Among the Dead (9 page)

Lowell tried once more to tell his father what had happened. More tears bubbled from him, and his face broke into a dozen shaking pieces. Frank walked over to him and put a hand on his back, which seemed to be what he needed, a touch.

‘I'm sorry, Dad. There was a plane crash. Frank missed the plane, but Madeleine and Anna were killed. Yes, the crash in San
Diego. I'm with Frank now, in his hotel room. The airline is putting him up.'

Frank took the phone. He wondered if Lowell would have cried had he not told him to tell his parents that he was too upset to talk. He had given his brother the burden of a lie, which ignored his brother's right to grieve.

‘Hi, Dad.'

‘This is real?'

‘Yes.'

‘I don't know how to tell your mother.'

‘Could you try?'

‘Let me call you back. What hotel?'

‘The Sheraton. Room ten thirty-five.'

‘Near the airport?'

̵Yes.'

‘Do you want to stay here?'

‘Not now. The airline is putting me up, there's a lot of us here, people who had family on the plane.'

‘She was so beautiful.' Who did he mean, daughter or wife? Daughter.

‘I know.'

‘I'll call you back.'

Frank knew this would be hard on his father. He wasn't sure if his father had ever really liked Anna, but his father had loved Madeleine, his first grandchild, and her shining armada of promises. And his mother, what had she thought of his wife? Did his mother love Anna for loving the son no other woman had ever loved? It was true, Frank had never really said ‘I love you' to anyone who said ‘I love you' to him until Anna. Did his mother love his wife for being the daughter she never had, finally to have a woman in the family who would keep her best jewellery after she died? And then to have a granddaughter! So his mother loved Anna for what she brought to the family, although he wasn't sure if his mother loved Anna for herself. And perhaps his mother was, at least before the wedding, suspicious of Anna for loving this awkward, unlovable boy, although Anna's love for Frank may have taught his mother something about him, that he was capable of love. Or did his mother love Anna simply because she married a twenty-eight-year-old who had never lived with a woman and whose brother was homosexual? Yes, it was possible that his mother would have loved any woman he had married, because the
woman who married Frank rescued Ethel and Leon from having two homosexual sons. So his mother could say that Lowell's homosexuality was nature, not nurture.

Lowell asked Frank if he wanted a drink.

‘I don't know,' said Frank.

‘Why not?'

‘You can have one if you want,' said Frank.

‘But why don't you want one?'

‘I'd like to know what my feelings are.'

‘There's no shame in wanting to give yourself a little warmth,' said Lowell. ‘You're not some kind of Mormon. You can have a drink.'

Frank wanted to ask his brother how he could be so sure of Mormon grieving rituals, but checked himself.

‘I want to stay sharp,' said Lowell, ‘in case you need help.'

‘What do you need to be sharp for?'

‘If your wife and daughter had been killed in a car crash ... it would be different, but this, this is ...'

‘What are you trying to say?' Frank cut into Lowell's meandering thoughts quickly, even with a suggestion of impatience and cruelty, telling his brother that to be anything but precise and honest, right now, was morally without defence.

‘If they died with no one else, if it was their fault ...'

‘What are you trying to say?' Frank felt himself rising towards hysteria, and this flight into a vicious rage at his brother's pauses felt to him like the first good thing that had happened since he heard that his family was dead.

‘The airline is keeping you here because they know that this is going to cost them millions of dollars, if it's their fault. And I need to be sharp, to make sure that someone doesn't get you alone and try to put your signature on a settlement.'

‘So why couldn't you just say that?' Frank heard himself scream at his brother.

Lowell stopped crying. ‘Because I'm thinking about money and I wish I weren't.'

The phone rang again. Frank picked it up.

‘Mr Gale?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is Bettina Welch. I met you this afternoon.'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm here in the command centre, in the ballroom. It's extension
two-oh-one-five. Or you can just ask the operator to connect you. We're down here on the mezzanine level if you want to come -we're available for all the survivors. Or you can stay in the room and you can order room service if you're hungry, of course, or you can join us down here. The buffet will be open all night.'

‘Thank you,' said Frank, aware of his automatically good manners. Frank thought there was something dishonest in calling him a survivor, an inflation. The survivors were the people who were on the plane but didn't die. But everyone on the plane was dead. So the survivors were people on the ground whose houses were destroyed, and who were in the houses but were not killed.

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Not well.'

‘Is there anyone with you? Do you want someone to come up to your room and be with you? Would you like to talk to a minister or a rabbi?'

‘My brother is here.'

‘That's good. Because you need to be with someone now. Our psychologists are telling us that it's important that all the survivors have someone for support right now. We have grief counsellors with us now, and we'll assign one to you as soon as we can. We don't want you to be alone. And you're not alone.'

‘No. I have my brother.'

‘You can bring your brother down here too, of course. Whatever he needs, whatever you need, we're here for you.'

‘Thank you.'

Lowell looked up at Frank and made a face to say, What are they asking you? Why are you saying so little? Who is it?

‘And please feel free to take advantage of the hotel, use the room service, it's available twenty-four hours, or make all the phone calls you want.'

‘Thank you.'

‘If you need any clothing, let me know your sizes, and I can get you what you need, underwear, a shirt, socks.'

‘Not now.'

‘And toiletries, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo.'

‘I think there's shampoo in the bathroom.'

‘Well, if you need more.'

‘Right.'

‘We all lost people we loved, Mr Gale. All of us.'

‘Yes.'

‘Whole families were killed.'

‘Unh.' It was all he could say, a grunt.

‘When will you be coming down?'

‘I don't know.'

‘The buffet. It looks very good.'

‘I don't know how hungry I am.'

‘Of course. Maybe you'll just have some soup.'

‘That sounds good.'

‘Soup is very comforting.'

‘I'll see you down there.'

Lowell turned on the television. It was a few minutes after seven o'clock, and the crash was the hour's lead story.

A woman who lived across the street was describing what she had seen. The plane had rolled across the street, breaking into three pieces, tearing up the block. She was asked if she had known people across the street. Of course she had. ‘This is a neighbourhood. Of course I know my neighbours.'

At least fifty people were known to have died on the ground. The count was expected to rise. Someone expected as many as another hundred dead from the neighbourhood.

The reporter on the scene was replaced by the anchorwoman in Los Angeles. She then introduced an interview with a crash expert, William Hoyt. The interview had probably taken twenty minutes, but only one sentence of the interview was shown, Hoyt saying, ‘We don't know yet what caused the crash.'

Before the anchorwoman returned, and then introduced a commercial, the last shot from the crash scene was of a dog running down the street with a child's shoe in its mouth. ‘Jesus, how can they show that?' asked Lowell. ‘That could be Madeleine's shoe.' He was screaming at the television.

‘Lowell, that's not her shoe.'

‘How can they do that?' asked Lowell. Frank could see he was getting ready for a fight.

‘Do what?'

‘Show the dog with the shoe. That's so exploitive. Can't they leave anything alone?' Lowell screamed at the television, ‘You sentimental assholes!'

Frank had to put his arms around Lowell, and he turned off the set. He repeated, ‘It's OK.'

Lowell guided Frank's hand away and then slumped forward, staring at the floor for a long moment. He was ashamed of himself.

‘Come on, Lowell, let's get something to eat.'

In the hall they passed a room with someone inside, another mourner, crying. ‘No. No.' Unless it was someone making love, and they weren't hearing ‘No', they were hearing a sound, the usual pleasure of pain, release delayed.

Lowell walked a little ahead of Frank. It was always this way, Lowell thinking about something and Frank thinking about Lowell's better thoughts.

When the elevator opened to the lobby, Frank saw a crush of news people, photographers, camera crews, reporters with microphones. They will find me, he thought. It's only a matter of hours before they find the man who missed Death Flight 221.

They walked across the lobby to an escalator that brought them back up to the mezzanine. Bettina Welch was at the door to the ballroom.

In what must have been the quick set-up of the room, the hotel mixed the symbols of different occasions. The buffet, beginning in salads, with the irrefutable peaks of a ham and a turkey in the centre, and then falling away again to a flat zone of cookies and cakes and packages of yoghurt, was too lavish, and the three chefs, in their toques, were more appropriate for a brunch. Mustard-yellow tablecloths were on the fifty or so round tables, without the rest of the service, no napkins or silverware, so the room looked as if it were about to be cleared. Not set? No, the tables were dirty, a lot of people smoked, and there were ashtrays everywhere. There were a hundred or so people – as many as the dead on the ground in San Diego? – in the room, at the tables, and airline officials were with them. Someone had placed a few television sets around the room, tuned to the news. And the crash was the news.

Frank closed his eyes. He tried to construct from the sounds in the room a feeling of unhappiness, but there was something else that he couldn't yet define for himself, something that made the room unpleasant, a feeling of privilege. If he blocked out the occasional sobbing he could have been in a night club before the headliner came on stage. What was it? Cigarettes, alcohol, air-conditioning, the disinfectant that adhered to the carpet. He opened his eyes. There were a few tables of Mexicans, little children tended by older children, and Frank, who usually felt envious of these large families, now hated them for their resignation. They sat quietly, waiting for direction. Two Mexicans wearing blue jackets and brass name-tags were with them. They were reservations
clerks pulled in for the assignment, to translate. Frank supposed they were hoping that their good work here would lead to promotions.

‘No!' a woman cried. Frank looked for her.

She cried again, ‘No!'

She was a tired woman in her fifties, with copper-coloured hair and skin healed badly over acne. She sat in the middle of the room, at a table with – her husband? thin, quiet, chewing gum – and a friend – her sister? – the same generation, the same look of defeat. There was a feeling coming from the table of people choking on their own gall, that the deaths of whoever had brought them to this ballroom were just more cards in the bad hand that life was always dealing.

‘My baby!' she screamed. ‘They killed my baby!' She stood up. She screamed again, without a clear word.

‘Sit down,' said her husband.

‘My baby is dead!' she screamed again. The shriek brought others in the room to tears, reminded of their own dead.

Her voice rose and fell on surges of emotion and complicated streams of memories that shifted with all the feelings of a bad relationship that will never be reconciled. Her desperate shrieks might have been unbearable for everyone in the room, but there crept into this extended solo of pure feeling a cheap ornament, a self-consciousness that announced her indignation, her lawsuit. If she had not admitted the deposition into her grief, then everyone in the room might have been sanctified, if only for a few hours, by the presence of so strong and real a thing as these cries. Instead, she was embarrassing, and reminded everyone of the fortunes waiting for them.

Bettina Welch rushed to her table. The woman was standing and screaming, ‘They killed my baby. They killed my baby,' and Bettina forced the woman into her arms, to give her a hug. The woman didn't want to accept or return the embrace; she was hysterical and pushed Bettina back, but the executive held on, as though she were the one who needed comfort, and in the effort it took the woman to give this hug to a stranger, in the awareness of the public spectacle of her reluctance, her misery was brought to scale. Tamed, she sat down, and Bettina stroked her hair. She sat down next to her.

Now the woman broke into silent crying, and Bettina hugged her again, pulled the woman into her chest. The sister reached a
hand across the table, and the copper-haired woman held on to it while Bettina slowly rocked her from side to side. Everyone in the room was quiet, watching. There was only the sound of the news on the television sets, which had left the scene of the accident to return to local stories. One of the Mexican reservations clerks thought to turn the televisions off, and went around the room, like a butler blowing out the candles.

Bettina guided the sister to her side of the table, without breaking contact with the woman's hands, and then gave her control of the hug. The husband put a hand on his wife's shoulder, and if he seemed ashamed of her, Frank thought perhaps he was too lost in his own unhappiness and could not find the way to ask for help. Or else he wanted a hug.