After Two
Van and Allie had a room together, in the Hotel Narsarsuaq, with British Airways picking up the tab. They had more privacy
than most. The hotel had just eighty rooms and needed to find beds for close to three hundred passengers—quite a few people
were sleeping on cots in the hotel ballroom. Another hundred survivors were bedding down in the gymnasium of a secondary school
on the far side of the fjord.
Allie couldn’t sleep. In the months that followed, she was often only able to sleep in two- or three-hour snatches, twitching
awake all of a sudden with a feeling like someone’s hand was on her throat.
That first night, though, there was no tiredness in her, and not much thought either. She felt raw inside. She thought it
would help if she could cry, but she couldn’t cry and she couldn’t sleep and she felt unclean. She felt tacky with blood and
sweat and the diesel stink of jet fuel. She left Van snoring and tried to wash in the bathroom, scouring herself with hot
water and scrubbing until her skin was pink. They had good hot water at the Hotel Narsarsuaq. But even shampooed and rinsed,
she felt contaminated by the night, by the murder of the pilots flying the F-16s, by the death of Frank Heck (who had been
removed from BA 238 in a body bag), by Horation Matthews’s implacable madness.
“I hope his well is real,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t mind a dip myself.”
“What well?” Van asked.
She hadn’t known he was awake. When she had gone for the shower, he had been snoring strenuously. She lay beside him in a towel, cooling off, above the blankets.
“He thought there was a holy well in England. Horation did. He thought he could take a plunge and wash King Sorrow right off
him. I could use that. I’d like to get some evil off me too. Look at what we did.”
“I’ll tell you what you did, Allie. You saved four hundred people. You saved me. It’s not about who died, it’s about who lived. King Sorrow killed the bad guy and the good guys live to fight another day.
The end.”
Allie sighed. “I guess it could’ve been so much worse.”