The Note

by Hunt, Angela

  He married Kathy, ten years his junior, when Peyton was in the ninth grade, and by the time she left Bolles the new family consisted of two kids and another on the way. By the time she met Garrett, the love of her life, her father’s new brood included three children, two dogs, and a station wagon.

  Fearing a complete circus, she decided not to invite her father or his kiddie clan to her wedding. In ’78 she and Garrett were married in a small church in Gainesville—the same year Kathy conceived the fourth child of Peyton’s father’s second family. In late ’81, Peyton received a card announcing the birth of her fifth half-sibling . . . only a few weeks before a minister held Garrett’s funeral at that same small Gainesville church.

  No. When she thought of her father, she did not think of love. She thought of separation.

  Sighing, she placed the sentimental Father’s Day card back in the rack. The only person who came to mind when she considered the word love was Garrett, who’d been an assistant professor at the university when they met and her world turned upside down.

  They dated, they kissed, they sparred—and for the first time Peyton felt she had found a person in whom she could anchor her soul. They married quickly, starved through lean months, and wrote profound poetry for one another alone. They had just moved into a rental house that seemed to have more good points than cockroaches when she answered the door and discovered two polite highway patrolmen in pressed uniforms who came to explain that she was a widow.

  Darkness followed . . . a depression so deep she couldn’t fathom it even now, then the light began to shine again, slowly and steadily. After her time of mourning and adjustment, her father begged her to come back to Jacksonville, but Peyton accepted a job with the Orlando Sentinel and professed a sudden liking for all things Disney. Jacksonville seemed distant and stifling, and the thought of visiting her father amid the happy bedlam she often heard in the background of his phone calls did not appeal.

  She’d only been in Orlando a few months when her new friends accused her of despising the male species. Peyton was quick to point out that she did not hate men—after all, her father was a man, and she tolerated him. But the two men with whom she later developed semi-serious relationships never seemed interested in marriage. The first bolted when he met a blonde cocktail waitress who dipped her cleavage toward him, the second seemed content to merely talk about commitment. When Peyton asked him if he ever intended to live up to his lofty conversation, the talking ceased. As did the relationship.

  In the passing years she grew accustomed to living alone and, to her surprise, found she enjoyed her freedom. She had two cats for company, a dozen hobbies for pleasure, and a host of friends at the office. After moving from Orlando to Tampa—after a while, too much Disney could blur the line between reality and fantasy to even the most discerning eye—she found herself delighting in a career that utilized her talents and satisfied her curiosity. Her column even had the potential to provide practical help for people’s lives—

  If she still had a column.

  She made a face as the memory of Nora’s conversation came flooding back. In three weeks, she might find herself in the business of padding obituaries for influential Floridians, so she might as well go home and sketch out some ideas to improve the column. She had a week to laze around and think, so maybe she’d paint the guestroom and hope that inspiration would strike as she slapped paint on the walls.

  She plucked a plain, unvarnished card (Happy Father’s Day from Your Daughter) from the top of the rack and moved toward the cash register. A small boy of three or four crouched in the candy aisle, his greedy eyes fastened to a basket of bubblegum balls.

  “Mom, where are you?” Peyton murmured, moving down the aisle. “He’s going to end up with a pocketful of candy if you don’t watch him.”

  Peyton took her place in line, then rocked back on her heels and turned to search for the wayward mother. A pair of teenage boys in jeans and T-shirts had draped themselves over a video game by the door; a sunburned tourist with a Walkman on his waistband checked out the bottles of Solarcaine in the first aid supplies.

  Out on the street, the wail of a siren rose and fell.

  “Miss?”

  Peyton turned to the freckled woman behind the register, then handed her the card. “That’s it for me.”

  The siren grew louder.

  “Musta been a wreck out there,” the cashier said as she turned the card over in search of the UPC. “Traffic’s terrible this time of day.”

  Peyton smiled. “I know.”

  The clerk swiped the card beneath a scanner, then punched a couple of keys on the register. “Six-thirty-five,” she said, cracking her gum as she shifted her gaze toward the glass doors.

  Peyton gasped. Six dollars for a card?

  “It’s been a long time.” She pulled her wallet from her purse. “I had no idea cards were so expensive.”

  “It’s a ripoff,” the clerk agreed amiably, sliding the card into a bag.

  Outside, a different siren howled, then another, from closer by, joined in the caterwauling. As Peyton glanced toward the doors, she saw that the two teenagers had stepped outside. One was pointing to the street and jumping in consternation.

  “What in the—,” she began.

  The tourist, red-faced and sweating, came toward them. Earphones dangled from his neck. “I heard it on the radio!” Beads of perspiration shone on his upper lip and the Adam’s apple in his throat bobbed as he swallowed. “A jet just went down in Tampa Bay.”

  Struggling to mask her disbelief, Peyton painted on a smile. “Surely you’re mistaken. We’ve never had a crash in this area.”

  “Look for yourself, lady.” The man jerked his thumb toward the front of the store. “Every emergency vehicle in the area is en route to the scene. It’s all over the radio.” Peyton felt the wings of tragedy brush past her, stirring the air and lifting the hair at the back of her neck. Could the unthinkable have happened? The airport lay right next to Tampa Bay, so if a jet had gone down in those waters, there might be survivors. There would definitely be a story . . .

  Gulping for breath, she left the cashier and ran for her car.

  Only later would she realize that she never did send a Father’s Day card.

  THREE

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20

  Sitting at a booth in a dark corner of a seafood restaurant, Peyton held a sweating glass of iced tea to her forehead and struggled to keep her eyes open. Every time she closed them, visions of the previous week played on the backs of her eyelids, and she didn’t think she could stand to witness such tragedy again. She’d seen enough sorrow in one week to last a dozen lifetimes.

  Immediately after the crash, spurred by a reporter’s instinct, she had driven down Memorial Highway until she reached a roadblock north of West Cypress Street. Abandoning her car by the side of the road, she tossed her keys into her pocket and ran toward the water, joining a crowd of others—kids on bicycles, men and women, white- and blue-collar workers from the surrounding commercial buildings, all drawn by the spectacle of disaster.

  At the end of West Cypress, she stood with the others and stared past the emergency vehicles at . . . nothing. A dark remnant of cloud hovered over the water, stretching gauzy fingers toward the north, but nothing marked the gray-blue sheen of the bay.

  “It’ll take time,” the man next to her said, his gaze sweeping over the water. “For things to . . . surface.” Taking mental notes, Peyton studied him. He wore a white dress shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, with a navy tie loosely knotted at his neck.

  “Do you work around here?” She gestured over her shoulder toward the tall buildings lining the bay.

  “There.” Without looking, he pointed toward the Bob Hawkins headquarters at the end of Cypress. Peyton thought Bob Hawkins, Inc., made manufactured homes; she made a mental note to check.

  The air shimmered with heat haze and vibrated with the wail of sirens as other emergency vehicles rushed toward the water and stopped. A
pair of Tampa cops were attempting to cordon off a stretch of sand close to the water, but Peyton couldn’t see anything on the beach to protect . . . only a few stands of grass, a handful of scrub oaks, and an occasional sea gull.

  For things to surface. Heaviness centered in her chest as the words hit home—the police would soon need this beach for recovery. The remains of human life would eventually rise from the deep.

  Gulping back a sudden rise of despair, Peyton turned from the water. Behind her, a teenage boy in oversized tennis shoes balanced a boom box on the handlebars of his bike while he stood slack-jawed. From the radio, a deejay announced that traffic had come to a standstill on both cross-bay bridges, effectively shutting down two counties. “This is truly terrible,” he said, his voice breaking. “We have never known anything like this. If you believe in a higher power, now is the time to pray.”

  Peyton lengthened her stride, setting her jaw as she moved away. What good would prayer do now? The plane had apparently dropped out of the sky, and God had done nothing to stop it.

  Once she reached her car, traffic had so backed up that it took her three hours to travel less than a mile. At the entrance to Tampa International Airport, she parked on the shoulder and jogged toward the terminal, then threaded her way through the mob gathered in the airside serving PanWorld Airlines.

  Behind the desk at the gate reserved for Flight 848, a pale PW spokesman was assuring anyone who approached that help was on its way. When pressed for further information, the man admitted that “help” was a trauma team from the airline’s New York office. “For now,” he told Peyton and a horde of other insistent reporters, “we can confirm that Flight 848 has experienced an in-flight incident. The plane dropped off our radar at 6:31 P.M., and we are doing everything possible to search for survivors. An Accident Operations Center has been established at PanWorld headquarters in New York, and trauma experts are en route to Tampa.”

  Over the next few hours, time stopped for Peyton— and for much of the city. Like a tall oak draws lightning, the tragedy drew hundreds of people to the Tampa airport—counselors, rescue workers, clergy of every stripe, and, of course, members of the media. Airside C, serving PanWorld Airlines, was temporarily closed off to serve the families of victims, while other PanWorld flights were shifted to different gates. A public relations team from PanWorld’s New York office arrived to handle the news media.

  Peyton wasn’t surprised to learn that reporters had been barred from Airside C. Tampa policemen guarded the entrances, protecting the mourners’ privacy, and even local reporters who had friends in airport administration found themselves having to rely upon press conferences for updates and information. Within twenty-four hours of the crash, however, local writers from the Tampa Times and St. Pete Post were displaced by television newscasters from all the major networks. As reporters jockeyed for position inside the airport hotel, news trucks from the local stations jostled in the airport pickup lanes with vans from CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and the new World News Network. After each press conference, the print reporters retreated to quiet corners to type up their impressions on laptops or mumble into digital recorders while the TV newscasters scrawled out quick scripts, adjusted their makeup, then taped interviews with stricken family members and somber airport officials.

  In all the media madness, one reporter stood out, both on the air and off. Wherever Julie St. Claire of the World News Network went, an appreciative crowd followed. Though she’d never heard of the woman before, Peyton thought it wasn’t hard to understand St. Claire’s appeal—the twenty-something brunette was not only beautiful, but poised. While Peyton noticed other reporters pacing, yelling, and snapping during the few moments before a live interview, Julie St. Claire remained as calm and cool as an ice princess. But she delivered news of the tragedy with compassion and warmth, and in the newsroom, when Peyton lifted her gaze to the TV sets hanging from the ceiling, she usually found herself watching WNN’s coverage.

  On Thursday afternoon, as she waited in the Marriott ballroom for a press conference called by the Tampa Bay Bucs’ head coach, Peyton watched Julie St. Claire do a live interview for WNN. A team of personnel surrounded the reporter, one man fluffing her hair while a woman applied pancake makeup with a sponge, but St. Claire could have been a mannequin, so concentrated was she on her task. She stood with her eyes open and mouth closed, her gaze focused on the waiting camera, a steno pad in her grasp. When the director lifted his hand and began the countdown with his fingers, the makeup artists stepped back, and St. Claire sparked to life.

  “Good evening,” she said, her voice level as her blue eyes stared into the wide camera lens. “Grief still roams the halls of the Tampa Marriott Airport hotel, where weeping relatives remain on scene for news of their loved ones aboard Flight 848. But no longer are they hoping for a miracle. As PanWorld released the complete passenger list this afternoon, recovery teams brought the first of the bodies up from the wreckage. Later tonight, in the area behind me, the coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will formally announce the death of Tom Harold, beloved defensive coach of the Bucs, who helped move the team from last place to the Super Bowl in the space of one season . . .”

  Peyton listened with admiration as the reporter moved from news to sports. She’d heard other television and radio reporters stumble and fumble their live reports, but Julie St. Claire performed as if she had been born for the job. She certainly looked the part. Dressed in a tasteful blue suit, with nary a stain or wrinkle . . .

  Peyton glanced down at her own outfit—jeans and a cotton shirt, topped by a sweater she’d tied around her neck to ward off the air-conditioning chill. Her short hair was probably standing on end, considering how many times she’d raked her hands through it, and as for makeup, who had time for such foolishness in a situation like this?

  Newspapers, Peyton decided, had been invented for communicators who had more brains than beauty. It wasn’t fair that television reporters made more money and reached more people than print reporters, but being high-maintenance had to have a downside.

  Though she was technically on vacation, an irresistible power drew Peyton to the airport and the newsroom. Reporting was too much a part of her, the experience too close to ignore, so day after day she hung out at the airport, then drove to the newsroom and sat at her desk, helping out where she could, providing snatches of overheard conversations and facts for writers who needed dashes of local color. The newsroom throbbed with life—phones ringing, fingers flying over clattering keyboards, and tempers flaring—but Peyton wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  Questions flew back and forth at the speed of thought.

  “Who do you know at the FAA?”

  “I need a warm body to run over and get me a quote from the president of the airline!”

  “Anybody know anyone at the New York mayor’s office?”

  “I need a contact at Boeing, and I need it now!”

  The calls for help came thick and fast, frightening Mandi and the young copy kids into scared-rabbit silence, but Peyton found herself energized by the electricity that zipped through the newsroom. Though “The Heart Healer” wouldn’t appear at all in the coming week, she stayed at the office, jotting down questions for her fellow reporters, answering phones, and logging on to the Web to help with research. When things grew quiet in the newsroom, she headed off to the airport to gather whatever information she could.

  Except for the daily ritual features—the comics, syndicated columns, and the classifieds—all stories seemed to revolve around some aspect of the crash. The news reporters worked round the clock to concentrate on airline problems and the recovery efforts, the economic writers focused on the financial prospects of TIA and PanWorld Airline, King and his sportswriters investigated the blow dealt the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Other writers took their cues from the crash as well—the health/medical writer did a piece on how the human body reacts to a time of severe grief, the guy covering retail and tourism wrote an article on how Tampa Bay
’s image might suffer, and the woman who covered social services featured the charitable organizations who were offering relief and counseling during the aftermath of the tragedy.

  Milton Higgs, manager of the archive and research center, moved a cot into the library and sprouted a beard, choosing to sleep in his office rather than miss an opportunity to provide photos and background on prominent citizens who had perished in the crash.

  Nora Chilton had her features writers considering every angle of the tragedy not already covered by the news department. She sent people out to interview local victims’ families, arranged for photography shoots, and reserved front feature page coverage for the most heart-wrenching stories. The events coordinator spent so much time on the phone in his effort to compile a list of times and dates of local victims’ memorial services that he ordered a telephone headset, and the children and families writer did a three-part piece on how to gently teach children about death. Peyton thought Nora was treading dangerously close to overkill when she assigned the home/gardening/pets writer, Diane Winters, a major feature on memorial statuary for the residential garden.

  Compelled to help her coworkers, Peyton attended every press conference she could squeeze into, conducted spot interviews with willing PanWorld employees, and made a list of the various approaches employed by other reporters. She took notes as the mayor of New York, who had lost personal friends on the flight, lashed out at the airline for not notifying family members in a timely manner. She listened as Red Cross workers, priests, and rabbis led stricken family members in prayer at the airport chapel. And she studied other members of the media—some of whom handled interviews with tact and grace, others who ran over trampled emotions like freight trains on a fast track to nowhere.