A moment seared into me, a paralyzed moment when nothing happened and I knew something should have. The back half of the plane writhed in flames, and yet no one moved, no one spoke, as if we had burned to the spots we stood on, gasping for air. Do something. Someone, do something.
I was out the door before I realized I was screaming it, with Chip snatching at me as I hurled myself across the tarmac toward the runway.
The air was too angry to breathe in, and I flung my arm across my nose and mouth as I charged forward until the heat rose up before me like a wall. I could only stand, helpless, a cacophony of jet fuel and burning rubber and melting plastic searing inside my nose. The flames lashed upward and left me only distorted glimpses of blackening metal through the heat waves—the tail, the wing, a gaping hole where a window had been. Then, as if a giant voice had scolded them, the flames cowered before a twisted mass of horror that pushed another scream from me.
I started forward again and felt Chip’s arm come around my chest from behind and clamp me against him.
“Sonia’s in there!” I cried.
“You can’t get her out—”
Sirens wailed from somewhere, and more people scattered like ants from a burning log, but no one went near the plane whose tail melted and twisted and wrestled with the flames.
A fluorescent yellow van cut through the smoke and halted just short of the fence. Movement caught my eye at the front half of the jet, which lay silent and still in the field. A waif appeared in the unnatural opening that should have been the rest of the plane and pleaded frantically with its arms.
Chip let go of me, screaming Marnie’s name, and tore toward the aircraft, straight into the path of a fire engine. Someone hurled himself from the truck, tackling Chip and rolling him away from the fuselage. He shoved off a fireman, struggled to get up, still screaming for the girl above the din of burning and sirens and shouts.
Two more firemen ran with Sonia’s assistant cradled between them, and Chip bolted for them with me at his back. When he stopped abruptly, I slammed into him.
“I can’t do anything,” his voice croaked through the smoke. “You go, Lucia.”
“But Sonia—”
“I’ll see about Sonia. You can help Marnie. Go!”
Some health-care professionals would tell you that their training completely takes charge of their emotions in a medical emergency— that in essence they have no personal feelings when their skills are needed. They have obviously never watched an airplane melt around their sister and known she couldn’t possibly survive it.
I was nothing but raw gut as I chased the men to one of the parked yellow vehicles and forced myself not to look back. Dear God, let Sonia be in that half of the plane—dear God, let her be alive.
My prayers were as chaotic as the scene around me. Demands for information were shouted over the roar of vehicles that catapulted onto the field and the end of the runway. Foam swallowed the ground around the still-smoldering rear of the plane. Bodies in helmets and leaden-looking coats shot back and forth in a dizzying zigzag that pumped my fear up into my throat.
“I’m a registered nurse,” I said.
“Can you stay with her till I get a paramedic?” one of the firemen muffled to me from behind the shield covering his face.
I pushed him away from Marnie and slid my arm around her waist. “I’ve got her—go get my sister out.”
“Paramedics are on their way.”
“Go!”
A fat lady’s voice can be vicious. He fled.
I tried to focus on the next thing to do, and the next, as I got the oxygen mask someone handed me over Marnie’s face and tore off the bottom of my tunic to staunch the bleeding above her eye. More sirens screamed in until a haphazard crowd of fire engines and ambulances blocked my view of the burning back of the jet. Smoke continued to heave, and the heat distorted the sky.
Marnie’s eyes were wild.
“It’ll be all right,” I lied.
A paramedic emerged from the smoke and went to his knees beside us. “What have you got?” he said.
As I looked up, I caught sight of a tight knot of people in uniforms between us and the smoldering skeleton of the jet’s tail. Their movements were quick and tense. Critical.
I heaved myself to my feet. “Sonia?” I said. “Is she alive?”
“Babe, come on,” Chip said out of nowhere. “You need to get back.”
“We have to help her.”
I strained to pull away, but Chip pressed me close to him.
“You know I can’t touch her,” he said. “Let the paramedics do their job.”
I stared up at the face smeared in soot and sweat. Their job? That was my sister—this was my job.
I hauled myself away from him and ran for the paramedic knot, clawing through the smoke until I nearly plowed into a figure tearing open a bag.
“How bad?” I managed to get out.
“You need to get back.”
“I’m a registered nurse.”
“Looks like full thickness burns,” one of them said into a cell phone. “Face and neck. Probably second-degree on her hands from recoil.”
I looked down at the gurney, still at ground level, where Sonia lay. I couldn’t tell what part of her face was her nose, which part her mouth. She was as twisted as the plane they had pulled her from. Panic rose in me as I realized her eyes were open. They had to be. Her lids were no longer there.
The paramedics spoke in staccato. “BP 90 over 50—respirations faint—32—pulse tachycardic—130.”
My own pulse pounded at me and brought me down to my knees. One paramedic squeezed a bag valve mask over her mouth. I watched another start an IV in her arm, tossing wrappers aside. And I saw Sonia’s charred fingers move.
“Sonia!” I said. “Sorella, can you hear me?”
“We’re going to have to intubate,” the third one said into the phone.
“Got the Albuterol going.”
“Sonia?” I said.
Her fingers tapped me, like the tentative touch of a baby’s hand. I wanted to stroke her hair, but I was afraid I would draw back her scalp in tattered sheets.
“It’s Lucia—I’m here—it’s okay.”
“You know her?” the female paramedic said.
I wasn’t sure. That mass of white ash and grayness and soot could not be my sister.