What The Photographer's Wife Saw

I wrote the first draft of this piece shortly after 9/11, based on a conversation I had with a photographer I knew. They lived in Albany, and while his wife was taking the kids to school, she had seen one of the planes that left from Logan Airport bound for the World Trade Center as it banked in Albany and headed south. The rest I made up. I'd intended it to be part of a series, cataloguing a number of different perspectives on the day, but never got around to completing it. Yesterday I needed to tell a different story, but I wanted to share this today.

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For a moment, for a sliver of a moment, everything in Amy’s life was perfect. The kids were in the car, dressed (finally) for the first day of school, strapped and buckled and quiet, if only for that moment. She looked up at the unbroken dome of blue sky and took a deep breath of that last-of-summer air and realized that it had been a long time since she did that, just stopped. Stopped and noticed and appreciated what was around her. The dawning of a new day, three healthy children, a husband whose favorite part of his job was when the shoot was over and he could come home to his family. She was too busy finding lost binkies and matching up shoes and doing laundry and answering the millions of calls for “Mommy” that she got every day, even more so now that her husband the photographer was off on more and more shoots that lasted a full day, two days, three.

“We gotta take advantage of this weather,” he’d said. “And the money.” He just shrugged. And so did she. God knows they needed the money. With winter coming and the house growing smaller and the children growing bigger.

But Amy liked this house. When they moved in, just her and Bill and Teddy, with Becky on the way, it was perfect. In a perfect neighborhood close enough to the criss-crossing thoroughfares of Albany – eastward to Boston, southbound paralleling the Hudson River to Manhattan - so they could be on their way to wherever they needed but far enough away so the hum of traffic faded into a blur. Faded into the omnipresent melody of her day – whirs of electrical appliances, the bright, tinkly sounds of children’s television channels, the hum of the car engine, the cries of “Mommy,” weaving over and under, the leitmotiv of her life.

“Moooommmy!”

The sky was so beautiful…

“Mooommmy!”

Damn. “What, Becky?”

“Don’t want these shoes.”

Becky hated shoes.

Amy sighed. “We’ve been through this, Miss Rebecca. Remember? Big girls who go to school keep their shoes on all day.”

“Don’t wanna go to school.”

God, why couldn’t Bill be here for this? Their only daughter starting kindergarten and he should have been home to see her off. Also, Becky adored her daddy and would do anything he said. Bill just had that way about him. But they needed the money. He couldn’t miss the shoot. “But honey, just yesterday you told Daddy how much you really wanted to go to school.”

Becky’s face was turning red. Oh, God. “No school! No school!”

Now she’d gotten the other kids started chanting it, too. Teddy, who was starting first grade, and even baby Max, who could barely gum the syllables and wasn’t going anywhere except back home with her.

She mustered together all of her patience. Kept her voice quiet. Everybody always told her it was more effective than yelling. “We’re going to school. Teddy, Becky, no more of this now. We. Are. Going. To. School.”

Silence. My God. It worked. Three little faces just stared at her. With a triumphant smile, Amy slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

“But I’m taking them off when I come home,” Becky said.

“That’s fine.”

She peeked at the gas gauge and rolled her eyes. Damn. The needle was floating just a smidge above empty. That’s what she was supposed to do yesterday. Fill the tank. Now she had to stop, fill up, hope the kids didn’t start in again. Why, why, couldn’t Bill have been here this morning?

Driving to the station, she realized that his being home couldn’t have done anything about gas magically getting into the tank, but at least she’d feel more at ease.

“Kindergarten baby,” Teddy said to Becky.

“Am not!”

Oh, no. It had taken her twenty minutes yesterday to stop this same skirmish.

“Are too!”

“Teddy.”

“Well, she is.”

“Did you like it when the big kids called you that last year?”

He let out his breath. “No.”

“Then don’t do it to your sister.”

The gas station loomed ahead of her. She put on her signal.

In the rear view mirror she saw Teddy start to sidle toward his sister. “You even say it, young man, and no TV tonight.”

Teddy grumbled himself into silence.

A knot of dread formed in Amy’s stomach as she pulled into the station. Was this how it was going to be every September? Last year was easy. Teddy was excited and proud to start kindergarten, and Becky adored nursery school, mostly because they had snack time and the teacher let her take off her shoes. Now it would be two of them, acting up because during the summer they’d let normal routines go to hell, and in a few years, Max, too – stop this, she warned herself. Your little girl is starting kindergarten. Just try to live for today.

She got out of the car and swiped her little pass over the electronic eye. Whoever invented these things must have had mothers in mind. And once she felt the surge of the gas pouring into her tank, again she took a moment to appreciate the perfect blue of the sky.

Then she saw the plane.

She saw a lot of planes, it was no big deal, as they lived close to the Albany airport and were on the flight paths of anything coming west from Boston or north from the New York airports to see them crossing all the time.

But there was something about this one. Something wrong. The banking was strange. It was sharp, and low, as it swung from westbound to south. God, was it going to crash? Right in front of her children? She’d had nightmares of planes crashing, but she’d read in some women’s magazine that that was a common dream for mothers, symbolizing fears that something horrible would happen. She remembered that awful plane crash from a few years back, the one in the Everglades, where the plane went down nose first and plunged into the muck and vanished. All she could think about was the people. She prayed that they’d all passed out before contact. Still, it gave her the shivers for weeks.

The plane continued to bank. It wobbled a moment, then righted itself, and continued south toward New York, straight and smooth. Amy let out her breath.

“Moooommmmmy!”

Amy was still watching the perfect blue sk , marred only by the vapor trail of the disappearing plane.

“Mommy, Max dropped his binkie.”

She watched until the plane dissolved out of view. “Well, get it for him.”

“But I’m all buckled!”

Damn, that was right. Everybody strapped in safe. “Just a minute,” she said. Amy took her receipt and screwed the gas cap back in place, then checked on the children. Max was asleep, happily drooling against his car seat.

“He’s sleeping, honey,” Amy said. “Let’s wait until we get to school, OK?”

“But it’ll get dirty!” Becky said.

“I’ll wash it when we get home. Don’t worry, it’ll be OK.”

And she got back in the car, and started the engine, and took her children to school, and didn’t think about the plane again.

Until she got home and turned on the television.