Part 2
Chapter 17
Twelve years earlier
He remembered his aunt helping him with the oxygen mask, holding his hand and praying with him, even as they were in the tuck position. And then he remembered objects flying—drawn here and there as if by some magnetic field gone haywire—and people crying and screaming as the lights went off, the plane went down and water, lots of water, poured in, cold, so cold.
When he emerged, he was a thing remarkable—a boy like Auden’s Icarus, fallen from the sky while others plodded on with their unsuspecting lives. But he had no other memory of the experience till that moment in the Alaskan hospital when he woke, unable to move, screaming for his aunt in Bahasa, knowing somehow she was dead, surrounded by strangers trying to soothe him, trying to understand
