Hellgoing by Lynn Coady Page A

with all the family and everything.
    But it’s over, said Sean. He put his arms around her.
    When we get home, Erin whispered after a moment, I want you to beat the living shit out of me.
    They’d never gone a week without before.

CLEAR SKIES

P eople were laughing, afterwards. They laughed during, too, before anyone knew what was going on or what might happen. The thing to do upon landing was tell the story and make jokes. When Sara was up there, seconds after the  boom , she imagined doing just that. She’d even rehearsed it a bit for future audiences.
    I was so scared. I thought an engine had exploded. I thought: well, this is it.
    At the airport, Terry was carrying a copy of Sara’s book for identification purposes. She saw him from a distance, peering down at the author’s photo every time a new arrival emerged through the sliding doors. His eyes went from her face on the book, to her face in real life, and still they passed right by her. She had to come and tap him on the shoulder.
    â€œIt’s me,” she said, pointing to the book. It was her first book. The person in the photograph was nineteen years old. Sara’s tap had surprised him and he gave her an instinctive, hostile look. “What a tiny airport!” she added.
    â€œOh!” yelled Terry, grabbing her hand. He asked how her flight had been.
    â€œThe plane was struck by lightning,” Sara said. She told her little story for him, watched his blue eyes widen. It was a good way to kick things off.
    They had to wait for Herb, the fiction guy, before making their way to the monastery, but his flight was not due for another twenty minutes. Sara went to the bathroom as Terry studied the back of Herb’s book, which was stamped with a gilded reminder of his nomination for a major book award the previous year.
    Everywhere she went in the airport, there were posters — on practically every wall. It was almost ridiculous, the number of posters. She saw such posters in her grocery store, and the post office. But here it was the same poster over and over again, the same pudgy, uncute face.
    â€œWhat’s with all the posters?” she asked Terry.
    He jumped again at the sound of her voice. I will get a little bell to wear around the retreat, Sara decided.
    â€œOh,” he said, looking around. “Marie.” As if the girl in the posters were related to him or something, a colleague maybe. “She’s been gone a month now. Everyone’s desperate. Sad .”
    â€œBut why —” Sara didn’t know how to ask the question without sounding callous. “I mean — there’s only one missing kid in the entire province?”
    Terry shrugged. He was supposedly a playwright, but Sara had never seen any of his work. “It’s one of those things — mysterious. You know, her parents are still together, so it’s not like one of them nabbed her. Just disappeared out of the blue.”
    Sara felt what she knew was a prissy twinge of annoyance, because the phrase was inappropriate. You didn’t disappear out of the blue. You  appeared  out of it, suddenly, like a holy bolt of lightning.
    It was a year in the world where people seemed to be dying explosively or else disappearing without so much as a bleat. She wanted to leave it behind, which was why she’d said yes to the retreat. She’d liked the sound of it:  a prairie retreat . The brochure Terry’d sent her showed photographs like abstract paintings: one thick, vertical band of brilliant green topped by a second, thicker band of glaring blue.   Your view , the brochure promised.
    On TV there was nothing but explosions anymore. In her city, in the past year, an abrupt slew of people had blanked from existence as if culled by hungry aliens. Pictures of people who had recently failed to exist were always on the front page of the paper. It was not like she ever bought the paper — front page after