The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train and Three American Heroes. Anthony Sadler

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СКАЧАТЬ with their homework. And daily she felt she could use an assist, so she looked up and asked God for his favor. She did it in times of particular struggle, or particular need, but also when an opportunity presented itself, like when the couple next door started talking about moving out, and Joyce recognized a chance. She went around the property and found strategic places to pray, conveying upward her preferences for the next tenant. Ideally a single mother like her, please, because it’d be nice to have someone to commiserate with. Ideally one with children the ages of her own, so that the children’s social lives might improve, without Joyce having to drive them more.

      And he answered, proving his grace in the form of a young mother coming off her own divorce with two kids in tow and one in her arms. Spencer’s sister, Kelly, took the new neighbors flowers from the yard to welcome them, and then came trotting back, bubbling over with excitement. “Mom, she’s kind of like you!” Joyce invited the woman over for coffee, and the instant they began talking, Joyce’s eyes widened with surprise. “You used to be a flight attendant too?” Joyce had traveled the world that way, and Heidi had as well. The country too. Heidi had worked for a bus company before that. She laughed. “Guess I’ve always been in the travel business,” and her latest trip had brought her right here to Joyce. As they spoke, a series of uncanny coincidences revealed themselves, and the two women talked over each other.

      “You adored your parents too?”

      “You worry about being overprotective of your boys?”

      “You also look back, a little embarrassed at how naïve you used to be?”

      Joyce had been delivered a replica of herself. The only difference was Tom, a rock of a man whom Heidi had started dating, and who took to her kids like they were his own. He plied them with pizza and Chris Farley movies, had a good job, and was so obviously a strong man with a good soul. But Heidi was reluctant to take the plunge with him, she said; she didn’t want to marry right away because she still didn’t trust herself after what she’d just put her kids through. But he was there, a stand-in father for her kids, and soon for Joyce’s too.

      The two became like sisters; their two houses became two wings of the same estate. They might as well have had no doors or walls because the kids moved through them so freely. Joyce was sure the Lord had something to do with it, that it was he who deserved the credit for this new friend. Or perhaps more accurately, he deserved most of the credit and Joyce perhaps just a little bit of gratitude herself, if you please, for having thought to ask him in the first place, thank you very much.

      They were two pillars leaning in on one another, doubly strong. Each was exactly what the other needed, at exactly the moment each needed the other the most. They were both strong-willed and wise, but both in desperate need of support, and for someone with whom to let her guard down, because the kids needed stability after what they’d been put through. Each woman felt guilty. Each felt the need to subdue her own feelings for the sake of the children, because what the children needed was a dependable parent, not an emotional one. It was only with each other that each could let down her guard and admit to even having feelings.

      Joyce and Heidi filled a missing piece for one another, and as if that wasn’t enough, their children were just the right ages. Joyce’s son Everett was still the oldest, and Heidi had Solon, the youngest of the new crew, but Heidi’s son Peter was Kelly’s age, and Heidi also had a young son who, it turned out, was born within a few months of Spencer. A quiet child with an occasional flare for the dramatic. She’d wanted to call him Alex, for Alexander, a good Greek name like her first son Peter’s, but when a speech therapist next to her at Lamaze class pointed out it was hard to say the s in Skarlatos after an x, Heidi decided to tweak it. He would be Aleksander. People would call him Alek.

      Spencer and Alek became as close as their mothers; they were always together. Alek was usually quiet, a reserved child, but he had a sense of humor and of self-expression that came out in the most unexpected ways. A fleeting obsession with Batman during which he wore a Batman muscle costume all day, every day, for months, even out on errands with his mom, earning compliments from cashiers and supermarket stock boys.

      He played a tin soldier in the church’s Christmas production, done up with the full French-style moustache, drawn on with a makeup pen. When an audience member came up to him after the show and kneeled down to congratulate him, the six-year-old Alek looked up and considered the man. He frowned, then he said, “So do you want my autograph?”

      Alek was still water running deep, picking up and feeling more of what went on around him than he let on. A barbeque Joyce and Heidi held ended early when the police showed up at Heidi’s door, claiming they were responding to an emergency. Joyce looked at Heidi, who raised her eyebrows—she didn’t know of any emergency. It took half an hour for the moms to find out that Alek, who hadn’t been getting enough attention during the festivities, had decided to call 911 and report a crime in progress. Alek explained to Spencer, who defended his friend; Alek was guilty only of laziness, not sabotage. He’d picked up the phone at Spencer’s house to make the fifteen-foot phone call over to his own, but his finger slipped when typing the 916 area code. An honest mistake!

      Or like how well Alek understood Spencer. Spencer’s favorite topic of conversation during his first five vocal years was his own birthday. Without letting on, Alek picked up bits and scraps of things Spencer said about it, and then, when it was finally time to bake a cake for the neighbors, Alek asked Heidi if he could be in charge. He dragged her to the toy store, made her buy three plastic army men and a tiny American flag, and wedged them into the top of the cake in a loose approximation of the marines at Iwo Jima.

      Spencer walked into the kitchen on his tenth birthday, saw the cake, looked over at Alek, and then smiled, overwhelmed by the feeling that never before in the whole grand course of human history had a more perfect gesture been performed by one friend for another.

      ALEK SITS NEXT TO HIM, looking out the window. Spencer is slumped in his seat, feeling himself beginning to fade. He takes a photo of the laptop on the tray table, the half-sized bottle of red wine, and posts a picture: “First Class Baby!”

      Then his eyelids go heavy, and he leans back to bask in the wonderful, heavy swaying, slipping in and out of much-needed sleep.

      Soft, reassuring motion, R&B on the noise-canceling headphones. He does not know how long he’s been asleep when there is a moment of foggy disruption, a distant jangling behind the music. Body in uniform at full sprint across his vision, the half realization that he is waking up, tumbled headlong into a movie scene already under way. Headphones off. Eye contact across the aisle, Anthony’s face screwed up in confusion.

      Now he is fully awake and crouched between the seats. A gate in his brain has lifted, and a tidal wave of adrenaline is crashing in; his muscles tighten and time decelerates for him. He sees a glass door slide open, a skinny man with an angry face wearing a backpack the wrong way, strapped to his stomach, and somehow Spencer knows without having to think that the bag is full of ammunition and swung to the front because that way it’s easier to reload. Spencer can hear the footfalls as clear and loud as if the man was stomping on purpose; he steps forward, reaches to the ground, and picks up a machine gun that for some reason is lying there. He lifts it up, and Spencer can hear the metal-on-metal cha-chunk of the weapon being cycled.

      A beat passes. Someone has to get this guy. A sliver of frustration sparks off something in his brain. I’m gonna die here—then an electrical charge surges through his entire body and one more final thought tumbles home with a flood of energy, a notion stored away from a classroom at Fort Sam two years ago that his brain now accesses like a hard drive retrieving a kernel of information: I am not going to die sitting down. The realization verges on euphoria. Sound compresses СКАЧАТЬ