The Three (4 page)

Reuben had been restless all morning and I’d settled him in front of CNN; sometimes it calms him down. In the old days, he loved to watch the news updates, especially anything political, really got a kick out of it, used to heckle the spin doctors and political analysts as if they could hear him. I don’t think he missed a debate or an interview during the midterms, which was when I first really knew there was a problem. He was having trouble recalling the name of that Texan governor, you know, that damn fool one who couldn’t say the word ‘homosexual’ without screwing his mouth up in disgust. I’ll never forget the look on Reuben’s face as he floundered to remember that putz’s name. He’d been hiding his symptoms from me, you see. He’d been hiding them for months.

On that dreadful day, the anchorwoman was interviewing an analyst of some type about his predictions for the primaries when she cut him off mid-sentence: ‘I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you there, we’ve just heard that a Maiden Airlines plane has gone down in the Florida Everglades…’

Of course, the first thought that jumped into my head when I heard the words ‘plane crash’ was 9/11. Terrorism. A bomb on board. I doubt there’s a single person in New York who didn’t think that when they heard about the crash. You just do.

And then the images came on screen; an overhead view, from a helicopter. It didn’t show much, a swamp with an oily mass in its centre, where the plane had plummeted with such force it had been swallowed up. My fingers were freezing–as if I’d been holding ice–though I always make sure the apartment was warm. I
changed the channel to a talk show, trying to shake off that uneasy feeling. Reuben had dozed off, which I hoped would give me enough time to change the sheets, take them down to the laundry room.

I was just finishing up when the phone rang. I hurried to answer it, worrying that it would wake Reuben.

It was Mona, Lori’s best friend. And I thought, why is Mona phoning me? We’re not close, she knows I’ve never approved of her, always thought of her as fast, a bad influence. It turned out fine in the end, but unlike my Lori, even in her forties Mona hadn’t changed her flighty ways. Divorced twice before she was thirty. Without even saying ‘hello’ or asking after Reuben, Mona said, ‘What flight were Lori and Bobby coming home on?’

That bitter coldness I felt earlier was creeping back. ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘They’re not on any damn plane.’

And she said, ‘But Lillian, didn’t Lori tell you? She was going down to Florida to see about a place for you and Reuben.’

My hand went limp and I dropped the phone–her whiny voice still echoing out of the receiver. My legs buckled and I recall praying that this was just one of those sick pranks Mona had been so fond of playing when she was younger. Then, without saying goodbye, I hung up on her and called Lori, almost screaming when I was put straight through to her voicemail. Lori had told me she was taking Bobby with her to see a client in Boston, and not to worry if she didn’t get hold of me for a couple of days.

Oh, how I wished I could have talked to Reuben right then! He’d have known what to do. I suppose what I was feeling right then was pure terror. Not the sort of terror you feel when you watch a horror movie or you get accosted by a homeless man with crazy eyes, but a feeling so intense you barely have control of your body–like you’re not really connected to it properly any more. I could hear Reuben stirring, but I left the apartment just the same and went straight next door, didn’t know what else to do. Thank God Betsy was in–she took one look at me and swept me inside. I was in such a state, I barely noticed the cloud of cigarette smoke that always hangs in the air in her place; she usually came over to
me if we were in the mood for coffee and cookies.

She poured me a brandy, made me knock it back, then offered to return to the apartment with me and sit with Reuben while I tried to contact the airline. Even after all that happened afterwards, I’ll never forget how kind she was that day.

I couldn’t get through–the line was busy and I kept being put on hold. That’s when I really thought I knew what hell was like–waiting to hear the fate of those you hold most dear while listening to a muzak version of
The Girl from Ipanema
. Whenever I hear that tune nowadays, I’m taken right back to that awful time, the taste of cheap brandy on my tongue, Reuben moaning from the living-room, the smell of last night’s chicken soup lingering in the kitchen.

I don’t know how long I tried that same damn number. And then, just as I was despairing of ever getting through, a voice came on the line. A woman. I gave her Bobby and Lori’s names. She sounded strained, although she tried to remain professional. A pause that went on for days while she clacked away at her computer.

And then she told me. Lori and Bobby were listed on that flight.

And I told her there must be a mistake. That no way were Lori and Bobby dead, they couldn’t be. I would’ve known. I would’ve felt it. I didn’t believe it. I wouldn’t accept it. When Charmaine–the trauma counsellor the Red Cross assigned to us–first arrived, I was still in such denial I told her… and I’m ashamed of this… I told her to go to hell.

Despite this, my first impulse was to go straight to the crash site. Just to be closer to them. Just in case. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I’ll admit. How could I have possibly have done that? No planes were flying and it would have meant leaving Reuben with a stranger for God knows how long, maybe putting him in a care home.

Everywhere I looked I saw Lori and Bobby’s faces. We had photos up all over of the two of them. Lori holding a newborn Bobby in her arms, smiling into the camera. Bobby at Coney Island, holding a giant cookie. Lori as a schoolgirl, Lori and Bobby at Reuben’s seventieth birthday party at Jujubee’s, a year before he
started to go downhill–when he still remembered who I was, who Lori was. I couldn’t stop thinking about when she first told me she was pregnant. I hadn’t taken it well, didn’t like the idea of her going to that place, shopping for sperm as if it was as simple as buying a dress and then being… artificially inseminated. It seemed so cold to me. ‘I’m thirty-nine, Momma’ (well into her forties she still called me Momma), she said. ‘This could be my last chance, and let’s face it, Prince Charming isn’t going to rock up any time soon.’ All my doubts vanished when I saw her with Bobby for the first time of course. She was such a wonderful mother!

And I couldn’t help but blame myself. Lori knew that one day I hoped to relocate to Florida, move into one of those clean, sunny, assisted-living places where Reuben would get the help he needed. That’s why they’d taken the trip. She was planning on surprising me for my birthday. That was just like Lori, unselfish and generous to her very core.

Betsy was doing her best to calm Reuben down while I paced. I couldn’t sit still. I fidgeted, kept picking up the phone, checking it was working, just in case Lori was going to call me to say that at the last moment she hadn’t made the flight. That she and Bobby had decided to take a later one. Or an earlier one. That’s what I clung to.

News of the other crashes was starting to break, and I kept turning the damn television on and off, couldn’t decide if I wanted to see what was going on or not. Oh, the images! It’s strange to think of it now, but when I saw the footage of that Japanese boy being carried out of the forest and air-lifted up into a helicopter, I was jealous. Jealous! Because at that stage we didn’t know about Bobby. All we knew was that no survivors had been found in Florida.

I thought we’d had all the bad luck one family could ever need. I thought, why would God do this to me? What had I ever done to deserve this? And on top of the guilt, the agony, the crushing absolute terror, I felt lonely. Because whatever happened, whether they were on that plane or not, I’d never be able to tell Reuben. He wouldn’t be able to comfort me, make any of the arrangements, rub my back when I couldn’t sleep. Not any more.
He was gone too.

Betsy only left when Charmaine showed up, said she was going to go back to her kitchen to make us something to eat, although I couldn’t have swallowed a thing.

The next few hours are hazy. I must have settled Reuben in bed, tried to get him to eat a little soup. I remember scrubbing the kitchen counter until my hands were raw and stinging, though both Charmaine and Betsy tried to get me to stop.

And then the call came in. Charmaine answered it while Betsy and I stood frozen in the kitchen. I’m trying to remember the exact words for you, but each time it shifts in my mind. She’s African-American, Charmaine is, with just the most gorgeous skin you’ve ever seen, they age well, don’t they? But when she walked into that kitchen, she looked ten years older.

‘Lillian,’ she said. ‘I think you should sit down.’

I didn’t allow myself to feel any hope. I’d seen the footage of the crash. How could anyone have survived that? I looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘Just tell me.’

‘It’s Bobby,’ she said. ‘They’ve found him. He’s alive.’

And then Reuben started screaming from the bedroom and I had to ask her to repeat herself.

You gotta understand, Elspeth, an incident of this magnitude, we knew it would be a while before we could be absolutely sure what we were dealing with. Think about it. Four different crashes involving three different makes of aircraft on four different continents–it was unprecedented. We knew we’d have to work closely and coordinate with the UK’s AAIB, the CAA in South Africa, the JTSB in Japan, not to mention the other parties who had a stake in the incidents–I’m talking about the manufacturers, the FBI, the FAA and others I won’t go into now. Our guys and gals were doing all they could, but the pressure was like nothing I ever experi enced. Pressure from the families, pressure from the airline execs, pressure from the press, pressure from all sides. I wouldn’t say I was expecting a clusterfuck exactly, but you got to expect some misinformation and mistakes. People are human. And as the weeks rolled on, we were lucky if we managed to get more than a couple of hours’ sleep a night.

Before I get to what I know you want to hear, I’ll give you a brief overview, put it into context for you. Here’s how it went down. As the IIC [Investigator-in-Charge] on the Maiden Airlines incident, the second I got the call, I started rounding up my Go Team. A regional investigator was already on site doing the initial stakedown, but at that stage all the footage we were getting was from the news. The local incident commander had briefed me via cellphone on the conditions at the site, so I knew we were facing a bad one. You gotta remember, the place where the plane went down, it was remote. Five miles from the nearest levee, a good fourteen miles from the nearest road. From the air,
unless you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t see any sign of it–we flew over it before we landed, so I saw that for myself. Scattered debris, a watery black hole about the size of your average suburban home, and that saw-grass that cuts through your flesh.

Here’s what I knew when I was first briefed: A McDonnell Douglas MD-80 had crashed minutes after take-off. The air traffic controller reported that the pilots had indicated an engine failure, but I wasn’t about to rule out foul play at this early stage, not with reports trickling in about incidents elsewhere. There were two witnesses, fishermen, who saw the plane behaving erratically and flying too low before plummeting into the Everglades; they said they saw flames coming from the engine as it dropped, but this wasn’t unusual. Witnesses almost always report seeing signs of an explosion or fire, even if there’s no chance of there being any.

I immediately told my systems, structures and maintenance guys to haul ass to Hangar 6. The FAA had assigned us the G-IV to fly to Miami–I needed a full team on this one and the Lear wasn’t going to cut it. Maiden’s track record with maintenance had caused us some concern before now, but the aircraft itself was known to be reliable.

We were an hour away when I got the call that they’d found a survivor. Remember, Elspeth, we’d seen the press footage–you wouldn’t even know a plane had gone down unless you’d been right there at the site, it was completely submerged. I got to admit I didn’t believe them at first.

The boy had been rushed to Miami Children’s Hospital, and we were getting reports that he was conscious. No one could believe that a) he’d managed to survive, and b) he wasn’t taken by the alligators. There were so many of the goddamned things we had to call in armed guards to keep them away while we were pulling up the debris.

When we landed, we headed straight to the site. DMORT [Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team] were already there, but it didn’t look like they were going to find any intact
bodies. With so little to go on, top priority was to find the CVR [cockpit voice recorder] and black box; we’d need to get specialist divers in. It was bad in there. Hot as hell, crawling with flies, the stench… We needed full bio-hazard suits, which aren’t fun to wear in those sorts of conditions. Right from the get-go I could see that it was going take weeks for us to piece this one together, and we didn’t have weeks, not now that we knew other planes had gone down that day.

I needed to talk to that kid. According to the passenger list, the only child of that age group on board was a Bobby Small, travelling back to New York City with a woman we assumed was his mother. I opted to go alone, leaving my team on the scene to do the preliminaries and liaise with the locals and other parties who were en route to the crash site.

The press was swarming around the hospital, dogging me to make a statement, ‘Ace! Ace!’ they were calling. ‘Was it a bomb?’ ‘What about the other crashes, are they connected?’ ‘Is it true there’s a survivor?’ I told them the usual, that a press statement would be issued when we knew more, that investigations were still under way etc. etc.–the last thing I was going to do as IIC was shout my mouth off before we had something concrete.

I’d called ahead to say I was on my way, but I knew it was a long shot that they’d let me talk to him. While I waited for the doctors to give me the go-ahead, one of the nurses hustled out of his room, careened straight into me. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. I caught her eye, said something like, ‘He’s all right, huh?’

She just nodded, scuttled off to the nurses’ station. I tracked her down a week or so later, asked why she’d seemed so disturbed. She couldn’t put it into words. Said she had a feeling that something was off; she just didn’t like being in that room. She felt guilty for saying it, you could see. Said she must have been more affected by the thought of all those people dying at once than she realised; that Bobby was a living reminder of how many had lost their lives that day.

The child psychologist who was on the case arrived a few minutes later. Nice gal, mid-thirties, but looked younger. I forget
her name… Polanski? Oh right, Pankowski. Thanks. She had only just been assigned, and the last thing she wanted was some gung-ho investigator upsetting the boy. I said, ‘Lady, we got an international incident on our hands here, that boy in there may be one of the only witnesses who can help us.’

I don’t want you to think I’m insensitive, Elspeth, but at that stage the info on the other incidents was sketchy, and for all I knew, that boy could be a key to the whole thing. Remember, in the Japanese situation, it was a while before they confirmed there were any survivors, and we didn’t get word about the girl from the UK incident till hours later. Anyway, this Dr Pankowski said the boy was awake, but hadn’t said a word, he didn’t know his mother was more than likely dead. Asked me to tread carefully, refused to let me film the interview. I agreed, although it was standard procedure to record all witness statements. Gotta say, afterwards, I couldn’t decide if I was glad I hadn’t been able to film it or not. I reassured her that I was trained in interviewing witnesses, that one of our specialist guys was on the way to do a follow-up interview. I just needed to know if there was anything specific he remembered that could help point us in the right direction.

They’d given him a private room, bright walls, full of kids’ stuff. A
SpongeBob
mural, a stuffed giraffe that looked kind of creepy to me. The boy was lying flat on his back, a drip in his arm, you could see the abrasions where the saw-grass had sliced his skin (we all fell foul of that particular hazard in the days to come, let me tell you), but other than that, he’d suffered no other significant injuries. I still can’t get over that. Like everyone said at first, it really did look like a miracle. They were prepping him for a CAT scan, and I knew I only had a few minutes.

The doctors hovering around his bed weren’t happy to see me, and Pankowski stuck to my side as I approached his bed. He looked really fragile, specially with all those cuts on his upper arms and face, and sure, I felt bad about questioning him so soon after what he’d been through.

‘Hiya, Bobby,’ I said. ‘My name is Ace. I’m an investigator.’

He didn’t move a muscle. Pankowski’s phone beeped and she stepped back.

‘I sure am glad to see you’re okay, Bobby,’ I went on. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

His eyes flipped open, looked straight into mine. They were empty. I couldn’t tell if he was even hearing me.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Good to see you’re awake.’

He seemed to look right through me. Then… and listen, Elspeth, this is going to sound as hokey as hell, but they started to swim, like he was about to cry, only… Jesus… this is hard… they weren’t filling with tears but with blood.

I guess I musta cried out, because next thing I know Pankowski’s at my elbow and the staff are buzzing round the boy like hornets at a picnic.

And I said: ‘What’s wrong with his eyes?’

Pankowski looked at me as if I’d just sprouted another head.

I looked back at Bobby, stared right into his eyes, and they were clear–cornflower blue, not a trace of blood. Not a drop.