light, jovial, unconcerned.  “No need to worry.  I’ve been in touch with the reserve bank in San Francisco.  Plenty of capital to fulfill each and every demand.  It will be here Monday morning before opening.  Plenty of cash on hand.”

He put on his hat and passed through the doors, out of the cool marble interior of the bank and onto the street, and many faces turned toward him, worried, hopeful, shined with perspiration.  He greeted people by name, kept up the same patter.  “No need to worry.  An influx of the bank’s reserves, currently held in San Francisco, Monday morning.  You’ll see me greeting the 6:10 train myself, to supervise the transfer of funds.”

“Should we just go home for now?” a carpenter in overalls asked.

“Well.”  Forge took his watch from his pocket and frowned.  “I’ve got every teller working, but I don’t know that we’ll get to everyone.  Monday morning, though.  Business as usual.”

“I’m waiting.”  Kent, a wiry and mean-eyed harness maker spoke with a bitter smile.  He had come directly from his shop, and he still wore a leather toolbelt hung with awls and shears.  “I’m waiting, and if you don’t make good today, I’ll be here bright and early on Monday.”

“Monday morning will be fine, Mr. Kent.  Normal business hours.”

“Yah.”  Kent shifted the chaw of tobacco in his lip and spat a thin stream of juice into the gutter.  “We’ll see.”

Richard Forge Sr. was sweating by the time he returned to the bank lobby, and he took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his pocket handkerchief.  The lines had advanced, and those who succeeded in making a withdrawal tucked it away carefully and then stole out of the bank, as though ashamed of getting away with something while others were still at risk.  Forge smiled at them politely, to let them know that there was nothing untoward in requesting a withdrawal.

Then the grandfather clock began to chime, one two three four five, and all the tellers did as they had been instructed, and completed the transaction of the person at the counter before swinging the brass bars of the teller’s cage shut.  Those inside the bank had hoped that they, at least, would be able to withdraw their money, and as the small cage doors were shut and locked, they moaned, and the line broke down, and people began to mill about in the lobby, and some shouted demands that their money belonged to them, and they had a right to it that day.

Forge walked to the rear of the lobby, beside the gate that led to the back offices, and he held up his hands for quiet.  The bank detective stood beside him, dressed in a blue uniform with a billy club dangling from his belt.  When Forge had the attention of all, he repeated what he had been saying all along.  That the bank would be open normal hours on Monday.  That the bank’s reserves were coming from San Francisco.  That all requests for withdrawals would be met.  Then he passed through the gate and locked it behind him, and left it to the bank detective to slowly disperse the crowd and lock the bronze doors that led to the street.

Richard Forge Sr. did not go home that evening.  He retired to his office at the rear of the bank building, a cool and spacious office he had designed for himself when he had the building constructed.  Bookshelves in dark-stained wood extended to the ceiling, filled with volumes of history, classics, memoirs of leading Californians, as well as books on the businesses of agriculture and transportation, the twin pillars of Forge.  A thick Webster’s on a dictionary stand in one corner, a globe on a stand in another.  One wall with a large map of the county that showed every road, every field, every waterway, every railroad line.  On another wall, the plaques of appreciation from the California Bankers Association, the Southern Pacific, the local fire department.  The framed proclamation he had read aloud from the gazebo in the town square on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Forge’s incorporation.  In the center of his office was his large walnut desk, carved with spiral columns on the corners, matching walnut chairs facing it for conferences, and against the wall opposite, a long divan upholstered in green velvet.

He sat in the office chair, leaned back, looked up at the maps on the wall above the divan.

There was no one left to contact, and he wondered if one of the men in the Western Union office had read his urgent pleas that day – pleas that had gone unanswered.  Then he knew.  Of course his wires had been read.  The run would continue Monday.

There were papers and ledgers scattered on his desk, and he took some time neatening them up.  Mrs. Hall, his secretary, normally did filing at the end of the day, but he had told her to go home.  He knew where everything belonged.  He placed the many mortgage documents the bank held into cabinets in the outer offices, and the crop loan documents under the names of those landowning families, his friends and investors, with whom he had done business for decades.  The ledger books were filed on one of the lower shelves within his office.

Then he went to the wall safe, a small safe that he used rarely.  He spun the dial right to a number, left around twice to another number, right to a third number.  Then left, and the bolts slid into their cylinders and the door opened.  Inside the safe was a revolver, a Smith & Wesson with filigrees on the handle chased with gold.  It had been a gift to him from the city council on the occasion of that twentieth anniversary speech, and he had fired it once only, to signal the beginning of fireworks later that evening.  He took it out and closed the safe and spun the dial to lock it, then returned to the chair.  He leaned back, put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, set his teeth onto the unfamiliar hardness of it.

He took it out suddenly and stepped to the coatrack, where he kept a scarf for days that turned unexpectedly cold.  He took the scarf, a warm plaid in red and green.  Sat again in his chair and wrapped the scarf carefully and tenderly around the back of his head.  Put the barrel of the gun again in his mouth.

*

Richard Forge Jr. boarded the first train he could back to Forge after he heard the news, a night train pulling freight that left at midnight from the Oakland yards.  He climbed into the caboose, still in his business suit, and tossed his grip in the corner.  On the small platform at the back of the car, he felt the steam engine gather the weight of the cars to it, hesitate for a moment, then begin to haul them all.  The train gradually snaked its way out of the yard, clacking slowly over switches until the eastbound rails narrowed down to three, to two, to one.  Then the train picked up speed, and Richard gazed back at the red signal lights of the railroad and the glary white lights strung on wires above the loading docks, and he saw them dwindle. Behind him in San Francisco was his wife, Joan, the daughter of one of the big wheat farmers, and his son Noah, only five years old, growing up far away from the town named after his family.

The train bore Richard through dark valleys and up into the Diablo Range, and he stood on the platform and felt the wind in his hair, smelled the soot from the burning coal, saw the summer stars.  As the train crested the summit and passed into the Central Valley, he felt a burden waiting for him – the town named for his family, the bank with his family name carved into granite on the façade.  At times, in San Francisco, he had wished he was not his father’s son, he had wished that he and Joan could just make a good and prosperous life in the city, as their friends did.  A place in Cow Hollow.  Tickets to the opera.  Lowell High School for Noah someday.  But his father had always told him that he would be the bank president someday.  His father had directed him to Cal, his father directed him to work at Wells Fargo in the City, and learn the business, and make contacts.  And now he was returning to Forge, and to the bank, and he felt his father’s dead hand still directing him, to take up the task he himself had failed, and Richard both missed his father and bitterly blamed him for abandoning him.

*

On Saturday, Richard left his mother in black mourning in the care of his two older, unmarried sisters.  He went straight to the bank, not stopping at Casselman’s Funeral Parlor where his father’s body was being prepared for visitation, and spent the day in the outer offices with Mrs. Hall and one senior employee.  He didn’t want to work in his father’s office.

He learned that the bank held paper on nearly all the land surrounding Forge, mortgages and crop loans on all the wheat fields that shipped their crops through the Forge depot.  Yet he could also see the owners of those fields, some of them original shareholders in the bank, beginning to siphon funds out of the bank as wheat prices dropped.  They were afraid that the prices would be so low that the crop loans would default, and they were shielding themselves from their own failure and putting the bank at risk.  And keeping their money where?  Maybe Wells Fargo.  Maybe Bank of Italy.  Maybe in their mattresses.

Then he found the record of Henry Goodling, Joan’s father, his own father-in-law.  Henry farmed a thousand acres of wheat, and Richard remembered how satisfied his father had been when he and Joan decided to marry.  The son of the banker marrying the daughter of a big landowner.  The way things were supposed to work.  Henry Goodling had withdrawn his money, just like every other large landowner.

Word of the withdrawals had gotten out.  It always does somehow.  A run begins with a trickle.  And Richard saw his father, unwilling or unable to see himself betrayed, bewildered at how the rules had changed, still thinking that appearing in a good three piece suit flanked by the granite columns of the bank’s façade was enough.  The man who had always seemed a giant to Richard looked now shrunken and weak, a paper man, torn down easily by men who had been his friends.

“Those bastards,” Richard said.

*

Richard called the meeting on that Sunday morning.  He summoned all the shareholders, the big landowners, the owners of the largest hotel and the general store, and also one non-shareholder – Skipper Cook, the railroad boss, the Southern Pacific’s top executive in Forge.  Richard told them to skip church that day, the Presbyterians and Methodists and Lutherans and Catholics could do without their presence for one Sunday, though if the congregations wanted to send a prayer or two their way, it would be welcome.

Richard chose to have the meeting in the president’s office, that same office where his father had turned the revolver on himself.  The shareholders came wearing suits dark and sober, dark ties, white shirts with stiff collars so that each had to hold his head erect.  Some of them still wore the thick moustaches or beards common twenty years ago, though now their hair all was gray or white.  They greeted each other with quiet voices, then saw the young Richard standing behind his father’s desk, and one by one they offered their sympathy, said how sorry they were to hear of his father’s passing.  When Henry Goodling shook Richard’s hand, Richard nodded his head unsmiling.

As the shareholders sat, they looked at the wall behind the desk, at a white hole drilled into the plaster, white cracks spreading from it into the dark green paint.  Not even covered up.  And there, pushed against the wall beneath the bullet hole, the death chair, the very chair in which their old friend, a man of their own age, had died.  While they looked, Richard paced behind the desk, unstill and waiting, and the men sat stiffly and cast their eyes from the bullet hole, to the chair, to the son of the man, pacing.  They were older men, as old or older than the man who had killed himself in this office, and though they were solid in the chest and leg, strong from farm work and farm food, they had each felt the finger of death brush their cheek when they heard about the suicide.

Richard wore a light camelhair coat from a men’s store on Post Street, the only one in the office not dressed darkly, and he had a list of names on the desk blotter that he checked off as men came in.  When all were present, he greeted the last and asked Mrs. Hall to leave and close the door.

The men had expected a quiet meeting, they expected to speak with quiet respect about the man, Richard Forge Sr., whose family had given the city its name, who had founded the bank and been its president for twenty-five years.  Despite the peremptory tone of the summons to the meeting, they also expected respect for themselves, their years and experience, deference from the man they still thought of as Junior.  They expected to talk to him about how to cushion the blow from the bank’s failure, that now seemed inevitable to them, as inevitable as the funeral procession that would follow from the church to the town’s cemetery.  Some had imagined they would be asked for advice, and were ready with counsel.

They were not prepared for the accusations the young Richard launched at them.  He paced back and forth and accused them by name of fearfulness, cowardice, lack of faith.  He accused them of pulling out their money because they didn’t believe in their crops, and hiding their money in pillowcases, and huddling over their little piles like scared children.  He told them that they had caused the bank run, starting it slowly weeks ago.  Did they think that no one would notice that all the big men in town were drawing down their money?  Did they think no one would talk?  People always talked, and now everyone from the schoolteacher to the barber wanted their money out of the Bank of Forge.

Pop Simmons, the oldest man there, stood up from his straight-backed chair.  He took his pipe out of his suit pocket and pointed the stem at Richard.  “Ain’t a man here did a thing wrong,” he said.  “Not a thing wrong in taking out your own money.”

“You, Pop.”  Richard glanced down at a paper on the desk.  “You want me to tell everyone how much you took out?  You were one of the first.”

“Don’t care if you do,” Pop came back.

“And how many years did my father carry your mortgage, and roll it over, and give you the money to buy what you need every spring?”

“I’m a shareholder.  I helped found this bank.  Your father didn’t do that, the bank did.”

“The bank did,” Richard agreed.  “And right now, I’m the majority shareholder.  So when I speak, just take it that I’m the bank.  I know two figures.  The money you took out, and the dollar amount on your mortgage.  And they don’t match, do they Pop?”

“So what if they don’t?”

Richard tapped his finger on the table, tapped right on the name Theodore Simmons.  “I can sell your paper tomorrow.  Sell it cheap to Wells Fargo.  I know a trader there who gobbles up paper on Central Valley land.”

“You can’t do that.”

“The hell I can’t.”  Richard looked around the room, looked at all the old men sitting back, suddenly calculating.  “Each of you, think about it.  Think about those two figures.  And then think about someone other than a Forge holding your paper.  You think anyone else is going to roll over your paper when you’re growing wheat?”

“Your Daddy wouldn’t have done that.”

“Pop, why don’t you sit down.  I sell that paper, and you can either make a pauper out of yourself hanging onto that piece of dirt, or else lose it and keep your clutches on that money you’re so keen to hold.”

Pop opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking.  He put his pipe back in his pocket and sat down, and Richard began to pace again.

“Pop is right.  My Daddy wouldn’t have done that.  And that’s why he didn’t have any answers when the bank began to fail.  And everyone here – except Skipper – helped that failure along.  And failure led to that.”  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the wall, to the bullet hole in the cracked plaster.

“We all thought the world of your father,” a grower named Wilhelm Pruger said.  “None of us thought it would end up like this.”

“That so?” Richard said.  “So none of you feel like you had a finger on the trigger?”

“We all thought your father was a great man,” another grower said, and everyone mumbled agreement.

Richard shook his head.  “Once upon a time, he was.  But not when he died in that chair.  He was a man who couldn’t look ahead.  Just like none of you looked ahead when you pulled out your money.”

He leaned forward, palms on the desk, and looked at Wilhelm Pruger.  “You, Wilhelm, what are you growing on your land?”

“Me?  Wheat.”

“Howard, you?”

“Wheat.”

“You?”

“Wheat.”

“Henry Goodling?”  Richard looked at his father-in-law.  “You growing wheat too?”

“Yes,” Henry admitted.  “Wheat.”

“So it’s wheat all around?”  When everyone nodded, Richard smiled.  “You all have God damned wheat on the brain.  Dry land farming, when there are artesian wells not fifty miles from here and a gorge for a dam site up the river.  Skipper, what’s the coming thing in railroads?”

Skipper, the railroad boss, had been leaning half-seated against the broad bookshelf near the globe.  He was an outsider, not from one of the old Forge families, a salaried employee of Southern Pacific sent out to manage the railyard and coaling station, and he was not part of the past history that joined everyone else in the room.  But he had a hundred men under him, and he spoke for the railroad, and his words carried weight, and now he pushed himself upright and faced the circle of men.

“The coming thing?  Cooling cars.  Shipping fresh back east.”

“Right.  And wheat shipments from our silos?”

“Level, or falling.”

“So if we’re looking ahead, what should we be producing?”

“Row crops,” Skipper said.  “Beans, sugar beets asparagus.  Maybe some tree and vine crops too.  Walnuts, wine grapes, raisin grapes.”

“Thanks, Skipper.”  Richard turned back to the growers.  “I can’t bring back my father, but I can try to save his bank.  Right now, I can get Wells Fargo to recapitalize this bank if we invest in an irrigation district.  We’ve got water right below our feet, and the new centrifugal pumps can get it out.  Some of you have senior rights on that river water, and we’ve got a dam to build.  You’ll all sign contracts to buy the water, and you’ll plant what Southern Pacific can ship.”

“Wells Fargo won’t do that for nothing,” Pop said.

“That’s right.  Afterwards, they’ll own half the bank.  But I figure half of something is better than all of nothing.  Don’t you, Pop?”

“I guess it doesn’t matter what all I think.”

“It matters.  I’ve got to have all of you thinking that this is the time to grow, to invest.  Or else the bank will go down and this town will dry up and blow away.  And I’ll sell the paper on your lands, all of your lands, for what I can get for them.”

Richard was sweating in the hot and gloomy room, and the overhead fan spun slowly and moved around the heated air.  He took the kerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his brow.

“Why don’t you all go home to think about it,” he said.  “We’re going to throw a black ribbon across the door tomorrow, and put out a sign saying we’re opening at three.  If you’re in, I’ll expect to see you there.”

The men stood up slowly, stiffly.  They were older, in their fifties and sixties, and knew only one kind of farming.  But they all had sons and daughters, Richard’s age or younger, and their children were in their mind as they slowly walked to the desk, shook Richard’s hand, and walked out.

Henry Goodling was the last to leave.  “Sorry again about your father.  None of us expected this.”

“No.  Of course not.”

“I only wanted to protect myself.  And my land.”

“Of course.”

Alone in the office, Richard glanced down at the list of names, thought about how well he’d done in scaring men who were already scared.  And though he hadn’t shown it, he was scared himself.  He still had to go to the Western Union office.  He’d asked for an operator to work Sunday.

The light coming in through the curtains seemed dense and weighted, tinged with red.  He felt the presence of his father’s ghost in the office, and he wished he could talk with him.  He was going to try to make the deal his father hadn’t thought possible.  He needed to talk about it with someone, share it, he needed someone to tell him he was doing well, and he couldn’t think of anyone else whose word would matter except his father’s.

*

On that Monday, two tellers draped black velvet crape across the tall bronze doors of the Bank of Forge, a black velvet bow poised above the long door handles.  The town sign painter had hand lettered a sign informing all that, out of respect for the passing of the bank’s founder, Richard Forge, the bank would remain closed until three p.m.  The sign was placed on an easel and displayed between the columns at the bank’s entrance.  A crowd of people had gathered by nine when the sign was posted, those who had been turned away on Friday, and they muttered in small groups.  Everyone knew that Richard Senior had shot himself in the head.  It was impossible to keep such a thing secret, and it convinced everyone that the bank was indeed going under and could take their money with it.  They looked at the sign mistrustfully, wondered if it was just a way to put them off awhile longer in hopes they would go away.  Those who had come first remained in the doorway, determined to be first in line when the bank opened – if it opened.  Some others wandered down the street and looked through the black wrought iron palings and across the neat and green yard to Casselman’s Funeral Parlor, where the visitation was already taking place.

Inside the funeral parlor, Richard sat in the front row of the visitation room, beside his mother and two sisters.  Before them, on a bier draped with black velvet, the dark walnut casket was displayed.  A cross hung behind the casket, a silver cross suspended before black drapes, and candles and flowers were spread on the steps leading up to the bier. They had brought over and displayed the painting of Richard Senior that had hung in the bank lobby, a painting that showed him proud and prosperous, dressed in his best three piece suit, standing before the bookshelves and the county map in the office where he had shot himself.  The painting was how Richard’s mother wanted to remember her husband.

The casket was closed.  Harold Casselman had shown Richard the restored face of his father, the best his art could do with the violence of his death, and Richard made the decision without consulting with his mother.  He hadn’t wanted her to see the face.  When he’d arrived on the late train, he found his mother frightened and confused, and he promised her he would set things aright, and she clung to him and clung to him.

Now he sat, stiff and upright, keeping vigil, and women came and went about him, dressed in black, walking with a quiet swish of their stiff black skirts.  They entered from the back, but neither Richard nor his mother nor his sisters ever turned to see who it was had come.  They took up a gold pen to sign the visitation book, came forward to lay flowers by the portrait and casket, turned and whispered condolences to Richard’s mother.  They took his sisters’ hands in theirs for a moment, gloved hand pressing gloved hand, nodded at Richard, then took a seat in the row of chairs behind them.  Once seated, there was stillness until the next arrival.  They did not talk, all concentrating on the task of seeing a soul out of the world and, they hoped, redeemed.

When Richard heard the clock tower above the courthouse ring noon, he stood up, squeezed his mother’s hand, bowed his head toward the casket, and walked out into the thick and heated air of the valley.  His cabriolet was brought around to the porte cochere with his horse already in harness, and he shook the reins and started down the curving way, through the wrought iron gates.  The small crowd at the fence recognized him, pointed at him, and their voices grew loud, but he ignored them as he turned left onto Central Street.  When he passed the bank, he saw the line formed outside, the knot at the top of the stairs within the shade of the columns and pediment, and men and women extending down the sidewalk, pressed against storefronts to shelter under the shade of awnings.  These recognized him too, and he waved at them.  They watched, gaped, as he passed the bank and continued to the railyard.

Skipper was waiting for him under the metal canopy on the freight dock, and he pulled out his pocket watch when Richard walked up to him.  “The 1:20 is on time.”

“Good thing.”

“I hope this works.”

Richard looked back down Central Street.  A few of the curious who had been outside the funeral home, or who had been at the tail end of the line outside the bank, were wandering north toward the railroad tracks.

“I’m sure it will work,” he said, though he wasn’t sure at all.  Some depended on those gawkers, and how they acted.  Some depended on the landowners, those old men afraid of change.

While they waited, an open haywagon rounded alongside the loading dock, drawn by a matched pair of Percherons.  The driver, a man who had been grown when there were only horses and mules and oxen to work the valley, was dressed in clean overalls, and he saluted Richard with his coiled bullwhip.  Richard nodded at him, then turned.  A train whistle sounded across the hot and rainless plain from the direction of the Diablo Range.  A black speck grew above the vanishing point of the railroad tracks.  Then the plume of steam grew visible, and then the round blunt face of the engine above the cowcatcher.  The whistle blew again, and the bell above the engine clanged, and the engine grew enormous as it slowed into the station, huge and black and dwarfing the men on the dock.  It passed them, slower still, the brakes smelling hot, steam vapor enveloping the engine as it continued through its own self-created cloud, until it expelled a great hiss and sigh and came to a halt.

Richard and Skipper walked toward the caboose, and then Richard saw William Tower, a banker he had worked with in San Francisco, step from one of the railcars onto the dock.  William shook hands with them both, then drew the back of his hand across his forehead and looked around.  “So this is Forge,” he said.  “Christ, is it hot enough?”

“Never been here before?” Skipper asked.

“I don’t go past the Embarcadero if I can help it.”

A Pinkerton Detective stepped out of the car behind William, a beefy man in a blue serge uniform and bowler hat, carrying a shotgun.  He inspected Richard and Skipper with hard little eyes.

William ignored the Pinkerton and let Skipper and Richard into the car.  Two other Pinkertons stood at one end, each cradling an identical shotgun.  Behind them was a pile of white canvas bags, stacked nearly to the ceiling of the car, with the name Wells Fargo stenciled on each one.

“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” William said.

There were contracts and receipts to sign, formalizing in principle the agreement that Wells Fargo would take an ownership stake in the Bank of Forge, and would finance the creation of an irrigation district contingent upon contracts being signed with local landowners and the Southern Pacific, in exchange for a certain sum with which to recapitalize the bank.  And there would be more documents to sign in the future, studied by lawyers on both sides before signatures were affixed.  When sufficient guarantees had been exchanged, William and Richard shook hands.

“Hard to believe you pulled this off,” William said.  “But when I first met you on the adjustments floor, I knew you were a comer.”

“It was this or nothing,” Richard said.

“It’s too bad your father couldn’t see this deal.”

“Yes.  It’s too bad.”

“I was sorry to hear about your father.  We all were, at the office.”

“Thank you.”  Richard took his watch out and snapped open the cover.  “Let’s go.  The bank opens in an hour, and the people outside are waiting for a show.”

Outside the car, six yardworkers stood in a knot, keeping at a ten-yard distance as instructed by the Pinkerton.  William gave the word, and the Pinkerton gestured with his shotgun, and the yardworkers filed into the railcar.  One of them whistled in admiration.  “Oh Lord,” another said, “I will never see that much money in my lifetime.”

“Stow the gab,” Skipper said, “and get it loaded.”

The yardworkers spread out and formed a human chain, passing bags of bound cash out of the car, across the loading dock, and into the open bed of the haywagon stationed opposite the railcar.  The Pinkertons spread themselves out along the line, all large men in blue with stiff bowler hats, shotguns looming over the lanky workers in coveralls.

A ring of townspeople had gathered near the loading dock, waiting in the sun as Richard had disappeared into the railcar.  Now, as the first bag of money thudded into the haywagon, they moaned slightly, a soft exhalation of breath as they witnessed something miraculous, something they had hoped for, and yet something they could never actually touch.  The bags of money became a river, a waterfall, as William stepped down into the wagon to count them off, and the crowd watched the bags mound up higher than the wagon sides, visible through the shafts of the hay rack around the wagon bed.  How high would it go, they wondered, though it already rose high enough in their minds that it would purchase each of them a life free from want and worry.

Richard stood on the dock and watched the sacks of money, and he knew he was being scrutinized by those wasters on the ground below him, and he kept his face stolid and impassive, a banker’s face.  But inside, he felt an unaccountable glee.  It was working, and he felt like tickling himself and laughing out loud, and he wished his father were here to admire the triumph that mounted with every sack in the wagon bed.

The yardworkers passed the last sack across the loading dock and into the wagon bed, and the Wells Fargo man gave a thumbs up, ignoring a call or two from the crowd to throw one bag a little further, nobody would miss it.  The Pinkertons took up positions in the corners of the wagon, standing with their shotguns in the crook of their arms, and then Richard descended from the loading dock with Skipper at his side, and the crowd parted for them as they made their way to Richard’s cabriolet.  He had his horse pull in front of the draft horses, and then the wagon driver uncoiled his whip and cracked it in the air above the ears of the right hand horse, and the horses started forward into their leathern collars and rattled the trace chains and drew the wagon piled high with money behind them.

Richard shook his reins smartly, and they formed a small parade the six blocks from the railroad station to the bank.  Down Central Street, Richard in the cabriolet with the Southern Pacific represented in the seat beside him, followed by the horse-drawn wagon with the wealth of the world on display.  The crowd of onlookers who had been at the station followed along on foot, drawn by the magical attraction of money, and they were joined by others along the way, the numbers of folk swelling, an impromptu triumphal procession in celebration of wealth and the town’s future.  A festival mood grew as the money proceeded down the street, a sense that the ruin of the bank that had seemed inevitable that morning would not occur.  Rather, the opposite was happening, evidenced by those sacks stamped with the magnificent name of Wells Fargo.  The bank would survive and prosper, the town would thrive, they all would live.

As the cabriolet and the wagon passed in front of the bank and turned into the alley beside it to offload, those who had been in line before the crape-bedecked door stared and wondered, and soon heard the story of the 1:20 train, the special railcar, the Pinkertons, the sacks of cash.  They had been in line for hours in the blanketing heat, and most of them stayed in line, unwilling to leave before they were certain of their money, disbelieving the spectacle that had passed them by, mistrustful of the joyful mood of the parade that had turned into a moil of people below the bank’s granite steps.  The clock on the courthouse had rung 2:30, and the sign on the easel still said the bank would open at 3:00, and most of those in line chose to remain.  If Richard Forge Sr. had been telling the truth, and the reserves really had come from San Francisco, why had he taken his own life?  They would wait, and would see their money in their hands.

Richard walked into the center of the bank’s marble floored lobby.  All about him, his employees worked with a quiet intensity.  Within their brass teller cages, the tellers were making ready their cash drawers, while beyond the gate at the rear of the lobby, loan officers stood inside the open vault, pressed into service sorting stacks of banded cash.  Richard had spoken to every employee, especially the tellers, informed them of the attitude they were to have:  Be cheerful, pleased to be of service, don’t show any hesitation in giving someone every last dollar they have in their passbook.  It’s only when they see and know they can have their money on demand that they’ll trust us to hold it for them.

He looked at the grandfather clock, looked above it where his father’s portrait had hung, a large rectangle with the paint slightly less faded.  He knew that even now, the bank didn’t have enough cash for every depositor.  The bank usually kept three percent of its deposits on hand, and today it might have ten percent.  He thought it would be enough, though he still wasn’t sure.  He needed the landowners.

The bank detective stood near the bronze double doors with a ring of keys in his hands, ready to unlock it from the inside.  The Pinkertons were also ranged about the lobby, silent and watchful.  Richard looked through the plate glass and cross hatch of bronze, saw the strained faces of people peering in.  The grandfather clock began to toll three, and the bank detective turned the key and drew the doors open and collected the black ribbon, and Richard stepped forward.

He put his hands up to the press of people, and the Pinkertons and the bank detective closed ranks behind him to keep them from rushing forward.  There was a brief surge of bodies that then fell back as Richard called for quiet, quiet please, he had an announcement.

“I appreciate you, all of you, waiting while we paid our respects to my father, who gave so much to our city.”  He spoke with a clear and articulate voice, and his voice carried.  At the mention of Richard Forge Sr., some in line clutching a passbook looked down, a little ashamed.  “Now.  We’re going to serve everyone.  But we’re going to have two lines.  One for those of you making withdrawals.  And one for you making deposits.  So if you’re making withdrawals, stay in the line you’re in.  If you’re making deposits, line up here to the left.

The Pinkertons stepped aside, and the first in line, the wife of a mechanic and mother of six named Mrs. Hanson, came in, a little cowed by having to pass through that gauntlet of large men dressed in blue.  She kept her black beaded snap purse tight between her two white gloved hands and went to a teller cage.  Others followed, quiet and well-behaved, walking between the files of armed men.

Meanwhile, word passed down the line of what Richard had said, and some took it as a joke.  Was anyone there to make a deposit?  No.  They were all there to get their money.  And they wondered if his short speech was just another ruse.

Inside the bank, orderly lines formed at each teller cage.  The loan officers had cash drawers full and ready to exchange with the tellers when their funds ran low, and the tellers were working slowly and methodically, giving each patron exactly as much as requested.  Many left one dollar in their account – just in case – and left with a hundred or a hundred and fifty stuffed in their pocket or purse.

Outside, Richard stood at the top of the steps, and greeted by name many of those who entered the bank.  And then he saw the first of them, and he smiled because it was Pop Simmons, and he was carrying a pillowcase.  Pop marched awkwardly alongside the line of those waiting to withdraw money, awkward in a suit and vest and tie, and he barely grunted in response to those who greeted him.  He walked up the steps of the bank to where Richard waited in the shade of the columns, the pillow case weighted and incongruous, bouncing against his shin.  They shook hands, went inside the cool and shaded interior of the bank, and Richard rapped on the one teller cage that had remained locked.  As the people in line to withdraw their funds turned to watch, a teller opened the cage and Pop swung his pillowcase onto the marble counter and spilled out a heap of filthy banknotes.

The teller took some time to separate the bills into stacks of common denomination, and the stacks were high and visible to all, and then each stack was counted twice before the teller summed it up and wrote the new sum on the bank’s paper and in Pop’s passbook.  The line to withdraw advanced, and those in line at that time watched the teller pick up each stack of bills, and riffle it, and place it into his cash drawer.  Pop shook hands again with Richard and walked out of the bank and down the line, fisting his now empty pillowcase.

Wilhelm Pruger followed, and Howard Mackey, and Gad Watkins.  One by one, the growers and landowners and businessmen of Forge, the men known to all, walked down the line carrying cash in satchels and boodle bags and feedsacks, and they deposited their money in public fashion.  Gad Watkins came in with his son Josh, a man Richard’s age, and the two of them talked while Gad watched his deposit counted.  “I convinced him,” Josh said.  “It’s progress, isn’t it?”  And Henry Goodling came in with his son as well, Richard’s brother-in-law, Todd, who smiled and punched Richard lightly on the shoulder as though they were still in school together.

After making their deposits, they walked out with the light and empty bags as proof.  And as they walked back down the line, they told anyone who asked that the bank was recapitalized, the bank was sound.  Hadn’t they just seen that wagon full of money?  They might have been worried a little, but no more.  Richard Junior had taken over, a good businessman, a man you could trust, and everything was back on an even keel.

The line on the street began to break apart, as those toward the rear, who had heard four o’clock ring on the courthouse bell and judged themselves unlikely to get in that day in any event, found reason to take the good men at their word and consider their money in the bank safe.  Then others, tired of standing in the heat of August, and thinking of the job they had left for the day, or the children left in care of an aunt, decided it was fine to trust the bank again.  Now those who were near the foot of the steps, who had been waiting longest and feeling smug in thinking that they would get their money while those behind would not, found themselves at the end of the line, with no one behind them.  Those with a foot on the steps remained, but the line would soon be entirely within the lobby.

Then, as Richard stood at the top of the stairs, smiling and pleased, Mrs. Hanson walked up to him, clutching her black-beaded purse, and asked if she could re-deposit the money she had taken out earlier.  He said of course, and led her in to the same teller cage where men had emptied out thousands of dollars from sacks and pillowcases, and watched over her benevolently as the teller took her ninety-six dollars and wrote in her passbook.  Another man, who had just taken out his money, looked stupidly at the stack of cash in his hand, then walked across the lobby and stood behind Mrs. Hanson to re-deposit it as well.

By the time the courthouse bell rang five o’clock, there was no line down the steps, and the lobby was empty.  The exhausted tellers and all the bank’s employees were still filling out paperwork, and Richard thanked them all and wished them all a good evening.

He went back to the president’s office, his office now.  And the ghost was waiting for him in the office, sitting in the chair beneath the bullet hole, wearing the three piece suit, the diamond stickpin, the gold cufflinks.

The chair creaked.  The ghost seemed to be looking at him, though its eyes were shadows and it was impossible to be sure.

Richard hesitated.  Then he stepped around the desk and took the chair, the president’s chair, the death chair, and he sat right where the ghost was sitting.

Later that evening, Richard would have dinner at the Bohemian Hotel with Skipper and William Tower, and Fritz would bring out bottles of Eclipse Champagne, and they would toast beating the bank run, toast the future dam and irrigation, toast the coming boom.  Later that evening, he’d send a telegram to Joan and tell her to call workmen, that they would have to move back to Forge.

But just then, he spun the chair around and looked at the cracks spreading out from the bullet hole.

1

The morning after, the Sunday newspaper calls me “a friend who stopped by to check on the recent stroke victim.” Not the half of it, not even ten per cent, leaving out nearly everything that put me in those still-anonymous shoes.

So, listen. By 10 a.m. Saturday, after Linda Warren didn’t answer when I called at 9 and then again at 9:30, I was dressed and out the door. Since her husband Hank’s stroke going on six weeks ago, she’d never not answered my morning call. There was the chance she hadn’t heard the landline because she was busy in the bathroom with Hank or herself. She could have been running late with her schedule because she’d had a hard time getting Hank put together, the muscles on his right side so clumsy now he couldn’t button a shirt or tie his shoes, but I wanted to be sure this wasn’t something more. It’s never a good thing, frustration.

By then it was sunny and fixing to be the best early April weather of the year.  Nice enough, anyway, for me to think about a long walk after I’d made my stop, locking my door and bringing along my key ring where I’d added the one for the Warren’s front door after Linda had given it to me in the middle of February. So I could come and go at their place. So I could help with things after Hank had what she kept calling his “incident.” And I walked slowly, giving the two of them another minute’s time to be ready to welcome me.

Still, there wasn’t an answer when I knocked and then rang the bell.  Which is what the key was for. Which is how I walked in on such a thing that can best be described as “never in a million years,” though not the half of that either, not by a long shot.

2

Monday doesn’t ask me for anything more than the weekends do these days, but when it comes, I haven’t been out of the house since I’d let myself into the Warrens, seen what I’d seen, and said my piece to the police.

By the looks of the newspaper, neither have any reporters.  What’s new according to them?  Hank Warren is still unresponsive, in critical condition at the county hospital, but the doctors aren’t releasing additional details.  The police still have a person of interest for the crime, but they’re not commenting further. Both of those items could have been had for one-minute phone calls, and for sure, there’s no sign that someone might have persisted past “fine, let us know when you’re ready.”

One good thing about that—my name’s not public yet, though maybe it’s worse waiting for it to be shouted from half the front porches in the county at six a.m., my small role in a story where everybody, before they read any further, knows what will happen. It’s like the way I remember reading Shakespeare fifty years ago, knowing all those people with their names in the titles, no matter how much they talk and talk in pretty language, are very shortly going to be dead.

3

Since Hank and I had retired five years ago, whether Thursdays were hot or cold or in between, Linda always made iced tea for after our dollar-a-stroke golf or during our nickel-a-point gin rummy, and then she busied herself someplace else in the house.  “Big time gamblers,” she said. She always had a book to read. A new one every time I stopped by.  Even the thick ones were over and done with by the next week. “You two have your stories.  I have mine.”

Hank and Linda had lasted longer in marriage than me and my two wives put together. I’d managed twelve and eighteen years, and they were going on forty-five. “Hank’s my best friend,” Linda would say. “I’ve been lucky.”

They’d never had kids, so there wasn’t even that cliché of staying together for the children to fall back on as reason. Sometimes I thought them lasting was more surprising than most of the childhood-traumas-as-sources-of-issues I heard from troubled students from my working years, but then I’m not being a counselor when I think on marriage.

Hank was the one who labeled my work as mind-massages for the masses. He picked at my stories the way sports fans second-guess coaches.  To tell the truth, I loved egging him on. Two weeks after his stroke, when I finally half-relaxed around him, I mentioned a student who had sued her college because it failed to account for her allergies to escalators, tall people and cactus.  I wanted Hank to laugh and maybe forget himself for a few minutes.  This student hadn’t attended the college where I worked. Both of us were free to joke about something that seemed to make satire out of my job. “She’d be safe in here,” I added, encouraging him by pointing out how he and Linda were short and didn’t own a cactus or have an escalator in their small, one-story, two-bedroom house.

Hank didn’t smile.  “My mother always made me retie my shoes before she’d let me step onto an escalator,” he said.  “She told me never talk to big people I didn’t know. Those aren’t allergies. Those are fears. If you pay attention to that drivel, you’ll spend your whole life making the weak feel important.”

“What about cactus?” I said.

“That’s just common sense.”  He looked at me as if he expected me to apologize for gullibility, but then he went on. “There wasn’t any of that overthinking in driver’s ed. Kids wouldn’t last a day on the road thinking like that.”

“Allergic to bridges,” I said. “There’s some drivers that are.”

“They can walk then.”

“Or live in Kansas.”

“A clear head,” Hank said. “Anticipation. A lot of what used to be called horse sense.”

“Sounds right,” I tried, but Hank seemed pensive.

“You have your pine trees and grass seed,” he said. “Maybe you ought to sue the golf course for your lousy scores.”

“There’s medicine.”

“For goddamned sure. I’m stuffed to the gills with it, but none of it says ‘right-side hemiparesis.’”

“Lucky us,” I said, meaning it, but Hank looked bothered, his eyes fixed on the carpet by Linda’s empty chair as if he’d spotted crumbs from the oatmeal-raisin, vanilla, or anise cookies she baked every week to put out for us.

4

The story is still front page on Tuesday, but now there are two columns embellished with human interest, Hank and Linda’s neighbors talking, their pictures to the side.  All three neighbors say the same thing.  Such a shock.  A devoted couple.  Linda the nicest person you could run into when you stopped in on business at the borough office. Linda so devoted to her job as secretary she never once complained about having to attend all those public meetings that dragged on forever because townspeople thought they had something that needed listening to. Linda, according to one, a possessor of a good soul whose anise cookies at Christmas and Easter not only were decorated with Christian images but tasted as if they were baked in heaven.

Hank, I thought, would agree with that in a slanted sort of way. “Arguing with Linda,” he’d told me two weeks ago, “is like arguing with Jesus. All you earn is shame.”

He had fans as well. “The sweetest little man” is how one of Hank’s former driver’s ed. students describes him.  “So gentle.” She’s my daughter Kelyn’s age, thirty-five, but I don’t remember her being in our house.   She’s shown standing with three little kids and a baby in her arms, and I wonder whether her husband is as out of the picture as my Kelyn’s.  The yard around her house, I notice, has the same well-kept look as Hank’s and Linda’s.

I’d say we live in a neighborhood where violence is as rare as a tornado or a Democrat elected to office.  The paper says the last murder in the borough was twenty-four years ago, a two-year-old child, and I remember at once how a young father had thrown his boy against the wall of his apartment.  “Because he cried and cried and wouldn’t stop,” the baby-tosser had said.

Hank’s condition is still described as critical. What’s included, just after, are two sentences that name me as the frequent visitor who discovered Linda’s dead body and Hank’s unresponsive one.  I lay the paper down on the kitchen table, put on a coat, and drop my keys in the pocket.  I don’t want to be home when the phone starts ringing, not even at 6:30 when some I know might call.

It’s still half dark, so when I pause a few steps from the crime scene tape that’s still up and intact, I finger the key Linda had given me, nearly pull it and the others from my pocket before I push myself down the block to keep from playing the fool.

By seven o’clock the sun has broken through, the morning brightening so intensely I start to think I’m being watched from houses where people live who recognize me.  I imagine being stopped at the end of a driveway, a small crowd gathering to ask and ask.  I take the shortest route back home, one that doesn’t go past the Warren’s house.

Two messages are blinking on the phone, and when it rings for the twentieth time before noon, I lock the door and drive off to see a movie.  Tuesday afternoon, the one o’clock showing of 10 Cloverfield Lane has three other customers, each of us alone, each sitting in a center seat at least four rows apart.

All along I think John Goodman’s character is right to be hunkered down in his bomb shelter because the aliens have arrived. Not because it makes sense to believe him, but because I’d seen the earlier Cloverfield movie, the one filmed with a hand-held camera so I felt like I was right there, where it felt real because things turned out badly.  Walking out, though, I wish I had Hank Warren to tell that Goodman acted “movie paranoid,” not much at all like my troubled students, who mostly stayed inside themselves the way I’d learned to do around my daughter since she’d turned overbearing after I’d retired, equating that natural event with senility.

I brought up one of those students to Hank about three weeks ago, a case more than seven years old so when I changed the boy’s name and considered the time that had passed, I decided confidentiality had expired like my old income tax records.

The referral, I told Hank, had been made in person to me and my colleague Rachel Faust by a professor.  He’d never heard or seen anyone picking on this student, he’d said, but the boy had begun to send him email messages claiming persecution and humiliation, saying how much he hated everyone, including him, for allowing it.

“The first time,” the professor said, “I answered by email and suggested we talk, but he didn’t show.  The second time, I asked him to stay after class, but he walked right out.  The third time I came to see you because I find myself watching his hands when he enters the room.  I pay attention when he reaches into his backpack until he extricates a book or a notebook.  Even worse, he always sits directly to my left so I have trouble keeping him in sight. I’d be dead in a heartbeat if he wanted it that way.”

We did our jobs, I told Hank.  We talked the student through the “situation,” and Rachel set up weekly meetings with him after he seemed more at ease with a woman than with me.  For a while, Rachel reported “promising progress.” A few weeks later, though, that boy walked out of class and into the bathroom just across the hall so everyone in the class could hear him slam the walls with his fists and yell, “You fucking pussy” over and over, as if, the professor said later, he was admonishing himself for not shooting me and whichever students he held a grudge against.

Hank’s expression didn’t change.  “Another professor brought the boy to the counseling center that day,” I said.  “He was teaching in an adjoining room and hurried to the door, which turned out to be unlocked.  He led the boy outside and walked him straight to Rachel Faust.”

By then Linda had shown up with two big tumblers of Arnold Palmers, what she’d started making after Hank’s stroke, diluting the tea with lemonade to cut down on Hank’s caffeine. Hank didn’t reach for his, and Linda waited while I sipped and said, “Good batch.”

A moment passed.  Linda hovered.  Hank stayed quiet in a way my mother used to call “down in the dumps.” Like nothing could rouse him.

Linda glanced my way.  “How’s your girl getting along these days?” she said, and Hank sat up like he’d heard a cue from a prompter.

“That daughter of yours was a humdinger,” he said.

The word sounded so suggestive I didn’t know how to answer. Finally, Linda chimed in, “Whatever do you mean by that, Henry Warren?”

Hank smiled at me. “What? She never acted up around you? Speaking her mind?”

Linda shook her head and disappeared into the kitchen; I said, “She’s feisty.”

“A humdinger. She had herself more spirit than brains when she first got behind the wheel.  A heavy foot. Like a boy almost, how she went at it.”

“She’s always been her own self.”

“That’s another way of putting it,” Hank said, and we both went silent for a few beats too long. The year before, Hank had asked three months running about my daughter right up until her divorce became final. “I kept hoping for some gumption from that man of hers,” he’d said when I gave him the news.

“She says it’s for the best,” I’d said, and Hank shook his head as if he was disappointed by the final episode of a thirteen-week mini-series.

Linda, when I’d told her about the settlement, said “She needs a shoulder,” and I imagined a much younger Linda baking and coddling for a few weeks while some boyfriend showed himself more and more to be a prick.

Hank turned animated, like his old self that would be ready to play a round of golf in forty-degree weather just because the calendar said Spring. “I bet you counseled some of my young drivers over the years,” he said.

“Not that many townies attend, so maybe not,” I said, but Hank didn’t slow down.

“Or maybe you’re doing right by them, keeping mum.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m here to tell you I remember them when I read about their crashes and their DUIs.  How they acted at the start.  How you could set your watch to inevitable. You do that with yours?”

“Mine scatter.”

“So you never know the sheep from the goats?”

“Not often.”

Hank lifted his glass left-handed, took a sip from his drink, and frowned. He put the glass down carefully, but it nearly tipped, some of the amber liquid splashing onto the table. “Fuck’s sake,” he muttered, glancing toward the kitchen, and he turned toward me. “Those kids all expect something they’ll never get, every last one of them, so you’ll never be surprised.”

Right then it was a relief to have Linda come back in with a plate of her Easter season anise cookies that meant she was joining us, that an hour had passed, maybe more, so she could spare a few minutes for small talk before I left. “Here’s your favorites,” she said, giving me one and placing one beside Hank’s barely touched Arnold Palmer. She sat in her chair that was always protected with a shawl she’d bought years ago from an Amish woman who sold along the highway south of town.

“You hear how she has the hospice in her voice now?” Hank said.

Linda looked stricken, but Hank kept on. “She likes me being laid up. Like it’s good for me to be dependent.”

My cookie, I noticed, had two lilies embossed on its surface.  There were crosses, doves and the face of Jesus on the others. I sat there deciding what I could say so that Linda wouldn’t speak.  As it turned out, a moment too long. “A little time off never hurt anybody,” she said, biting into a cookie.

Hank pushed his cookie away from his glass until it looked as if it was meant for somebody who was expected to join us.  “Hear that?” he said.  “That’s the speech you get after your nurse decides she knows your time’s up.”  He lifted his glass and moved it beside the uneaten cookie.  “Arnold Palmer should be ashamed of himself having his name on this kids’ stuff.”

“Now, now, Hank, you know why,” Linda said.

“See?” Hank said.  “See what I mean?”

On the phone the following morning, Linda volunteered, “He’s not as bad off as he thinks he is.” I could hear the television turned up loud coming from the living room where, by the sound of the dialogue, Hank was watching an old movie on the Turner network, sitting, I was sure, in his tan lazy-boy. “He can walk and talk and all that. Just slower with everything is all.  I keep telling him he’s seeing just a yellow light.  Caution. You need some of that when you’re seventy, stroke or no stroke, but he’s already slammed on his brakes.”

“A stale yellow,” I said, but I heard Hank hollering from the living room, and Linda managed just “Excuse me” before she hung up.

5

I sleep in on Wednesday, the bleak weather keeping the light from the bedroom.  When I rouse myself, I leave the newspaper lie outside in its rainy-day plastic wrap until I finish a cup of coffee.  Which is why I don’t get up from the dining room table while the phone rings at 8:45, figuring it’s one of the twelve who left messages the day before. But when the voice mail kicks in, it’s Kelyn leaving a message from two hundred miles away to tell me she’s coming to visit to make sure I’m ok.

“Why wouldn’t I be ok?” I try, picking up, and she’s off and running. “Word gets around fast, Dad,” she says.  “Yesterday I got seven text messages saying you walked in on a murder scene.”

“You don’t have to come,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“It’s no problem.”

“I don’t need anything,” I say. “Stay home.”

Though I’m sure it’s moot, I hang up and manage a six count before the phone sounds again. She drops right back into her second-hand news. “This morning I got five texts that said it was your friend Hank Warren who’s the murderer,” she says. “I thought you said he had a stroke and lost most of his right side,” letting me know what to expect in the plastic-protected newspaper before I retrieve it. “I’ll be there tomorrow night. I’ll leave the girls with my friend who loves to have them, no questions asked.”

“I have questions,” I say, but the line is already dead, nothing to do but pick up a little to keep her from starting a lecture. I empty two shopping bags of boxes Kelyn had brought as “a cheer-up present” the last time she’d visited. Altogether, there are two full outfits: a new shirt, a pair of pants, a sweater, even a warm-up suit and what any sensible person would know was nothing but an extra pair of tennis shoes. Before she’d left, she’d filled two plastic bags with old clothes of mine and said she’d help out by dropping them off at the Goodwill bin on her way out of town.

The story’s been moved to the Local section, a good thing, because the first half of the front section has been dampened by water leaking under the plastic wrap. No matter what people were thinking before, now they know this was not a home invasion. Hank is the “person of interest,” the sole suspect. There is a picture of Linda, a recent one, because she’s wearing the glasses with the new frames she bought in January.  Hank, it says, stands accused of bludgeoning his wife to death, beating her multiple times with a hammer found at the scene along with two empty vials of prescription drugs.

There’s no sign of a neighbor or old student talking nice in this article.  There’s no sign of me except my name repeated in a cut-and-paste paragraph, nobody, not yet, interviewing me so I could tell them there are situations where you find out how many ways the world sticks to you. Seeing’s just a part of it. Hank’s clothes covered in blood.  Linda’s body on the living room floor nearly hidden under a blanket. There’s silence, too, Hank so still slumped in his lazy-boy that I leaned down to feel for a heartbeat in his throat warm to the touch and faintly pulsing.  Smell?  Blood soaked into the carpet, the worst.

And the glass of white wine by the kitchen sink, nearly full, and me, without thinking, picking it up and sipping before I dumped it down the drain and ran water over it and set it back to dry, thinking, right then, that I’d walked in on something absolutely and purely inexplicable. Unless Hank Warren survives to tell his tale  Unless he beats the odds of tragedy.

6

Two Thursdays before the murder, as I told Hank about another seven-year-old case, he seemed to perk up. I took it as a signal to elaborate on a student who, despite having been hauled into the student life office for multiple offenses, proved to be friendly when he came in to talk. With his phone, he’d secretly taken pictures of his resident assistant and a few other students who lived in his hall and posted them on Facebook with the headings “asshole” and “douchebag” and “dickface.” When some other students “liked” and even shared those pictures, it became fan-club-like, something more than nuisance when it tuned out he’d also made crude drawings on notebook paper of those students, each identified by name in a caption below their bodies being stabbed and bleeding.

The boy, I said, had left the pictures sit in plain sight on his dorm room bed long enough to be discovered by the resident assistant, which is when Hank interrupted. “That sneaky one from last week is the danger,” Hank said. “The stabber artist is just showing off.  He’s a little wuss.”

When I smiled, Hank snorted. “You and your ambition. You should have stayed in the high school where people know what needs to be done. The college left the sneaky prick stick around, didn’t it? And dumped the kid who drew cartoons.”

“Uh-huh. Before you could say “fantasy,” it was a real mess. I did my best to mitigate the inevitable. I wrote a letter expressing my sense that this boy wasn’t a threat.”

“Not your call?”

“Rachel Faust’s, but student life had already decided.”

“A woman’s going to vote against blood every time.”

“What a counselor you’d make, using gender as the first criterion.”

“If I was prejudiced, I wouldn’t have passed any of the girls who never stopped talking while they were driving.”

“I know one of them,” I said, and for once, Hank laughed aloud and spouted the names of three students, all boys, he’d refused to have in his driver’s ed. car.  “One time only offenses,” he said.  “Talk about your dickheads, six years apart coming through, the three of them, but each was hopeless, so I said, ‘Ask your fathers to teach you this one thing.’  No doubt about it, those boys were always a danger to themselves, but in a car, they were a danger to others, so absolutely no more. Nobody complained or called the principal. Those fathers had to know exactly why I wouldn’t have their sons in the car ever again.”

Hank took a couple of quick breaths, panting like he’d just finished a dash down the block and back, before he settled in the lazy-boy and closed his eyes.  I waited a minute, feeling like I was being tested, but though it had been nearly an hour, Linda didn’t bring in the Arnold Palmers, so I made my way to the front door, turned to look back just to be sure, and found Linda coming into the foyer from the kitchen.  “Good for you, letting him feel smart,” she said.

“I didn’t want to get him worked up.”

“Thank you for that as well. I know he has his ways, everything either right or wrong.  A boy’s way of seeing never quite left him.”

“Nuance isn’t his friend,” I said.

“That’s why I’m so happy you’ve kept coming by every week since the incident. You’re a prescription, and he doesn’t even know it.  He gets a dose with his tea and lemonade.”

“Or without,” I said, and she looked back into the living room.

“I’ll make his tea straight again next week.  Maybe normal’s better even if it’s pretend.”

“Normal’s what you make of it.”

Linda stepped closer to me, nearly whispering. “You know what Hank has said at least once a week for thirty-five years every time he’s angry over nothing?  ‘Driver’s ed. is a fool’s job.’”

“Everybody has doubts about what they do,” I said, but she wasn’t finished.

“Not like Hank when he got going.  ‘Anybody can drive,’ he’d say. ‘Just look around. It’s easier to drive than to print your name.  It’s like the only math you need can be counted on your fingers.’ Everybody said Hank was a great teacher, but I’m the one who knew all that time that he hated that nobody thought he was smart.”

7

Today is the Thursday I was going to tell Hank Warren about the woman who was allergic to mauve. She claimed pale purple shortened her breath. It’s warm enough Linda would have talked him into sitting outside on the screened-in porch, the only change they’d made in that house since they’d moved in when I was still working with Hank at the high school.

I thought it would be good for him to mock me for even mentioning that one with a straight face. But what I really wanted was a prelude to telling him and Linda about my daughter’s allergy to gold, how the impossible can be fact.

The night Kelyn turned twenty-one, a friend at a bar bought her a special liqueur speckled with gold dust.  As soon as she swallowed, her throat shut tight. She gasped and wheezed; her friend begged the bar for a doctor; strangers stared and did nothing until the seizure somehow passed.

“Like children watching a magician,” I said when she told me, and she answered, “I could have died a metaphor, the woman with an allergy to gold” before we walked outside, the day clear, just before sunset, as if we needed to dare both the light and dark.

8

The last Thursday before the murder I told Hank that the dagger and blood boy became my Facebook friend. He doesn’t post often, I told Hank, but a couple of years ago he posted himself and a girlfriend in caps and gowns graduating from another college. And when Facebook dropped in one of those You’ve Been Friends for Seven Year photos as compulsory nostalgia, it was the picture of me he’d posted right after I agreed to be his friend. I’m slouched in the school snack bar, and inexplicably close to me is a stuffed panda that belonged to his then-current girlfriend.

“There’s a thing called play therapy,” I told him. “Way back when we were kids, Life magazine had an article about it, a psychiatrist using a boy who heaved clay against the life-sized scrawled drawing of his brother, the body chalked on the wall like the dead.  The patient declared he was happy now, and though not exactly in love with that hated brother, he’d stopped screaming, ‘I want to kill you!’”

“See?” Hank said. “The know-it-alls were wrong.”

“I message him from time to time like he’s an outpatient,” I said.

“All you have to do is wait for the other guy to snap,” Hank said.  “Then you can message your old friends from student life and give them a Facebook poke.”

Linda walked past the doorway with a book, but she didn’t say anything.  Without the Arnold Palmers or the straight ice tea or the cookies, it felt as if I’d just arrived.  Hank rapped on the arm of his chair like a teacher. “Listen,” he said, “can you remember the time when you wanted your mother to stop touching you.  You know.  Fixing your collar or smoothing your hair.”

“I guess there was a time,” I said.  “Maybe when I turned thirteen or something like that.”

“I was ten,” Hank said.  “It was my birthday, and she kept fussing with my hair, taking her own comb to it like I was a simpleton.  I had friends about to arrive, and she kept saying “birthday boy” like she’d never seen me before.  As soon as the doorbell rang, I ran my hands through my hair so it fell all over the place before I answered.”

9

When I open my door, Kelyn throws her arms around me, but I feel myself stay rigid for a second before I move one hand onto her back. “You poor thing,” she says, “having to see all that and him your friend and such a nice, gentle guy.” When she doesn’t let go, I step back, and she says, “Are you ok?”

“You know what drivers ed. story Hank Warren told me just two weeks ago?” I say.  “He wanted me to know that over the years he’d forced three boys out of the car and made them walk back to school.”

“Everybody knew that story when I had him,” Kelyn says, “but nobody knew what made him so angry.”

“Something about putting others in danger, but what I think he meant was they wouldn’t listen.”

“All that tough guy stuff about making kids walk. It was like a myth, Dad.  Like that woman in the Bible who turned to a pillar of salt for not obeying. He must have thought those stories made it easier to teach us.”

“He said you were a humdinger.  His word.  It means you never shut up and drove too fast, too soon.”

Kelyn smiled. “He really was sweet, Dad.  We had to change a tire for a test.  Everybody dreaded it.  There was a boy in my group, a head, you know, a druggie kid, and when it started to rain really hard while he was right in the middle, you know, the tire off, but the other one sitting there, Mr. Warren got out and finished up for him.”

“To be kind or because he had no patience?”

“I don’t know, Dad.  He’s your friend.”

“In that case, because he wanted you to see how competent he was.”

“You mean another myth?  Jesus, Dad, you talk as if you’ll testify against him.  Maybe they’ll find out she had cancer or something. He covered her, Dad, and then he tried to kill himself with all that medicine.”

“Who beats his wife with a hammer if it’s a mercy killing/suicide?”

“He killed her with one blow and the others were just making sure. Or he thought he could kill her with one blow, but the stroke made him swing left-handed, and he had to keep going once he started.  Don’t you hope for that?”

“There’s no reason to hope for the impossible.”

Kelyn starts to stack the old newspapers and gathers one empty frozen dinner dish that sits on the coffee table.  “Look at this place.  You go relax and let me clean up for a while before I take you out for a decent meal.” She runs water in the sink and squeezes detergent into it before dropping silverware and dishes into the soapy water.  “I’ll stay until Sunday, Dad. Help you catch up with things like laundry and shopping.”  I go and sit on the porch and wait for her to exhaust her charity.

When she comes out at last, the twilight starting to fade, she goes to her car and comes back, thankfully, with only her suitcase. “I’ll take it inside later,” she says, “and I’ll make a grocery run after dinner.”

For what? I want to say, but I begin to tell her what I know about Hank and Linda, how the police were waiting to get the full story because all this was such a surprise. “It sounds so open and shut,” I say.  “I keep thinking that all those clues won’t let me see any way but straight in Hank’s eyes. Hank’s my friend, and yet I missed something beforehand.”

“That’s called normal, Dad.”

“Normal’s not enough then. I never even saw your Donny for who he was.”

“Dad,” Kelyn says, “Hank’s not my story. Donny never touched me. He was just 24/7 needy. Mom called him the Wicked Witch of the West’s little brother, a man who’d melt if somebody turned up the thermostat.”

“And now here you are mothering like you have everything figured out.”

“It’s just housework, Dad.”

“Unless a visitor does it. Then it’s called patronizing.”

“You want me to shut up?” she says.  “How’s this?” and she zips her lips together with one finger to make it clear she’s done talking.

I give it a minute. Kelyn keeps her lips tight, but she doesn’t turn away. “Your mother had a way with words,” I say.  “She told me I’d been a counselor so long I’d forgotten who people really were.  She called it hand-holder’s paradox—the more you try to help somebody, the less you know about them.”

It sounds so weak, I look right at Kelyn and start again. “Your mother always hated Donny,” I say.  “From the very first.  Maybe that’s what made her so sure she knew everything about him, but I was always hoping you’d work it out.”

Kelyn sighs, but her shoulders don’t slump, and I feel a surge of panic. “For the girls,” I say and hear my voice crack.

Kelyn turns, her gaze going out across the yard.  There’s nothing I can think of to do but turn as well, looking toward where the darkness amplifies how the forsythia’s annual bright yellow is fading. In a few days, the bushes will be all green and nothing but a hedge-clipping job all the way to October. For a moment, I thought either I would ask her to leave or she would do it on her own accord.

“The thing is, Dad, I did work it out,” she says.

I feel her hand on my arm, and I steady my eyes on the forsythia, allowing my fear and anger to pass. I want her hand to rest there, but it lifts as quickly as comfort.

Time: 1917 hours

Altitude: 34,100 ft

Speed: 480 mph

Position: Somewhere over Nebraska

Cynthia would do bodily harm to a stranger for an ice-cold Coke just now—not that her joints would allow such a thing—but no matter how many times she pushes the call button, no stewardesses ever come. Wait, that ain’t right. Flight attendants. That’s what they are now. The world changes so dang fast these days, she thinks, then tries to remember the last time she flew on an airplane. Probably that time when she and Glenn went down to Florida, and he’s been gone since … well, all right, call it twenty-five years then.

She shifts her legs in the tiny space in front of her. “I know I haven’t flown in a long while,” she says to no one in particular, “but did airplanes always used to be so dang cramped?”

Nobody pays her the slightest attention. Somewhere over Iowa, the 777 shuttling them from Columbus to Sacramento turned into a party plane. Even though the seat belt lights have been on for the entire flight, people are getting out of their seats, talking to and laughing with complete strangers, their relief and elation bubbling up and out of them in an endless froth of chitchat.

 “What about you?” someone says to Cynthia. A man, standing in the aisle by her row, looks at her expectantly. He has a receding hairline and a potato-shaped face and wears the kind of grin that Cynthia has always associated with simple-mindedness. “Ever been to California before?”

California—they got a different name for that now too. Western Autonomous Region. The Fox News people like to call it by its initials: the WAR. That’s where she’s going. Off to the WAR.

“I never have,” she says. “Never had the urge to. Still don’t, not that anyone asked me.”

Melanie, in the seat in front of her, turns around. “That’s not true, Mother. We talked about this plenty of times.”

“It most certainly is true. Did you ask before you put our names into that website? Did you ask me if I wanted to uproot myself and drag my life clear across the country? Leave my home? You did not.”

Potato-face clears his throat. “I’m just going to …” he says, trailing off and pointing toward his seat up toward the front. “Yeah.”

“I know there’s nothing to be done about it now,” she continues, ignoring the simpleton’s departure. She closes her eyes, fans herself with her hand.

“Mother, are you all right?” Melanie asks.

“Just a little light-headed is all. Nothing a Coke wouldn’t fix right up, if I could even get one,” she says, and she presses the call button once again.

Time: 2043 hours

Altitude: 33,000 ft

Speed: 496mph

Position: Just east of Salt Lake City, Utah

Melanie swallows two more of those pills Doctor Weller prescribed for her a couple months back. In the seat next to her, Danny gives her the stink-eye. She doesn’t have any water to wash them down—what is going on with the flight attendants, anyway?—and she’s not supposed to be taking them anymore. But she has talked herself into the notion that these are special circumstances, that she needs something to keep this whole thing from unraveling on her, right here on the plane. Just like the whole country has been for the last couple years: pulling itself apart, cooking itself down to slag for no reason other than simple spite.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Right away she feels the tension melting away, and even though she can’t quite shut her mind of the unnerving libretto of the New America—frantic rallies of young berserkers in white polos, screaming bile and hate; or the “Whites Only” signs that seemed to sprout up everywhere at once; or those terrifying slack-jawed baby goons patrolling the streets in their trucks, caressing their guns and threatening you with their dead-eyed stares; or that bomb they found at the newspaper offices down in Dayton—even with all that, she is more relaxed than she’s been in weeks.

She listens to Cynthia behind her, complaining to her neighbor about how her own daughter tricked her into leaving the house her dear departed husband built for her, how this whole thing was just a silly overreaction, and boy wouldn’t they feel dumb in a few months when they all came crawling back home. Fruits and nuts, she’s saying now. That’s what they got in California. Or should I say, Mexi-fornia. Whole place is full of crazy people. Nuts. Liberal left-wing raving moonbats. Always has been. And when I say fruits, I’m talking about—

Melanie slips her earbuds in and turns on some music. There was a time once when she would have interrupted her mother, apologized for her, but those days are long gone. She’s already done more than her share to save Cynthia from herself. It’s true that she didn’t say anything when she registered the five of them for the relocation lottery on the first day it opened, but considering the long odds, she didn’t really see the point. Later, she heard on the news that in just the first two days, over three million people requested official permission to dislocate themselves and cart whatever they could carry with them to WAR, where the country would finally make its metaphorical left-right divide into something real: Liberals on one side of the line, conservatives on the other, once and for all.

The website crashed every few minutes from all the traffic. But she kept trying, and a month later, she got a letter from the Department of the Interior, the agency in charge of the Partition Program. Partition. Like what they did in India back in the 1940s, when the Muslims and the Hindus couldn’t get along, couldn’t live in the same country with each other, and the only solution was to separate the two, like cranky children on a long car trip, and invent Pakistan for all the Muslims to go live in. Melanie wasn’t sure how she knew about this; she might have seen a movie about it once. The whole idea seemed silly to her, that drawing a new line on a map and moving some people around could really solve anything.

But you never know. Maybe it’ll work better this time. This is America, after all.

She gulped down a lungful of air. Ripped open the envelope. Read the words Your family has been selected. There it was. They were going to the west coast. I did it, she thought. I saved the family.

That’s what her mother doesn’t understand. What she’ll never understand. She did this for her. For her and Danny and Cody and Laura.

The sounds of laughter and revelry seep around Melanie’s earbuds and into her consciousness, pulling her back from the brink of sleep. People are dancing in the aisles now, yell-singing songs about California into each other’s faces. It’s a certified party.

She smiles. It’s almost right in front of us now, she thinks, and for just an instant she pictures them all living in a tidy and stylish ranch house on a cul-de-sac, grapefruit trees in the front yard and a mountain range in the back, the entire landscape awash in sunshine like an overexposed photograph before she realizes that the house in her vision is the one from The Brady Bunch. She rests her hand on Danny’s bicep and her head on his shoulder.

“You okay, babe?” he asks.

“I think it’s the pills,” she says. “They’ve never hit me this hard before.”

Time: 2201 hours

Altitude: 26,650 ft

Speed: 471mph

Position: North of Sacramento, California, WAR

The seatback monitor in front of Cynthia is showing her footage from the latest uprising in the northeast, a riot in Worcester, Massachusetts: Eighteen dead, three of them police officers. She watches a phalanx of cops in riot gear huddling behind their man-sized Plexiglass shields and shooting gas canisters into the throng of rioters. Thick yellow clouds sweep across the crowd, which shows no inclination to disperse. Cars smolder and smoke in the background.

Annoyed, she switches it off; the monitor defaults to the interactive flight map. They shouldn’t show that sort of thing on an airplane, she thinks. Likely to get people all riled up. But the cabin is calm and quiet now: she can make out a soft-voiced conversation here and there, but it seems like most people are napping now. She’s not surprised. Things were getting pretty raucous there for a while. But eventually folks just partied themselves out.

She contemplates the interactive map in front of her. A little animated airplane slowly ticks off the last few millimeters of a thin red arc stretching from Columbus to Sacramento. Finally. Just about there now. It’s been a long flight, and her knees are starting to ache. Outside and below, a filigree of tiny lights crisscrosses the terrain and rolls off into the distance. Cynthia presses her forehead to the window. She has never seen a city like this before, the lights from so high up. To her mind, cities at night have always been something to avoid, places of danger and vitiation. But from up here, it’s peaceful, mesmerizing.

What would Glenn think of this, she wonders, but only for a moment. She knows exactly what he would think: that this entire chicken-shit scheme was half-baked from the start. He was not a man to tolerate foolishness or quitting, and he no doubt would have considered the entire idea of a Western Autonomous Region to be both of those things. A safe space for precious little snowflakes too weak to fight for what they claimed to value. No place for his family, that’s for damn sure.

No, that place was—is—the house he built for her, almost fifty years ago. It took him the better part of a year. He built it as a surprise, a gift for her, and even all these years later she still remembers the day he first brought her there so vividly: It was a raw, gray morning, and she wore a cream-colored crocheted scarf with matching hat and gloves. She remembers the wet leaves stuck in the windshield wipers of Glenn’s turquoise Ford Fairlane, the faint smell of the stale cigarette butts in the ashtray, the Conway Twitty song playing softly on the radio. She remembers the unpaved driveway, how the mud tried to hold her shoes as she stepped out of the car. She remembers how it felt when she realized what was happening, how her breath caught and she couldn’t quite get any coherent words out for a minute; it was like every Christmas and every birthday surprise she’d ever had, all rolled into one.

They had thirty-two happy years in that house. When he died, he died suddenly, and Cynthia didn’t speak a word to anyone for nearly three full weeks. Melanie thought she might have had a small stroke or something; she had never known her mother to stay quiet for very long. Cynthia spent those three weeks sitting in Glenn’s favorite recliner, watching one of the cable news channels. They were supposed to be living in the future now, but the new century had barely even started and the world was on fire already. She usually watched with the sound off; she could usually get the gist of things just from the pictures and captions. And that gist was, things were different now. Things were different and they’d never go back to how they used to be, not ever again.

I never wanted to leave it, she thinks. But I couldn’t let them go without me. You understand that, don’t you?

She looks at the map again, drags her finger along the arc eastward, back to Ohio. Wishes it was just as simple as that.

Just as her finger reaches Columbus, the screen goes black.

She cranes her neck and looks across her row, at the seat backs on the rows in front of her. All the map screens are black now. Must be about to land, she thinks.

But the plane holds its course and altitude. Below them, the lights of Sacramento gradually thin out, eventually ceding the entire territory to the spreading darkness.

“What’s happening?” she asks, of nobody in particular. “Why aren’t we landing? Where are you taking us?” But there is no one to answer her.

Something is wrong. She knows it. But she can’t quite see it; she can barely hold her thoughts in her mind for more than a few seconds before they slip away. If only I wasn’t so goddamn light-headed, she thinks just before she passes out. If only I could have got that Coke.

Time: 2244 hours

Altitude: 13,200 ft and dropping

Speed: 525mph

Position: Over the Pacific Ocean

The innately terrifying sensation of freefall snaps Melanie awake. She blinks a few times, trying to flush the fog from her mind. Her family sleeps in the seats around her: Danny, snoring as usual; Cynthia in the row behind them, her head lolling with every nudge of turbulence; Cody and Laura curled together in the row in front of her.

Outside, she sees the glint of the full moon reflected from below. It is a bright night, and she can see the surface gently ripple and swell. It takes her a moment to realize that they are over water, and that they are descending rapidly.

The cabin is silent. She is the only one awake.

What the hell is going on?

But she knows. Even before she finishes the thought, she knows the answer. It’s why there weren’t any flight attendants.

She wonders what happens to an aircraft cabin that’s been pumped full of almost-pure oxygen for five hours when it hits the surface at several hundred miles per hour.

She wonders why she didn’t just let Cynthia stay in Ohio like she’d wanted. She had been ready to do it at one point, when Cynthia was at her most recalcitrant. I can’t force her to go against her will, Melanie remembers telling Danny. But she couldn’t let Cynthia be the anchor that bound them all to a sinking ship. She would cut her mother loose if she insisted on sabotaging the rest of them, and then bear that cross for the rest of her life.

And then the next day, Cynthia relieved her of that obligation. Melanie was grateful for that, as well as a little surprised that it wasn’t shame she felt for having so seriously considered such a strict and pragmatic act of self-preservation, but rather pride.

Now look at us. I’ve doomed us all.

She wonders if she should wake her family up to say goodbye. This is her last chance to tell them all how much she loves them.

On the other hand, letting them skip the terrible knowledge of their own impending deaths seems like the best way to show them that love.

Not knowing what else to do, she tucks herself into the crash position and waits.

This isn’t a very dignified way to go, she thinks, but at least no one’s here to see it.

Time: 2245 hours

Altitude: 0 ft

Speed: 540mph

Position: In the Pacific Ocean

As the plane slams into the water and rips itself apart in the horrible anarchy of force and flame, Cynthia dreams, as she often does, of the house Glenn built for her almost fifty years ago. In the dream, Glenn is still alive. They are in bed asleep when a loud bang rattles and shakes the house to its foundation. Oh my God, I think a truck hit the house, she tells Glenn. He kisses her on the forehead and gets out of bed.

I’ll take care of it, he says, and he opens the bedroom door and lets the water come rushing in.

It’s so cold, she tells him. Why’s it so cold?

Don’t you worry about any of that, he says. Just go back to sleep.

I don’t like it, she says. Make it stop.

It’ll stop in a minute, he says as he climbs back into the bed with her. But you just got to trust me.

All right, she says. I trust you, and she feels the warmth of his body and the surety of his arms around her as the water takes them both.