Among the Dead (7 page)

Frank took a seat in the cart, and Dockery drove them through the terminal. By now word had spread about the crash, people coming into the terminal had heard about it on their radios, and the gate attendants knew about Frank. People watched him, cooking up faces that tried to show their sympathy.

Dockery took them to an elevator for which he had the key. Frank recognized in himself the rush of grandiose anticipation he felt when he went backstage at concerts, when the girls who did anything to sleep with musicians looked at him, trying to gauge, by his clothes and his hair, what role he had in the concert. But no one ever offered him a blow-job to get backstage.

‘Where are we going?' asked Frank. It occurred to him that they had no hold over him; he could leave now if he wanted. What if he made a joke, what would they do if he told them that he wouldn't talk without his lawyer present, and that before he went anywhere else with them, they had to advise him of his rights? They would not laugh. He supposed that until the truth were known he should conform to
ACCEPTABLE STANDARDS OF GRIEF
. The woman at the gate, the attendant, her tears, the way she held back only her screams. Will I cry like that? he wondered. Not now.

They went up one floor and then walked down a hallway. He was taken to a heavy wood-panelled door, with a discreet button beside it on the wall. There was a small brass plate with the airline's emblem on the door.

The woman who opened the door was about fifty, with carefully
styled grey hair. Frank guessed she had been a flight attendant, because she had dry, lined skin on a youthful expression, and she was trim; there were so many women about her age who looked young, thought Frank. Did fifty-year-old women always look so young? Diet and exercise and a positive attitude. She was introduced to him. Mary Aberg. Another Mary. He was going to have to remember a lot of names.

They brought him through the lounge to another door, to a conference room with couches and telephones. Mary Aberg offered him a drink. He said no.

Ed Dockery and Bettina Welch nodded to Aberg, and she retreated. Now it was time to make the news official. It was Dockery's job.

‘Mr Gale.'

‘Call me Frank.'

‘Frank, flight two-twenty-one crashed about an hour ago. It exploded in mid-air just south of San Diego, and crashed into a crowded neighbourhood. Everyone in the plane was killed, and we don't know how many people on the ground were killed, possibly fifty or sixty more, possibly many more. The plane was at twenty-eight thousand feet when it went down. I'm sure they never knew what happened.' He stopped. Frank could see that this kind of speech had been rehearsed, and research must have proven that the best way to handle the survivors was to tell the truth quickly, and to let the questions come. Frank could have asked Dockery how he knew that no one suffered, but what would have been the point? Unless they were killed in the explosion, if that's what it was, they fell with the plane. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand. Even if the plane hit the ground five seconds after the event, there was time to have a few dreadful thoughts. Five seconds is a tennis ball from an office building. This is twenty-eight thousand feet. Five miles? Almost. Thirty seconds? The plane flying. Seatbelts already unfastened. People walking. Madeleine standing on the seat. The flight attendants with the drink carts in the aisles. Free-fall. And then what? A wing tank explodes, an engine falls off.

What is the rate of a falling object? Thirty-two feet per second per second.

What does that mean? Faster and faster.

‘Do they know what happened?'

‘Not yet.'

Bettina Welch sat beside him and took his hand. ‘We all lost people on that plane, Frank. The airline is a family too. I knew the co-pilot, and one of the girls, I was her bridesmaid last year.' One of the girls – that meant one of the flight attendants. At that moment he could have fucked Miss Welch on the carpet; he had an erection and the feeling that at this moment, if he gave in to all of his impulses, he could taste immortality, no one would punish him for anything, he had the king's right to take whomever he wanted, because he was superior in ways only dimly imaginable to someone as common as this cheap groupie in a dead-end job. He could have fucked her, and she would have let him. He forced himself to hold a steady gaze until her eyes brushed his, and she felt it, because he'd seen that look before, it was Mary Sifka's when they'd first met. But Welch wasn't as smart as Mary Sifka, so she couldn't elaborate the sexual moment, and Frank let the hurricane of possibilities pass away. Did Miss Welch know that this had been a flicker of rape? She relaxed; her shoulders had been tense and now they fell. He tried once more to see himself pulling down her pantyhose and twisting her pubic hair, but there was no pressure behind the fantasy; the image seemed borrowed.

‘I want to make a phone call.' He said this without knowing whose voice he wanted to hear, but he didn't want to deal with Miss Welch any more. Had she felt anything of what he'd been thinking?

She gave him a phone. ‘Just dial nine to get an outside line.' He dialled 9, and then Lowell's number in San Diego. The phone wouldn't let him complete the call; a recording told him that he couldn't dial that area code.

‘I can't dial that area code,' he said.

Ed Dockery took the phone. He tried a number. ‘Shit,' he said. ‘There's a block on this phone. It's to keep anyone from calling long distance without paying for it. You're supposed to use this only for local calls.'

‘This modern age,' said Frank.

Dockery dialled another number. He spoke to someone and then asked Frank what number he was calling. Frank told him and then Dockery hung up. ‘They'll get it for us,' said Dockery.

The three of them looked at the phone for the minute it took to complete the call. Dockery answered and then gave the phone to Frank.

‘Hello?' Frank wasn't sure whom he'd be speaking to.

‘Yes?' said the woman on the other end.

‘Is this Lowell Gale's office?'

‘You have the wrong number.'

Frank hung up. ‘It was a wrong number. Let me call collect.'

‘Maybe that would be better,' said Dockery. ‘And then submit the bill to us, we'll reimburse you.'

In the other room, the main lounge, Frank could hear a woman screaming. Welch got up to see what the problem was while Frank pushed the 9 and then the operator button.

Lowell's secretary accepted the call.

‘Is Lowell there?' Frank asked.

‘He's in La Jolla.'

‘Could you connect me?'

‘I think he's in his car.'

‘Then you can definitely connect me.'

‘Just hold on. What number are you at if there's a break?'

There was no number on the phone, just an extension number, 3. ‘I don't think you can get through to this line. If it doesn't work, I'll have to call you back.'

She put him on hold but it didn't take long.

‘Why aren't you in Mexico?' asked Lowell. Frank heard the sounds of traffic in the background, his brother's voice was surrounded by a wall of noisy air.

‘I was late for the plane, Lowell. I missed the flight. And it crashed, they say it crashed in San Diego.'

‘Wow,' said Lowell. ‘Talk about luck.' So Lowell thought that Anna and Madeleine missed the flight, too.

‘I said that I missed the plane,' said Frank. ‘I was late to the airport, I was meeting Anna and Madeleine, but they made it.'

‘What?' asked Lowell. He understood.

‘They were on the plane, Lowell. They're dead.'

‘Anna, Madeleine?'

‘They're dead, Lowell.'

‘It was that crash south of the city?'

‘How close to the border?'

T don't know.'

‘I was just wondering.'

‘Frank. My God, Frank.'

‘I'm at the airport now. Maybe you could come up. I think I'm going to need some help.'

Lowell was crying. Frank had seen people crying in their cars, usually women; he always imagined that they had just left their boyfriends, or that their boyfriends had told them to leave, or that they had been fired for incompetence from jobs that weren't so demanding. He had never seen a forty-year-old man in a car crying while he was talking on the car-phone. Lowell drove a Ford Explorer.

‘I'll be there in three hours. Should I come to the airport?'

Ed Dockery and Bettina Welch had walked across the room, to the door that was now open to the lounge. There were three groups of people in the lounge: airline officials, a few first-class travellers, and another ten or so people who only an hour and a half ago had said goodbye to their families and friends who had just died in San Diego.

He heard someone say that she had heard about the crash on the radio. Someone else said the same thing.

His privilege as the first of the next-of-kin to show up would soon be over, and he would be ushered into the crowd. He called to Ed Dockery, who came to him immediately.

‘What do you need?'

‘How long will I have to be here?'

‘You don't have to be here at all if you don't want, but the airport chaplain is on his way over and also some grief counsellors. And personally I don't think you should leave on your own. Is there anyone who can meet you here?'

Frank nodded and returned to Lowell on the phone. ‘I'm not going anywhere for a while.'

‘She was so beautiful, Madeleine. She was just so beautiful.'

Frank said, ‘Yes,' and then he put the phone down. Bettina Welch was standing next to him. She had something to say, and he guessed she wanted him to join the others in the lounge.

‘Mr Gale, the chaplain is here now, and so is Mr Dahlgren, who'll be acting as liaison with the airline. Would you come into the lounge?'

Someone had moved the first-class passengers out of the room. How many people were cancelling their travel plans because of the crash? Or would they say to themselves, like gamblers playing a roulette number because it hadn't come up in a long time, that they were safe now, because the odds were against two crashes on the same airline leaving the same airport in one three-hour period?

A television crew was trying to get into the lounge. The chaplain was a Catholic priest, a Filipino with a little charisma. As he began a benediction, another airline official opened the door for the cameras. Frank supposed that part of the airline's strategy now was to show the world that
THE AIRLINE'S FIRST RESPONSIBILITY IS TO THE MOURNERS
. The language of the catastrophe would be managed by the airline. He had seen this before, disasters on the news, and now he was part of it. How many crashes are the direct fault of the airlines? They said this was an explosion. Terrorism? Arab? Or some other group. A plane to Mexico. It could be anyone. Mexican politics. What a stupid way to die, worse than just slamming into a mountain top because of bad weather and bad radar. They probably know more than they're saying. All that crying at the gate; was there a feeling of some extra shock, an added horror? Why had the crying woman been so fiercely miserable? A friend of hers died, and she was feeling her grief. What other explanation? Lamentations. The keening of women. Not so self-conscious – they are not like me.

The priest blessed the living and the dead. Did he believe what he was saying, or was it only by rote? People around him were crying. It had been a day of different kinds of tears. In the morning Madeleine had asked him to carry her from the den to the kitchen, and he told her he would hold her hand. He didn't like carrying her in the house, he wanted her to walk by herself, to tolerate being alone in a room, he wanted to build her character, make her less dependent. He didn't know if this was a stage from which she'd grow, in which case carrying her would not sap her moral fibre, or if she was testing him, in which case it was essential that she learn to walk by herself. He offered to hold her hand, and she had taken it, lightly, and kept crossing his path with her arms wide, blocking and imploring him. He had refused to carry her, and so she had cried, but the tears were not from a deep well, and by the time he half pulled her by the hand into the kitchen, she was already asking him to let her feed the goldfish. He had to lift her up to the counter, and she got the hug she had wanted. Later he had seen a tear in Mary Sifka's eyes. He had brushed it aside with his finger, a gesture he regretted in the limousine on the way to the airport. He should have let her cry, alone. Just as he should have let Madeleine walk, alone. But was it fair to compare those tears, since Madeleine's were strategic, and Mary Sifka's, although they rode on the surface of a grief that was complicated, for an
impossible love that had run its course, told him that she mourned the death of a passion, of a friendship? Mary was going to miss him; she was going to miss the friendship. Why had he given this up? Why did I construct this stupid drama? If I had left things alone, I could have kept Mary Sifka, and my family would still be alive. Don't some people manage with a mistress and a wife? Lowell has his share of lovers, thought Frank. Before the plague, he had a boyfriend, and other friends. And he never caught it. Lowell had the flu once, and everyone was scared; no one wanted to say what they were afraid of, that he was going to get sicker and sicker, with sores, and pain, and that Frank would have to take over his business, and would run it into the ground. And when Lowell had that flu, and before he recovered, Frank almost welcomed his death, because he thought, If Lowell dies, I can show them all, I can run the business too. I just need to have it to myself. And then Lowell got better. Frank's mother called him with the news when Lowell's fever dropped, and he hated her at that moment because he knew she would never have called Lowell with such relief, such gratitude to God, if Frank had been through the same thing. His mother's tears that day came from an abundance of emotion. They were different from Madeleine's and also from those of Mary Sifka, who cried from self-pity, but who else was there to give her the sympathy she needed?