by Joe Schuster
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” the captain said, his voice pleasant. “We’ve got a small situation with our landing gear. We’re going to divert to Scott Air Force Base on the Illinois side. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
“Why Scott?” a woman asked from a few rows in front of Edward Everett.
“If we crash, they don’t want us in a high-traffic airport,” a man said.
They began descending again, the engines changing pitch as they slowed. Edward Everett leaned his head back against the cushion, closing his eyes, aware of his pulse thrumming in his ears so furiously he wondered if he was having a heart attack. Around him, passengers sobbed. Several talked on cellphones. “I love you,” someone said. “Tell the kids—” another said. Edward Everett fingered the cellphone in his pocket but thought, Who would I call? How pathetic it was to be in a plane about to crash and have no one in his life that he could call.
Meg gripped his forearm suddenly, her long nails cutting into his skin, and he found himself laying his left hand over her right, giving it a squeeze as he began thinking of all the divergent roads in his life that had brought him here, to a plane that was most likely going to crash, holding on to the hand of a woman who hadn’t been part of his life until an hour earlier when they nodded pleasantly to each other as she sat down: if, if, if. If he had pursued football as his father wanted, he would be in an office in a high school, playing around with next year’s depth chart, his worst problem that the All-Conference running back who had graduated in June would be hard to replace. If he hadn’t gotten injured in Montreal, if he had let that fly ball go and not gotten hung up in the fence, he would be fat and retired someplace warm—a tanned hacker on the golf course, lining up a putt on eighteen, taking a phone call from his agent: A baseball card show in Tucson would work fine next month. But even if he had made the decision to chase that fly ball in Montreal but hadn’t gone to Cleveland for the tryout, if he had been content selling flour with his uncle, content marrying Connie, raising her son, he would have a wife and son who would sit with him at a banquet when—long after he had taken over his uncle’s territory, long after he had his own house beside a pond—someone would call his name from the dais and he would rise to applause and make his way forward to receive the sort of honor that successful men gave to other successful men.
He realized that Meg was saying something: “… was sorry.”
“What?” he asked. His ears were even more closed up now, her voice even more distant than it had been before.
“I wish I could tell her I was sorry,” she said.
“Who?” he asked.
“Patience,” she said.
“What?” He wondered if she had suddenly gone mad: patience, for what? Was there a moment coming at which it would be better for her to answer his question?
“My daughter, Patience,” she said. “Oh, God, I was so terrible to her.”
“I’m sure you weren’t,” he said.
“You don’t know,” she said. She took an iPhone from her purse but sat holding it in her lap. She laughed. “And I can’t even call her to tell her. What kind of person in the twenty-first century doesn’t have a phone?” She shook her phone at him in an accusing way, as if he was responsible for something—for whatever she’d done to her daughter. For her not being able to tell her daughter she was sorry. For the plane’s mechanical problems.
“What could you have possibly done?” he asked.
“I thought I wanted a little girl,” she said, almost so quietly he had a hard time hearing her over the drone of the engines and with his ears as clogged as they were. “Momma’s little girl. But when I had her, I had no idea what to do with her. Change her diapers. Clean up her poop. Her father was no help. ‘She’s your child,’ he said. ‘You wanted her.’ Hiding in the basement, making fucking guitars. I took it out on her. Oh, I wish I could tell her it wasn’t her fault. ‘Am I bad, Mommy?’ she’d ask. What can a four-year-old do that could be bad? But I … there were times she would cry in her crib and I would sit in the living room and turn the volume up on whatever I was watching. Falcon Crest, Dallas, with the volume up while she wailed.” She closed her eyes and he wondered if she was going to cry but she didn’t. “That’s what I’d tell her. That I was sorry—for that and for so much more.”
Through the window now, he could see the landscape changing, becoming more residential. Tracts of homes, a shopping mall, an industrial court.
“What do you regret?” She laid her hand gently on his, giving him a small pat.
He turned his head toward her. Just because she had told him what she regretted didn’t mean he had to tell her. They were strangers. The plane shook, at first twice, then three times, and then started quaking violently. The flight attendant coming back up the aisle swayed from side to side from the force of it, not so much walking as pulling herself up the aisle, as if she was struggling against a wind.
“I had a boy,” he said, glancing at Meg and then turning away. “I had a boy but I never got to see him. His mother left before he was born and I never met him.”
“Never,” she said. She curled her hand into his, lacing her fingers through his.
“No,” he said. The photos came to him. The baby fending off bright sunlight at its baptism. The boy raising a glass. And then the boy in the image lowered the glass and glanced up at him, smiling, and Edward Everett realized he had never thought of the boy as animate before.
“I’ve never told anyone about him,” he said. “Not my wives. No one.” On Connie’s porch after the first picture came: “What’s wrong?” “Nothing. I just love you.”
“Oh, my,” Meg said. “How awful to carry that with you all this time.”
He realized he was crying and squeezed his eyes to stop the tears. “I wish—” he said, then cleared his throat to steady his voice. “I wish I could have known him a little.”
“You poor, poor dear.” Meg patted his face. “She was terrible to do that to you. Kidnapping. Did you ever try to find them?”
“I did,” he said. “I looked—”
“Maybe he tried to find you,” Meg said. “Maybe he’s looking this moment. That’s something to live for.”
The captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “I’m asking the flight crew to belt themselves in,” he said.
Through the window, Edward Everett could make out something that looked like a factory and then the edge of downtown St. Louis, the distinctive Arch glinting dully against the gray sky. The loudspeaker began crackling, the captain’s voice mixed with cracks and pops. “… crash position …” and then the loudspeaker went silent. Throughout the cabin, passengers bent their faces toward their knees, locking their hands behind their necks, and Edward Everett imitated them.
The engines slowed yet again. Edward Everett could feel the pull of gravity, and pressure built in his ears. Everything seemed far away: the sounds of the engine, the crying of a baby, a woman. It seemed as if he was hearing it all through water. Then came the roar of the engines reversing. He lifted his head momentarily to glance out the window. They were coming in fast, past a parking lot filled with military jeeps, past a mass of airmen running in pale blue shorts and T-shirts. It seemed they should be on the ground by then; he braced himself, thinking, Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you, but at the same time thinking of how that was cheating in a way, something he wasn’t certain he believed in but hedging his bets, in the event Sister Annunciata was right, an Act of Contrition could pull him out of a free fall toward hell at the last moment. The landscape continued to flash past, rows of clapboard military housing, a field with jets lined up as if at some sort of aeronautical parade rest, watching them speed past. From somewhere ahead of them, he caught sight of flashing blue and red lights. They were barely above the ground, all but skimming it; part of him willed them to touch down, to get whatever was going to happen over, while part of him willed them to stay up.
“Oh, my God,” Meg said, and
she pushed at his head, shoving it back toward his knees, his legs pressing against his torso making it difficult to breathe. The engines were nearly deafening, and then he felt them hit the ground with an impact that jarred him in his seat, the plane bouncing, the front end rising and falling, rising and falling, shaking him wildly. His head banged against his knee hard enough that he thought he might have fractured his cheekbone. He thought, incongruously and wryly: Renee will end up a widow and not a divorcee after all, would inherit everything he had, and then the plane seemed to be careening, the fuselage screeching as they rode the ground, a long eeeeeeeeeeeeeee rising above the drone of the engines, a sound he felt in his fingertips, in his groin. All around him, passengers were screaming: was he? No. His mouth was open, but no sound was coming out. A drink cart from the front of the plane broke free of what had tethered it and bounced along the aisle, banging into seats, bottles and cans spilling out, some breaking, filling the cabin with a strong scent of alcohol and sugar. Overhead compartments popped open, carry-on bags falling all around them. The plane seemed on the verge of tumbling, fishtailing side to side.
He turned his head against his thighs to look up and out through the window. Something outside whipping madly at the fuselage: smoke, he realized, pouring up around the wing. For some reason, he had thought the impact would be the worst, tear him apart; he had not considered the possibility of fire and he sucked in his breath, closing his eyes, waiting for the fuel to ignite. His body jerked front to back, side to side, his head shaking so violently he wondered that he didn’t fall unconscious. When they hit a hard bump, his jaw clamped abruptly and a small hard fragment of something came loose in his mouth, most likely a piece of a tooth, pricking the underside of his tongue, making him taste blood. Then, suddenly, it seemed they were slowing. They were slowing, no longer careening, but skidding, smoke obscuring his view outside the window, until they came to rest, finally, with a savage bump that made the belt strain against his midsection so hard that it drove the wind out of him, and he thought, It’s cutting through me, but then they were still. They were still and, he realized, quiet, as the engines were off. There was only the distant crying of his fellow passengers, and the gentle creaking of the plane settling—as if, after terrorizing them, it had decided to lull them to sleep.
Chapter Thirty
Later, safe in his suite in the airport Hilton, twisting the cap off a mini-bar bottle of Jim Beam and slumping, drained and dumb, into an upholstered wing chair in the room, while plane after plane thundered over him, the aftermath of the crash came to him in pieces like a collection of photographs someone had once organized to illustrate a sequence but then dropped, scattering them, confusing the order:
From outside the plane, he could hear sirens approaching but the smoke outside made it impossible to see how near the vehicles were. Inside, the crew was up and moving, forcing open heavy doors, unfurling a gray inflatable slide.
“Please,” the flight attendant who had served their drinks implored, “orderly, orderly.” But passengers ignored her, shoving one another. A plump man wearing a Cardinals cap knocked into the attendant and she tumbled against a small girl. A teenaged boy with a faint blond mustache dusting his upper lip clambered over seat backs, kicking the newlywed husband in the head.
Outside the plane, emergency crews were spraying white foam. It slid across the wing in a wave, some of it blowing in through the emergency exit in the row behind Edward Everett and he felt it wet and sticky on his face, burning his tongue, gagging him.
He was little more than part of a herd, following dumbly the hand signals and exhortations of airmen in uniform directing them across the field, away from the wrecked plane, the tight knot of a hundred or so fellow human beings stumbling across uneven ground, kicking up grasshoppers that stung his hands when they flung themselves up to avoid being trampled. Meg held on to him, unsteady in her impractical heels.
Beside him on the plane, Meg was sobbing. The newly married woman unclasped her seatbelt and stood but it was evident from her vacant gaze that she had no notion she was standing. When she sat back down, she miscalculated, landing partly on the armrest, and slumped into the aisle, her legs splayed in front of her until her husband stood, losing his balance briefly, and then righting himself to take her limp left hand, her good hand, and tug on it gently until she showed him a sign of recognition and he helped her up.
The right leg and crotch of his jeans were damp. At first he worried that he had peed himself, but when he dabbed at the stain tentatively with two fingers of his right hand and held them up to his nose, he realized it was beer.
Beside him in the frenzy of passengers surging for the exits, Meg laid her hand in the crook of his elbow, giving him a squeeze that he understood as Don’t leave me.
Meg was taking his hand and tugging it, insistent, pulling him toward an exit, where he lost his balance and slid headfirst down the chute, clawing at it to keep from falling onto the newly married woman, who was below him, but banging into her shoulder, the fire suppression foam covering their clothing, soaking their hair, until he tumbled at last onto the ground, his face buried momentarily in the foam, and he shoved at the bodies falling into him, thinking: how odd to survive the crash only to drown.
On the bus, he gazed back at the plane. Its underside was scorched, the fuselage sitting in a lake of foam that was beginning to melt. The emergency vehicles turning around made broad arcs in the high grass, clouds of grasshoppers appearing and vanishing, appearing and vanishing, as the vehicles bounced across the field to the roadway. He thought: My laptop! My luggage! But the bus was pulling away, joining the line of other buses, its engine rough, the foul scent of diesel fuel filling his nostrils.
He spit something hard and sharp out of his mouth into his cupped hand, a fragment of a tooth, one edge tinged with black, the decay that had made it vulnerable. He considered dropping it onto the floor but it seemed somehow valuable and so he slipped it into the change pocket in his jeans.
Disembarking at the curb outside the St. Louis airport, they moved as a herd, docile now, unlike their frantic push to get out of the plane, down the steps of the bus into the hot and humid St. Louis late morning. He stepped onto a splotch of bubble gum, which stuck to the sole of his right shoe, and every time he took a step his foot made a sucking schmack. Inside the air-conditioned dimness, the terminal seemed frenetic, a pace that confused all of them. They stood there, blinking, as a soldier in camouflage fatigues set down his pack and embraced a gray-haired man.
On the bus—or was it the plane?—Meg handed him a folded piece of paper. He opened it but his mind couldn’t make sense of it: letters and numbers in an unsteady hand, as if someone either very old or very young had written it, and he stared at it until she took it back, folded it again, and slipped it into the pocket of his shirt, saying, “Where are you staying?” But he couldn’t remember if he answered her.
In the hotel room, he finished the whiskey, drinking directly from the bottle, replaced the cap and returned it to the mini-bar and then realized what he was doing, removed it and laid it delicately into the lined wastebasket beneath the desk. He went into the bedroom. It was then that it struck him he had no change of clothes, no toothbrush, no razor. He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back, thinking he would get up in a moment, at least wash his face and hands, but he closed his eyes. He had the sensation of his body spinning. Then it occurred to him that he could not go to his meeting with Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, in clothing reeking of sweat and beer. He sat up, took off his clothes, pulled the complimentary robe off the hanger in the closet, put it on and went down to the laundry on the ground floor. When his clothes were finished, he went back to his room, and lay down without pulling back the blankets. From across the room, his cellphone rang and he thought he should answer it but closed his eyes and didn’t remember it ceasing to ring as he fell asleep.
The directions Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, gave him took him thirty miles from the Hilton, past affluent residential
developments and a shopping plaza with stores designed after Swiss chalets, past exit after exit of Denny’s and McDonald’s and Ruby Tuesdays and Lowe’s. He realized he was out of sync with the pace of heavy traffic in a large city and, as the stream of cars and trucks rushed past, he kept his rented sub-compact in the right lane, often caught behind lumbering trucks hauling heavy construction equipment.
After a time, he came to a state route that led him to a series of county roads that rose and fell along the edge of the Ozark Mountains, past modest tract houses and trailer parks, and then farther still, past limestone rock faces and wooded areas, until he reached a narrow private road marked with an etched wooden sign reading “Gossage Farms” and turned onto it, creeping uphill between trees so dense their branches scraped the roof of his car. When he crested the hill, the landscape opened onto a lush pasture on both sides of the road, bounded by wire fencing. Spread across it, forty or fifty horses grazed while, a hundred yards off, two figures cantered along a ridge.
Finally, he came to a metal gate at the end of a drive leading to a barn and, beyond that, a broad stone house with a wraparound porch. The gate was closed and he pulled over and got out, struck immediately by the overwhelming stench of manure and damp hay. As he was about to lift the fence latch, a voice called out, “Jesus, don’t,” and a man he hadn’t noticed trotted toward him. He was short but fit, wearing a black Stetson that shadowed his face. His rubber boots and the cuffs of his jeans were caked with what at first seemed graying mud but when he reached the gate, Edward Everett could smell that it was manure. The man lifted the cover on a metal box mounted to a fence post, flicked a switch and a humming Edward Everett hadn’t previously heard ceased.