Five-Sentence Novel
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Alma and Joel, students at Northeastern University and Boston College, respectively — undergraduate and graduate, respectively — were both aboard Amtrak on their way to Philadelphia and Baltimore, respectively, to spend the holiday with their respective families when three passenger cars derailed on the notoriously perilous curve at Frankford Junction killing two passengers and injuring fifty-one; yet, despite being in the second of the three cars, Alma and Joel suffered only minor scrapes so that he was able to carry injured people out of the overturned car and she to tend to them, a joint effort which made a bond that two years later eventuated in their marrying one another.
Alma’s pregnancy was unplanned, a surprise, and turned out to be difficult, requiring an emergency Caesarian section with complications that meant Alma and Joel’s son would only have a brother if they adopted, which, after many discussions, lengthy advice from their parents, and much wavering, they did.
The boys were of an age, got on well, were loved equally by their parents, lived placidly in their leafy suburb until puberty when, almost overnight, one turned morose, hostile, secretive, alienated, unhygienic, isolated, pierced, impolite, dressing only in black jeans and black shirts so that, though his classmates were terrified, they weren’t surprised when one morning in home room he lifted from his backpack a Kabar hunting knife he’d bought online and started swearing at and trying to slash those of his classmates who didn’t flee at once, and he was still doing this when the School Security Officer Sal Accetta burst in and shot him in the chest, a fatal shot which the marriage of Alma and Joel also did not survive, and which so traumatized Officer Accetta that four months later he was admitted to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge as a long-term resident, the ferocious cost of which was paid by the affluent suburb’s grudgingly grateful taxpayers augmented by a co-response grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Department of Mental Health.
Like Alma and Joel, Officer Accetta and his wife Jeanne had two children and lost one when his daughter Giulia died at the age of three of an untreatable congenital heart defect, a fate her parents had been assured would come inevitably and soon, though the doctors couldn’t say exactly when, so they had time to steel themselves, get ready to face the blow together, also to prepare Guila’s big brother David who, when he had grown up into a kind, intelligent, and imposing six-foot-three law student regularly drove himself and his mother from Boston to Stockbridge and back every weekend to visit his father, in the course of which visits David fell in love with Belinda Doherty, an attractive young nurse who, over time, and after many strolls through the Center’s grounds, reciprocated so that, in due course, they were wed at Saint Mark’s, her family’s church in Pittsfield.
Belinda and David had three children, all robust in body and mind, the oldest named Salvatore after David’s father and who from an early age was obsessed by aviation so that when he enrolled in Boston University he also signed up for Air Force ROTC, served the required four years, re-upped for another four, then left the service to become a pilot with Delta Airlines and was at the controls on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles when his plane lost one engine over Kansas and the landing gear jammed so that he had to pull off a nearly miraculous belly landing at Garden City Regional Airport, saving all aboard, including the beautiful and brilliant classical scholar Ophelia Langhorne whom I met at a professional conference three years later and married last June.
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