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him.
    —
    After they’d admitted that initial group, Michelle and Wade moved inside. Other people showed up individually or in small clusters, lured by the loudspeaker’s monotonous chant or directed there by Joanie or Erika or an indifferent recorded message on the airline’s answering machine. These new people peered through the thin rectangular window in the door frame, then tapped at the wire-meshed glass. When Michelle opened the door partway to check their identification against her printout, she tried not to meet the gaze of those who lingered outside the room, banished to the hallway as if their friendship had no value.
    Did the people inside count as the lucky ones? There were fifty of them in the conference room now, all suspended over the cliff of a horrible grief. Occasionally, a ripple would start in one row or another, the beginnings of a protest eventually stifled by decorum. And false hope.
    Wade held them off with a partial announcement at ten o’clock, told them simply that radio contact with the plane had been lost.
It may have been diverted to a different airport. We’re working on locating it now.
    But Michelle had seen enough on Wade’s laptop to prepare herself. The projected image remained constant, but her boss periodically cycled through the other camera views on his private screen. He tried to do this subtly—when none of the family members were close to his lectern, and therefore couldn’t catch a stray close-up of metal scraps, torn and burnt and bloody fabric, or a crisp white sheet on a stretcher pulled over shapes that didn’t quite add up to a complete body.
    Each glimpse was enough to force Michelle back into a noncommittal smile, to send her among the rows to collect napkins folded over half-eaten doughnuts or see if anyone needed a different magazine or a coffee refill, decaf or regular, and no, we haven’t heard anything new, not since the last time you asked, I’m sorry.
    She grasped for a general way to refer to them in her mind, these almost widows and nearly orphans, these older men and women who’d soon cast the name of parent painfully into the past tense. Without intending to, she’d attached nicknames to some of them. Big Gulp for the woman with the soda tumbler; Surfer Dude for the twenty-year-old with a slurred California accent. Then there was the stocky middle-aged man who looked like he’d slept in his clothes. His short brown hair had an uneven part on the left side, his face scratchy with a pepper stubble of beard. Maybe she’d been influenced by Wade’s predictions, but this man’s eyes, dark and darting around the room, seemed to
take notes.
So she’d dubbed him the Reporter. The nicknames weren’t meant to be unkind—just a way to identify people, yet keep them at a distance. If Michelle registered the real name of the elderly black woman—if it was Gladys, for example, and if she held an infant granddaughter named Tammy—the knowledge would only make their suffering more tangible.
    Occasionally she’d hear the ring of a cellphone or overhear the tentative, nervous half of a phone conversation. She gathered nobody at home had information, either: Whatever happened or hadn’t happened wasn’t yet enough to attract the national media, and local news sources remained silent or unaware. Unlike typical cell conversations, loud to the point of rudeness, people here whispered into their phones, unwilling to amplify their anxiety to the room. They hugged phones to their ears, turned their heads to hide the electronic devices as Michelle passed.
    An unconscious symbolism seemed to control them. Michelle was playing at stewardess, and Wade had seated them as if they were on a spacious flight. People stayed mostly in their seats, for fear of missing an announcement the instant it was conveyed—but just as strong was the sense that leaving was impossible, would break the air seal of the cabin, send them from safety into rooms governed by cruel gravity, with