I got pregnant quickly and things started to change. At first, Oliver actually seemed excited by the idea. For a few months he did the usual things: told me to stay off my feet, and held his ear to my belly. Then work got very busy for him, and he got a promotion earlier than expected, and he started to travel with other researchers. He missed Rebecca’s birth, but by that time I didn’t really care. I had a daughter and I truly believed she was everything I could ever want.

When the plane crash happened my first thought was that this was my punishment for tricking Oliver. Then I thought it was my punishment for leaving Oliver. Whatever the reason, it was clearly my fault. My father had been watching a baseball game on TV and it was interrupted with a special bulletin on location in Iowa. He yelled into the kitchen that some plane had crashed and I didn’t even have to hear the flight number. I knew. It is that way between mothers and daughters.

I flew to Iowa and I remember looking at the other people on the flight. Were any of them relatives of other people on the Midwest plane? What about the woman in the pink jumpsuit? She was crying on and off. Did it have to do with the crash in What Cheer?

By the time I arrived in Des Moines the survivors of the crash had been taken to a hospital. I met Oliver at the front door; he was pulling up in a taxi too. We ran through the green corridors, calling out Rebecca’s name. I would not go into the morgue to identify bodies. Oliver did that for me, and came out smiling. “She’s not there,” he said. “She’s not there!”

We found a Jane Doe in pediatrics. They had been calling her Jane all this time; I found that very strange. She was asleep, heavily sedated, when we were let into her room. “Came out hardly with a scratch,” one nurse said. “She’s a lucky little girl.”

Oliver held my hand as we walked over to Rebecca, so tiny and white against the dotted hospital sheets. She had a breather tube in her nose, and a kidney-shaped bruise on her forehead. Oliver had brought her a yellow teddy bear. I started to cry, realizing that Edison, Rebecca’s old teddy bear, had probably burned in the crash. “It’s all right,” Oliver said, holding me against him. He smelled of the shampoo we had at home in San Diego. It took me several minutes to realize that the whole time, he was crying too.

She was released two days later. We went back to the site of the crash. I don’t remember it looking like this; I wonder if some of these pieces-the seats, the engine, what have you-have been moved as the years went by. I excuse myself to Arlo van Cleeb and begin to circle the remnants of this plane.

Metal ribs poke into the sky at odd angles, and although many of the hinges are intact, the doors of the plane are nowhere to be found. There are pretzeled knots of black steel at the sides of the wings. All the windows are gone. I remember hearing they exploded due to the change in pressure, when the plane was plummeting to the ground. Suddenly I realize I cannot see my daughter. I run around the plane trying to peek through the holes and the gaps, trying to catch a glimpse. Then I see her coming towards me. Her eyes are shut tight and her hands are pressed against her head as if she is trying to keep it from splitting. She is running so fast her feet are kicking up a stream of mud. I do not think she realizes it but she is screaming at the top of her lungs. “Rebecca!” I cry out, and Rebecca’s eyes fly open, that startled shade of green. She crashes against me, demanding to be protected, and this time I am waiting there to catch her.

Midwest Airlines flight 997 crashed on September 21, 1978, in What Cheer, Iowa-a farming town sixty miles southeast of Des Moines. When the pilot realized he would not be able to land in Des Moines he coasted into a farmer’s cornfield. The plane landed on its own fuel tanks and exploded.

These are the reports, as faxed to me by my secretary, that lead me to the site of the crash. It was not easy to find a facsimile machine in What Cheer, Iowa, either, but I have had two days’ advance time.

I know of Arlo van Cleeb but I have never been a fan of intermediaries. Therefore I set up shop in his cornfield without him ever noticing. I have a small folding beach chair and a thermos of coffee. A portable clip-on fan; the heat gets intense at this elevation. I sit behind a fringe of corn stalks, hidden by the greenery and yet strategically able to peer through the vertical bars. For two days I have been waiting for Jane and Rebecca, binoculars in hand.

It has not been an entirely idle forty-eight hours. You see, the partially obscured view I have of the wreckage gave me a slightly different perspective from the one splashed across the oily faxes of the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. When I first perceived the airplane’s frame, blackened by fire and age, it was through the haze of corn that forms my camouflage. And quite honestly, at first glance I thought it was a beached whale. Enormous in proportions, with the sun glinting off its slightly sunken tail-have you ever noticed the parallels between humpbacks and airplanes? The elongated body, the hub of the cockpit and the whale’s jawbone, the wings and the fingered fins, the cross section of the tail and the fluke? I have never thought of whales in terms of aerodynamics but of course it makes sense. What is streamlined underwater serves the same purpose in flight.

It has been a tedious trip here, and I have to say I’m glad it’s all coming to an end. I can take my family home with me; I can get back to my research.

I am just pouring my second cup of coffee (a lousy habit I’ve picked up on this tracking voyage, I’m sorry to say), when I see the farmer van Cleeb push his way through the corn stalks. Then out of this sea of green steps Rebecca, her hair pulled away from her face. Following her, in close pursuit, is Jane.

She stands tall with her hands on her hips, talking to the farmer. She seems to be holding a conversation but her eyes betray her, running over the framework of the plane, assessing it; carefully checking the movements of Rebecca. She has this down to an art, I think. How is it I have never really watched her act as a mother?

Rebecca points to the plane and then moves closer. She steps into the gashes in the metal body, as I did two days ago. She runs her hands over everything, it seems, cataloguing and processing the information. Her eyes are wide, and from time to time she bites her lower lip. She is standing only feet away from me when she says, quite clearly, “This is where I sat. Right here.”

I push my hand through the stalks in front of me and pull them aside so that I can really see her face. She looks like me, in many ways. My hair, my eyes. And she has always been able to hide her emotions. Even after the crash, she would not talk about it. Not to me, not to Jane, not to the psychiatrists. They tried to get her to act the crash out on dolls and models, but Rebecca refused. At the time I thought it interesting to find such willfulness in a four-yearold. Now I have my doubts.

I could take my daughter in my arms and tell her it is all right. And she will smile like the sun itself, so surprised to see me. Like she used to do as a child when I came home from Brazil or Maui, wherever. I’d hide toys in my pockets, and shells and small bottles of sand. I told her I would always bring her back a piece of the place that took me away from her.

I am ready to push through the corn when I see Jane from the corner of my eye. She is calling Rebecca. She starts to walk towards me.

I let the corn free, a shade. I am breathing arhythmically. I am terrified of speaking to Jane.

For one thing, I haven’t any idea what I am going to say to her. I know, I am supposed to have prepared something elaborate, something akin to wooing, but everything that has crossed my mind in the past two days has simply disappeared. What I am left with is how I feel, and what am I supposed to do about it? I want to just walk up to Jane and say that I miss the way she flips pancakes. That no one but her has ever left me a love note on a steamed-up shaving mirror. I want to tell her that sometimes, when the sun is setting over the unfurled fluke of a humpback, I wish I had her beside me. That when I give a speech, I wish I could see her face in the first row. How stupid you are, Oliver, I think. You can write circles around any scientist in your field. You’ve published more than any researcher your age. You are supposed to be the expert. But you don’t know how to tell her that you can’t live without her.