Before the Fall(56)

Overhead, helicopters circle. Scott arrives in a yellow cab. He’s wearing a black suit found in Layla’s guest closet. It’s a size too big, long in the sleeves. In a dresser drawer he found, conversely, a small white shirt, too tight in the neck, that leaves a noticeable gap under his necktie. He’s shaved badly, cutting himself in two places. The sight of his blood in the bathroom mirror and the sharp slice of pain startled him back to a kind of reality.

He can still taste salt water in the back of his throat, if he’s being honest, even in sleep.

Why is he alive and they dead?

Scott tells the driver to leave it running and steps out into the mug. For a moment he wonders if the boy will be here—he forgot to ask—but then he thinks, Who would bring a toddler to a stranger’s funeral?

The truth is, he doesn’t know why he came here. He is neither family nor friend.

Scott can feel the eyes on him as he walks up. There are two dozen guests in black ringing the grave. He sees them see him. He is like lightning that has struck twice in the same place. An anomaly. He lowers his eyes out of respect.

Standing at a respectful distance he sees half a dozen men in suits. One is Gus Franklin. He recognizes two of the others, Agent O’Brien from the FBI and the other is—Agent something or other from, what is it, the Treasury? They nod to him.

As the rabbi talks, Scott watches dark clouds move over the skyline. They are on a planet called Earth at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Spinning, always spinning. Everything in the universe appears to move in a circular pattern, celestial objects rotating in orbit. Forces of push and pull that dwarf the industry of man or beast. Even in planetary terms we are small—one man afloat in an entire ocean, a speck in the waves. We believe our capacity for reason makes us bigger than we are, our ability to understand the infinite vastness of celestial bodies. But the truth is, this sense of scale only shrinks us.

The wind kicks up. Scott tries not to think about the other bodies still buried with the plane—Captain Melody, Ben Kipling, Maggie Bateman and her daughter, Rachel. He pictures them there, like a lost letter in the lightless deep, swaying silently to unheard music as the crabs consume their noses and toes.

When the funeral ends, a man approaches Scott. He has a military carriage and a handsome, leathery face, as if he spent years of his life in the hot Arizona sun.

“Scott? I’m Michael Lightner. My daughter was—”

“I know,” says Scott softly. “I remember her.”

They stand among the tombstones. In the distance there is a domed mausoleum, topped by the figure of a man, one leg raised, walking staff in hand, as if to say even now the journey was not done. He is dwarfed by the city skyline, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, so that if you unfocused your eyes you could convince yourself that all the buildings are just tombstones of a different kind, towering edifices of remembrance and regret.

“I read somewhere that you’re a painter,” Michael says. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, taps out a smoke.

“Well, I paint,” says Scott. “If that makes me a painter, I guess I’m a painter.”

“I fly airplanes,” says Michael, “which I always thought made me a pilot.”

He smokes for a moment.

“I want to thank you for what you did,” he says.

“Living?” says Scott.

“No. The boy. I ditched once in the Bering Strait on a life raft, and that was—I had supplies.”

“Do you remember Jack LaLanne?” asks Scott. “Well, I went to San Francisco when I was a kid and he was swimming across the bay pulling a boat behind him. I thought he was Superman. So I joined the swim team.”

Michael thinks about that. He is the kind of man you wish you could be, poised and confident, but salty somehow, as if he takes things seriously, but not too seriously.

“They used to broadcast every rocket launch on TV,” he says. “Neil Armstrong, John Glenn. I’d sit on the living room rug and you could almost feel the flames.”

“Did you ever make it up?”

“No. Flew fighter planes for a long time, then trained pilots. Couldn’t bring myself to go commercial.”

“Have they told you anything?” asks Scott. “About the plane?”

Michael unbuttons his jacket.

“Mechanically it seemed sound. The pilot didn’t report any issues on an earlier run across the Atlantic that morning, and maintenance did a full service the week before. Plus, I looked over Melody’s record, your pilot, and he’s spotless—though human error—can’t rule it out. We don’t have the flight recorder yet, but they let me see the air traffic control reports and there were no maydays or alarms.”

“It was foggy.”

Michael frowns.

“That’s a visual problem. Maybe you get some turbulence from temperature variation, but in a jet like that, flying by instruments, it wouldn’t have been a factor.”

Scott watches a helicopter come in from the north, gliding along the river, too far away to hear the blades.

“Tell me about her,” he says.

“Emma? She’s—was—You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

He drops his cigarette on the wet ground, puts a foot on it.