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It had been a few hours since she had last been questioned by the investigators and airlines. Elliot had held her for hours after, just letting her listen to his heart beat.

She had moved upstairs, asking to be alone. She was inside her bedroom, the clock hitting five pm. She wondered what was meant precisely by pilot error. A left turn when a right turn was called for? A miscalculation of fuel? Directions not followed? A switch accidentally flipped? IN what other job could a man make a mistake and kill 344 other people? A train engineer? Someone who worked with chemicals? With nuclear waste?

It couldn't be pilot error, she thought. For Julia's sake, it couldn't.

It was cold in the bedroom. The door had been shut all day. The bed was unmade, just as se had left it at 3:30am in the morning the day she had been told James had died. The circled the bed and looked at it, the way an animal might do, wary and considering, She pulled back the comforter and top sheet and studied the fitted sheet. How many times had James and her made love on that bed? she wondered. She touched the sheet with her fingers, her hand dragging over the wrinkles. She sat on the edge of the bed, seeing if she could stand that. She no longer trusted herself, could no longer say with any certainty how her body would react to any piece of news. But she sat there, she felt nothing. Perhaps, during the long day, she had finally become numb, she thought. The senses could only bear so much.

"Pilot error" she said aloud to herself

But it couldn't be pilot error, she thought quickly. It would not, in the end, be pilot error. She lay down on the bed, fully clothed. This would be her bed now, she was thinking. Her bed alone. All that room for only herself. She glanced over at the bedside clock 5:20.

Carefully monitoring herself for seismic shift-reached down and pulled the top sheet over her. She imagined she could smell James in the sheets. It was possible-she hadn't washed the sheets since he left. But she couldn't trust her senses, didn't know what was real or imagined. She looked over at James' shirt flung over the chair. Olivia had gotten into the habit, earlier in the marriage, of not bothering to tidy the house just until James got home from a trip. Now she knew, she would not want to remove the shirt from the chair. It might be days before she could touch it, could risk bringing it to her face, risk catching his smell in the weave of the cloth, and when all the traces of James had been cleaned and put away, what would she be left with then?

She brought the the flannel up over her mouth and nose and breathed slowly through it, thinking that might help to stop the panic. She got up quickly from the bed and walked into the bathroom, her tired eyes looking back at her. Her feet then took her outside her bedroom, and past James' office. She saw that the light had been left on. The office was over bright and colorless, white, metallic, plastic, grey. It was a room she seldom entered, an unappealing space with no curtains on the windows and metal file cabinets lining the walls. A masculine room.

She supposed it had its own order, an order only know to James. On the massive metal desk there were two computers, a keyboard, a fax, two phones, a scanner, coffee cups, dusty models of planes, a mug with red juice in it, Julia's she guessed, and a blue clay pencil that Julia had made in the beginning of kindergarten year. She looked at James' fax machine with its blinking light. She walked to the desk and sat down. Robert had been here, earlier. Using the phone and the fax. Olivia opened the left hand drawer. Inside were James' logbooks, heavy, dark ones with vinyl bindings and smaller ones that fit into a shirt pocket. She saw a small flashlight, an ivory letter opener, he had brought a few years ago from Africa. There were handbooks for airplane types he no longer flew, a book on weather radar. A training video on wind shear. Coasters that looked like flight instruments.

She closed the drawer and then opened up the middle drawer. She picked up tortoise shell reading glasses that James had run over with the car, he insisted they still worked. There were boxes of paperclips, pens, pencils, elastic bands, thumbtacks, two batteries, a spark plug. She opened a larger file on the right. It was intended for legal size files, it was a stack of papers about a foot high. She found several of James' bank statements. She and Jack had had separate accounts. She paid for clothes for herself and Julia, for food and other household items. James had paid for anything else. Any money James saved, he had said, was going toward their retirement.

Olivia was beginning to have trouble keeping her eyes open. She looked down at the open drawer. In the drawer, slightly stuck in the seam, was an unopened envelope, junk mail, yet another invitation to apply for a visa. Bay Bank. 9.9 percent. This was old she thought.

She picked up the envelope and was about to toss it into the wastebasket when she saw writing on the back. Call pharmacy, call Alex, bank deposit, June expenses, taxes. She turned it to the other side and it was a note, in James' handwriting.

Muire 3:30, it read.

Who was Muire? Olivia wondered. Was it Ed Muir from the bank? Had James' been negotiating a loan?

Olivia looked again at the front of the envelope. She checked the postmark. Definitely four years ago she thought. She put the stacks of paper back into the drawer and shoved the drawer closed with her foot. She was now going to lie down, she left James' office and walked into the spare bedroom, her retreat. It was decorated with a pastel green, the bed in the corner was made already, it hadn't been slept in for a few months. She lay back against the flowered comforter and within seconds she fell asleep.

In the morning, she heard a dog barking. There was something familiar about the dog barking. And then she braced herself, the way she might do if she were stopped at a light and happened to look up in the rear view mirror to see that the driver behind her was going too fast.

She walked down the stairs and found Robert to be the only one in the house. He sat at the kitchen table, his usual spot. She could see the comb lines in his hair, he had on a different shirt, a blue one, that was almost a denim, with a dark red tie. Second day shirt, she thought.

A coffee cup was on the counter. He had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and he was pacing. She looked up at the clock, 9:00 am. When he saw her at the kitchen doorway, he took his hands out of his pocket and walked towards her. He put his hands on her shoulders.

"What?" she asked, alarmed.

"Do you know what the CVR is?" he asked

"Yes" she said. "The cockpit voice recorder."

"Well, they've found it."

"And?"

He hesitated. Just a beat.

"They're saying suicide."

He walks with his arm around her toward the planes, which seem too small, only toys that children might climb in. The heat, deep and roasting, radiates from the pavement. This is a masculine world, she thinks, with its odd bits of machinery, its briefing room, its tower. All around her there was metal, brilliant or dull in the sun's glare.

He walks briefly, the plane is pretty with red and white markings. She takes his hand as she steps onto the wing, then crawls through the tiny opening into the cockpit, the size of which is immediately alarming. How could something as monumental as flight take place in such a small place? Flight, which has always seemed to Olivia to be improbable, now seems clearly impossible, and she tells herself, as she has sometimes done when in a car with a bad driver or on a ride at a carnival, that this will be over soon and all she has to do is survive.

After helping her get into the cockpit, James hoists himself inside. He tells her to buckle up and hands her headphones, which he explains will make it easier for them to talk to each other over the noise of the engine. They bump along the pitted tarmac, the plane feels loose and wobbly. She wants to tell him to stop, that she had changed her mind. The plane gathers speed, the bouncing stops, and they are up.

Her heart fills her chest, James turns to her, his smile full of confidence and amusement, a smile that says this will be fun, so just relax. Before her is a huge expanse of blue, what happened to the ground? She has an image of a plane reaching a terrible height, tipping slightly, and then falling, as nature would demand it to do. Besides her, James gestures towards the window.

"Take a look" he says

They are over the coast, so high up the surf looks stationary. The ocean ripples back to a darker blue. James banks for a turn, and her hands jerk out to save herself. She wants to tell him to be careful, which immediately strikes her as inane. Of course he will be careful. Won't he?

As if in answer, he angles the plane steeply up, an angle so shark she thinks he must be testing the very laws of physics. She is certain they will fall from the sky. She calls out his name, but he is intent upon his instruments and doesn't answer. Gravity pits her against the back of her seat. They climb to a long, high loop, and for a second, they are motionless, upside down, a speck suspended over the Atlantic. The plane dives then into a run out the other side of the loop. She screams and grabs for whatever she can reach. James glances over at her once quickly and puts the plane vertical to the ground. She watches James at the controls, his calm movements, the concentration on his face. It amazes her that a man can make a plane do tricks-tricks with gravity, with physics, with fate.

And then the world is silent. As if surprised itself, the plane begins to fall. Not like a stone, but rather like a leaf, fluttering a bit and then dipping to the right. Heartsick, she glances at James. The plane begins to spy crazily, its nose pointed toward the ground. Olivia arches her back, unable to scream. When he pulls out of the spin, they are not a hundred feet from the water. She can see whitecaps, the twitching of a slightly agitated sea. Astonishing herself, she begins to cry.

"Are you okay?" James asks quickly, seeing her tears. He puts his hand on her thigh. He shakes his head.

"I never should of done that." He says "Im so sorry. I thought you would enjoy it.

She turns to look at him. She covers his hand with her own and takes a deep shuddering breath.

"That was thrilling" she says. And she means it.

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