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Driving to the moon.

Article Excerpt
What I really hate about major disasters, Billy was fond of saying, is how they take away from all the smaller disasters, none of them any less disastrous. He had more or less introduced himself that way to Sarah and the whole small town of Fulton, North Carolina, in the fall of 1974, when he showed up late for football season their senior year. He'd continued through the years to connect with her at odd times with that line. He called on 9/11, in fact, twin towers crumbling again and again on the television, while Sarah waited for the school bus to bring her sons home. Until that day the major disaster that was 9/11 had been the plane crash in 1974 that claimed the lives of his parents and older sister, a domestic flight from Charleston to Chicago. Billy went from being a prep school kid, son of a surgeon, to being the orphaned grandson of an old tobacco farmer in eastern North Carolina. The plane's black box revealed that the crew had been talking and laughing too much--talking about politics and used cars, telling jokes--and as a result the Sterile Cockpit Rule came into being. Billy said the last thing you want to be is part of a lesson about how not to die. Studies from the crash had also proved how much more severe the burns were on those dressed in polyester, prompting his classic line about how his mother wouldn't have been caught dead in polyester. She was in wool gabardine. Halston. The suit she got his dad to buy for her the year before with the promise it would last her a lifetime.

Information about the crash preceded Billy's arrival, but it was clear that he would have had all the attention anyway, one of those boys too handsome and smart for his own good the principal was overheard saying when Billy got sent to the office for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The fact that he was an orphan just made everyone want him more. The boys wanted to be him or at least to befriend him, and the girls wanted to be with him, to be the one who could bring some happiness back into his life. For better or worse, Sarah was right in there with the best of them and had remained so through 30-odd years of a friendship that had cycled through puppy love and youthful lust, being a couple and then not, years of anger and then regret, bringing them back around to some claim on that strong affection they knew in the beginning.

THERE'S ALWAYS A MOST popular dead person, he called to say when the Challenger exploded. It really pisses me off too. So unfair. Sarah had been dating the man who was to be her husband for only a few months, and he was there with her, half-dressed and a little impatient that she had stopped to answer the phone. They had already watched the explosion many times over, had already spoken so sadly about Chrism McAuliffe, the ordinary schoolteacher on a mission--the dream of a lifetime. Hey, are you there? This was the first time she had actually heard his voice since their own breakup at the end of the six months they lived together at the beach. The decision to share space came during a long winter day while watching the rescue attempts after the Air Florida Flight 90 that went down in the Potomac. Billy had said he couldn't stop watching, that he kept hoping the guy who passed the rescue line to others so many times would wise up the next time it played and get selfish, choose to save his own neck. He then said he could get used to not being alone and they went on from there.

Four years had passed, days on end when she assumed he would do the right thing and at least call or respond to her angry messages and letters. Instead he had taken off and gone to Alaska for a while. Then he was somewhere way up in the mountains of Tennessee. She had gotten a postcard in the summer of 1985 on the heels of the catastrophic Air India and Air Japan flights. His scrawled note said, Shitty summer for travelers. Thinking of you.

Sarah? He said again, the Challenger blowing up in slow motion on the screen.

Yes. I'm here. Got a husband?

A boyfriend?

Yes.

Which? He laughed, and in the background she could hear bottles clanking and music playing. Out her window, the winter trees were as stripped bare as she felt at that moment, their lean rattling limbs more comforting than the arms opening to her from across the room, a finger beckoning her to hang up the phone.

The second.

What's it to you? That's what you want to say, isn't it? She could tell he had been drinking. If the boyfriend wasn't right there breathing down your neck, you would say that, too. He laughed again. What's it to you, asshole? I don't know anybody on the Challenger. I don't give a shit about you.

But she knew that he knew better than that.

HE CALLED WHEN 183 people died in a crash in Poland and then 290 more on Iran Air. He called right after the explosion over Lockerbie and asked her to sit quietly with him while they timed what those thrown from the plane at 31,000 feet had lived through. He told her how it was likely during the two-minute fall that passengers, still strapped in their seats, woke while passing through lower altitudes--nightmare to end all nightmares. Afterward the rescue team found one young man they were fairly certain was still alive on impact. There was a mother holding her baby, a couple holding hands. I bet...

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