Ironically, the very same week that Barry Bleecker discovered he was soon to be a father, he was also declared officially dead. Under normal circumstances (if a human being vanishing without a trace may ever be considered normal), obtaining a death certificate in absentia is a lengthy process, demanding seven years of inexplicable absence. In the case of Barry, the fact that his flight was known—or at least strongly presumed—to have gone down in the sea was indeed an expediting factor. And as such, almost two and a half years after he had vanished, the death certificate was rendered by the state of New York to his heartbroken parents. Barry had left no will behind him, and the vast majority of his savings had already been donated to the United Way, so there wasn’t much for anyone to do. Mr. and Mrs. Bleecker held a memorial service at a Presbyterian church in Cleveland, at which a number of his childhood friends and elementary school teachers offered heartfelt eulogies, accompanied by a touching, although perhaps a tad cliché, rendition of “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, courtesy of the local fire department. His high school football coach offered to make a closing speech but choked up halfway through and had to sit down. The service was followed by a picnic on the grounds outside of the Cleveland Museum of Art—all in attendance remembered how much it had meant to Barry—and a rough approximation of a funeral reception line. The guests trickled out one by one, while his mother untaped the plastic tablecloths from the picnic tables and gathered up the grease-stained paper plates. The entire affair ended for his parents with a somber car ride home in a rust-flecked Toyota minivan; they proceeded slowly up Cedar Hill, to the house they had shared for the better part of their adult lives, and released two long, desperate sobs, almost in concert, when they came to a stop beneath the sagging basketball hoop of their only son. Then they wiped their eyes and went inside. It was finally over.
As for Sophie Ducel’s own version of a premature memorial service, it had occurred only six months after the Cessna was swallowed by the sea, the government of France being a little less stingy with its death certificates. The ceremony commemorated both her life and the life of her husband, at the very same church in Toulouse where they had been married. Both families were in attendance; Sophie’s drove in from their village just outside the city, and Étienne’s took first-class flights down from Paris. It was short, sincere, and followed by a meal of cassoulet at a restaurant on the edge of Le Capitole square, directly across from the big Occitan cross where Sophie had played marelle as a young girl. The portions were huge, and few of the guests were able to clean their plates, leaving her parents and her brother to clear away the sad sight of all that uneaten duck. The next day, feeling that the memorial had been only half complete, they decided to give it some closure with a hike in Gavarnie. The three of them parked in the town and followed the path up into the mountains, taking note of how the wind at their peaks stirred up a delicate curtain of snow: The sunlight caught it in glorious suspension, a pall of pure and crystalline white, and it was done. They were at peace with it, as only those born of mountains ever truly can be.
Who among them—honestly, who—could have ever guessed that the “dearly departed” from that crash, at least two of them, anyway, were not returning to dust at all, but resting instead on a bamboo cot two feet above it, curled up together at the world’s blue end, not subtracting from the great sum of humanity but quietly adding to it? Love, hope, renewal—such things all spring eternal, and although it was still far too small for Sophie to feel, the diminutive heartbeat in her belly bore testament to that fact.
Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump . . .
And so on and so on goes the cardiac beat in this polka called life.