Flight #116 Is Down Page 12

  “It’s broken up pretty badly. One wing was separated and caught fire, but it seemed to be downhill from the house, maybe in the pony field. It was hard to tell from the angle of the camera. The camera filmed—conservatively speaking—a thousand trucks in the courtyard, and they were carrying wounded out our front door. So I don’t think there’s too much damage to the house,” said Rebecca.

  Alex thought that if one wing had been flung into the pony field, the other could easily have been flung into his study. He loved the house. Only Heidi loved it more. And Burke was not there. He had National Guard this weekend. Alex could not imagine how Heidi and Mrs. Camp would cope with this. They were people who preferred very narrow boundaries: groceries and TV choices were about Mrs. Camp’s limit, while catching the school bus and taking the dogs out seemed to be Heidi’s.

  “Maybe Burke’ll bring his unit down,” said Alex, trying to joke, picturing his beloved daughter, who rarely got anything right, who was so easily humiliated and stumped.

  Alex and Rebecca Landseth were helpless.

  It was not a situation in which they had ever found themselves. More than anything they were angry; angry that they could not phone home, take charge, be sure, check, or know.

  Alex sat through the night, watching the little red numbers on his clock slowly changing, waiting for his wife to ring again.

  Rebecca sat stabbing the buttons on her phone, telephoning everybody she could think of, and finally calling the Connecticut State Police, who said they had plenty of people on the scene, and as far as they knew, nobody from the house was hurt.

  “But you don’t know for sure,” said Rebecca Landseth.

  “No, ma’am. We’ll check. Stay by your phone. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

  Rebecca knew by the tone of voice that it wouldn’t be any time soon; it was not their top priority. She told herself that this was reasonable; top priorities had to be saving the injured and preventing the spread of fire; but she was a parent, and a scared parent cannot be reasonable. She screamed at the state policeman until she was hoarse, and the state policeman said implacably, “Yes, ma’am. We’re going to check, ma’am. Stay by your phone. We’ll get back as soon as we can.”

  Saturday: 8:31 P.M.

  Heidi was almost inside the door of the library when Darienne pirouetted, her mouth making a little smile of sophistication and pride. Ugh, thought Heidi. Darienne’s complexion, in the firelight and the spotlight, was incredibly lovely. She had been designed for things like this.

  Complexion. thought Heidi.

  Skin color.

  Carly! I left her alone. I was holding her hand, and I got up to do something—do what?—it couldn’t have been important—but whatever it was, I left her there. Alone.

  Heidi forgot Darienne. Darienne was nothing, had been proving that all night. Heidi rushed down the Gallery, checking patients. Looking for Carly. The dogs yipped on. This was a breed with an incredible capacity for making noise. She didn’t see Carly, could not believe she still had the dogs to deal with, raced upstairs, put the ankle biters in Mrs. Camp’s room for the last time, and rushed back down.

  A more careful check this time. Still no Carly. What a relief. They had finally put Carly in an ambulance.

  She sighed. She did not need to worry about Carly now. Other people had worried for her.

  The entire evening was so amazing. The kindness of strangers was such an incredibly beautiful thing. Yet another Christmas analogy came to her: some irritated innkeeper having to deal with some woman dumb enough to give birth on the road. But he was kind to strangers. All these people: they were all strangers: to the passengers, to each other, to Heidi, to Dove House, some of them even strangers to Connecticut. Two New York State ambulances had arrived, and helicopters out of Springfield, Massachusetts.

  And all these strangers, with all their kindness and skill, were not getting on TV.

  Darienne was getting on TV.

  It was enough to make you want to strap the girl to a stretcher of nails and tape her mouth to her hair.

  Heidi was headed back to the library to stop Darienne when she saw an old afghan on a couch in the Hall, twitching. How could Clemmie or Winnie possibly have gotten down there? Heidi was furious. She strode into the Hall. Mrs. Camp was capable of making truly ugly crochet: her favorite colors were mud brown, avocado green, and turquoise blue. Maybe it’s Tally, thought Heidi hopefully, although he was too big to hide under the afghan. She tweaked it aside, and there, beneath, lay the very first passenger Heidi had failed to rescue.

  Teddie.

  It seemed years ago. How could this child still be in the house? Heidi knelt down beside the little girl. “Hey, Teddie,” she said.

  Teddie’s face seemed greasy. She had a sickly glint to her skin. How long has she been lying here? thought Heidi, horrified.

  “The man said he would call,” said Teddie. Her voice quavered. “But he didn’t.”

  Had Teddie fallen asleep—or lost consciousness—and been forgotten in the confusion? Was she so small that they had not remembered her? Mrs. Camp had set Teddie on the couch—but all the other wounded had been laid carefully on the floor, as flat as possible, and tagged. Teddie was not tagged.

  “I started with a quarter,” said Teddie, holding up a palm with dangling Mickey Mouse Band-Aids. “I lost my quarter when we crashed. The tapes came off. And the man didn’t phone Mommy and Daddy. They don’t know I’m here. They won’t be able to find me. And now I can’t call.”

  “That’s okay. We’ll find them. They’ll come.”

  Teddie shook her head. She had heard this line before.

  Heidi thought, What’s the matter with me? “Be right back, Teddie.” Heidi ran into the kitchen, where she and Burke and Mrs. Camp dumped their change into an immense restaurant-sized jar that had once held about a million portions of peanut butter. They played a lot of card games for small change and were always betting on televised sports. The pot got all. Someday they were going to take a fabulous vacation on the money, but they hadn’t gotten around to planning the details yet. Shoveling down among the pennies, Heidi rooted around until she came up with a quarter. Then she got some adhesive tape from Robyn and went back to Teddie. “Here,” she said. “One phone-call quarter.”

  Teddie smiled up at her. What an adorable smile!

  Heidi carefully taped the quarter down, winding the tape between Teddie’s small fingers to be sure that this time, it stuck.

  How awful to be little, thought Heidi, and not understand. Not know that if she couldn’t find Mommy, Mommy would find her; not know that all these strangers would take care of her.

  Teddie’s body seemed slack. Her tears seemed to dry up, as if nothing existed anymore to provide them. Her eyes stayed open. They did not blink. “Teddie?” whispered Heidi. She pulled back from the little body. She found her own lungs impossible to fill; her breathing had become a hundred tiny spasms. She ran to find a doctor.

  But with all the people filling her house, her yard and field and barn, she seemed to be alone. For one horrifying twilight-zoned minute, she and Teddie were the only people on earth, the only people in Dove House.

  The others were moving patients to Life Star or to ambulances. They were going out the back and front, loaded down. She would make them take Teddie next; they had to take Teddie next; she would insist on it. It was her house, wasn’t it? The helicopter was landing on her grass, right?

  Heidi grabbed the shoulder of the only person she recognized, the man Gorp. “There’s a little girl inside, I don’t like how she looks, nobody has checked her at all, she looks as if—”

  “In a minute,” said Gorp. “You stay with her until I get there.”

  I left Teddie alone a second time, thought Heidi. Just like Carly. Am I afraid of being next to them in case they die? Do I run away and pretend to be getting help, when really I’m just a coward? How am I going to telephone Teddie’s mother and father? Do I say, Well, I was busy, and I had other thi
ngs to do, so Teddie died alone.

  She saw Patrick.

  “Patrick,” she said, grabbing him, hauling him with her.

  “What?”

  “The little girl, the first one, Teddie, I think she’s dying.”

  He went with her.

  “In shock,” said Patrick briefly. He and Heidi slid a backboard under Teddie, and Patrick elevated the entire board with books off a shelf in the Hall, getting Teddie’s feet above her head. By now Heidi knew the shock trousers, which were pumped up to keep the blood in the head and heart, couldn’t be pulled over the broken bone. “Robyn!” he called. “Oxygen here.”

  Robyn was with him in a moment, little muscles around her jaw clenching and unclenching. “Children do this,” she said.

  Heidi raised her eyebrows to ask what children did.

  “Mask shock very well,” said Robyn. She lubricated and slid in an airway, which would have made Heidi scream and gag, but Teddie put up no resistance. Robyn said comfortingly, “Now, it’ll be easier to breathe, sweetie pie, much much easier. You just hold old Patrick’s hand here, and you know what? We’re going to take you for a helicopter ride!” She attached oxygen. “Won’t that be neat? Boy, will you have stories to tell Mommy and Daddy now!”

  She said aside to Heidi, “And then they crash, just like that.”

  The word crash hit Heidi like a slap. Was Robyn saying the helicopter was going to crash?

  “She means going into shock,” whispered Patrick quickly. “Crash. Like sleeping a long time after you stay up studying? Crash?”

  Don’t crash, Teddie, she prayed.

  She felt a queer buzzing in her own head; the same airless rata-tat-tat that had drilled her thoughts when this whole nightmare began; one that somehow removed Heidi from what was really happening.

  “Patrick?” she said dimly.

  “Yeah?” He was taking Teddie’s vital signs again, writing them down on a card, tying it to Teddie’s jacket.

  “I’m losing it,” Heidi said.

  He smiled at her. It was a tired, gentle smile. An old man’s smile. She was so touched, she wanted to stroke his face and coax the lips to turn up more. He took Heidi’s hand in his and transferred Teddie’s little hand into Heidi’s. “You’ll be fine,” he said to them both.

  Robyn said, “Okay, guys, let’s get another blanket over Teddie and get her on down the hill to Life Star.” She said, “Teddie, honeybunch, you’ll be able to breathe just fine, and Heidi here is going to hang onto your hand. Why, before you know it, you’re going to be all warm and cozy in a nice hospital bed! You be my good girl now, okay?”

  Teddie, unable to speak, nodded under the plastic mask. But her blue lips closed and her little cheeks sagged.

  Heidi was displaced; helicopter personnel took Teddie’s stretcher, men who clucked like sets of grandmothers, stroking and soothing.

  Heidi was somewhat irritated that the majority of the rescuers were men. Heidi had never had a feminist thought in her life. It was totally not interesting to her whether a man did something or a woman did. Now she cared. For every Robyn working, there were ten Mr. Farquhars. Heidi wanted more women out there saving lives instead of making coffee.

  She pictured her few girl friends. She could not imagine Karen or Jacqueline planning to serve the sick and the wounded instead of spending the day at the mall. Or would they, too, have risen to the occasion? Done their very best? Been their very kindest?

  “Give me a hand,” said Gorp to her, and she ripped open an envelope of bandages for him.

  She had not dared ask questions before; the pace was too desperate; but now everything had slowed. She pointed to Gorp’s hands. Although he was outdoors as much as in, he was not wearing winter gloves but thin disposable white surgical gloves. Almost all the real rescue workers—the ones in uniforms; the trained ones—were also wearing disposable gloves.

  “Why?” she asked Gorp.

  “AIDS.”

  She stared at him. “At a plane crash?”

  He laughed without humor. “Who knows who’s on board?” he said. “It’s fine to rescue people, but it’s not so fine to contract a fatal disease while you’re doing it. Gloving is protocol for every rescue group in the state. Lots of squads require double gloving.”

  She stared down at her hands, the bare hands that had briefly held Carly’s and Teddie’s and so many others.

  Gloving is protocol, she repeated in her head.

  Other people’s jargon took time to be understood.

  The three words zinged around in her already rata-tat-tatting head, and somehow as she considered it, the “g” fell off, until the words that thrummed for Heidi were, Loving is protocol.

  Saturday: 8:42 P.M.

  Tuck MacArthur would worship Ty Maronn the rest of his life.

  When the school bus pulled up into the courtyard, and the eighteen walking wounded climbed on, Tuck looked around longingly. “I’ve never driven anything in my life,” said Tuck sadly. “I’m thirteen, and my father was going to let me start driving, but they got divorced, and I live with my mother, and she’s a scaredy-cat about everything and probably won’t let me drive until I’m ninety.”

  Ty knew how serious this was. He had a mother like that, too, but luckily his parents had not divorced, and his father had sneaked him out real young. They used to go out at dawn to practice driving when his dad said the laws didn’t count because nobody else was on the road. Ty had a lot more years of driving experience than anybody his age was legally allowed to have.

  Ty pulled the skinny little kid toward him so a passenger considerably more wounded could get on the bus. “Keep your voice down, kid,” said Ty. He figured this Tuck was the type who probably snitched forbidden chocolate and forgot to wash his mouth off afterward. “You be good,” said Ty, “and when we get on the straightaway, I’ll let you drive.”

  Tuck’s mouth sagged. He stared at Ty in awe. In love. “Let me drive?” he repeated.

  “Shh,” said Ty.

  The bus filled.

  The walking wounded were by now much more bored than they were hurt. They had helped a great deal during the first hour, assisting others up to the house, and so forth, but then what seemed like several hundred disaster-trained volunteers appeared on the scene, and the walking-wounded set was retired to the back of the house. It was like being in jail. They got reprimanded whenever they tried to escape. Their keepers brought them food—odd food, like coleslaw; these people were really peddling coleslaw—but basically, when they left their room, they were in the way and got sent back.

  Tuck had been sent flying through the air when his seat ripped loose, but his only real wound was a split lip. He and two others went the wrong way trying to reach safety from the fire and spent some time in the woods. They finally circled the flaming wing, way off through a bumpy stumpy field, and one of the survivors got hung up on some old barbed wire, so they had to peel him loose from that, in the dark, and they all fell into another little stream, of which the property seemed to have dozens, and when they finally reached the house on the hill, they were frozen stiff and got sent up to a bathroom to rest their feet in warm tub water.

  Tuck had asked everybody about his brother, but when he said they’d been sitting near the wing, and it was wrenched off in front of him, everybody got vague, and said, Well, now! How about a doughnut! Or some coleslaw?

  Tuck was trying not to think about Daniel. Of course, he’d been trying not to think about Daniel most of his life, that was the kind of brothers they were, but this was different.

  He was going to be very mad at himself if the only kind of brother he would ever have been was a rotten one.

  He touched the embroidered jacket the bus driver wore. “You have the same initials as me. T.M.,” he said.

  “Yeah? You better drive good, then.”

  “You really gonna let me?”

  “Said I would, didn’t I?”

  “You can’t believe everything people tell you,” Tuck told him.<
br />
  “What am I—your parent? Believe me.”

  Tuck believed him. He kept his eyes fastened on the road, waiting for the straightaway. But there was something wrong here. None of the roads were straight. These roads were Figure Eights. “Who designed these roads?” said Tuck, frowning. Was this America? People drove on these windy little lanes? What were they, insane?

  Saturday: 8:45 P.M.

  “Heidi, dear,” said Mrs. Camp, “take this tray of hot food and drinks into the barn for the workers there.”

  She nodded and set off before she remembered why there were workers in the barn.

  The barn was the morgue.

  Body bags really were just bags. No matter who you were, no matter what condition your body was in, you were just zippered in, like a parcel. You were no Christmas present, shiny and beribboned; you were brown paper. Ready to be shipped.

  She found she could turn her mind off, as if she had electrical connections from which she could take the fuse.

  She was okay with the bodies as long as she did not look at the faces or hands. The legs were legs. The shirts were shirts. The backs were backs.

  But the hands: they had gender. Bitten nails. Rings. Age spots. Some were small and childlike, hands that had not yet learned how to steer a crayon. The hands were a person, somebody Heidi had not met and never would now. Somebody for whom family waited at an airport, never to hold again.

  And the faces: impossible: she could not look at the faces. She blurred them like true crime television programs where the criminal’s features turn watery to prevent identification.

  She looked at the bags, not the people going into them. The bags were huge. They could have stuck giraffes in those bags. “Why so large?” she whispered.

  “Sometimes,” said the attendant, “you don’t get the victim in until after rigor mortis, and the arms or the trunk can be twisted out and rigid, and you have to have—”

  “Don’t tell me any more,” said Heidi. The body bag was plastic, with the longest zipper in the world. Somewhere out there is a factory, she thought, that makes body-bag zippers. Can you imagine doing that for a living? Inserting …