Flight 753 survivor Ansel Barbour huddled with his wife, Ann-Marie, and his two children, eight-year-old Benjy and five-year-old Haily, on a blue chintz sofa in the back sunroom of their three-bedroom home in Flatbush, New York. Even Pap and Gertie got into the act, the two big Saint Bernards allowed inside the house for this special occasion, so happy to see him home, their man-size paws leaning on his knees and patting gratefully at his chest.

Ansel had been seated in aisle seat 39G, in coach, returning home from an employer-paid database security training session in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. He was a computer programmer embarking on a four-month contract with a New Jersey–based retailer following the electronic theft of millions of customers’ credit card numbers. He had never been out of the country before, and had missed his family intensely. Downtime and sightseeing tours were built into the four-day conference, but Ansel never ventured outside his hotel, preferring to remain inside his room with his laptop, talking to the kids via Webcam and playing hearts over the Internet with strangers.

His wife, Ann-Marie, was a superstitious, sheltered woman, and Flight 753’s tragic end only confirmed her closely held fears of air travel and new experiences in general. She did not drive a car. She lived in the grip of dozens of borderline obsessive-compulsive routines, including touching and repetitively cleaning every mirror in the house, which reliably warded off bad luck. Her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was four—she’d survived the crash—and she was raised by an unmarried aunt who passed away just one week before Ann-Marie and Ansel’s wedding. The births of her children had only intensified Ann-Marie’s isolation, amplifying her fears, to the point where she would often go days without leaving the safety of her own house, relying exclusively on Ansel for anything involving a transaction with the outside world.

The news of the crippled airplane had brought her to her knees. Ansel’s subsequent survival revived her with the power of an exultation that she could define only in religious terms, a deliverance confirming and consecrating the absolute necessity of her redundant, life-preserving routines.

Ansel, for his part, was intensely relieved to be back home. Both Ben and Haily tried to pile on top of him, but he had to hold them off due to the lingering pain in his neck. The tightness—his muscles felt like ropes being torturously twisted—was centralized in his throat, but extended past the hinges of his jaw up to his ears. When you twist a rope, it shortens, and that was how his muscles felt. He stretched his neck, hoping for some chiropractic relief—

SNAP…CRACKLE…POP…

—which nearly doubled him over. The pain wasn’t worth the effort.