Flight #116 Is Down Read online

  Patrick hated how she apologized for herself. It was a habit he definitely wanted her to quit.

  “What time was it?” said the FAA official. “Exactly? Do you know?”

  We weren’t in that time zone, thought Patrick, we weren’t in a place where time is exact. Some of it raced past, time in which people were dying. But the very same time gathered slowly, when our hands struggled, our feet slipped, and no progress was made.

  What progress had they made?

  How many people had they saved and how many had they lost?

  How many had died on impact? How many were doing well at hospitals across the state? Would he ever know what had happened to them? Or would his part in this operation be yet a third sort of time? A stranded, unattached time, with no past and no future: just a motion, setting people on stretchers and watching them leave.

  Saturday: 10:49 P.M.

  They loaded Daniel into the helicopter.

  “You’re last, kid,” said the attendant, grinning, putting a blood-pressure cuff around his arm.

  “That was pretty lousy of you,” said Daniel. “I wanted to go first.”

  “You should have,” said the doctor, or the paramedic, or whoever he was. Probably just a passerby, thought Daniel. Probably they used up all the real ones with the first trips. This guy just picked up a white coat and climbed in.

  “They had to cut you out, huh?” said the attendant.

  Daniel meant to say yes, but he was getting woozy again, he’d been woozy all through the cutting out, although Mrs. Jemmison said he was doing fine, everything was fine, the whole thing was coming along just fine; he’d wanted to say, Mrs. Jemmison, are you on drugs? This is not fine.

  Daniel felt the helicopter lift, felt himself lifting at a different pace, his soul and his inner organs shifting position, as if trying to decide whether to stick together. Or maybe it was the helicopter shifting. It would really be the pits if the helicopter crashed.

  He thought, I’ll make a joke; tell these guys we all need a laugh about now.

  But his lips didn’t go along with it. They didn’t say anything.

  The colors of his enclosed world flashed for a moment like sunlight on the beach and then faded.

  Saturday: 10:50 P.M.

  Heidi looked down at her watch. I used to know what time it happened, she thought. I was clocking those first few minutes. But I don’t know anymore. It was a hundred years ago.

  The weird thing was, it had not crossed her mind to wonder what had caused the crash.

  The inspector seemed not to believe this. “You’ve been working here for hours,” he said, “you must have thought back on what you first heard and saw.”

  But she had not thought back at all. She had only thought ahead, trying to guess the right thing to do next. “Doesn’t the radar tell you that?” she said. “Don’t you find a little black box somewhere that records what happened?”

  “I’m asking for your description,” he said.

  She had no description. “Whatever went wrong, though,” said Heidi, “had to have gone wrong before they were in my backyard. We don’t normally have planes circle above us here.”

  She saw somebody carrying bodies as if they were baggage, by the handles, and at first she was shocked and angry, until she realized it really was baggage, and incredibly enough they were rescuing that, too. “Are all the people out of the plane now?” she said to him.

  He seemed uncomfortable with the question.

  Somebody else said, “We didn’t get anybody in the cockpit. Maybe in the morning. And beyond the ravine, there are maybe thirty or forty bodies we haven’t retrieved.”

  “And who knows how many in the burned wing section,” added another man.

  “We’re done with Life Star, though. Nobody left alive to tow off.”

  “God, that was a bad site, where we had to load the helicopter. Barbed wire around the whole damn field.”

  “It was a pasture,” said Heidi faintly. There had to be a fence around a pasture.

  “Yeah, well, somebody might have mentioned the barbed wire. You can’t see it in the dark. We ran into it. But somebody had his toolbox in his truck, wire clippers, we got it down, rolled up, but not without a bunch of people getting scraped up something fierce.”

  Heidi found herself crying and then found Patrick’s arm around her, for what—the third time that night? “She’s gonna be okay, I think,” said Patrick. “By now she’s gotta be at a hospital already.”

  “Huh?” said Heidi.

  “Teddie.” He was smiling at her, concerned, but now she really could not stop crying because now she was even worse; she had forgotten about Teddie again. Patrick’s huge, dirty fingers smoothed her tears away, matching gestures for each cheek. He kissed her forehead. “Let’s get some coffee,” he said. “You need to warm up.”

  “Actually I hate coffee,” she said.

  “Me, too. But I keep thinking one of these days I’m going to see why other people like it. Let’s give it a try.”

  “We can’t stop working,” she said fearfully.

  “Yeah, we can, actually,” he said. “There are hundreds of people here now, Heidi. Some of them haven’t contributed anything at all yet. Give them a turn.”

  “First I want to look again for Tally-Ho, our fourth dog,” said Heidi.

  Patrick was pretty sure he had seen the dog. He almost told her what had happened to Tally and decided not to. It could, like a lot of other things, wait until morning. Shrapnel from a splitting plane did ugly things.

  “Later,” he said to her, trying to make his voice expansive and comfortable, like his father’s.

  Saturday: 10:58 P.M.

  Mr. Farquhar yawned hugely, several times. “Let’s watch the eleven o’clock news, kids. We’ll be on it. Might as well see what the media got wrong.”

  “What can you get wrong about a plane crash?” said Patrick. Sometimes his father really irritated him. Patrick loved television, and his father was cynical about it. “Come on, Heid,” he said, taking her hand.

  A nickname. Nicknames meant affection. They were friends. Whatever else had happened on this terrible night, Heidi had made friends. She didn’t want to give him a nickname, though. Patrick was such a nice name. She didn’t want to say Pat.

  “Let’s go watch ourselves,” said Patrick.

  Heidi was doubtful about television, though. The crash was pretty clear in her mind. She didn’t need to see a film of it.

  But Patrick kept her hand and led the way. The warmth of Dove House enveloped them, and the very different, incredibly comforting warmth of his hand was something she never wanted to surrender. I should have held Carly’s hand longer, thought Heidi. Hand holding is everything.

  She and Patrick and Mr. Farquhar and Robyn and Gorp went into the little room off the kitchen, where a small TV sat cozily on a shelf. Mrs. Camp usually sat there to crochet one of her hideous blankets. In fact, Mrs. Camp was there right now, sound asleep, wrapped in coats, as all the blankets had been used. Heidi loved her, thinking, What a great family I have. Thinking, I’m the one who has to talk to Carly’s sister. Tell her Carly was coming home. At least she was aimed right, even if she didn’t make it.

  Heidi wept.

  The eleven o’clock news began.

  They listened to the voice of the reporter as the camera flicked over crash and plane, woods and house. The filming gave little idea of the hugeness of the crashed plane. It was just a big white thing in the dark. Not the horrifying two-story-high nightmare she had been passing all night.

  If anything, the cameraman had been more taken by Dove House than by the 747; he managed to have it in most of his shots.

  The camera panned down the length of the Gallery, catching the fine marble, now patchy with bloodstains. The camera contrasted the beautiful paintings on the wall to the horror of two body bags awaiting removal to the barn. It focused on a discarded bandage wrapper and slid into the Hall, filled, when they were filming, with the last of t
he hurt passengers and exhausted but still wired rescuers. In the corner, Heidi was shocked to see the afghan twitching. Teddie had been there even then, unnoticed by anybody, rescuer or cameraman.

  The anchorwoman, amoral in her flawless beauty, held a microphone, like a lover, to her lips. Facing the camera with a sober, serious expression, she said, “Darienne, how does it feel to be one of the survivors of this terrible tragedy?”

  I let her do this, thought Heidi. I should have rammed the dogs down her throat and been done with all of them.

  Darienne, too, faced the camera, her lovely face as impeccable as the anchorwoman’s, her hair as unruffled, her eyes as beautifully made up. She said gravely, “This has been a desperate hour for me. In helping the wounded, in bringing food and water to the sick, in holding the hands of the dying, I have become a better person.”

  “Why, that scum bucket,” said Patrick. He almost had a heart attack from pure rage. “Dad, she’s the one who wouldn’t so much as pour coffee. She was up there in Heidi’s own bathroom using Heidi’s blowdryer to fix her hair when people were down here dying. Dad, get a kitchen knife. We’ve got to find her. Stab that girl.”

  His father laughed. “Now, Patrick. We can’t be both life-savers and life-takers.”

  “I don’t know why not. Does she deserve to breathe? Look at her, getting fame and air time when all around her, people are dead and dying!”

  On the news, Darienne lifted her chin bravely. A single tear crept down her pale cheek. She whispered. “I am privileged to be here among these selfless and giving people.”

  “I bet she’s a thief, too,” said Patrick. “Make a cop search her. I bet she lifted jewelry.”

  His father took Patrick’s upper arm firmly. “She doesn’t matter. Anyway, what have I told you about television news? It’s never right.”

  “Dad! She does matter! She’s the one who’s on TV!” Patrick resisted his father, and for a minute they were two large, muscled men going in opposite directions.

  But he was still seventeen, and he was still used to obeying, and his resistance faded. “Okay, okay, I won’t kill her.”

  “Anyway she’s not here anymore,” said Robyn. “She paid somebody to give her a ride to wherever she’s going.”

  “Probably your money, Heidi,” said Patrick darkly. “She probably fished around under your mattress and that’s what’s paying for her ride. The scum.”

  Heidi giggled. “I don’t keep money under my mattress, and if I did, Patrick, I can’t think of a better use for it than getting Darienne off my estate.” Her laugh was sweet and silvery.

  Patrick said, “They should have filmed you, Heidi.”

  Fourteen

  SUNDAY: 12:15 A.M.

  “This is my second quarter, actually,” said Teddie. “I lost my real one when the plane crashed.”

  The nurse nodded. “Well, we’ve made the phone call for you, sweetheart, so you can hang onto your second quarter. Here’s Mommy. She’s pretty nervous, so you make her feel better, you hear me? And then it’s straight back to bed.”

  Teddie smiled and took the phone. “Hi, Mommy. I’ve been trying to call you.”

  Her mother said Teddie’s name about twenty times.

  Teddie said, “Mommy, I’m fine. I did good. Everybody told me so. You don’t have to worry. It’s just a little old break in my leg. And I have a great big cast. And I’m staying overnight here. I have my own room and everything. ’Course I’m not in my room now, because I’m sitting on the nurses’ station. They call it a station, but it’s really a shelf, like a big kitchen, with telephones. I didn’t need my quarter. They made the phone call for me.”

  Her mother said her name another twenty times.

  Teddie said, “And I flew in a helicopter. And it didn’t crash.”

  Now her father was saying her name over and over.

  Teddie said, “And I have a bracelet with my name on it. Plus, they blew up a nurse’s glove like a balloon and drew smiley faces on each of the fingers.”

  “So you’re okay,” said her father.

  “No. I’m terribly badly, very badly, horribly badly, hurt.”

  The nurse said, “Let me talk now, Teddie.”

  Sunday: 12:20 A.M.

  “You know how we left the site, Dad?” said Tuck. “On a school bus. This kid that was driving it? You know what? He let me drive for a few minutes.”

  His father could hardly hold the phone. Shudders of relief extended to the tips of his fingers. But parental scolding triumphed. “Tuck! You’re thirteen years old!”

  “I know,” said Tuck reverently. “It was on a straightaway, though, Dad,” he assured his father.

  His father moaned. “That’s like turning the plane over to the janitor.”

  “It is not! I steered fine. And nobody on the school bus complained. They all clapped.”

  “That’s probably because they’re happy about the amount of money they’re going to sue me for,” said his father, thinking of ice and darkness and people who had just escaped a plane crash now being in a bus crash.

  “Dad,” said Tuck. “You have an attitude problem these days, you know. Well, listen, I have to hang up and call Mom. Say hi to Linda. Tell her we’re sorry we’ll miss the wedding.”

  “Yeah, I bet. You two probably staged the whole plane crash.”

  Tuck tried to laugh.

  Only somebody who had never seen a plane crash could say that. Somebody who had not slipped and slid across an icy field while his fellow passengers burned to death.

  Tuck said, “I love you, Dad.”

  It wasn’t a sentence he had expected to use again in this lifetime. But he was among the one third of the four hundred passengers to survive—a high number, people said, for a plane crash. And Tuck felt he had been given a second lifetime.

  Daniel was in surgery.

  So they said.

  Tuck hadn’t seen him yet. But the doctor did not seem like the fibbing type, although you never knew with adults. The doctor had said he thought Daniel would make it, and Tuck had said suspiciously, “Make it how? Crippled?” and the doctor said, “No, I think he’ll play ball again. Eventually.” And smiled and went into surgery.

  So Tuck was banking on that. That Daniel would get another lifetime, too.

  “Nothing to worry about, Dad,” said Tuck. “We’re survivors, Daniel and me.” He wondered what Daniel would say if he were on the phone with Dad, and immediately he knew exactly what Daniel would say, and so he said it. “After all, Dad, we’ve been through a divorce. What’s a plane crash compared to that?”

  Sunday: 12:25 A.M.—

  Nearing River, Connecticut

  6:25 A.M.—Geneva, Switzerland

  “My daughter?” repeated Alex Landseth.

  Mr. Farquhar was irritated with the man. “Yes, your daughter,” he said impatiently. “Heidi. Splendid girl. Cool in a crisis. Tremendous help. You don’t have a thing to worry about with this kid.”

  There was a moment of silence, as if Landseth was thinking of some other Heidi. Then he said, “Thank you.”

  Patrick’s father shook his head. So many parents seemed not to have pride in their own kids. He couldn’t imagine it. Especially not with this little girl. What a head she had on her shoulders! He changed the subject. “The chaos at your house is pretty unbelievable, Mr. Landseth. The plane ripped out wood, fences, landscaping, and the rescue vehicles ripped out a lot more. Heidi gave us permission to use the house as center of operations and medical treatment center. Now the thing is, your place is crawling with airline personnel, safety personnel, fire personnel. But no wounded are left, and there’s no worry about fire now. I’m taking Heidi on home with me to spend the night because she can’t sleep here. Mrs. Camp’s daughter came for her, and she’s spending the night in New Canaan. The police will have people here, so don’t worry about the safety of the house.” He gave the man his home number. He added, “Heidi’s a doll. I’m really looking forward to meeting her parents.” He wasn�
�t, particularly, but that was the kind of thing you said to let people know you liked their kid.

  Mr. Landseth said, “Is Heidi there? May I speak to her?”

  “Heidi!” bellowed Patrick’s father. “Talk to your father.”

  Heidi took the phone. She was glowing. “Daddy!” she said, bursting. “I have so many things to tell you. It’s been the most incredible night. Daddy, I was really useful.”

  Alex Landseth sat in Switzerland.

  Useful.

  As if that were the most wonderful thing on earth: to be useful. Perfect hair, slim ankles, smooth complexion, high grades, captain of this, honors in that—nice enough in their way.

  But to be useful.

  From her tone of voice, useful was better than anything.

  “I’m so proud of you,” said her father huskily.

  His daughter’s silvery laugh, so rare because her parents had not often been proud, trembled across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Sunday: 12:40 A.M.—

  Nearing River, Connecticut

  Saturday: 9:40 P.M.—San Diego, California

  “But you’re all right,” said her mother again.

  “I told you, Mom. I’m fine.”

  “You didn’t get hit or burned or anything.”

  “No, Mom, I’m fine.”

  “We have been trying for hours to get through to you.”

  “I know, Mom. But I was too busy to talk anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted you to see any of that,” said her mother.

  “You couldn’t have stopped it,” said Heidi. “This is where the plane came down.”

  “You’ll have nightmares,” said her mother. “Are you sure you’re all right, Heidi-eidi-O?”

  “I’m sure I’m all right.” She rolled her eyes at Patrick, who rolled his back. Parents.

  “I’m flying to Connecticut in the morning,” said her mother.

  “Mom. Take a bus.”

  “A bus?” said Rebecca Landseth, truly horrified.

  “Mom, I love you, okay? I don’t want you to crash.”

  “I would rather take my statistical chances,” said Rebecca Landseth, “than ever set foot on a bus. Now, who are these people you said you’re spending the night with? I mean, can you trust them?”