Mayday

by Karen Harrington

Screams.

  Heat.

  Flickering light.

  And then everything came to a dark and silent stop. No one said or did anything. We waited to see if we were alive. We waited for everything to make sense. There was one random thought that rose to the top of my brain. Some fact from Uncle Reed. IED explosions. Accidents. What had he said?

  The first ninety seconds after an accident are crucial. It’s all about ninety seconds. Don’t panic.

  So while everyone around me began to move, scream, moan, and panic, I tried to survive.

  “Mom!” I screamed over the chaos and smoke. The sharp smell of fuel crept up my neck. I figured we had used up about thirty of the ninety survival seconds. I screamed again and realized no sound was coming from my mouth. No sound at all. Just a hot stab of pain as if a knife were pushing into my throat.

  So I grabbed her by the arm, and it made her scream in pain. I pulled her along anyway. I felt my way down the aisle. Other passengers did, too. We’d landed sideways, so walking was difficult. Still, I pulled us toward the gaping hole where rain and moonlight flooded the fuselage. The hole was big and square, like a whole panel of the plane had been cut away. There was a jagged ledge and we stood on it and looked down at the blackness. It was hard to judge how far it was to the ground. Then I heard the terrible sound. The sound of running water. Only it wasn’t water. It was jet fuel. So I looked at Mom and I could tell we had the exact same idea. There was no time to stop and calculate or consider the fall. We just had to do it. We held hands and leapt into the darkness. We landed on soft, muddy earth. She screamed.

  “Wayne, are you okay? I think I twisted my ankle,” Mom said. “I don’t know if I can walk.”

  Maybe sixty of the ninety seconds had passed by then.

  I could see orange flames crawling over the plane. My body was stuck in the rain-soaked ground. More passengers landed on the ground near us. I clawed at the damp dirt and tried to pry myself from the muck. Mad because I shouted for help to the few other passengers zombie-walking and crawling across the smoky field. They didn’t notice me. Panic rose up through me again. What if the plane went up in a fireball?

  Don’t panic.

  The red lights of emergency vehicles sprayed across the field. I knew we needed to move away from the trickling sound. The smell of jet fuel. Toward those lights. But we were stuck and running out of seconds.

  CHAPTER 6

  The day after, I startled awake, and for a second I didn’t know where I was. If you ask me, waking up in a strange room is almost as scary as a plane crash.

  Almost.

  I was a plane-crash survivor. A stranger in the new country called AFTER. I was in a hospital bed looking at a tiled ceiling. We’d really crashed, I thought. We’d really leapt from a hole in the plane. The awful smell of jet fuel and mud was still all around me. And the inside of my head was like the inside of our plane. Random stuff bouncing all over the place.

  “Rise and shine and pee. It’s the best part of waking up, honey,” someone said. “It means you’re alive. I’m Nurse Davis. You’re in the hospital. You’ve been in an accident. Your mother is okay. She will be here shortly. You should not try to speak. Your neck suffered a severe blow. Nod your head if you understand.”

  I nodded. It was the moment I realized that I would have to learn a new language in the country of AFTER.

  I opened my mouth to speak anyway. All that came out was a dry gasp. The pain in my throat was sharp and sudden. It made my eyes water.

  “Easy now, son,” Nurse Davis said.

  I’d gotten to the emergency lights and away from the fuel. But I couldn’t remember how.

  Uncle Reed would’ve laughed if I told him I was like the crocodile in his story.

  Hey, have I got a story for you.

  “Don’t try to talk now, son,” Nurse Davis said.

  Do you know how hard that is?

  I mean, if you were to try to tell a really funny joke at school, it would be something like this: Did you know that Wayne Kovok can’t talk?

  And everyone would laugh and say, Yeah, when pigs fly.

  A nurse wheeled Mom up next to me. Her arm was in a giant brace, and she had big bandages on her forehead and right ankle. She pulled herself up onto my bed and hugged me tight.

  A doctor with a clipboard came in next.

  “Wayne, I’m okay, honey. We’re okay,” Mom said. “I busted my arm in three places, but I’m fine, okay?”

  She didn’t look fine.

  “No need to worry, Wayne,” the doctor explained. “We’ve got to take a closer look at your neck, though. Some trauma there. You can’t talk now because of the swelling. And you had significant cuts on your face, which we stitched up last night. Nod if you understand.”

  I nodded. Then raised my hand to my face. I could feel a long line of bumpy stitches. They seemed to go on forever, like train tracks starting at the top of my head and traveling across my chin.

  “It’s okay, Wayne,” Mom said. “You still look handsome.”

  “Wayne, I explained to your mother that the hollow space below your throat is called the suprasternal notch,” the doctor said. “It’s severely bruised. You may have bowed your vocal cords. We’re hopeful it’s just a matter of allowing the swelling to go down, but you need to refrain from speaking or eating solid foods for a time.”

  My suprasternal notch hurt. A lot. The worst pain I could remember. But we’d made it. We’d leapt to our survival. We’d gotten unstuck. There was still mud under my fingernails.

  Nurse Davis said, “Okay, we need to give him a moment to go to the restroom.”

  They all cleared out. I stepped into the tiny bathroom. My ankle gave me a painful reminder. It was sprained but still worked.

  First thing I saw in the mirror was that my left eyebrow was missing. My chin was purple, and my neck was red and swollen. Stitches formed a clean zipper line from my forehead, through my shaved left eyebrow, down my cheek, and then across my chin from left to right.

  Do you know what it looked like to me?

  An L shape.

  An L shape of stitches across my face.

  The sign of a loser.

  It was so pathetic and so Wayne Kovok. I laughed. But you have to use your suprasternal notch to laugh, and when I did, the fire pain shot through me ten times worse than before.

  I didn’t look so hot before my makeover. And now? A nonverbal Frankenface? Every girl’s dream.

  Another wave of memory hit me.

  The flight. The hole in the fuselage. The things on the plane being sucked out one at a time.

  My laptop computer.

  Luggage.

  Purses.

  A one-pound book about Steve Jobs.

  A red-and-green quilted Christmas tree skirt from the woman in 14A.

  And one precisely folded burial flag presented “from a grateful nation.”

  Why did this happen? This wasn’t the plan.

  This was the plan: Fly 179 miles to Dallas. Five hundred miles an hour. A thirty-seven-minute flight. Get home. Unpack. Take dog for a walk. Display flag on Wall of Honor. Call Sandy. Apologize for Frankenbuckettia joke.

  A knock on my door. “Honey, you can ring that buzzer in there if you need my help,” Nurse Davis said.

  I took another glance in the bathroom mirror. I swallowed hard, which also hurt. Then I crawled back into my hospital bed and pulled the sheet over my head.

  New topic.

  Did you know that for the average lightbulb, only 10 percent of the electricity is turned into light? Ninety percent of the electricity is wasted as heat. Anyway, a flickering lightbulb is annoying. It can flicker right through the sheet covering your head.

  So I gave up hiding and tried to watch TV. I clicked through the channels. Soap opera. Soap opera. Spanish soap opera. Lots of good-looking people with good-looking faces.

  Bueno.

  I finally found Jeopardy!

  Alex Trebek’s favorite Jeopardy! category is geography. />
  I don’t know why I know that fact, but I do.

  I watched Jeopardy! and knew all the answers. But I couldn’t answer before the contestant did, because my voice was trapped.

  No contestant knew the origin of the term rookie. I did. It was an American military term coined during the Civil War. Back then, there were so many new recruits pushed into battle without training. The older soldiers called the new recruits “reckies,” and it eventually became rookies. Grandpa had told me this fact.

  Nurse Davis forgot to refill my ice water twice. She apologized and said she was new.

  Nurse Rookie.

  Grandpa stepped in as Nurse Rookie left. He pushed Mom’s wheelchair up to my bed.

  He wore the exact same set of clothes he’d had on the last time I saw him. Flannel shirt. Light-blue grandpa jeans. Brown boots. It took my brain a second to remember that he hadn’t been on our flight.

  My eyes got wide when I saw him. Dark circles underlined his eyes. His face was pale. He needed a shave. My whole life, I’d never seen him without a shaved face.

  I sat up and then remembered my backless gown. You can imagine what it feels like to be in front of your grandfather in a flimsy gown.

  Grandpa studied me like I was a whole new kind of person. A whole new species.

  Don’t call me Buttercup. Don’t call me Buttercup.

  “At ease, son. No waterworks.”

  “A pen and paper for you,” Mom said, handing me a small notepad. “This is how you’ll communicate for a while, okay? It’ll be fun.”

  Her voice cracked. Her smile was forced. This was how she acted when she wanted things to seem fine and happy.

  “I can teach you some snappy hand signals while you’re mute,” Grandpa said.

  “Dad, he’s not mute—he just injured his throat,” she said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “It’s a big difference!”

  “Anyway, hand signals are widely used in tactical military situations, Wayne,” Grandpa said. “Thumbs-up. Thumbs-down. A-OK. Peace. Digitus impudicus.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mom asked.

  “Latin for the aviary gesture. You know, the bir—”

  “Dad, I know the aviary gesture!” Mom said. “But he doesn’t.”

  She elbowed him with her non-injured arm. I knew the aviary gesture, all right. You don’t get to be in seventh grade without a general knowledge of the dark side.

  I used the stupid notepad: How did you get here???

  And then I poked him in the arm and handed him the note.

  “Caught a flight from Nashville,” Grandpa answered.

  So my grandfather caught a flight to a plane crash?

  Yeah, he caught a flight to a plane crash.

  If you ask me, that’s braver than the first man who ate an oyster!

  I wished I could say that out loud. Mom’s face might have a real smile, then.

  “Wayne, there’s a counselor from the airline here today, but since you can’t talk, we’ll try that another time, okay?” Mom said. She touched my hair. The fake-happy smile came back.

  “And there’s a bunch of gosh-darn airline lawyers, too. Talking about signing papers already. Did you hear them?” Grandpa said.

  Counselors, I could understand. But airline lawyers sounded funny. So I wrote on my notepad.

  Why lawyers?

  “Well, um… for the victims, I guess,” Mom said.

  I wrote: What victims?

  Mom’s face closed up.

  That was how I found out about 14A. She had died. She sat one seat across from me in her brown sweater, trying to get me to talk about the red-and-green tree skirt.

  It didn’t seem possible that two people on the same plane, in the same row, only inches apart, wouldn’t both survive. Or both die.

  A million questions lined up in my mind. In my lap, I had the writing pad and pen Mom had given me. They looked useless. I was powerless without my voice.

  I just wrote: Why? How?

  She shook her head.

  Mom and Grandpa sat by my bed, drinking coffee. They talked like I wasn’t even there. It got so I didn’t even mind.

  Because I was thinking about 14A. How I hadn’t talked to her. How I’d ignored her. Sorry, woman in 14A.

  I swallowed hard. And that ignited all the pain in my neck again. I kept hurting myself.

  Just then, my dad rounded the corner into my hospital room. I was on the brink of waterworks. I stared at a plant on the table. I filled my eyes with green so that they wouldn’t fill with anything else.

  Green, green, green!

  “Hey there,” he said. “You okay?”

  “We’ll give you two a minute,” Mom said. She and Grandpa left the room.

  My dad fixed me with a worried look, squinting really. Kind of like the way Grandpa first scanned me. You can imagine how it feels to have the people you’ve known your whole life look at you like you’re a stranger from a strange land. My dad seemed jittery. I don’t know if I’d ever seen him worried. He put something on my table and then stuffed his hands in his pockets.

  “I didn’t know what to get you,” he said. “It’s stupid.” It was a teddy bear. It had the words GET WELL on its stupid T-shirt.

  No, it’s okay.

  “Man, what you guys went through,” he said. “I’d say you’re lucky to be alive!”

  They kept telling me to nod if I understood, so I nodded, pretending to understand. I was alive. But I didn’t feel lucky. Maybe that would come later. Now it was burst after burst of confusion. Because what were the facts about the crash? Why had it happened? Why didn’t everyone survive?

  “So, you can’t talk?”

  I nodded again. His nervousness was making me nervous.

  “Hey, I heard Imagine Dragons are going to be in town next week,” he said. “You like them, right? We could go!”

  I tried my best to smile and nod yes.

  “Say, did you know someone in the hall said your mother unbuckled her seat belt in the plane? Is that true?”

  So I took my notepad and wrote: To get Uncle Reed. Burial flag.

  “Is that so?” the Flee said. “Just for a flag?”

  It was my fault she did it. I wasn’t stronger than the wind.

  On the flight to Arlington, Grandpa had explained that burial flags have covered fallen soldiers since the Napoleonic Wars. I remembered that.

  The American burial flag is draped so that the stars are over the left shoulder of the soldier, he’d said.

  I wrote these facts on my notepad and gave them to my dad.

  “But you’re okay now,” he said. “That’s what’s important. I’m glad you’re okay.” He put a hand on my foot. Which was as awkward as it sounds. But my dad was never a hugger.

  “Okay, get some rest, son,” he said. “Maybe you could ride back to town with me, huh? The doctor said you’ll be released tomorrow. How would you like that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Okay, see you,” he said.

  I tried to settle my mind. Every time I dozed off, I had that falling feeling. Heard the flight attendants shouting, Brace!

  I turned the TV back on, and a guy named Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot, shouted from the screen.

  Here’s the thing: LeMoot was legendary in Texas for his screaming commercials.

  He shouted from the TV, “HURT IN AN ACCIDENT? CALL ME NOW! I’LL KICK CASH RIGHT INTO YOUR WALLET! I’LL GET WHAT YOU DESERVE! CALL ME NOW! I’M WAITING!”

  Have you ever met someone who can only talk in caps?

  Tim LeMoot’s voice had one volume: ALL CAPS!

  Man, he really wanted you to call him.

  You had to wonder if that was how he sounded in real life. Maybe he stood at the deli counter and placed his order in ALL CAPS.

  I’D LIKE A POUND OF SLICED SMOKED TURKEY RIGHT NOW! I’M WAITING!

  Sandy Showalter would think that was a funny joke. I’d remember it for her later.

  And then all
I could think about was Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot, because what if someone really was in an accident and wanted to call him, but his face and throat were all beat up and he couldn’t? And it was because of a flag, but not just any flag?

  And what did you do when you wanted to say a lot of words? A lot of words about flags and phone calls and survivors and victims, but you couldn’t speak? What did you do then, Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot? And why did this all happen in the first place?

  Why? Why? Why?

  There it was again. The question why. The plaguing question. Just as Uncle Reed had told me.

  I was plagued for sure.

  CHAPTER 7

  Late the next afternoon, when Jeopardy! was over and Judge Judy was coming on TV in ten minutes, we were told we could leave the hospital. They called us the “treated and released” survivors. There was another group still in the hospital. Hospital attendants wheeled me and Mom outside, where Grandpa sat in the front seat of a rental car. Reporters shouted questions at us. Camera flashes went off. Another of the treated-and-released group agreed to speak to the reporters.

  I hadn’t expected all that. I’d expected to just drive off with my dad.

  I passed Mom a note.

  Dad???

  “Oh, he had to get back home and said to tell you he was sorry,” she said. “He said he’d try to call you this week.”

  My dad. The Flee. He liked to drive at top speed with rock music at top volume. I’d been looking forward to that for my getaway from the hospital. Grandpa’s driving? It would be the opposite. Exact speed limit and talk radio.

  True story.

  Well, it was my fault. I’d only shrugged when he asked me if I wanted to ride home with him. I could have nodded yes. I should have written a note. Why didn’t I write a note?

  We rode home inside the rental car, which smelled of old cheese. Miles passed on the road. Rain poured down until the terrain changed from thick pine trees to flat, cold nothing. Grandpa hummed along to country music, which was worse than talk radio, and Mom checked her messages.

  “Oh, Wayne, there’s a call from Sandy,” she said. “How nice. She hopes you’re feeling better. And, honey, just so you’re prepared, the crash has been all over the news.”

  Do you want to know something? My whole life, I had dreamed I’d be in the news for some big achievement. Not a tragedy.