Cape Disappointment (15 page)

The mighty Columbia River drained into the Pacific Ocean here, forming the Oregon-Washington border. Because the winds howling down the gorge could be pretty spectacular and the river was as wide as many lakes, the area was a mecca for sailboarding enthusiasts on the water and mountain bikers on land. Vacation homes lined both sides of the river.

He'd been docking the launch up against an ancient, broken-down quay when I pulled up in Kathy's car. He said his girlfriend was holed up in the family vacation cabin with the flu and he'd been gadding about all afternoon looking for something to do. An expedition onto the open ocean with me seemed like the ticket. It didn't hurt that I handed him four hundred dollars cash. With Noah piloting, we sped out past the bar and onto the open ocean, bashing through the waves,
heading north as rapidly as the launch would carry us, which was pretty fast.

During the next twelve hours Noah did his best to flesh out the silences and ended up telling me almost everything about his life, including how he'd lost his virginity, though I forgot most of it as soon as he finished telling it. I could have shut him up, but his silly self-involvement, along with my seasickness, took some of the edge off my anguish. He'd graduated from Pepperdine over a year ago and still hadn't received any job offers. His father was a prominent Kirkland cosmetic surgeon— faces, butts, boobs— and was having a difficult time adjusting to Noah's inactivity and joblessness, though Noah confessed he personally regarded it as a much-deserved vacation. Life was good. He had a vacation home, free use of a boat, and his girlfriend was on the premises.

By the time we arrived at the scene, a helicopter was hovering three hundred feet over the water. Below the chopper a small Coast Guard boat trolled the choppy waters looking for wreckage and, presumably, corpses. When we got close enough, the Coast Guard hailed us with warnings to steer clear of their search grid. I shouted back, “My wife was on that plane. You want me to go away? Shoot me!” That was Noah's first clue as to what was really going on. The Coasties pretended we hadn't heard them and they hadn't heard us and turned back to their work without hailing us again, probably because night was dropping fast and they figured darkness would send us home.

More small craft arrived in the vicinity: two more Coast Guard boats, some fishing boats, a couple of pleasure craft, and even a bearded man in a twelve-foot aluminum dinghy. For the first hour all we found was a section of a wing and a gas slick that seemed to wrap around our hull like beautiful rainbow spiderwebs, but then as evening dropped and more watercraft joined the search, somebody on the Coast Guard boat hoisted a pilot's cap up on an aluminum pole. For some reason, seeing the drenched cap nauseated me as much as if they'd pulled the pilot's head out of the waves. It was the first personal item anybody found and the first material proof that we were dealing with dead people and not just a downed piece of machinery.

A bit farther north two half-submerged pieces of luggage were lifted out of the drink by the crew of a pleasure boat. A briefcase was retrieved.
Women's shoes were found floating here and there like flotsam drifting in from the Orient. I eyeballed each and tried desperately to recall what shoes Kathy had been wearing. I had the insane thought that because I couldn't remember I hadn't loved her enough. But I had loved her enough. As far as I could tell, none of it, including a loose bra, had belonged to Kathy. At least I could identify her lingerie. There was that. At eight-thirty Noah and I found our first items: a bag and a woman's sandal. I didn't recognize the sandal, but the bottom dropped out of my guts when I examined the bag. It was Kathy's.

I fished it out of the ocean with a net and opened it, even as somebody on the nearby Coast Guard boat told me not to. Actually, what I desperately wanted was a note in the bag that said, “Thomas, sorry I couldn't make this flight. Meet you at home.” The bag contained no note, just Kathy's clothes and bath kit, all still packed neatly despite having fallen almost a mile out of the sky. The meticulousness with which she had ordered the items in the bag watered my eyes. It was the first time I'd cried since watching the plane slam into the Pacific.

I had a habit of getting seasick every time I got on the open ocean, and that night, true to form, I was as sick as an old dog after gobbling a quart of motor oil. I didn't want to view any of the corpses, and I certainly didn't want to view Kathy's body getting jerked out of the brine on a hook. Particularly not out here with a gaggle of pleasure boaters gawking and in all likelihood taking souvenir photos they would post on the Internet or try to sell to the press. This was going to be big news. A United States senator had died in a plane crash. News outlets all over the country would be clamoring for information and photos.

I was growing colder and wetter from the spray flying out of the dark every time the wind hit a cresting wave, and it wasn't long before, in addition to the nausea, I felt myself beginning to get hypothermic. Noah saw me shivering and loaned me one of his father's old rain capes. His thoughtfulness meant more to me than it should have, and I suddenly wanted to put him in my will in the same irrational way I wanted to shoot the boisterous men in a nearby pleasure boat who kept talking about what the bodies were going to look like when they were finally pulled out. Everything out here was heightened: my anguish, my animosity, my seasickness, my sudden indefinable aloneness. In losing Kathy I'd lost everything, and I was acutely aware that nothing in my
life would ever be the same. It couldn't have been worse if a nuclear strike had taken out everyone in the country except those of us out here in boats. Hell, there was no way it could have been worse.

At just after nine o'clock one of the fishing boats that had been closer to the lighthouse brought a body to the surface. They motored toward the Coast Guard boat, towing the corpse on a long aluminum arm that was probably designed to gaff fish, the corpse vanishing in the dark waves and then bobbing back to the surface in an odd dance that changed with the shifting spotlights. After Noah maneuvered us into a position where we could see the half-submerged corpse alongside the Coast Guard boat, I saw that it was a woman. She wore a dark blazer very much like the one Kathy had worn in the car.

In the darkness and with the water and the spotlights, it was hard to know if it was Kathy's blazer. I strained desperately to recall if any of the other women at the airport had been in similar jackets. As they struggled to bring the body around to the stern of the Coast Guard boat, I could not look away even though I feared for my sanity should the corpse turn out to be the one I thought it might be. It didn't seem to me as if there should be
any
bodies. They should have all sunk to the bottom in the plane's cabin or been carried away in the current. It had been close to six hours since the crash. On the other hand, I craved resolution and for some flaky reason believed it would come when I finally saw Kathy's broken body.

They brought the corpse around with the aluminum pole and delicately transferred the payload to the Coast Guard people, who had their own gaffs. What a horrible feeling it must have been to be tossed around in that cabin as the plane fluttered toward the ocean. Had they been belted in or had they cartwheeled around the cabin? Had they been momentarily weightless? Had the luggage popped out of the overhead so that the suitcases ricocheted around the cabin like can-nonballs through an infantry line? Had Kathy reacted with disbelief? Had she been petrified? Had she ridden the plane into the water calmly, thinking the pilots were going to fly them out of trouble? Or had she squandered any of her last seconds trying to call me? Was that the reason I hadn't been able to reach her after we'd been cut off, because she'd been on the line attempting to reach me? It was a measure of my despair that no matter how hard I tried, I was completely
stumped as to how she might have occupied herself during those last moments. Not only that, but I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Word had gotten out, and the plane crash was the leading news item all over the country. In the last two hours on the ocean with Noah and the Coast Guard, I'd used my phone several times and had fielded calls from Beulah, Kathy's mother, various attorneys who worked with Kathy in the courthouse, one of our neighbors in the University District, and others. The conversation with Kathy's mother had been the worst. I wasn't sure if she was blaming me or if I was imagining it, but I had the definite feeling she somehow considered this my fault.

When Kalpesh called, it was obvious he thought he was going to have to break the news to me. “Thomas? Have you heard?”

“I'm out with the Coast Guard now. I saw it happen.”

“You saw the Coast Guard start the search?”

“I saw the plane go down.”

“What?”

“One minute it was flying out over the ocean, and the next it was diving into the ocean like a stunt plane at an air show.”

“How could you have seen it?”

“I was at the lighthouse at Cape Disappointment. I went there after I dropped Kathy off at the airport.”

Following a long silence, Kalpesh said, “That must have been awful for you.”

“It's not up there on my list of favorite moments.”

“I'm so sorry this happened. But what exactly did happen? Can you tell me? No. I guess you … I called because I wanted to make sure you didn't hear it on the radio or TV like I did. Maybe I should leave you in peace. You say you're with the Coast Guard?”

“Out on the water.”

“Maybe, if you're up to it, you could give me a few more details.”

“What do you want to know?”

“The TV news is saying the plane didn't radio for help, that it just vanished off the radar. There's speculation they tangled with another plane. Did you see another plane?”

“I didn't see another plane.”

“Either that or a freak storm blew through. A localized squall, perhaps?”

“We had a good view, and there was no storm. It's kicking up now, but not then. I didn't see lightning or anything else that might have brought it down.”

“Have they found anybody? Sheffield or … ? Have they recovered any of the wreckage?”

“They found one female. They're pulling her out now.” Even as I spoke, two Coast Guardsmen hoisted the corpse out of the water, doing their best to be delicate about it. The impact of the crash had ripped off the dead woman's clothing below the waist. Her face and head were oversized and misshapen from the impact. Her skin had a puffy look, the way skin did after it had been in the water awhile. All of her bones seemed to be broken, and she'd come out of the water like an oddly malformed statue, elbows pointing in awkward directions, one leg askew. I knew rigor mortis usually began two to four hours after death and could be accelerated by cold temperatures, so she was broken and then frozen into position like a human pretzel.

Even though I had expected something like this, I was stunned at the condition of the body, at the seminudity, and most of all at the injustice of this woman's random debasement. One of the Coast Guard people turned to me and shouted across the waves. “You know this woman?”

I knew it wasn't Kathy. Nor Jane Sheffield. I believed it was a woman I'd seen at the airport but had not been introduced to, a woman whose name I'd heard from Kathy but couldn't recall. I shook my head.

“Have they found anybody else? Or any parts of the plane?” Kalpesh asked. He'd been asking questions on the phone all along, but I'd been hypnotized by the body. Now they laid the cadaver out on the fantail and stood in a semicircle as if they'd just landed a trophy marlin.

I explained to Kalpesh what was going on, sounding, I thought, particularly cogent and calm, considering the circumstances and my role in them. Perhaps I was only imagining I was calm and was actually coming across as a blithering fruitcake. Even as I wondered how I'd shucked the depression and shock, I began to remember how much I despised Kalpesh for being the instigator of Kathy's death. My awakening had something to do with his failure to ask the identity of the corpse. After all, there was a possibility I was staring at the body of my
dead wife as we spoke, yet he kept blathering on as if we were arranging a golfing date.

I knew he was an irrepressible womanizer and had flirted outrageously with Kathy, but I despised him most of all for making her take his seat on the plane. Fury began to course through me like a dose of rat poison.

For the third or fourth time I vomited over the gunwale of the boat. I was puking onto the grave site of a dead senator. And of my wife.

“Thomas? You still there?”

I sat numbly in the stern of the boat as it rose and fell with the waves, staring into the lights that reflected off the roiling water. It was dark now, and I was looking for the shark somebody had spotted a half hour earlier. “I'm here.”

“I caught you at a bad time.”

“Let's see. Kathy just died in a plane crash, and I'm out here in the rain getting seasick while we search for bodies. And, oh, wait. Kathy was in the seat you were supposed to be in, so you should be dead instead of her. Yeah, I'd say this is a bad time.”

“Thomas, I feel dreadful about it. I hesitated even to call, but I couldn't bear the thought that you might find out from the news. I wish it was me instead of Kathy. I don't even know what to say. I don't know why they had to be on the plane, really. It was a stupid idea. I'm sorry I ever thought of it.”

“That makes two of us.”

“But I am sorry.”

“Sorry doesn't bring any of them back.”

“No, but—”

“You're a shithead, Kalpesh.”

“Go ahead, blame me. I blame myself. I should have been on that plane. I should be dead. I am the worst of the worst.”

I hung up on him rather than continue. I wanted to tear him limb from limb, but he had rolled over like a dog who knew he deserved a beating and there was no satisfaction for me in that.

We were on the water for twelve hours total, Noah and myself in his father's fiberglass twenty-footer. The Coast Guard was out for considerably longer, rotating teams and bringing in four more boats for a total
of five, along with a series of helicopter flyovers once dawn came. To my astonishment, we continued to bring up bits and scraps from the wreck, including more shoes and two more bodies. The first of the next two bodies was one of the pilots, who was almost unrecognizable, and the second was another man from the Sheffield team. Three corpses in all, along with papers, seat cushions, a thermos bottle, shampoo bottles, and an electric shaver in a watertight case. By morning only Noah and I remained with the Coast Guard, though we saw a fishing smack loaded with news photographers heading out as we were heading in. Noah had been a good soldier and, once he realized we were looking for my wife's body, had not complained about any of it.