45

They were close to the pension, but they didn’t continue eastward. They walked south instead, following the sweep of another dark road bending toward the southwest, engulfing them in a fog-bank, a spray of water. They weren’t far from the barachois — the inlet sheltering the harbour and separating them from the pension and the town. Southward they walked, ahead of them the dim halos of airport lights in the distance, then along another fogbound road that slithered off toward Étang du Cap Noir, the large pond abutting the airport runway. There were scant trees along the pond; the shore rock-strewn. Here and there were coves punched out of the barren landscape, as if the rocky soil were edible and some enormous canine had bitten off a chunk or two. Valerie’d walked along the airport road before, but she’d never bothered to cross the fields, thinking there was little of interest anywhere near the runway.

Now she noticed a small dock protruding into calm water. Two ancient dories were moored there, their red and blue paint peeled and chipped. The boats, she thought, were far too picturesque for the real work of fishing. They looked posed, as if some journalist had arranged them for a photograph, a quaint image for the Travel section of the weekend paper. Only the photographer might have walked away, forgetting to take the picture, leaving it hovering in air. Something had distracted him. Maybe this morning, before the towers were attacked, he’d come here planning to shoot. Or fifty years ago, before the towers were even built, a woman ambled out to the dock with a squat box camera and tripod — who knows. Time ebbed away, lapping against a pair of weathered boats still waiting for the shutter to open, for the camera’s lens to press them into light. At the far end of the dock was a seaplane, shimmering white in the darkness. It looked to her like a creature born of longing and desire, not the product of a factory floor, of a riveter’s careful work.

“It doesn’t look real,” she said to Jean-Claude.

“What does, anymore?”

If there had been planes in ancient times, she thought, they would have looked like this one.

“This is the ghost of early morning,” she replied.

“Why do you say that?”

“The plane is still beautiful. Undefiled.”

“C’est vrai.” His voice was full of sadness.

“The last plane on earth.” She might as well be looking at the stars, thought Valerie — at distant light reaching her eye after its journey of a thousand years. Only the plane’s glow came from light that had shone before the attacks — the same light that Gerard had seen on an airplane’s wings from the observation deck of a tower that had fallen.

You cannot go back, she thought. You cannot undo what has happened.

“We must go,” said Jean-Claude.

“Someone’ll hear the engines,” said Valerie. “So close to the airport.”

“They will not.”

“With all the surveillance?”

“They will not hear them,” he insisted, “because they do not expect to hear them.”

No one expected an attack, either, thought Valerie.

The plane looked ethereal, an unfocused haze of light. She put her hand on the fuselage. Metallic and cool to the touch, its whiteness gleamed in the night air.

Jean-Claude gave her a boost, up into the cockpit. Climbing in on the pilot’s side, he put on his headset and started flicking switches. The array of dials began to blink on, their needles swinging into position — fuel gauge, tachometer, artificial horizon — a green glow in the blackness, a numeric code as indecipherable as a lost language.

Andre, I love you.

The engine roared, crushing silence in its teeth, frothing up water as the plane rose over the cove.

***

We are alone in the sky.

The thought terrified Valerie as she peered into the blackness framed by the overhanging wing and the zigzag struts with their cut-out view of the night. She couldn’t talk to Jean-Claude. The noise of the engine made talk impossible, even with the headset he’d given her. Then as she was gazing out into the darkness, she could feel the rumble of the plane as it entered her body, as it took on the rhythm of her pulse and heartbeat. We are alone in the sky, the rumbling said. The noise grew louder and louder until it crashed and broke on her ears.

The engines cut out. The vibrations stopped.

Then came silence. It was profound, and it held everything in its depths, as if it were rich soil, seeded with life. No one could find us inside this silence, thought Valerie. Radar could beam on them, its array of enormous dishes waiting to receive the echo of signals bouncing back, but she felt certain that this ghostlike plane would evade detection. Yet it troubled her to imagine a breakdown of radar — how one by one, each dish might quit its slow, deliberate scanning of the sky, how each might become a cartoon of itself yawning and stretching, softening into collapse. Perhaps their attackers had found some way to make this happen.

Valerie didn’t believe that Jean-Claude had rediscovered the système de pilotage — flying on pirate beacons, communicating with blacked-out towers, sending encoded signals on lost radio bands, keeping the two of them hidden. She believed that no one was paying attention to these tiny islands and the sky above them. In any case, the worst has already happened, she thought, as if the day’s allotment of cruelty had been used up. She felt no danger.

Static crackled in her headset. “Notre belle terre,” said Jean-Claude.

Our beautiful earth.

She looked down. They were flying along the archipelago of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, its luminous geography etched into the glassy sea, but even though she could recognize its contours, she couldn’t penetrate its strangeness. She wondered what made it so, even as they headed northward, bearing east, passing above a shoreline full of tiny lights, the gleam and twinkle of the town of Saint-Pierre. Valerie imagined the settlement below as a sky full of starry constellations — the lit shapes of houses and bistros, gendarmerie and harbour, quais jutting out like small, bright fists into the water. She felt upside-down, as if she were tethered to a spaceship, drifting above the stars of a lonely earth.

“Yes,” she said. “It is beautiful.”

The town slipped away as they moved northeast, flying above the shore road, above the waters of L’Anse Coudreville. This was the inlet she’d seen from the hills in the early morning, but no, it was not; she’d never again see L’Anse Coudreville as it was at the moment when James had been on his way to the tower restaurant in New York and Chantal was striding off to a working lunch in Paris and she herself was crouching on her knees, camera aimed at tiny flowers, frail and growing low to the rocky ground. How precious these human conjunctions were, those meandering thoughts, these silvery spheres of light, these ghosts that cannot be brought back.

Absences made everything looked strange to her.

“No one can find us here,” Jean-Claude said.

They were flying in figure eights around the archipelago, over open water westward toward Langlade, an island hitched by a slender thread of sand to the largest of the chain, Miquelon, as if sand were flowing from one to the other, the two forming an hourglass. West across the neck of the hourglass they flew; northward along the west coast of Miquelon, making an eastward loop around Le Cap at the northern tip of the island, then heading south along its eastern coast. She saw the brittle etching of shapes against water, broken shards of waves hitting rock, their scattered light gleaming. Now they were completing the figure eight, flying westward across the neck of the hourglass, southward along the west coast of Langlade. She wondered if the northernmost island of Miquelon might disappear, its sand pouring through the narrow spit to the smaller island below it.

We’ve run out of time, said Charlie Reilly.

She wasn’t even sure what time was. Or direction. Eastwestnorthsouth, the oscillating of gyrocompasses, slamming planes into buildings. A thing no human being would countenance. The plane headed eastward, back toward Saint-Pierre.

Jean-Claude was talking on his radio.

She’d forgotten to call Marguerite.

She wondered where Gerard was.

At some point, she must have slept.

They were gliding above open water, the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

She watched Jean-Claude as he radioed whatever tower was guiding them. Yet as she looked at him, she saw a stranger, a man inhabited by a need for silence, and she thought of poor Mr. Groves, that lost soul who longed for tranquillity, a hope that once again had vanished from the earth.

***

Matt, what do you think happened to that guy?

I think he took off, is what I think.

They were sitting on his back stoop. Valerie was plucking her guitar.

You think he’s alive?

Yup.

Don’t you think that’s kind of a creepy thing to do?

What, you mean run off?

Valerie felt impatient. I mean, not telling anyone where you’re off to.

Matt paused. He took a long, low breath. After what he’d been through, I guess you should sort of expect it.

But he had a family. They loved him.

They loved him in another world, said Matt. That world is gone.

***

There are two worlds then, she’d said to Gerard when he came home from Rwanda. There’s the branch that for years is whole and then there’s the same branch that snaps and breaks in a hurricane. You can’t go back and fix it.

It is like that, chère Valerie, he replied.

Even though I love you.

You loved me before it happened, he said.

Are you saying I can’t love you now?

Hesitant, he reached out to embrace her, as if she were nothing but shadows, as if he were blind.

***

On the stoop with Matthew, she had plucked out the chords, the notes of a song. The melody kept running through her head.

***

Those men with the knives, those hijackers killed my father, who was found this morning, lying face down in the brackish waters of the pond. It’s the truth. Lift the constraints of time, and you will see that those same murderers twisted the mind of Charlie Reilly and set it ticking like a bomb, the sound so loud that I could hear it coming from the horlogerie as I walked this morning on the Rue Maréchal Foch. Maybe what I heard wasn’t the sound of clocks at all, but of a human pulse, the thudding of terrified hearts, the voices of those about to die.

Laurent Sarazin was dead by then.

Matt still wears his father’s ancient wristwatch. He wore it this morning.

At eight forty-six a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, the watch stopped.

***

Peering into the darkness, she glimpsed Gerard, high above the city, standing at the confluence of two great rivers. He was taking a picture for her. A shot of James, stepping into the elevator. Another of Andre walking into the lobby, laptop on his shoulder.

What you remember is still here. Nothing ever vanishes.

It is happening now, unfolding before me.

How brave of Jean-Claude, to open his heart to the sky.

Through her headset, she heard him. “Let us defy them all,” he said.

***

Andre and James, I lift up my eyes to the hills. I feel you in the mystery of this night, in the air’s cool touch on my hand. Flower in the crannied wall, precious children, I pluck you out of the towers’ crannies. I hold you, root and all, in my hand.

Andre, Andre.

I cannot know anything at all.