“Shit, what was that?” Jane said hoarsely. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and Bill’s face was tense.

“I don’t know. It could be a fuel leak. I’m not sure,” he said tersely, as his jaw clenched. He was fighting to control the plane as they lost altitude rapidly, and with that the engine caught fire, and he guided the plane down looking for a clearing to land. Jane said not a word. She just watched as Bill fought to level them out again, but he couldn’t. They were listing badly and heading down at a frightening speed as he called in to the controller and told him where he was. “We’re going down, our left wing is on fire,” he said calmly, and Jane reached out and touched his arm. He never took his hand off the controls, and he told her he loved her. They were his last words as the Cessna hit the ground and exploded in a ball of fire.

Annie’s cell phone rang again just as she was erasing a change she had spent an hour making on the plans. She didn’t like it and was delicately changing it back. She was concentrating intensely, and then glanced at her phone lying on the drafting table. It was Jane, they had obviously gotten home. She almost didn’t answer it, she didn’t want to break her concentration, and Jane always wanted to chat.

Annie tried to ignore it, but the ringing was annoying and persistent, and finally she picked it up.

“Can I call you back?” she said as she answered, and was met by a flood of Spanish. Annie recognized the voice. It was Magdalena, the Salvadoran woman who took care of Jane and Bill’s kids. She sounded frantic. Annie knew these calls well. Magdalena had her number for when Bill and Jane were away. She usually only called Annie when one of the kids got hurt, but Annie knew that her sister would be home within minutes, if she wasn’t already there. She couldn’t understand a word Magdalena said in rapid Spanish.

“They’re on their way home,” Annie reassured her. Usually it was Ted who had fallen out of a tree or off a ladder or bumped his head. He was an active boy and accident prone. The girls were a lot more sedate. Lizzie was almost a teenager, and Katie was a fireball, but she was more verbal than athletic and had never gotten hurt. “I talked to Jane two hours ago,” Annie said calmly. “They should be home any minute.”

With that, Magdalena exploded in another torrent of Spanish. She sounded as though she was crying, and the only word Annie understood was la policia. The police.

“What about the police? Are the kids okay?” Maybe one of them really had gotten seriously injured. So far it had only been small stuff, except for Ted’s broken leg when he fell out of a tree at the Vineyard and his parents were there. “Tell me in English,” Annie insisted. “What happened? Who got hurt?”

“Your sister… the police call… the plane… ” Annie felt as though she had been shot out of a cannon and was spinning in midair. Everything was in slow motion, and she could feel herself reeling at the words.

“What did they say?” Annie managed to grind out the words through the shards of glass in her throat. Every word she formed was a physical pain. “What happened? What did the police SAY?” She was shouting at Magdalena and didn’t know it. And all Magdalena could do was sob. “TELL ME, DAMMIT!” Annie shouted at her, as Magdalena tried to tell her in English.

“I don’t know… something happen… I call her cell phone and she not answer… they say… they say… the plane catch fire. It was the police in New London.”

“I’ll call you back,” Annie said, and hung up on her. She finally got a police emergency number in New London, that referred her to another number. A voice asked her who she was, and after she told them, there was an interminable silence on the other end of the phone.

“Are you nearby?” the voice wanted to know.

“No, I’m not nearby,” Annie said, torn between a sob and an urge to shout at this unknown woman. Something terrible had happened. She was praying they were only hurt. “I’m in New York,” she explained. “What happened to the plane?” She gave them the call numbers of Bill’s plane, and a different voice came on the phone. He said he was a captain, and he told her what she didn’t want to know and never wanted to hear. He said the plane had exploded on impact and there were no survivors. He asked her if she knew who was on the plane.

“My sister and her husband,” Annie whispered, as she stared blindly into space. This hadn’t happened. It wasn’t possible. This couldn’t happen to them. But it had. She had no idea what to say next so she thanked the captain and hung up. She told him he could contact her at her sister’s home in Greenwich and gave him the number. And then she grabbed her purse and walked out of the apartment without even turning out the lights.

Later, she could not remember getting into her car or traveling to Greenwich in a driving rain. She had no memory of it whatsoever. The promised storm had hit New York. She left her car in the driveway in Greenwich and was drenched when she got to the house. Magdalena was crying in the kitchen. The kids were upstairs watching a movie, waiting for their parents to come home. And when they heard the door slam as Annie walked in, they came running to see their mom and dad, and what they saw instead was her, standing dripping in the living room, her hair plastered to her head, the tears running down her face like rain.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” Ted asked, looking confused, and Lizzie stared at her with wide eyes. The moment she saw Annie standing there, she knew, and her hand flew to her mouth.

“Mom and Dad…,” Lizzie said with a look of horror, and Annie nodded as she ran halfway up the stairs to them and put her arms around all three. They clung to her like a life raft in a stormy sea, as the realization hit Annie with the force of a wrecking ball. Now all three of them were hers.

Chapter 2

The next days were a total nightmare. She had to tell them. Lizzie was devastated. Ted hid in the garage after he heard the news. Katie cried inconsolably. And at first Annie had no idea what to do. She went to New London to speak to the police. The wreckage of Bill’s plane was charred beyond recognition. There were no bodies, they had been blown to bits.

Somehow she managed to make the “arrangements.” She held a dignified funeral for them, and half of Greenwich came. Bill’s publishing associates came out from New York to pay their respects. And Annie had called her office and explained that she needed to take a week or two off and couldn’t make the presentation.

She moved into Bill and Jane’s house and went back to the city to get her things. The new apartment she loved was history. It had only one bedroom, and she didn’t want to uproot the children so soon, so she’d have to commute to the city. Magdalena agreed to move in. And Annie had to adjust to the idea that suddenly she was a twenty-six-year-old woman with three children. Jane and Bill had talked to her about it, that if anything happened to them, she would have to step in for them. Bill had no close relatives, and Annie and Jane’s own parents were dead. There was no one to take care of them now except Annie, and all four of them had to make the best of it. There was no other choice. And Annie’s vow to Jane the night before the funeral was to devote her life to their children and do the best she could. She had no idea how to be a mom, all she had ever been was a fun aunt, and now she would have to learn. She couldn’t even imagine stepping into their shoes, and she knew she was a poor substitute for parents like Bill and Jane, but she was all they had.

Seth had the grace to wait until a week after the funeral before he came to see her in Greenwich. He took her to dinner at a quiet place. He told her he was crazy about her, but he was twenty-nine years old, and there was no way he could take on a woman with three children. He said he had had a terrific time with her for the past two months, but this was way, way over his head. She said she understood. She didn’t cry, she wasn’t mad at him. She was numb. She said nothing after he explained the situation to her, and he drove her back to the house in silence. He tried to kiss her goodbye, and she turned her head away and walked into the house without a word to him. She had more important things to do now, like bring up three children. They had become a family overnight, and Seth wasn’t part of it, and didn’t want to be. She couldn’t imagine a man who would. She had grown up instantly the moment the plane had hit the ground.


* * *

Nine months later, in June, at the end of the school year, Annie moved them into the city, to an apartment she had rented, not far from the one she had just moved into when her sister died. This one had three bedrooms. And she signed the kids up in school in New York. Lizzie had turned thirteen by then, Ted was nine, and Katie six. Since she had been with them, Annie had done nothing but rush from work to home, to be with the kids. She spent the weekends taking Katie to ballet and Ted to soccer games. She took Lizzie shopping. She started Ted at the orthodontist and went to school meetings when she wasn’t working late. The architecture firm she worked for had been understanding about it. And with Magdalena covering for her, she managed to stay on top of her projects. And eventually she even got a promotion and a raise.

Bill and Jane had left their children comfortably provided for. Bill had made some good investments, the house in Greenwich sold for an excellent price, and so did the one on Martha’s Vineyard, and there had been an insurance policy for the children. They had what they needed financially, if Annie was careful with it, but they didn’t have a mom and dad. They had an aunt. They were patient with Annie while she learned. There were some bumps and some sad times for them all at first, but in time they all got used to the hand they’d been dealt. And Magdalena stayed.