Due Preparations for the Plague. Janette Turner Hospital

sister is so disreputable.

      “Were you disreputable, Lou?”

      Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”

      “My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”

      Lou looks as though Samantha has struck her. She stretches her fingers out flat and covers Olympia with them. Her veins crisscross the backs of her hands like string. She picks up the photo album and turns the pages. She stops. She points to a photograph. Sam’s mother and Sam’s aunt, her father between them—a happy threesome—are ankle-deep in white sand. All three are in swimsuits. Sam’s mother wears a one-piece suit, demure; her aunt is in a bikini and has a flower in her hair. Her father, in the middle, has his arms around them both. “The good sister and the disreputable sister on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina,” Sam’s aunt says in a sardonic tone. “The summer after my high school graduation. Rosalie and Jonathan were engaged already. Look, you can see her ring in the photograph. And I was supposed to be getting ready for the College of Charleston in the fall, but I ran away to New York instead.”

      She points to another photograph. Lou must be about eighteen, Rosalie twenty. They are standing in front of a church. “Someone else’s wedding,” Lou says. “Later that same summer.” In the photograph, Lou has bright red bad-girl lips and wears an off-the-shoulder dress. Her eyes are outlined in kohl. Sam’s mother looks sweet and shy. “The disreputable one,” Sam’s aunt says, tapping her own image on the head. “And you’re in the photograph too, though nobody knows it yet, not even your mother. Did you know your parents had to get married sooner than planned?”

      Samantha closes her eyes for a moment, the better to rehear the pinprick of malice.

      “I figured it out,” she says. “So what? Is that a big deal?”

      “It was, back then. In Charleston, South Carolina, believe me, that sort of thing was still a very big deal. At least, in the best families it was. When she found out about the pregnancy, your grandmother was distraught. She was actually hospitalized with ‘nervous prostration’.”

      “Is that why I was born in New York?”

      “Yes. And that’s why your mother had to give up her Charleston wedding, which broke your grandmother’s heart. That’s why your parents were married in a registry office in Manhattan, and why they moved to Atlanta immediately afterwards, and why I stayed in New York.”

      “Hurricane Sam, that’s me,” Samantha jokes, to hide her disturbance. “Cause of wholesale evacuation of Charleston”—and perhaps, she has always irrationally feared, of her parents’ deaths.

      “That’s pretty much the way it was,” her aunt says. “Certainly as far as our parents—your grandparents—were concerned.”

      Samantha studies 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