the three people in the photograph, her mother Rosalie and her aunt Lou and her own invisible self.
“Who’s this?” she asks, pointing to a photograph of her aunt and another woman in front of the Tour Eiffel. The woman is frowning.
“That’s Françoise. The one I shared the apartment with.”
“She looks pretty glum.”
“I put up with her because I only had to pay a pittance for rent. She paid most of it, and she paid all utilities. Of course there was a downside. Sometimes her boyfriend would show up and I’d have to find somewhere else for the night.”
“Françoise,” Samantha says. “That’s a funny coincidence. There’s a Françoise who just contacted me through the website, the Flight 64 website. She lives in Paris.”
“It’s a very common name.”
“Did I meet her? Your roommate? Did we visit your apartment?”
“No, you stayed in a hotel.”
“Would she have known—your Françoise—that you had relatives on the flight?”
“It was her TV set that I was glued to for days, but then I moved out anyway to collect you in Germany.”
“And then we flew back to Charleston,” Sam says.
“You remember that?”
Sam remembers verandas, porch swings, jasmine. She remembers planes that exploded every night. She remembers tantrums. She remembers throwing things at her grandparents and at her aunt. “I remember we didn’t last long in Charleston.”
“No.”
“And then you and Grandma Hamilton had a big fight, and you brought me here to New York.”
“Yes,” Lou says sadly.
“You should have known it would never work,” Samantha says.
She remembers years of shuttling between her aunt Lou in New York and her grandparents in Charleston, fighting with all of them, always moody, always in trouble at school, until her grandparents paid for a boarding school in Vermont, which seemed to them an institution both sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently far away, and there Samantha discovered American history and American government, and then she discovered obsession. She became obsessed with the politics of hijacked planes and with the capacity of press and public for quick forgetting, and with the quiet erasure of events from government records. She decided that Washington, D.C., was where she needed to be, and she applied to Georgetown University and was accepted.
Samantha holds the magnifying glass again to the shot of the family boarding the plane. “Why is my father watching you like that?”
“I had the camera,” her aunt says.
“Why is my mother watching my father like that? She’s worried about something. What is she worried about?”
“Your mother never liked traveling much,” her aunt says.
Samantha jumps up and walks out to Lou’s kitchen and looks in her fridge and rummages there as though a different possible past is hidden somewhere behind the milk carton. Her head is deep inside the white-enameled cold. “If she hadn’t begged them to come to Paris, we would never have been on that flight,” Samantha says in a low voice to the back wall of the refrigerator, trying out the words. They bounce back from a tub of butter. She shuts the fridge door. She goes back into the living room and picks up the photo album and puts it down and goes out to the kitchen again. She goes to the sink. She turns on the cold tap, then the hot. She lets both of them run full blast. She watches her life running down the drain.
Her aunt follows and puts her hands on Samantha’s shoulders. Samantha has a sudden violent wish to push Lou’s hands into the Cuisinart and turn it on. “Grandma Hamilton calls you the black sheep of the family,” she says, wanting to draw blood. “You slept around.” The tap water is plunging ferociously down the drain. “There would even have been a baby, Grandma says, if the family hadn’t taken care of the matter.”
Sam can see the sudden pain in Lou’s eyes, but nevertheless the eyes rest on her niece’s face, calm and assessing, disappointed perhaps. Is she embarrassed for me? Sam asks herself. This makes her furious. She puts her head under the rush of water and hears chance. It roars like Niagara. She can see the fog, angry-colored, that hangs over Porte 12, between her aunt’s camera and herself. There is something about the camera that sends rockets of anger scudding under the surface of Sam’s skin. This anger beats in and out like a bass drum in her ears and it signals war, but the truth is, she does not really understand why she is so furiously angry with her aunt and the awkwardness of being in the wrong makes her angrier.
“Let it go, Sam,” Lou says. “Let them be. Let them rest in peace.”
“I can’t,” Samantha says.
She wants to show the world photographs that don’t exist. Look at this, she wants to say: my mother’s eyes. These are my mother’s eyes at the moment when Matthew finally stopped crying altogether. And here is something else, she wants to say: here are the eyes of the children all around me, some time later (days later, airports later, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines later) when we huddled together watching TV—we were crowded on makeshift cots in some vast room, I think it was a high school gym, I know it was somewhere in Germany—forty pairs of eyes, opened wide, unblinking, watching the fate of their parents on one small screen. The plane, before it turned into an underwater sun, before it branched into red and orange coral, seemed to swim in blue haze like a fish. We knew we had been dropped like tiny eggs from its belly, we were vague about when. Pow, pow, one little boy said, pointing his fingers at the screen. No one cried then. All the eyes were so dry, they prickled. There was an eerie silence in the room.
Here is a photograph, Samantha wants to say to the world. Here is a photograph, never taken, which I would like you to see: the eyes of forty frightened children as they step off the lip of an abyss.
Onstage, back in Washington, D.C., Samantha blazes with light and looks into the dark. Chien Bleu is murkily lit. This is a basement dive, thick with perfume and blues and jazz and the hot scent of illicit assignations. Chien Bleu caters to the lower levels, so to speak, but the baseness is exclusive. Inside the Washington Beltway, all sex is costly and the Chien Bleu’s cover price is high. Tables are so close that the waiters must pass between them sideways, trays held aloft. Couple by couple, even one by one, clients sift in past the bouncers. No standees are allowed. In the heat of the overhead spotlight, Samantha dabs at her forehead—she has tissues tucked into her bra—but she can feel her makeup melting on her face. She waits for the sax backstage to well up and flow over the din of conversation and she rides the wave.
“Hi,” she says huskily, floating herself out on an arpeggio. The soft curl of attention washes back toward her.
“I can’t sing,” she tells them, almost touching the mike with her lips. “I’m the entr’acte between musical sets.” She makes this sound like a proposition, low and sultry.
She takes a clasp out of her hair and lets it cascade around her shoulders. She unbuttons the cuffs on her long white sleeves. (She is dressed
