The Flight of the Silvers (2 page)

“W-what do you mean?” Amanda asked.

Melanie tugged her forward. “Don’t talk to her.”

“It’s no matter,” the woman replied. “Just take comfort that you have a future, my pretty rose. I’ve seen you, tall and red.”

“Leave her alone,” Melanie hissed.

The stranger’s smile vanished. Her stare turned cold and brutal.

“Be careful how you speak to me, cow. We spare you and your husband as a courtesy. Perhaps we should slay you both and rear the little ones ourselves.”

“NO!” Amanda screamed.

The white-haired man sighed patiently at his companion.
“Sehmeer . . .”

“Nu’a purtua shi’i kien Esis,”
said the other man, without turning around.

The madwoman pursed her lips in a childish pout, then narrowed her eyes at Melanie.

“My wealth and heart oppose the idea. Pity. Your flawed little gems would thrive in our care.” She tossed Amanda another crooked smile. “We’d make them shine.”

The Givens moved in tight-knuckled silence for the rest of their journey—past the turnpike, over the guardrail, and up a steep embankment.

The tall ones stopped at the peak and surveyed the falling truck in the distance. The fuel tank had just touched the concrete and was starting to come apart.

“Brace yourself,” said the white-haired man, for all the good it did.

In the span of a gasp, the bubble of time vanished and a thunderous explosion rattled the Givens. Robert covered Hannah as a fireball rose sixty feet above the overpass. A searing blast of heat drove Melanie and Amanda screaming to the ground.

The strangers studied the swirling pillar of smoke with casual interest, as if it were art. Soon the madwoman swept her slender arm in a loop, summoning an eight-foot disc of fluorescent white light.

The family glanced up from the grass, eyeing the anomaly through cracked red stares. The circle hovered above the ground, as thin as a blanket and as round as a coin. Despite its perfect verticality, the surface shimmied like pond water.

Before any Given could form a thought, the quiet man in the windbreaker pulled down the lip of his baseball cap and brushed past the family with self-conscious haste. He plunged into the portal, the radiant white liquid rippling all around him. Robert watched his exit with mad rejection. It was the stuff of cartoons, a Roger Rabbit hole in the middle of nothing.

The dark-eyed woman gave Amanda a sly wink, then followed her companion into the breach. The surface swallowed her like thick white paint.

Alone among his rescuees, the white-haired man took a final glance at the Givens. Melanie saw his sharp blue eyes linger on Hannah.

“Just go,” the mother implored him. “Please. We won’t tell anyone.”

The stranger squinted in cool umbrage, clearly displeased to be treated like a common mugger.

“Tell whoever you want.”

Robert stammered chaotically, his throat clogged with a hundred burning questions. He thought of his minivan, which no doubt stood a charred and empty husk on the road. Suddenly the father who’d cursed the gods for his horrible fortune knew exactly what to ask.

“Why us?”

The stranger stopped at the portal. Robert threw a quick, nervous look at Amanda and Hannah.

“Why them?”

The white-haired man turned around now, his face an inscrutable wall of ice.

“Your daughters may one day learn. You will not. Accept that and embrace the rest of your time.”

He stepped through the gateway, vanishing in liquid. Soon the circle shrank to a dime-size dot and then blinked out of existence.

One by one, the survivors on the freeway emerged from their vehicles—the injured and the lucky, the screaming and the stunned. In the smoky bedlam, no one noticed the family of mourners on the distant embankment.

The Givens huddled together on the grass, their brown and green gazes held firmly away from the turnpike. Only Hannah had the strength to stand. She was five years old and still new to the universe. She had no idea how many of its laws had been broken in front of her. All she knew was that today was a strange and ugly day and her sister was wrong.

Hannah moved behind her weeping mother and threw her arms around her shoulders. She took a deep breath. And she sang.

ONE

On a Friday night in dry July, in the Gaslamp Quarter of downtown San Diego, the Indian-dancers-who-weren’t-quite-Indian twirled across the stage of the ninety-nine-seat playhouse. Five lily-white women in yellow sarees flowed arcs of georgette as they spun in measure to the musical intro. The orchestra, which had finished its job on Monday and was now represented by a six-ounce iPod, served a curious fusion of bouncy trumpets and sensual
shehnai
s—Broadway bombast with a Bombay contrast. The music director was an insurance adjuster by day. He’d dreamed up his euphonious Frankenstein three years ago, and tonight, by the grace of God and regional theater, it was alive.

The curtain parted and a new performer prowled her way onto the stage. She was a raven-haired temptress in a fiery red
lehenga
. Her curvy figure—ably flaunted by a low-cut, belly-baring choli—brought half the jaded audience to full attention.

The spotlights converged. The dancers dispersed. All eyes were now fixed upon the brown-eyed leading lady: the young, the lovely, the up-and-coming Hannah Given.

With a well-rehearsed look of sexy self-assurance, she swayed her hips to the rhythm and sang.

“Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.

And little man, little Lola wants you . . .”

She shot a sultry gaze at the actor sitting downstage right, a handsome young man in a cricket player’s uniform. He was theatrically bewitched by her. In reality, he was mostly bothered. Her neurotic questioning of all creative decisions made rehearsals twice as long as they needed to be. Still, he was casually determined to sleep with her sometime before the production closed. He wouldn’t.

“Make up your mind to have no regrets.

Recline yourself, resign yourself, you’re through.”

A sharp cough from the audience made her inner needle skip, throwing her Lola and dropping her into a sinkhole of Hannah concerns. She fished herself out on a gilded string of affirmations.
Your stomach looks fine. Your voice sounds great. Gwen Verdon isn’t screaming from Heaven. And odds are only one in ninety-nine that the angry cough came from the
CityBeat
critic.

You know damn well who it was,
a harsher voice insisted.

She narrowed her eyes at the dark sea of heads, then fell back into character. The rest of the song proceeded without a hitch. At final-curtain applause, Hannah convinced herself that the whole premiere went swimmingly aside from that half-second skip. She figured the misstep would haunt her for days. It wouldn’t.

—

She wriggled back into her halter top and jeans and then joined the congregation in the lobby, where half the audience lingered to heap praise on the performers they knew. Hannah had given out five comp tickets, including two to her roommates and one to the day job colleague she was kinda sorta a little involved with. None of them showed up. Lovely. That only left the great Amanda Ambridge, plus spouse.

Hannah had little trouble finding her sister in the crowd. Amanda was a stiletto pump away from being six feet tall, with an Irish red mane that made her stand out like a stop sign. She stood alone by the ticket booth, a stately figure even in her bargain blouse and skinny jeans. At twenty-seven, Amanda’s sharp features had settled into hard elegance, a brand of uptight beauty that was catnip to so many artists. Hannah felt like a tavern wench in the presence of a queen.

Amanda spotted her and shined a taut smile. “Hey, there you are!”

“Here I am,” Hannah said. “Thanks for coming.”

After a clumsy half-start, the two women hugged. Hannah stood five inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier than her sister, though she’d squeezed it all into a buxom frame that drove numerous men to idiocy. Amanda felt hopelessly unsexy in her company, the Olive Oyl to her Betty Boop. Her husband did a fine job fortifying her complex tonight. The only time Derek didn’t writhe in agony during the awful show was when Hannah graced the stage with her grand and bouncy blessings. Amanda had hacked a sharp cough at him, just to throw sand in his bulging eyes.

Hannah scanned the lobby for her brother-in-law, a man she’d met six times at best. “Where’s the doc?”

“He’s getting the car. He’s tired and we both have to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay. Hope he didn’t suffer too much.”

“Not too much.” Her smile tightened. “He really enjoyed your performance.”

“Oh good. Glad to hear it. And you?”

“I thought you were terrific. Better than . . .”

Amanda stopped herself. Hannah’s brow rose in cynical query. “Better than what? Usual?”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Then just say it.”

“I thought you were better than the show deserved.”

A frosty new leer bloomed across Hannah’s face. Amanda glanced around, then leaned in for a furtive half whisper.

“Look, you know I like
Damn Yankees,
but this whole idea of turning it into a Bollywood pastiche was just . . . It was painful, like watching someone try to shove a Saint Bernard through a cat door. But despite that—”

Hannah cut her off with a jagged laugh. Amanda crossed her arms in umbrage.

“You asked me my opinion. Would you rather I lie?”

“I’d rather you say it instead of coughing it!”

A dozen glances turned their way. Amanda blinked at her sister. “I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Now you’re lying.”

“Hannah—”

“You just couldn’t hold in your criticism. You had to let it out in the middle of my big number.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Bullshit. You know what you did.”

“Hannah, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Oh my God.” The actress covered her face with both hands. “You do this every time.”

“Well, I’m—”

“‘—sorry you’re upset,’” Hannah finished, in near-perfect synch with her sister. “Yeah. I’m well acquainted with your noble act by now. You might want to change it up a little. You know, for variety.”

Amanda closed her eyes and pressed the dangling gold crucifix on her collarbone. This, Hannah knew all too well, was the standard Amanda retreat whenever her mothersome bother and sisterical hyster became too much for her.
Give me strength, O Lord. Give me strength.

The lights in the lobby suddenly faltered for three seconds, an erratic flicker that stopped all chatter. Hannah furrowed her brow at the sputtering laptop in the ticket booth.

Amanda checked her watch and vented a somber breath at the exit. “He should be out front by now. I better go.”

“Fine. Say hi for me.”

“Yup.”

The sisters spent a long, hot moment avoiding each other’s gazes before Amanda turned around and pushed through the swinging glass doors.

Hannah leaned against the wall, muttering soft curses as she gently thumped her skull. Between all her regrets and frustrations, she found the space to wonder why a battery-powered laptop would flicker with the overhead lights. She pushed the concern to the back of her mind, in the dark little vault where strange things went.

—

Seventeen years had passed since the madness on the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Givens never spoke a public word about the bizarre circumstances of their rescue. With each passing year, a welcome fog grew over their collective memories, until the family embraced the cover story as the one true account. They saw the truck teetering. They fled before it fell. That was just how it happened. End of subject.

Eight years after the incident, death came for Robert a second time and won. His cancer and passing had shattered Amanda in ways even her mother couldn’t divine. She spent her final summer at home like an apparition and then disappeared to college, coming home once a year with thoughtful gifts, a practiced smile, and at least one major change to her state of being. First she found God. Then Hippocrates. Then a credible shade of red. And finally, during her brief stint at medical school, she found Dr. Derek Ambridge, who was eleven years her senior. From there, the arc of her life went into gentle downgrade.

Hannah, meanwhile, had cratered early. A spectacular nervous breakdown at age thirteen ended both her and her mother’s resolve to turn her into a child star. After a year of therapy, she landed comfortably on the civilian teenage track, where she became lost in a routine tsunami of highs and lows, LOLs and whoas, breakups, makeups, and adolescent shake-ups. Upon graduation, she went west to San Diego State, where she dyed her hair black and experimented with all-new mistakes. On the upside, she rediscovered her theatrical ambitions. She stayed in town after college, found an office job, and began the slow process of rebuilding her résumé.

Six months ago, fate reunited the sisters when Derek accepted a partnership at a private oncology practice in Chula Vista, California, nine miles south of San Diego. For Melanie, the move was a golden opportunity for her daughters to finally connect.

“I want you to see Amanda as often as you can,” she ordered Hannah. “Because she’s going to leave that guy sooner or later and she’ll be the one who moves away.”

Though Hannah promised to try, she’d only met with Amanda three times in the last half year. Their first two encounters had been brisk and cordial and as tender as a tax form. No doubt their mother would be even less pleased with how the Great Sisters Given fared tonight.

—

With a thorny glower, Amanda emerged from the theater onto J Street, where her hybrid chariot awaited. Cigarette smoke rose from the driver’s side.

Amanda slung herself into the passenger seat. Her husband tensely tapped ashes out his window.

“In case you’re keeping score, I lost five IQ points tonight. Plus my faith in man.”

“I know,” Amanda sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Derek was two years shy of forty. Though nature stayed kind to his boyish good looks, he regarded his impending middle age like a Stage 3 carcinoma. He worked out every day, ate raw vegetables for lunch, and overtook the medicine cabinet with pricey creams and cleansers. Nicotine was his last remaining vice. He was never happier to have it.

“If you love me, hon, you won’t make me go to her next musical.”

“I don’t even know if I’ll go,” Amanda admitted with a hot blush of shame.

“What’s the matter? You two have a fight?”

“Yeah. I tried to tell her she was good tonight and somehow she took it as a personal attack.”

“Well, you always said she was a minefield.”

“I know, but there’s something else behind it. I think she resents me for moving out here. Like I’m crashing the nice little world she built for herself.”

Derek jerked a weary shrug. “I’m sure you gals will work it out.”

He propped the cigarette in his mouth and merged into traffic. Two blocks passed in dreary silence.

“I’ll say this for your sister, she’s got quite a set of pipes on her. Quite a set of everything. Jesus.”

“That was classy, Derek.”

“I know. I’m a real charmer after ten. If it’s any consolation, you have the better face.”

Amanda snatched his cigarette and took a deep drag. She spat smoke out her window, at an illuminated bank sign. The digital clock had become hopelessly scrambled, forever stuck in crazy eights.

“Just drive.”

—

The electricity continued to surge and dip throughout the night. Citywide power fluctuations were spotted in various pockets of the globe, from Guadalajara to Rotterdam. The night owls screeched and the utility workers scrambled, but most of the West slept through the muddle. In London, the morning commute was hamstrung by a chain of mini-blackouts. In central Osaka, the sun set on a flickering skyline.

And then at 4:41
A.M.,
Pacific Time, the entire world shut down for nine and a half minutes. Every light and every outlet. Every battery. Every generator. Even the lightning storms that had been swirling in 1,652 different parts of the world were extinguished by invisible hands. For nine and a half minutes, the Earth experienced a mechanical quiet that hadn’t been felt in centuries.

At 4:50, the switch flipped again, and the modern world returned with confusion and damage.

The American power network was as complex and temperamental as the human psyche. In some areas, the electricity came back immediately. In other regions, the circuits stayed dead forever. On some streets, people struggled to help their neighbors out of stalled elevators and plane-wrecked buildings. In others, there was panic and violence. Accusations. Tribulation.

Throughout all the chaos, the sisters slept.

Amanda woke up an hour after sunrise, her alarm clock blinking confusedly at 12:00. She made a sleepy lurch to the shower and heard Derek’s off-key crooning over the running water. She used the other bathroom.

“Power failure last night,” he said twenty minutes later, as they both dressed.

“Yeah. I noticed.”

“I’m not getting a signal on my phone either.”

Her shirt still undone, Amanda turned on her smartphone and patiently waited for the little image of a radar dish to stop spinning. She gave up after a minute.

Derek crossed into the kitchen and nearly slipped on a pair of magnets. Yawning, he stuck them back on the refrigerator. Amanda flipped on the living room TV. Channel after channel of “No Signal” alert boxes. She peered out the front window and relaxed at the normal procession of cars and joggers, the comforting lack of screams and sirens. Aside from the all-encompassing power burp, life seemed fine in Chula Vista.

Soon her mind drifted back to the mundane—chores and cancer, Derek and Hannah. Her bleary thoughts kept her busy all the way to the medical office. She didn’t notice the two separate plumes of black smoke in the distance, spreading like stains across the flat gray sky.

—

Two of the nurses failed to show up for their Saturday shift. From the moment she threw on her peach-colored coat, Amanda became a whirlwind of activity, spinning between the office’s endless rooms and needs. Along the way, she picked up morsels of chatter about the blackout. Her fingers curled with tension when one of the patients mentioned something about a crashed Navy jet.

Tommy Berber eyed Amanda balefully from the far end of the hall. He was a barrel-chested biker with a bandana skullcap and a bushy gray beard that hung in knotted vines. Mechanical beeps emanated from inside the chamber.