Due Preparations for the Plague. Janette Turner Hospital

was crying,” she says. “Didn’t the man come?”

      “What man?”

      “The man you had to see about the painting job.”

      “Oh,” he says. “No. He didn’t show up.”

      “Why were you staring at the lockers, Daddy?”

      He says slowly, “I left something in one of them, but I’ve lost the key.”

      Amy watches his hand, hidden under denim, clenching and unclenching itself. “Maybe it’s in your pocket,” she suggests.

      “What do you know?” he laughs. “Little Miss Magic. You’re right. Here it is after all, down in the lining. There’s a little hole and it’s almost … You want to open the locker for me?”

      “Okay.”

      He has to lift her. Her lips are parted; the tip of her tongue draws tiny arcs of concentration as she inserts the key into the lock and turns. She tips herself back to open the door. “It’s a bag,” she says. “Is it yours, Daddy?”

      “Yes,” he says. “Well, no. But I’m looking after it for someone.”

      “For the man who didn’t come?”

      “Right.” He pulls out a blue sports tote with a Nike logo on the side. The bag is surprisingly heavy. “Amy,” he says. “Wait here with Jason. I have to go to the bathroom.”

      “Jason wants to go with you,” Amy tells him.

      “Daddy, I come with you,” Jason echoes in his two-year-old lisp.

      Lowell kisses the top of Jason’s head. “Daddy’s in a big hurry,” he says. “You stay with Amy, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

      Jason wails loudly. “Come with you,” he insists.

      “No,” Lowell calls over his shoulder, running. “Daddy’s in a big, big hurry. Wait there.”

      He intends to lock himself into a stall, but there are too many people present and this makes him nervous, though he does not wish to draw attention to himself by leaving without taking a leak. He is afraid to set the bag down. Indecisive, he moves into a space between a businessman and some drifter who reeks of gin. He stands with the bag between his legs, feet close together, and unzips.

      No one pays him the slightest attention and he picks up the blue tote and leaves.

      “Daddy, Daddy!” he hears Amy call, and he turns. The children are running after him, breathless. Jason is crying. Dear God, Lowell thinks. What is happening to me? He sweeps Jason up with his right arm. He holds the blue tote in his left. “You didn’t think I’d forgotten you, did you?” he asks, smothering Jason with kisses. “Silly Jason. Okay, let’s go home now. First the shuttle bus, then the subway, then home. Who remembers where the shuttle stop is?”

      “I do,” Amy says.

      “Okay, Captain. I’ll follow you.”

      Why the international terminal? a voice buzzes inside his head. He tries to picture his father on the shuttle up from New York, the elegantly dressed professional man. He cannot visualize his father with a blue sports tote. Had it been inside something else? Did his father disappear into a men’s bathroom at the domestic terminal, change into jeans and baseball cap, and carry the blue tote to the lockers at international? Is there some suggestion that Lowell will be required to embark on a journey after he sees the contents of the bag? Or is this purely memento mori for the flight that never reached its intended destination, the flight from which Lowell’s mother never disembarked? Unless she was one of the hostages. Unless there were hostages, ten hostages, as the hijackers claimed.

      The hostage hoax, the State Department said, is the final ruse of a handful of desperate terrorists …

      Lowell remembers that. He remembers watching the news when that statement was made.

      There is no evidence, the president told the nation in September 1987, of any survivors of Air France Flight 64, apart from the children who were disembarked in Germany. The final landing was somewhere in Iraq where the plane was blown up. Although Iraq has not permitted the Red Cross … nevertheless our Intelligence sources have confirmed …

      Lowell finds himself pausing at an arrivals monitor, scanning for flights due in from Paris.

      “Daddy.” Amy tugs at his sleeve. “Come on.”

      “Just a second, Amy.” Air France seems to have changed its numbering system. He sees AF 002, AF 006 … but of course flight AF 64 was going to New York, not Boston.

      “Hey.” Someone bumps into him. “People been coming through yet?”

      “What?” Lowell says. The man who has collided with him is disheveled and out of breath. He points to the monitor.

      “Flight from Frankfurt. It’s landed. People through yet?”

      “I don’t know,” Lowell says.

      “What flight you waiting for?”

      “I’m not. I’m just …” Why is he interrogating me? “Look.” Lowell points to the large automatic doors of frosted glass. “There are people just coming through now.” But he cannot resist looking back over his shoulder as he leaves the terminal, and the man waiting for the flight from Frankfurt is not moving toward the glass doors, but is still watching Lowell. This means nothing, of course.

      Though it could mean something.

      It might mean something.

      Lowell decides he will not go direct to the subway with the children, in case he is being watched. “Here’s our bus,” he tells Amy, and they get on the free shuttle that moves between the terminals and they get off again at terminal C.

      “This isn’t our stop,” Amy says. “The subway is two more stops.”

      “Jason’s hungry,” Lowell says. “Want some French fries, Jason? Want a Coke?”

      “French fries!” Jason grins. “Yummy yum.”

      “Yummy yum yum,” Lowell chants. “Want some French fries, Amy?”

      “Okay,” she says, wary.

      There are numerous fast-food stands, none of them appealing, but he buys fries and Cokes for the children, a coffee for himself. He sets the blue bag on the floor and keeps it tightly between his feet, though an inordinate number of people seem to knock it in passing. He tries to imagine his father, with a sports tote between his ankles, having coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He cannot visualize this.

      “Okay, kids,” he says. “Let’s go.”

      They take the shuttle to the MBTA stop, then the Blue Line to State. They change to the Green Line, change again at Park Street, take the Red Line to Union Square.

      Lowell’s car, a slightly battered pickup with a steel hold-all across the back, is where he left it in the parking lot. He unlocks the steel coffer. Nothing missing. He puts the sports tote inside, turns the key in the padlock, changes his mind, unlocks it, takes the tote with him into the cab. “Footrest,” he says. “Pillow for your feet.”

      “What’s inside the bag, Daddy?” asks Amy, clicking her seat belt shut.

      “Just stuff. Can you do up Jason’s belt?”

      He could take one quick look, he thinks, and then, if necessary, if he deems it necessary, he could toss the blue container and its contents into a dumpster. He sits there, his hand on the ignition key, thinking. The owner of the car in the next parking space arrives and the door of his white Nissan taps the side of Lowell’s car. Is it deliberate? The Nissan driver wears a plaid shirt and has a bald patch. Lowell waits for him to leave, analyzing the plaid: vertical stripes and horizontal, green, black, gray, a thin vertical red line.