Was he in heaven?
God. Please, not that.
My body shook with wrenching sobs in the dim, lonely room. Please, Dean . . . if you’re out there . . . if you can hear me . . . come home.
Hours later, I turned on the television. There were no more news items about the crash—if that’s what it was. The latest story involved a senator who had been caught shoplifting in Atlanta. There was nothing about Dean in the newspapers, either, not even a short piece on page ten or eleven.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I closed my eyes and dreamed about all the Sunday mornings that Dean and I had sat at the kitchen table, trading sections of the newspaper while we sipped coffee and thought about what to make for breakfast. Eggs or pancakes? Both? Usually we had both, and it was always Dean who stood over the skillet flipping the pancakes while I scrambled the eggs. The thought of it made me smile, but then it filled me with grief. When I opened my eyes, I could barely see through my tears.
I tried to nap in the afternoon, but it was pointless because I couldn’t stop staring at the telephone, waiting for it to ring, for someone to call me with news and tell me that Dean had been found.
Later, my eyes were fixed on the kitchen phone when it finally rang and interrupted the interminable silence. I jumped up and nearly knocked over a chair as I dashed around the table to answer it. I dropped the receiver when I picked it up. It bounced on the floor, and I fumbled to grab hold of the coiled cord and pull it back.
“Hello?” I said anxiously, afraid that I might have cut off the caller.
“Hello. Is this Olivia Hamilton?”
“Yes.” I listened like a wild creature of the forest—alert and ready to act.
“This is Mike Mitchell,” the caller said. “I was on the airplane with your husband a few hours before he disappeared.”
My heart turned over in my chest. Not knowing what to expect, I leaned against the kitchen counter and rubbed the back of my neck.
“Yes, I know who you are,” I replied, appreciating the fact that he had used the word disappeared instead of crashed.
“I heard they called off the search,” Mike said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you.”
There was an angry part of me that wanted to say: You have a lot of nerve. This is all your fault. If you hadn’t decided to fly off to your party mansion that night, Dean would still be here.
But I didn’t say that because it wasn’t fair. I could just as easily blame Richard or the other pilot who got sick and needed to be replaced at the last minute. Or I could blame myself for putting pressure on Dean to fly straight home.
“How are you holding up?” Mike asked.
“Not that well, if you really want to know.” I had to fight to keep my voice steady. “I just don’t understand how they could give up the search when they didn’t find anything. I mean, he has to be out there, right? An airplane can’t just vanish.”
“Well, that’s up for debate,” Mike said, “but I hear you.”
I shook my head, willing myself to be rational, to resist all the strange, outlandish theories that had been circulating the past few days, but it wasn’t easy.
Mike let out a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure if I should even call you. People kept telling me I should leave you alone to grieve and that I shouldn’t give you false hopes, but I at least had to offer my sympathies and tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thank you. But what sorts of false hopes would you be giving me? Specifically?” This I needed to know.
He cleared his throat. “Well . . . listen.” He paused. “I have a friend who has done some research on the Triangle. He’s a smart guy with a science background, and he has some interesting ideas about what’s going on.”
A week ago, I would have rolled my eyes at this kind of talk, but since the search had been called off, I was desperate for new information.
“Go on.” I pushed away from the counter and paced around my kitchen.
“Do you know about Flight Nineteen?” Mike asked.
“You mentioned it on the news,” I replied.
“That’s right, and that’s not the only mysterious case out there. And I’m not talking about the rubbish the tabloids have been printing. Ignore that stuff.”
“What are you talking about, then?”
“Well . . .” He paused. “In 1978, a plane disappeared while coming in for a landing in Saint Thomas. The aircraft was visible on the radar, and the air traffic controller could see it approaching—with his very own eyes. He estimated it was only about two miles away. He looked down at the radar for a second, and then boom! It was gone. They declared an emergency and a search began, but no trace was ever found. And that was two miles from the airport. That’s a true story. You can look it up.”
“How did they ever explain it?” I asked.
“They never did. And some of the official reports about other disappearances are highly redacted. There are other strange things, too, like they found a piece of a plane that had vanished, and there was a magnetic particle attached to it, but they couldn’t identify what that magnetic particle was. So where did it come from? Where did the rest of the plane go?”
“Are you talking about UFOs?” I asked, and despite my desire to cling to any possible theory that supported the idea that Dean had not been killed in a crash, my brain couldn’t rationalize that he had been abducted by aliens.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Maybe there are electromagnetic disturbances in our atmosphere that scientists have yet to identify. Think about it. Einstein’s theory of relativity was only published this century. We’re still learning, right? So imagine everything that physicists still haven’t discovered yet about gravity and wormholes and time warps. We don’t know what we don’t know!”
I exhaled heavily. “I just want my husband back.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go off like that. I just find it strange that this happened.”
“I find it strange too.” I twirled the phone cord around my index finger and thought about everything he had just told me. “Listen, would you mind sharing the name of your friend who’s been studying those missing airplanes? I might like to pick his brain.”
“Sure. He’s a retired schoolteacher, and he lives outside Miami. His name is Brice Roberts. I already talked to him about this, so he won’t be surprised to hear from you.”
Mike gave me Mr. Roberts’s phone number, which I jotted down on a notepad. “Thank you. I appreciate this.”
“No problem. Good luck. And let me know if you ever need anything. I’d love to help. I’m obsessed with this stuff.”
I hung up the phone and wondered what Dean would think about me calling a total stranger about wormholes and time warps. I was quite certain that he’d try to talk me out of it.
Mike Mitchell’s friend, Brice Roberts, turned out to be an eccentric, which was a polite way to describe a man who slept every night in a bomb shelter in his backyard and boarded up his house to prevent the Russians from infiltrating his water system through satellite technology.
He believed that Dean’s plane had been swallowed up by an alien mother ship. He suggested that I shouldn’t give up hope because Dean was most likely alive and well, and he would return to me years from now, not having aged a day. If I loved him, Brice said, I should wait for him, even if I was an elderly woman when he returned, because he would need my support in a world that was vastly different from what he had left behind.