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should properly utilize the attendant in the other aisle, calls out, “The burgundy, if you please, sir!” lifting a white eyebrow and holding up his fingers to indicate two. “And—” he rummages briskly—“the ladies.” He is going to treat us.
    â€œWonderful,” says the flight attendant—who must have been picked for this particular charter—in a pleased voice fresh as the celery he has ready in a glass of ice. “Sharon,” he calls, “I’ll take care of the gentleman here. Ladies? Red or white?” and this choice seems, as he offers it, such a pleasant one, so emblematic of all we have to choose from in life, that we sigh one after another, “Red.”
    The woman won’t wait. “My son was responsible for a terrible crime!” On her sleeve the nun’s hand begins to pat. I’m ready; I know the way people will sometimes talk when the tape is running, the formal and even pious language they will summon up. Was responsible . Like orthodox: it means the same as its opposite. He was responsible for it.
    â€œHe needed money for speedballs.” Ah! Voice of brown permanent, glasses, little parish-council face, saying “speedballs.” “He was high. Very high. We don’t even know what it means, the rest of us.”
    Who says we don’t? I’ve had enough Percocet to hurt somebody for fun. Sure. If the nurse with the wrong books had come in at just the right moment . . . when that octane was flowing in . . . who says I wouldn’t have drawn my knees up and let fly with both heels at her soft stomach?
    I’ll do a voiceover on the pause where we let down our trays for plastic glasses and wine, and screw open the little snapping lids. Maybe I will. Let the voice fade into the background noise and come back up farther down the line.
    â€œHe didn’t know what he was doing. People died. A young couple.”
    That’s enough. I don’t want to be told. I don’t want the rumors of earth up here, I’ve left its cities behind, I’m flying to Lourdes. At my most earthbound I don’t do crime stories.
    â€œI’m just . . . I’m just about . . . because my son . . .” She groans, loudly enough to make people turn around. “This young couple . . . and he came through the window. And there, there, there . . . !” Her hands make that up-held gesture from paintings of the martyrs.
    We fill our glasses. The old man keeps sipping and nodding, as if what the woman has said comes as no surprise to him, merely confirms his own experience. The nun is shaking her head. Seeing the woman’s distress, and the recorder, the attendant has paused to listen, turning his big semitransparent ear to us.
    â€œSo”—she draws a deep breath—“he did that. He did.” She squashes the paper-covered pillow to her face and scrubs the skin with it. Then she jams the pillow against her belly and doubles over with another sound, this one harsh, explosive, and absolutely abandoned, more a belch than a groan, a noise a cow or a horse might make in the barn.
    I brought this on, with my little mike. I thought she was going to stick with “responsible.” It’s my fault. After a minute I say, “I’m sorry and I see what you mean about those kids in Mexico. I have a son. I’m sorry.”
    â€œNossir: mama’s right there!” The old man hastens to set me right. “Selling trinkets! We’re nothing but tourists to them! American tourists! Parents put ’em up to it.” Forgetting, because he is old, everything the woman has been saying about her son. She doesn’t look at him but her companion does, with a wondering distaste. A deep, surprising rumble, the voice this sister produces at last. “I believe that’s a popular myth about crime in poor countries.”
    The woman has pulled herself erect and allowed the cushion to be slipped