Swifts, she said. They’re probably high over the building. They’re crepuscular.

Good word, he said. What does it mean?

They come out at twilight, she explained. They feed at that time.

May I use it?

The swifts?

No, the word.

Sure. She laughed. It’s all yours.

They both fell silent. She was thinking: Crepuscular. It sounded like “corpuscle” and “muscular,” only different from both. She heard him going back inside, the window closing.

Lawyers had called him, he said. They were starting a suit against the airline and they needed information. And there was another thing: they’d positively identified Lailah. He’d gotten the call that morning.

God, she whispered.

Yes.

He knew better than to ask about Russell. If they’d called her with anything, she’d have told him. He said he was thinking of returning to Iran to see his sister. They talked for a while longer, but Ana felt the wind go out of her sails. She was relieved for Pars and his family, yet she couldn’t help but think: Why not Russell? Why hadn’t he been identified?

Pars exhaled on the other end of the line. She could no longer hear the sound of the swifts.

Is it all right, he asked, that I called?

Yes, she said and wanted to tell him, he was one of the few things she looked forward to, his slightly lilting voice, a kind of ladder she could climb. But she didn’t say any of that. Instead she said she’d call the next night, or the night after.

November arrived. The days were empty amphitheaters, each filled with light, then dark, then light. She lit a Kaddish candle a Jewish friend had given her with Hebrew lettering on the glass. The lawyers called her too. She made lists of famous people who had died in plane crashes (Buddy Holly, Will Rogers, Roberto Clemente). She asked everyone she knew. Did they form a confederacy of their own, those who’d dropped from the sky? (Patsy Cline, Glenn Miller, Guido Cantelli.) Those who sublimated from air to air, or into water first? (Ritchie Valens, Amelia Earhart, Dag Hammarskjöld.) Someone told her—stupidly, as if it would help—that diving into water was a metaphor the ancients used for a good death: the waters of oblivion. The sarcophagus from Paestum (Icarus, someone said, the first known victim of flight).