Before the Fall(4)

David’s phone buzzes again. He checks it, frowns.

“All right,” says David, getting antsy. “I think that’s all the time we’ve got for the painter.”

He nods to Emma, who crosses to close the main cabin door. In the cockpit, as if by telepathy, the pilot starts the engines. The front door is almost closed when they hear a man’s voice yell, “Wait!”

The plane shakes as their final passenger climbs the gangway stairs. Despite herself, Maggie feels herself flush, a thrum of anticipation starting in her belly. And then he is there, Scott Burroughs, mid-forties, looking flushed and out of breath. His hair is shaggy and starting to gray, but his face is smooth. There are worn gouache splotches on his white Keds, faded white and summer blue. He has a dirty green duffel bag over one shoulder. In his bearing there is still the flush of youth, but the lines around his eyes are deep and earned.

“Sorry,” he says. “The cab took forever. I ended up taking a bus.”

“Well, you made it,” says David nodding to the copilot to close the door. “That’s what matters.”

“Can I take your bag, sir?” says Emma.

“What?” says Scott, startled momentarily by the stealthy way she has moved next to him. “No. I got it.”

She points him to an empty seat. As he walks to it, he takes in the interior of the plane for the first time.

“Well, hell,” he says.

“Ben Kipling,” says Ben, rising to shake Scott’s hand.

“Yeah,” says Scott, “Scott Burroughs.”

He sees Maggie.

“Hey,” he says, giving her a wide, warm grin. “Thanks again for this.”

Maggie smiles back, flushed.

“It’s nothing,” she says. “We had room.”

Scott falls into a seat next to Sarah. Before he even has his seat belt on, Emma is handing him a glass of wine.

“Oh,” he says. “No, thank you. I don’t—some water maybe?”

Emma smiles, withdraws.

Scott looks over at Sarah.

“You could get used to this, huh?”

“Truer words have never been spoken,” says Kipling.

The engines surge, and Maggie feels the plane start to move. Captain Melody’s voice comes over the speakers.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please prepare for takeoff,” he says.

Maggie looks over at her two kids, Rachel sitting with one leg folded under her, scrolling through songs on her phone, and little JJ hunched in slumber, slack-faced with childish oblivion.

As she does at a thousand random moments out of every day, Maggie feels a swell of motherly love, ballooning and desperate. They are her life, these children. Her identity. She reaches once more to readjust her son’s blanket, and as she does there is that moment of weightlessness as the plane’s wheels leave the ground. This act of impossible hope, this routine suspension of the physical laws that hold men down, inspires and terrifies her. Flying. They are flying. And as they rise up through the foggy white, talking and laughing, serenaded by the songs of 1950s crooners and the white noise of the long at bat, none of them has any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane will crash into the sea.





1.





Chapter 2




When he was six, Scott Burroughs took a trip to San Francisco with his family. They spent three days at a motel near the beach: Scott, his parents, and his sister, June, who would later drown in Lake Michigan. San Francisco was foggy and cold that weekend, wide avenues rolling like tongue tricks down to the water. Scott remembers his father ordering crab legs at a restaurant, and how, when they came, they were monstrous, the size of tree branches. As if the crabs should be eating them instead of the other way around.

On the last day of their trip Scott’s dad got them on a bus down to Fisherman’s Wharf. Scott—in faded corduroys and a striped T-shirt—knelt on the sloped plastic seat and watched as the flat, wide stucco of the Sunset District turned to concrete hills and wide-plank Victorians lining the serious incline. They went to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum and had their caricatures drawn—a family of four comically oversize heads bobbling side by side on unicycles. Afterward, they stopped and watched the seals splay themselves on salt-soaked docks. Scott’s mother pointed at flurries of white-winged gulls with wonder in her eyes. They were landlocked people. To Scott, it was as if they had taken a spaceship to a distant planet.

For lunch they ate corn dogs and drank Coke out of comically large plastic cups. Entering Aquatic Park, they found a crowd had gathered. There were dozens of people looking north and pointing toward Alcatraz.

The bay was slate gray that day, the hills of Marin framing the now defunct prison island like the shoulders of a guard. To their left the Golden Gate Bridge was a hazy, burnt-orange giant, suspension towers headless in the late-morning fog.

Scott could see a mass of small boats circling out on the water.

“Was there an escape?” Scott’s father asked aloud to no one.

Scott’s mother frowned and pulled out a brochure. As far as she knew, she said, the prison was closed. The island was just for tourists now.

Scott’s father tapped the man next to him on the shoulder.

“What are we looking at?” he asked.

“He’s swimming over from Alcatraz,” the man said.