“How? I just told you—”
Sherry waved him off. “You’ve been talking to the wrong people. For what they charge paying customers to stay here, I bet I can get resort management to find out anything I want to know.” She picked up the portable phone again and started to dial, then stopped after three digits to stare at the buttons. The reality of it hit her all at once, and her breath escaped her throat in a gasp. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Scotty might be dead.”
Larry hurried toward her to lend comfort, his arms wide, prepared to envelop her in a hug. “Oh Sherry…” When he was still five feet away, he stopped abruptly and ducked as Sherry hurled the phone at him, missing his head by inches.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was going up in an airplane?” she shrieked.
• • •
CODY JAMIESON WAS INDEED righteously fucked. A sliver of broken tree about the size of a two-by-four had skewered him through the belly, entering dead center at what looked to be the base of his rib cage, and exiting through the back of his seat. Scott gasped as his flashlight beam found the damage, and he quickly looked away.
“I’m gonna die, aren’t I?” Cody asked. There was a resolution to his voice that Scott found unnerving.
“Nah, you’re gonna be fine.”
“You’re a fuckin’ liar, dude. And not a very good one. Anyone ever tell you that?” Again, he faked a chuckle, and again, his body—and the plane—shook from his wracking cough. “The freaky thing is, it doesn’t hurt. I mean, I can feel with my hands where the spear goes in, but it must have done something to fuck up my spine, so it’s like I’m touching somebody else, know what I mean?”
No, Scott didn’t know what he meant. And he didn’t want to. He wanted to know nothing at all about what it felt like to die. He didn’t want to hear about bright lights, or angels or any of that crap. Right now, all he wanted to know was how in the hell he was going to get out of this tree without getting killed himself.
Think, Scott, think.
“Just promise me you won’t pull this thing out, okay?” Cody said. “If I judge things right, the pressure from the wood is about the only thing keeping me from bleeding to death.”
“We’re up in a tree,” Scott said, daring another look out the window and over the edge. “Way up in a tree.”
“Thinking of leaving me here, are you?”
A blast of wind howled like a train whistle through the evergreen boughs, rolling the plane a good five or ten degrees. Cody and Scott both yelled as debris slid across the ceiling and out into the vastness of the night.
Yeah, Scott was thinking of leaving him; but even as he did, his conscience burned. If Scott saved himself, Cody would die. It was that simple. Never in his life had Scott ever read a story or seen a movie where the good guy leaves another good guy to bleed to—
The plane pitched again, more violently this time. “Oh, God, Scott!” Cody shrieked. “Oh God, help me! It’s hurting! Aw, fuck, oh, Jesus, it’s hurting!” His words came in a rush as the aircraft continued to pivot in its cradle.
Scott didn’t know what to do. As the whole world shifted around him, and debris tumbled everywhere, he scrambled for something to grab hold of. The pilot’s unspeakable screams drove him even faster. The flashlight tumbled from his hands as he grabbed for something solid enough to hold his weight, and as the beam swept past Cody Jamieson’s face, Scott caught the shutter-flash glimpse of a shimmering gout of blood lurching from the pilot’s nose and mouth.
Now, the screams all came from Scott. Something cracked, with the sound of a pistol shot, and then the plane was falling. It was a hesitant, slow-motion fall, twisting and tumbling on all axes at once as branches and pieces of wreckage slammed into him from all directions. It was all shadows and noise and pain. He saw only varying shades of blackness, dark black against light black, and it all revolved at a speed that seemed too slow for the noise and debris it generated.
Through the confusion, Scott saw a rectangle of charcoal gray. His brain saw it as a window, and his body reacted without him even thinking. A tree limb would hold his 145 pounds a hell of a lot more easily than it would hold the wreckage of an airplane. As the rectangle passed, he dove for it, and just like that, he was out in the bitter cold, tumbling on his own through the limbs and branches, desperately reaching into the blackness for something to hold on to. He managed to snag a big branch in the crook of his elbow, his legs bicycling in the air. The odor of Christmas trees filled his head as the Cessna fell farther and farther away. Finally, the noise of the impacts stopped.
And then he was alone.
3
BRANDON O’TOOLE PRESSED THE BUTTON to lower the garage door, and dragged himself through the mud room into the family room. It was nearly ten o’clock, and it had been one hell of a day. He could barely focus his eyes as he sifted the mail. Junk, junk and more junk. Somewhere in this world there was a master mailing list, and when he found where it was located, he swore to God he’d burn the place down himself.
He missed Scott. For crying out loud, the kid had only been gone for five days, yet it felt like a month. He’d spent a week away lots of times—every summer for camp. What was it about this week that made it seem so impossibly long?
No Ph.D. required to answer that one.
The SkyTop trip was classic Sherry. She hated skiing. The whole time they were married, she’d refused to go, even though Brandon’s status as a volunteer ski patroller got them free lift tickets at any of the nearby resorts in Virginia or Pennsylvania. Skiing was what the guys did for fun, and it drove Sherry nuts. This was her most despicable move yet. Not just skiing, but skiing at SkyTop Village—for Brandon’s money, the most beautiful spot on earth. He’d made the mistake of mentioning his intention to take Scott there one day, and Sherry had beaten him to it.
Look up “controlling bitch” in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of Sherry. For an entire week, Scott would be treated to a nonstop litany of what an asshole his father was. Who’d be bitter about such a thing as that?
What had he ever seen in Sherry? He often questioned himself about that, and as best he could tell, it was something akin to a lucrative business arrangement. She had her Ph.D. in psych with enough of her own personal problems to keep three practitioners in business, and he had his career at Federal Research, and together, they’d be able to live a great life, sustained by really great sex.
And for ten years, it worked; until Scott stopped being the obedient little boy she so enjoyed parading in front of her patients as the poster child for good parenting, and he started experimenting with adolescent attitudes. Okay, Mom became in a minute, and sure became why, and suddenly, the great Sherry Carrigan O’Toole, celebrated author of The Mirror’s Not the Problem, found herself foundering in the same rocky waters where her patients’ ships had so often run aground.
It was all Brandon’s fault, of course; it had nothing to do with her own neurotic obsession with her only child’s quest for excellence, or the fact that she’d never had time to counsel him. As the son of a famous author—she’d been on Oprah, after all—Scott had no need for such things. Apparently, if it hadn’t been for Brandon’s insistence that the boy attend public school and associate with people whose parents weren’t as neurotic as she, then Scott would have had the decency to repress the normal struggles of childhood. Overnight, it seemed, the men in Sherry’s life became giant boils on her butt.
They conspired against her, don’t you know, intentionally putting the jelly or the milk on the wrong shelf in the fridge, and allowing dirty socks to touch the floor instead of making it all the way to the hamper. And God knows Scott’s soccer and basketball seasons were keeping her from fulfilling the contract on her second book.
A few weeks on the Times list means a lot of dough, easily trumping Brandon’s hundred seventy grand a year, and money made Sherry Carrigan O’Toole queen of the roost, leaving Brandon and Scott as mere servants to the court. At first, these bizarre changes in his wife bugge
d him. For months, they bugged him. Then one day, without fanfare or any single event he could point to, he realized that he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
He suggested they get a divorce and she said okay. Really, that’s all there was to it. They sold their house in Great Falls, and Brandon moved to a four-bedroom split-level in Fairfax, while Sherry bought a showplace in Georgetown, an address commensurate with her newfound ego. That Scott would live with Brandon was a foregone conclusion; none of them even questioned it.
Until the attorneys got involved, and Sherry suddenly discovered her long-lost maternal instincts. She sued for sole custody initially, but then the thought of actually winning must have frightened her, because within a week, she’d changed it to joint custody.
Child-sharing, Brandon called it. Like job-sharing, or ride-sharing. All about Sherry’s convenience, without a lot of consideration for what’s best for Scott. Brandon refused.
No, he declared, it would be sole custody with visitation rights, and he, Brandon, would be primary custodian. Twenty-eight thousand dollars in legal fees later, it all boiled down to this: If Brandon relinquished rights to their marital stock investments—about $3 million—Sherry would go along with his custodial demands, provided her child support payments would never exceed $1,500 a month, even during the college years. Brandon signed the papers without two seconds’ negotiation.
For the price of a Georgetown showplace, Sherry O’Toole had sold her son. If Brandon hadn’t been so ecstatic, he might have felt sorry for her.
So, Brandon and Scott became Team Bachelor, and they’d gotten by pretty damned well these past six years. Granted, they ate a lot more frozen dinners than they probably should, but they ate most of them together, and Brandon would bet bucks against buttons that he knew more about his kid’s friends and activities than ninety percent of the two-parent families on the block. Brandon worried sometimes what would happen in another two years when he found the nest empty. Who was he going to talk to? How was he going to stay plugged in to what was going on in the community? How was he going to deal with the loneliness?
Thank God it was only a week. Meanwhile, if he really needed a reminder of his son’s presence, he needed only to look around the family room. As Brandon crossed to the kitchen, it took real effort not to step on some bit of mess that Scott had left behind: two pairs of socks that he could see, three pairs of shoes and a week’s worth of dishes and glasses. For all their strength and bonding, Team Bachelor shared not a whit of housekeeping talent. Brandon was a borderline slob in his own right, but Scott made Oscar Madison look like Martha Stewart. The boy was a mess-making machine, and totally oblivious to it.
Of course, Brandon could have just cleaned it all up himself, but what was the point in that? Team Bachelor succeeded because of their commitment to cooperative independence. Long-term survival depended on each pulling his own weight. As it was, Scott’s vision of the universe held himself at the center of everything, with all the world’s resources focused solely on his personal needs. The less Brandon did to promote the fantasy, the better.
He put the mail on the counter under the telephone, noting with a sigh the blinking red 8 on the answering machine. Knowing that none of the messages were for him, he pushed the button and went about the business of nuking himself a Lean Cuisine. Chicken Teriyaki. What the hell, maybe he’d nuke two.
The first message featured Scott’s just-a-friend-not-a-girlfriend-even-though-I-spend-my-life-on-the-phone-with-her buddy, Rachel. She wanted to make sure that he had a nice trip, and that he knew she was thinking about him. Oh, and she really hoped that he’d use the trip as a means to learn to get along with Sherry.
The second message was from one of Scott’s band buddies at Robinson High School announcing a change in the rehearsal schedule.
Three and four were more words of encouragement from Rachel, first apologizing for meddling in Scott’s relationship with his mother, because she knew how tough a time he had with that sometimes, chased fifteen minutes later by a double-reversal, in which she apologized for apologizing.
Brandon had to laugh. That girl could burn up more tape than a recording studio.
The final four messages were all hang-ups, the time stamps for which were fifteen minutes apart.
How odd. Punching the time into the microwave, Brandon tossed the empty box into the trash compactor, then scrolled through the caller ID to see that the hang-ups were all from the same number—the Fairfax County Police Department. He scowled.
The digital countdown on the microwave had just cleared 2:00 when Brandon picked up the phone to call the number back. He’d pressed only the first two digits when someone mistook the knocker on the front door for a battering ram, hammering hard enough to make Brandon jump out of his shoes.
“I have a doorbell, you moron,” he muttered, replacing the receiver on its hook and heading toward the foyer. He’d made it halfway when they hammered on the door again. “I’m coming!” Brandon shouted. “Jesus, do you think I missed it the first time?”
A quick look out the peephole revealed the image of a freezing cop, the fur collar on his nylon jacket nearly touching the furry ear flaps of his Elmer Fudd hat. Brandon pulled open the door.
Actually, there were two men out there. The one he hadn’t seen through the peephole was a priest of some sort. Or maybe a chaplain. He wore a clerical collar. Brandon felt all the air rush out of his lungs.
“Mr. O’Toole?” the police officer asked.
Brandon nodded. “Yes. Brandon O’Toole. That’s me. What’s wrong?”
“I’m Officer Hoptman. This is Father Scannell.” With an uneasy glance, the cop deferred the rest to the priest, who inquired, “May we come in?”
Brandon quickly stepped out of the way, ushering them into the foyer. “Tell me what’s wrong.” He said the words as a demand, but his head screamed for them to apologize for frightening him. He wanted to hear a sentence that began, Everybody’s going to be okay, but…
Hoptman winced as he said very softly, “I’m afraid we have bad news for you, sir.”
SCOTT FELL THE LAST TEN FEET, landing on his back. Snowflakes kissed his upturned face. He choked on one as he drew in a deep breath, and his cough shot a jet of white vapor toward the sky. Rolling first to his side, he struggled up to his knees, and for the first time got a real glimpse of his surroundings. Down here, there was more light; the world was still a dim black-and-white television picture, but at least the shapes had definable form.
Behind him and to his left, the wreckage at the base of the trees made a soft popping sound, casting an instant of bright light, like a camera strobe, bright enough for him to see his shadow against the snow. He could barely make out the twisted pieces of aluminum and steel that had once been their Cessna. “Cody!” he called. “Cody, are you here?” Sooner or later, he’d have to check to make sure, but Scott didn’t entertain even a moment’s doubt that the pilot was dead. For the time being, he’d settle for recovering his dropped flashlight. There it was, over there by another tree, still on and casting a beam straight up into the air.
The snow was nearly hip-deep out here, and as he forced his legs to piston their way through, his ankle protested with shots of pain that reached all the way to his knee. That the ground below the snow was uneven and treacherous made it all the worse.
The wreckage sputtered again, and now that he was closer, the arc revealed a glimpse of the devastation. The plane rested nose-down, with the cockpit either crushed flat or buried, but either way invisible. Behind that, the passenger compartment and tail were twisted like a discarded toy. The right wing was nowhere to be seen, but the left one looked pretty much intact. Scott’s breathing faltered as he took it all in. He had no business being alive at all.
Armed with his flashlight, Scott waded back to the wreckage to check on Cody. This couldn’t be happening to him. Two hours ago, he was sneaking across the SkyTop airfield, looking forward to a night of heavy metal nirvana, and now, here he was in
the middle of absolute nowhere, waiting to look at a dead friend. A part of Scott told him that he should be feeling some remorse for all this, some sadness for Cody’s death, and maybe that would come, but for the time being, he was just pissed. This was supposed to be a concert night, dammit, not a plane crash night. And when it was all over, he was supposed to be asleep in a warm bed, and maybe a little hung-over in the morning. Now, when it was all over…
Actually, he didn’t want to think about that.
He reached the body before he reached the airplane. What he saw made him gasp and turn away. Apparently, the fall through the trees had yanked the spear out of Cody’s body, because now it was gone. Where it once protruded through his parka, Scott could now see a lump of entrails about the size of his fist. Cody just lay there in the snow, steaming and staining the whiteness red.
“Oh, my God,” he breathed.
Until that very instant, none of it was real. Oh, the fear was real, and the cold was real and the pain was real, but not the death. Cody’s mouth gaped, and his eyes stared straight into the void. Snowflakes were already accumulating on his eyeballs. In another twenty minutes, they’d be invisible. In two hours, the body would be completely concealed.
In a few more hours after that, if the storm continued at this pace, the entire crash site would be covered. According to his watch, they were closing in on 9:30, and the temperature seemed to be dropping as fast as the snowflakes. Scott felt his heart rate triple as he realized that of the two of them, Cody Jamieson may well have been the lucky one. Better to die quickly than to suffer the slow death of hypothermia.
Scott recalled the mountain survival class he’d attended last year with his dad, and the words of the instructor, Sven What’s-his-name, rang clear in his head. Everybody worries about starvation in the wilderness. But in the winter wilderness, your number one priority must be shelter. Food and water are luxuries to be secured later. At night, when the temperatures hover at zero or below, death can come in hours.
Scott Free Page 3