Down Around Midnight

by Robert Sabbag

  I found nothing in my conversations with Bernier, who’d been sober for more than sixteen years, to contradict what Gael said about his intelligence or his wit, or even his heart, for that matter—he is one of the more thoughtful and articulate of the people I talked to—but what struck me about him initially was his extraordinary memory.

  “It rarely fails me,” he admitted. “For good and for ill. There are nights, and entire presidential administrations, that I wish I could erase completely.”

  He has possessed it since childhood, he said.

  I knew that I had met Bernier, if only briefly, at some point prior to the crash. He remembered the moment and the circumstances precisely. I was introducing myself to him and a woman friend of his, he said, when her dog—a troubled mutt who had managed to find in his owner “the only person who loved him”—jumped up and made “such a mess” of me that I had to change my clothes. I don’t remember the encounter (Bernier claims I handled it well), but I do remember the day. It had to have been Saturday, March 13, the fourth day of the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the day in 1979 that Zachary Swan and I signed books in South Hadley. It’s in the calendar I carried on the plane.

  Equally memorable to Bernier was the moment he first saw Suzanne.

  “There was unanimous and immediate recognition that she was in trouble,” he told me. That she stood there alone—there was no car, no sign of a breakdown—made her appearance all the more ominous. “It looked serious, but it also looked seriously strange.”

  For Bernier and his friends, strange circumstances were a common occurrence, given “the way everybody was living life at the time,” and by that measure, he said, “this was not so extraordinary. ‘First, do no harm’: That’s pretty much how we were living in those days. Avoid violence and legal problems, and everything else was just fine.”

  As soon as Opperman saw Suzanne, standing there in the light of his headlamps, he pulled the car over.

  “Terry did exactly what I expected him to do. And he didn’t need any help from me or Kammy or Debbie. If Terry had reacted differently . . . I’m sure Kammy or Debbie would’ve told him to stop.”

  Bernier confessed that considering the . . . let’s call it festive . . . nature of the expedition, he invited some legal risk stopping that night, knowing that he might eventually be dealing with the police. He and Opperman identified themselves to Suzanne as the Cosmic Wimpout Clowns. But none of that came into consideration. Neither for him nor any of the others. “There are certain things you do because of who you are, no matter how uncomfortable they make you.”

  He might just as easily have been referring to Suzanne’s behavior that night.

  “Given the situation she was in, it was amazing how together she was.” He was not alone in that assessment. All four travelers that night were “struck by how heroic this person was.”

  When I asked if he’d been helpful in directing authorities to where Suzanne had exited the woods, he said, “Most of that is to the victim’s credit,” pointing out that Suzanne “was in shock and she was composed.” Expressing again his admiration for how well she handled things that night, he was unequivocal in asserting, “She was a hero. Four out of five of her peers would have been useless.”

  Suzanne asked to be taken to the airport rather than the hospital, presumably seeing it as the more direct approach to completing her mission. In the end, her choice was the perfect choice, eliminating as it did numerous links in the chain of communication. When they arrived at the airport, Bernier waited in the car with the women, and Opperman walked Suzanne into the terminal.

  And shortly thereafter the Cosmic Wimpout Clowns, having served what they saw as their purpose, were back on the road.

  “At the end of what we’ll politely call a full day.”

  The crash, reported nationally, dominated the regional news. The Boston Globe ran the story under a page-one banner headline. All the broadcast media led with it. My sister Elaine was driving to work that Monday morning, listening to all-news radio, picking up local weather and traffic, when the report of the crash came over the air.

  And I was mentioned as one of the passengers.

  “I almost went off the road,” she said. “When I got to work, I couldn’t breathe.” So distraught was she “. . . I was crying . . . my brother, my brother . . .” that it fell to her colleagues to put in the call to my parents, who by then had received word themselves and were leaving for the hospital.

  My parents, who lived outside Boston not far from Elaine, had learned of the crash from a nephew, whose daughter had caught the news that morning watching television. He phoned, got my mother, asked her, “How’s Bob?” and then had to explain to her why he was calling.

  The premature release of my name to the press was probably inevitable under the circumstances.

  My girlfriend, Mary, with a couple of weeks off before starting a new job in New York, had joined me on the Cape to work on the house. She was waiting for me at the airport that night, and she made her way to the hospital after Suzanne walked in with news of the crash. She was there when paramedics brought me in by ambulance. A native New Yorker, the force of whose personality matched that of anyone in the building, Mary was as smart, well educated, and experienced as any of the professionals on hand. A nurse herself, who came by her skepticism honestly, she knew better than to take anybody’s word for anything, and moreover, she knew how things worked. Moving unimpeded through the emergency room, no stranger to the territory—it was turf as familiar to her as were the streets of Manhattan—she told the hospital staff what they needed to hear. She told them she was my wife.

  From whatever angle you viewed the disaster, or any disaster, for that matter, in looking for someone to cover your back, you’d look in vain for someone better suited to it than Mary. She had all the qualifications. It was like going into combat with a Navy SEAL on the team. In addition to being a registered nurse, she held a graduate degree in public health, she had just been hired as risk manager of a major New York hospital, and three of her brothers were lawyers. The only way things could have worked out better is if she’d known how to fly a plane.

  As far as either the hospital or the airline was concerned, Mary’s presence on the scene that night, identified as my wife, constituted the necessary “notification of next of kin,” pending which my name was being withheld from the press. Whether my name would have been released had she said she was my girlfriend, I really don’t know. The question would have been academic, had it not been the middle of the night. She was not going to call my family until she had answers, and by the time she had them, it was three in the morning. She didn’t leave the hospital until four. When my parents tried to reach her at the house, she was asleep at a motel in Hyannis. But she had left word that I was OK. Having seen and talked to me, examined my chart, and debriefed the surgeons and orthopedists who were treating me—while they were treating me—she was able to say so with professional confidence.

  By then I was out cold on narcotics.

  Mary, whom I had met at a party four and a half years earlier, and with whom I had fallen hopelessly in love a couple of heartbeats thereafter, was in fact to become my wife, and eventually to become my ex-wife. We were married for the last thirteen of our twenty years together. Every marriage has its difficulties, and ours was no exception, but none compared with how difficult the marriage was to give up. When recently I traveled to New York to ask her what she remembered about the crash, it had been more than eleven years since we’d last seen each other. Nor in almost as many years, apart from my calling to arrange the visit, had we spoken to each other more than twice. Both of those conversations had taken place in 2001, the first when my father died early that year, the second in September, when I called to inquire about her brother, a federal agent who had worked out of an office at the World Trade Center in Manhattan. (He had by that time been transferred to his service’s headquarters in Washington.) Both conversations followed five years of silence and had
taken place on exceptional occasions. The conversations themselves were exceptional for the fact that they were polite.

  Truth is not the only daughter of Time.

  Arriving at the apartment that she and I had once shared, the apartment in which I had lived alone for four years prior to our marriage, I was sensitive to every nuance, a reporter alert to every detail, only to find my efforts at observation entirely confounded. The apartment had changed more than she had, and it had changed hardly at all. Walking into an environment that held so many memories for me, seeing her after so long, I was prepared to be overwhelmed by a rush of emotions, all of which I would record, but what erupted in me most dramatically was the experience of their absence.

  There was a matter-of-fact quality to our being together, a nonchalance I probably should have anticipated. One of the things I might have been more mindful of in advance of our meeting was that Mary, over the course of our twenty years together, had always been respectful of my work and tireless in her support of it. Nothing during that time saddened her more than watching me neglect it. Nothing would be more important to her now than the success of the task at hand, and nothing was more matter-of-fact than her report on the events of that night.

  The passenger terminal at Barnstable Airport in 1979 was no less dehumanizing than that of any other airport, only less pretentiously so. Displaying much the same dispiriting atmosphere as the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, it exhibited all the charm and none of the interesting characters of a bus station late at night.

  Throughout the delay, on the night of the crash, the people waiting to meet the plane had been seeking information from Air New England’s agents on the ground. Mary herself, on two occasions, had approached the ticket counter to confront the agents with questions. Something was wrong, but with airlines something was always wrong. Her first clue that something was really wrong, that things were going to be different this time, was “when they stopped communicating,” she told me, “when they physically removed themselves.”

  Something had changed.

  “I don’t know what they knew, but they disappeared,” she said.

  At that point, the tension escalated. Apprehension mounted with it, and the outlines of a tragedy took shape. All the indications were there. The word “disaster,” unspoken, insinuated itself into the silence until it could no longer be denied. The word was made flesh when Suzanne walked through the door.

  Mary spent the first minute or so settling Suzanne’s mother down. Once Mrs. Mourad had regained her composure, Mary turned her attention to Suzanne.

  “They sit, I’m waiting patiently,” she told me, “so I can ask the daughter something.”

  But she didn’t ask it right away. Instead, she addressed more urgent, procedural issues, asking Suzanne the kinds of questions an emergency worker might ask, things like “How did you get here? How long has the plane been down?”

  “Back and forth,” as Mary described it. “I’m pacing myself. Do I really want to know the answer to the only question I want to ask . . . ?”

  And finally she asked the question.

  “’My boyfriend was on the plane . . .’ ”

  And she described me to Suzanne.

  “ ‘You mean the author . . .’ ”

  Mary paused a second before saying yes.

  “. . . I’m getting closer now to the answer,” she told me.

  “ ‘He helped everybody get off.’ ”

  And that was it, Mary told me, as far as she was concerned.

  “You were off the plane,” she said. “That was all I cared about.”

  All of this transpired before Air New England employees, locked inside their office, had been made aware of Suzanne’s arrival. After hearing that I was alive, Mary banged on the office door and, ignoring their feeble protests now, told them, “There’s somebody out here I think you should talk to.”

  Mary and I spent a little more than two hours together remembering the events of that night. I was reminded that much of who I was and who I would probably always be grew out of my years with her. If in any significant way I was now that “more mature, outer-directed, caring individual” I’d wondered about, it was not because of the crash but thanks in large part to her. Continually, before and after the crash—she and I married three years after it—she’d tried to change me for the better, succeeding in a way I proved incapable of exhibiting, sadly and probably inevitably, until we said good-bye.

  We talked a while at the apartment, then walked over to Sheridan Square to a Mexican restaurant she wanted to try. We inquired after each other’s families. We talked briefly about her work. We didn’t talk about our personal lives. I was curious but didn’t ask. I could live with knowing only as much about her as she cared to volunteer. She looked good, she seemed to be well, and she appeared to be happy. That was enough for me. She was off the plane. That was all I cared about.

  She had work to do. I had a train to catch. I made my way uptown, thinking about something she said to me just before we said good night. It was a remark quite characteristic of Mary, who during our days together rarely let a minute go by without giving me something to think about. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by it. I’m not sure I was supposed to. It was one of those conversational attention-getters that had always enlivened our day-to-day discourse, a throwaway line that could be counted on to open up the intellectual terrain, a little taste of excess on the road to the palace of wisdom. Here now it came in closing, a parting gift, a conundrum I could puzzle out when in need of a little intrigue.

  “Those weren’t good days,” she told me. “We just thought they were.”

  I’m still wondering: What’s the difference?

  While Suzanne was fighting her way out of the forest, paramedics were fighting their way in, and they had no way of knowing what they might find once they located the wreck. Said one of them, William Smith: “Plane crashes that don’t have people dead on ’em are few and far between.”

  Dead and in the kind of condition that makes it tough for firefighters to sleep at night.

  Well over an hour went by before we sensed their presence in the woods. When we did, we called out to them. And at the sound of life in the distance, their level of urgency escalated.

  “We hear the screaming,” Pete Norgeot recalled, “but the screams are all diffused.”

  In the fog, it was difficult to determine the direction from which the shouts were coming.

  “We have no idea where they are,” EMT Bob Jenney said of the survivors whose voices he could hear.

  And then, almost two hours into the search, in the vaporous light of a utility lamp, like some half-buried Yucatán pyramid overgrown by vegetation and stumbled upon in the jungle by astonished archaeologists, there suddenly appeared, as Smith described it, rising up before them, “this great big airplane in the woods.”

  Smith, thirty-seven, a full-time firefighter and paramedic with four years on the job at the time, answered the call from home in Yarmouth wearing Top-Siders and a T-shirt and went into the woods that way. He was dressed only a little less casually when I met him twenty-eight years later in Eastham. Five nine, two hundred pounds, with enough red in his handlebar mustache to indicate the color from which his full head of hair had by now gone entirely gray, he answered the door wearing walking shorts and a polo shirt, as neat, well scrubbed, and shipshape as the house into which he invited me, a small, two-bedroom cottage he shared with the woman he called his life partner, Debbie Abbott, the executive assistant to the town’s fire chief. Abbott was away at work when I visited.

  “You’ll see a house with tacky flamingos out front. That’s me,” Smith had said when I called. It made the place easy to find. Out front, I saw only a couple of them, but Smith would later assure me that more flamingos, about “two dozen total,” occupied other parts of the small property. “Lots of plastic flamingos,” he said, “made in Massachusetts.”

  Coffee was brewing when I arrived. The second thing Smith did was
pour me a cup. The first thing he did was apologize.

  “It was probably the most significant day of your life,” he said, “and to me it was just another plane crash.”

  My crash had been the second of three to which Smith responded in his twenty-four years on the job. The others were of smaller craft, but he wasn’t making a point about plane crashes. He was speaking to one of the unofficial qualifications for work as a firefighter and paramedic.

  “If I saw you the next day on the street, I wouldn’t know you,” he said. “God took care of me there. I never remembered the patient. I never carried their faces around with me. But I recall vividly every location.”

  Smith and I hadn’t met that night. I hadn’t been his patient. What little he did remember about his patient suggested to me that the survivor he treated had almost certainly been the middle sister.

  “I carried a woman out of the woods,” he said. “She appeared to be young. She was conscious.” He remembered starting an IV on her, and he remembered the IV coming out. He remembered stopping for that and stopping frequently with the other stretcher-bearers, both to catch a breather and, just as important, to gain a footing. “You couldn’t walk out on the path you walked in on.”

  Rescuers had come in behind brush breakers, climbing over fallen trees that were inclined now in the wrong direction.

  According to newspaper accounts of the crash, the rescuers carried survivors a mile to waiting ambulances. “It was at least sixteen miles as far as I was concerned,” Smith told the Cape Cod Times, in an interview published a week after the crash.