She realized that she was in the grip of a fury not unlike that which
seemed to motivate Jim Ironheart. She remembered what he had said
during their whispered conversation in row seventeen, when she had tried
to bully him into saving not just the Dubroveks but everyone aboard
Flight 246: “I hate death, people dying I hate it!” Some of the people
he saved had quoted him making similar remarks, and Holly remembered
what Viola Moreno had said about the deep and quiet sadness in him that
perhaps grew out of being an orphan at the age of ten. He quit
teaching, walked away from his career, because Larry Kakonis’s suicide
had made all his effort and concern seem pointless. That reaction at
first appeared extreme to Holly, but now she understood it perfectly.
She felt the same urge to cast aside a mundane life and do something
more meaningful, to crack the rule of fate, to wrench the very fabric of
the universe into a shape other than what God seemed to prefer for it.
For a fragile moment, standing in that Iowa field with the wind blowing
the stink of death to her, watching the rescue worker walk away with the
little boy who had almost died, Holly felt closer to Jim Ironheart than
she had ever been to another human being.
She went looking for him.
The scene around the broken DC-10 had become more chaotic than it had
been immediately after the crash. Fire trucks had driven onto the
plowed field. Streams of rich white foam arced over the broken plane,
frosted the fuselage in whipped-cream-like gobs, and damped the flames
on the surrounding fuel-soaked earth. Smoke still churned out of the
midsection, plumed from every rent and shattered window; shifting to the
whims of the wind, a black canopy spread over them and cast eerie,
constantly changing shadows as it filtered the afternoon sunshine,
raising in her mind the image of a grim kaleidoscope in which all the
pieces of glass were either black or gray. Rescue workers and
paramedics swarmed over the wreckage, searching for survivors, and their
numbers were so unequal to the awesome task that some of the more
fortunate passengers pitched in to help. Other passengers-some so
untouched by the experience that they appeared freshly showered and
dressed, others filthy and disheveled stood alone or in small groups,
waiting for the minibuses that would take them to the Dubuque terminal,
chattering nervously or stunned into silence. The only things threading
the crash scene together and providing it with some coherence were the
static-filled voices crackling on shortwave radios and walkie-talkies.
Though Holly was searching for Jim Ironheart, she found instead a young
woman in a yellow shirtwaist dress. The stranger was in her early
twenties, slender, auburn-haired, with a porcelain face; and though
uninjured she badly needed help. She was standing back from the
still-smoking rear section of the airliner, shouting a name over and
over again: “Kenny!
Kenny! Kenny!” She had shouted it so often that her voice was hoarse.
Holly put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and said, “Who is he?”
The stranger’s eyes were the precise blue of wisteria-and glazed.
“Have you seen Kenny?”
“Who is he, dear?”
“My husband.”
“What does he look like?”
Dazed, she said, “We were on our honeymoon.”
“I’ll help you look for him.”
“No.”
“Come on, kid, it’ll be all right.”
“I don’t want to look for him,” the woman said, allowing Holly to turn
her away from the plane and lead her toward the ambulances. “I don’t
want to see him. Not the way he’ll be. All dead. All broken up and
burned and dead.”
They walked together through the soft, tilled earth, where a new crop
would be planted in late winter and sprout up green and tender in the
spring, by which time all signs of death would have been eradicated and
nature’s illusion of life-everlasting restored.
Something was happening to Holly. A fundamental change was taking place
in her. She didn’t understand what it was yet, didn’t know what it
would mean or how different a person she would be when it was complete,
but she was aware of profound movement in the bedrock of her heart, her