PART 1 Preservation and Invention CHAPTER ONE The St. Bernard Our annual picnics look like any other. A little early in the season, perhaps. The ground is often spongy and the trees reluctantly budding, but if the weather's at all decent, we gather in the park, the picnic tables down by the lake. We have the red-checked tablecloths, the plastic coolers, the potluck tubs of coleslaw and potato salad, the little grill for hot dogs. The kids bring dogs and Frisbees. Maybe even a ball, a football often, though it's April and most people haven't yet unpacked their picnic baskets after Portland's long, wet winter. The park is pretty empty, and down at the lake, the ducks are not yet overfed and a filthy menace.

(That's the nurse in me talking; can't be helped, hygiene, hand-washing fanatic, that's me.) But really, you would not have guessed that we all convene to commemorate a tragedy. We started out that brutal day five years ago, staring at one another, strangers newly endowed with our collective, our terrible title, the Families of the Victims. Slowly, we have become survivors. Most. Not all. Some have died. Some by their own hand.

Some cannot bear the sight of the rest of us. But for those of us who live here in Portland, we find a bit of strength in numbers. We keep it low-key. No grandstanding speeches. From the beginning, the first anniversary, everyone had enough sense to stay clear of that. Words would not bring back the dead. Often there's a priest and rabbi, prayers before we part. But you probably couldn't tell that this was a gathering of people who five years before had no connection whatever.

Then, suddenly, we faced one another in an airport lounge that cordoned us off from people who had not suffered what we had suffered. All our lives were suddenly thrust into one another, rammed into each other as the plane had slammed into the sea. From a distance people wave to Caryn and me as we get out of the car. We are a sort of duet. We have the same short hair, light brown, nondescript, no-fuss haircuts, and we have the athlete's springy walk. Instinct and training combined, I guess. Except that Caryn is blue eyed, broad shouldered, and long legged, and I still have a goalie's body. Big Nell they used to call me in college.

Respectfully. Women's soccer MVP. Women's soccer was my ticket, all right. How else does a Polish-Irish girl from Gary, Indiana, get into Notre Dame where she meets the likes of Caryn Henley from Grosse Pointe? I put our macaroni salad on the picnic table and the beers and bottled water in the cooler while Caryn embraces everyone. We all hold each other just a little longer than necessary. We bite our lips. We smile. We tell everyone how great they look and they say the same to us.

And in the midst of all this we peer into one another's eyes and ask the unasked and unanswerable: How are you living with this? Are you doing better than I am? Are you living past, living through, living beyond the crash? And of course we notice the changes. Five years have passed. Fatherless kids have grown up. Sometimes these kids have new fathers, the widow remarries or shyly stands beside a boyfriend she didn't have last year. There's nothing ever said, but all of us, the Families of the Victims, we want the others to like the new people who have come into our lives. Once that's accomplished, then often they don't return. I've noticed that. And this year, I thought our numbers had seriously diminished.

One hundred and twenty-two victims can have a lot of friends and family, though not everyone was from Portland, of course. That was the destination. I look around today's picnic and I start counting. Not just numbers, but faces. The family that always brings the rabbi brought a different rabbi, and I wonder if the original rabbi got tired of these old prayers. The family that always brought the priest wasn't even here. Some people had new babi.