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had been a world traveler and insisted on a room where he could see the horizon. The room had two single beds with a nightstand between them. The lamp on the nightstand had a fringed shade. On the wall was a map of the world from 1932—no Israel, Garrett noticed, and the names and boundaries of the nations in Africa were different. The map was marked with multicolored pushpins, showing all the places across the planet where Uncle Burton had laid his head for the night. Singapore, Guatemala, Marrakech. Katmandu, the Fiji Islands, Santiago, Cape Town. Underneath the bed that Garrett didn’t use was Uncle Burton’s traveling trunk. Garrett and his father had sifted through it once, examining the masks, the kris knife from Malaysia, a ladle made out of a coconut, the postcards and cocktail napkins from fancy hotels in Europe.
    Garrett placed the urn on top of the dresser. He wanted to convince his mother to let him take a year off before he went to college. He wanted to go to Perth, Australia. Garrett stepped out onto his one-person balcony, dreaming about a flat in Cottlesloe Beach, long drives into the Outback, sightings of emus and crocodiles and kangaroos, which he’d heard were as plentiful as rabbits. Arch had spent a year in Perth between college and law school, and he told Garrett all about the Fremantle Doctor, which was the name of a breeze that came off the water in January, and about the sheilas, a term for gorgeous Australian women with
Baywatch
bodies.
    Garrett wanted to live a life exactly like his father’s—Austra-lia, college, law school. A career as a Manhattan attorney, a wife and two kids, including a son of his own. He could then pick up where his father’s life tragically ended. Arch’s plane crash was, quite simply, the worst disaster imaginable. The plane was a Cessna Skylark. It had been gassed up at the Albany airport, and checked by mechanics. The flight pattern was cleared by the FAA, by the tower in Albany, by the tower in LaGuardia. The pilot had over two thousand hours of flight time. But he was only twenty-five years old, and the plane had propellers, like the toy planes Garrett used to play with as a kid.
    When they recovered the body, and the black box, two days after the crash, Garrett had wanted to see both. He wanted to see his father’s body; he wanted to listen to the flight recorder. But no one was willing to let him do either. The managing partner at his father’s firm, Trent Trammelman, identified the body. Garrett summoned the courage to ask Trent,
What did he looklike ? Please tell me.
    He looked fine,
Trent said.
Peaceful.
That word, “peaceful,” clued Garrett right in: Trent was lying. And so Garrett was left to imagine his father’s body. Blue, bloated, broken. Garrett’s father, his dad, whom he knew so well and had seen happy and healthy and handily in control of every situation that arose since Garrett had been born, was altered forever in a matter of seconds. Killed. Boom, just like that.
    The cause of the crash was ruled as ice on the wings. There had been a driving freezing rain and it was dark—the worst possible flying conditions. There was a mechanical failure— something called a “boot” on one of the wings was supposed to expand and crack off the ice, but it malfunctioned, and one wing grew heavier than the other. The pilot changed altitudes several times, but nothing worked. The pilot couldn’t recover. The plane went into a spin and crashed. The thing that Garrett hated to think of even more than the condition of his father’s body after the crash was those seconds or minute when the plane spun toward earth. What could those seconds possibly have been like for his father? Did his father scream? Did his father think about Garrett, Winnie, their mother? He must have. The only reaction Garrett wanted to imagine from his father was anger. His father would have been yelling at the pilot to regain control.
I have kids!
he would have said.
I have a