Free Among the Dead by Michael Tolkin

many crashes are the direct fault of the airlines? They said this was an explosion. Terrorism? Arab? Or some other group. A plane to Mexico. It could be anyone. Mexican politics. What a stupid way to die, worse than just slamming into a mountain top because of bad weather and bad radar. They probably know more than they’re saying. All that crying at the gate; was there a feeling of some extra shock, an added horror? Why had the crying woman been so fiercely miserable? A friend of hers died, and she was feeling her grief. What other explanation? Lamentations. The keening of women. Not so self-conscious – they are not like me.
    The priest blessed the living and the dead. Did he believe what he was saying, or was it only by rote? People around him were crying. It had been a day of different kinds of tears. In the morning Madeleine had asked him to carry her from the den to the kitchen, and he told her he would hold her hand. He didn’t like carrying her in the house, he wanted her to walk by herself, to tolerate being alone in a room, he wanted to build her character, make her less dependent. He didn’t know if this was a stage from which she’d grow, in which case carrying her would not sap her moral fibre, or if she was testing him, in which case it was essential that she learn to walk by herself. He offered to hold her hand, and she had taken it, lightly, and kept crossing his path with her arms wide, blocking and imploring him. He had refused to carry her, and so she had cried, but the tears were not from a deep well, and by the time he half pulled her by the hand into the kitchen, she was already asking him to let her feed the goldfish. He had to lift her up to the counter, and she got the hug she had wanted. Later he had seen a tear in Mary Sifka’s eyes. He had brushed it aside with his finger, a gesture he regretted in the limousine on the way to the airport. He should have let her cry, alone. Just as he should have let Madeleine walk, alone. But was it fair to compare those tears, since Madeleine’s were strategic, and Mary Sifka’s, although they rode on the surface of a grief that was complicated, for animpossible love that had run its course, told him that she mourned the death of a passion, of a friendship? Mary was going to miss him; she was going to miss the friendship. Why had he given this up? Why did I construct this stupid drama? If I had left things alone, I could have kept Mary Sifka, and my family would still be alive. Don’t some people manage with a mistress and a wife? Lowell has his share of lovers, thought Frank. Before the plague, he had a boyfriend, and other friends. And he never caught it. Lowell had the flu once, and everyone was scared; no one wanted to say what they were afraid of, that he was going to get sicker and sicker, with sores, and pain, and that Frank would have to take over his business, and would run it into the ground. And when Lowell had that flu, and before he recovered, Frank almost welcomed his death, because he thought, If Lowell dies, I can show them all, I can run the business too. I just need to have it to myself. And then Lowell got better. Frank’s mother called him with the news when Lowell’s fever dropped, and he hated her at that moment because he knew she would never have called Lowell with such relief, such gratitude to God, if Frank had been through the same thing. His mother’s tears that day came from an abundance of emotion. They were different from Madeleine’s and also from those of Mary Sifka, who cried from self-pity, but who else was there to give her the sympathy she needed?
    The gate attendant’s tears were the deepest he had seen today. Some of the tears around him in the lounge were unconvincing, exaggerated, theatrical. A woman in front of him, screaming out loud and looking at the cameras, was she a bad version of herself, or was she connected to the people who had blown the plane up, and