Cape Disappointment (16 page)

He dropped me off near Chinook, where Kathy's Prius was parked, and said, “Geez, man, I'm sorry. That was just …”

“Yeah.” Feeling leg weary and unsteady on shore, I clambered up the embankment toward the car, stumbling like a child who'd been thrown off a merry-go-round. The unsteadiness would linger for another five or six hours, but I knew I'd be way off-kilter for far longer than that.

Noah said, “I hope they find her, man. I really do.”

“What difference does it make?” I said, although we both knew finding her would be like closing a book.

Later as I was trying to work my way to the Coast Guard station at Cape Disappointment, I saw her.

It took almost an hour and a half to locate the station, and during the drive I passed a rickety old pickup truck hurtling along the highway in the other direction. For a split second I thought Kathy was in the passenger seat. An old man with whiskers was driving. I saw
him
clearly, but the woman I saw less clearly. Still, I was almost certain it was Kathy. Pulling into a turnout where I could turn around, bucking a barrage of honking motorists, I followed.

It was impossible to know how she could have come to be passing me in a strange truck. I was thinking all kinds of screwy thoughts: that Kathy had escaped the plane via parachute, that she'd survived the crash and washed up on shore, or that she'd missed the flight entirely and had been hitchhiking around the peninsula all night looking for me. None of the scenarios made any sense, but I chased the pickup truck anyway.

Driving like a madman, I tooted the tinny Prius horn— doing the whole pursuit in the oncoming lane as if I had a date with death myself. As I pulled even, both individuals in the truck peered out the driver's window at me. No doubt thinking I was indulging a bad case of road rage, the old man with the whiskers gave me the bird. The woman was fifteen feet away, and I could plainly see she did not look anything like Kathy. She was a crone in a black hooded sweatshirt that— given my sixty-mile-per-hour glimpse— had mimicked Kathy's hair. Crap. The adrenaline boost had revived me almost to normalcy, but as I turned around and headed toward the Coast Guard station I found myself overcome by exhaustion. The disappointment of discovering my wife was alive and then being forced to realize she was still dead had wiped out my last reserves.

Eventually I found the Coast Guard facilities at Cape Disappointment, parked, and went inside, where I waded through the cacophony and introduced myself. The place was a beehive of civilians on cellphones and others clamoring for attention from officials. It took half an hour, but in the end a young guardsman named Hutchins was assigned to look after me, partially because the station was already packed with reporters— the parking lot was rife with TV vans— and partly because I'd had a run-in with a cameraman. I don't remember what either of us said, but some of the bystanders felt we were about to come to blows and stepped between us. Seeing all these people who were only going to make my day more miserable had put me over the edge. I was ready for a fistfight over any little thing, and the cameraman bumped into me and then tried to push his way past when I didn't move. He was a big guy, undoubtedly used to getting his way, but I wasn't impressed.

Periodically for the rest of the day, Coast Guardsman Hutchins brought me doughnuts, bottled water, and ongoing news of the search, which went even more slowly during daylight hours than it had during the night. That second night I slept in the parking lot in the car— or more accurately, I dozed, listening to local radio stations. Actual sleep was for the guiltless. I'd decided on all sorts of ways in which Kathy's death was my fault. I never should have allowed her to break up our tête-à-tête with a plane trip. I should have insisted we spend two days at the ocean. I should have been more curious about the condition of the plane and the expertise of the pilots. What had caused the tailspin?

Had it been the action of dipping their wings for me over Cape Disappointment? That was a possibility I couldn't bear to consider. Even though the scene of the crash was continually and mercilessly being rerun in my brain, it kept altering so that I could no longer trust my own memory of what I had witnessed.

By four in the afternoon of the third day, they'd located the fuselage where it had settled on a sandy bottom eight hundred feet below the waves. The government was going to bring in remote-controlled machinery to recover the wreckage and, with luck, the remainder of the bodies. Around noon a fishing boat had found the second pilot's body on the beach near Ocean Shores.

Near sunset of the third day, hope for finding more bodies began to dwindle. My cellphone battery had long ago given out, and I didn't bother to charge it in the car charger. I knew when I finally got it running again it would disgorge dozens, if not hundreds, of messages, none of which I wanted to field. I'd already received more than my share of commiserating calls from assorted friends, family, and from myriad political hacks who hadn't known either Kathy or me eight weeks ago. Also, there would be more calls from Kalpesh, the shithead.

What galled me about Kalpesh's apology was that I believed his sincerity. I wanted to detest him for deceitfulness, but he'd been genuinely remorseful, and because of that I couldn't detest him with half the vigor I wanted to, which only made me despise him all the more.

DEBORAH DRISCOLL WAS ALMOST
more infuriating than Kalpesh Gupta, although she did nothing more than try to be my friend. My urge to find fault with her was like the inclination a lunatic might have to slam his fist into a wall, except it wasn't as satisfying to indulge. Kathy hadn't liked Deborah and, in fact, had been a little jealous of her, which I'd found somewhat amusing while Kathy was alive, but now that things had changed, everything about Deborah irritated me. What galled me the most was that she was still breathing and Kathy was not.

Eight days had passed since the crash, and by my estimate I'd slept less than twenty hours during that span. The biggest problem with trying to sleep was every time I woke up I would once again have to tell myself it was true, that Kathy had died in a plane crash and was missing— dead. Sometimes, as I slept, when I slept, I would wake up in the middle of a crying jag. I didn't like it. None of it. The neolithic part of my brain solved the problem by refusing me sleep. Because of my grief and lack of sleep, I was alternately despairing, unbelieving, spiteful, and once or twice hallucinatory. I was also afraid I might be turning lethal.

I'd never particularly thought of myself as dangerous. I got into trouble, sure, but I usually did it pursuing legitimate ends, and while it was true that over the years I had been responsible for at least two deaths, both were justifiable and could be placed in the sphere of things
unavoidable. Both could have been classified as self-defense. I did not consider myself a murderer, and as far as I knew, thugs and felons did not tremble when I tromped through the halls of the King County Courthouse. It was hard to explain even to myself why I might be dangerous now or what I might do, but I was beginning to get the feeling that sane people and people of delicate sensibilities had best steer clear.

Deborah Driscoll seemed unable to comprehend this. She had telephoned twice between the time of the crash and the fourth memorial service eight days later. The services, the funerals, the memorials, had all been delayed because of the retrieval efforts and because of the fact that some of the bodies had not been recovered. Kathy's hadn't been. Deborah's first call was “just to see how you're doing,” though I believed there might have been darker undercurrents. She hinted she might be able to put some time aside to come over and visit, possibly late after she left the office. It was likely there was nothing suggestive about her offer, but it was hard to tell. My antenna for that sort of thing was broken.

The next time she called she invited me to drive with her to the Sheffield memorial service at the convention center in Bellevue. I had been dreading the Sheffield memorial, the largest and most formal of the services. Kathy's was slated to be among the last, but I had been unable to bring myself to think about it or to help her family with details.

I drove with Driscoll to the Sheffield service, but only because she sounded down in the mouth on the phone and made noises to the effect that funerals were difficult for her and I would be doing her a favor by accompanying her. She picked me up in her silver Lexus, which still smelled new. “How are you doing?” she asked, and as soon as she asked I could tell by her tone she thought she was doing me the favor.

“Fine,” I lied. “I'm doing fine.” It was my fourth memorial service in three days. She had not shown her face at any of the others, nor had any other Maddox campaigners. The Maddox machine plunged ahead undiminished, in fact very much enlivened by the unexpected demise of their opponent. Maddox and a few of the others in his campaign seemed, if anything, invigorated by the Sheffield tragedy. That's what the media was calling it now: the Sheffield tragedy or, alternately, the Sheffield crash, or the Sheffield accident. As if there hadn't been ten
other people on board, as if the pilots and the staff and the cameraman and producer doing the commercial had never existed, as if Kathy had never existed, as if nobody was dead but Jane Sheffield. It was a natural posture for the media to assume, but it pissed me off. These days everything pissed me off.

“You don't have to talk if you don't want to,” Deborah said, as she drove east toward Lake Washington and ultimately across the water on the 520 bridge and into downtown Bellevue. Apparently she'd been trying to engage me in conversation for some minutes, but I hadn't noticed.

“Good. We won't talk.”

As much as I hated to acknowledge it, Deborah looked particularly fine in her black suit, the black contrasting with her red hair and pale skin. I wore the same dark suit Kathy had helped me pick out for official campaign dinners and whatnot. When we bought it, I'd made a batch of tasteless jokes to the effect that now that I was outfitted with a spiffy dark funereal suit, all my friends and relatives could start kicking the bucket, and the sooner the better, before my suit didn't fit anymore. The jokes seemed eerily prescient now and made me seem like a horrid man.

Traffic was heavy, and Deborah, as always, drove aggressively. Kathy hadn't been especially adept as a driver, while Deborah had taken race-car lessons three summers in a row and had even steered a F ormula 1 car around a track somewhere in Maryland. Her parents had paid for it. Wealthy family, I thought, from that and other things she'd said over the weeks.

“I know you said we weren't going to talk,” Deborah said, “and I respect that, but we were wondering how long you were planning to stay away from the office.”

“What?”

“Things are ramping up at the office, and there are some items Maddox needs you to look into. No pressure, or anything. There's still over a month until the election, but the ballots have already been printed and Sheffield will still be on it.”

“She shouldn't be hard to beat. She's dead. Or haven't you guys noticed?”

“Don't mock me, please. This is turning into a real battle.”

“It always
was
a real battle. Maddox never got close to her in the polls. But like I said, it should be easy now.”

“John Ashcroft lost to a dead man in Missouri in 2000. After he was elected, the then governor appointed the dead man's wife to take his seat. All perfectly legal.”

“Is that what you're afraid is going to happen here?”

“It's not over until it's over. This state has a Democratic governor, and the word is that if Sheffield gets reelected, she'll appoint Sheffield's husband. That plus the sympathy factor, and we've got a fight on our hands.”

“Shucky darn.”

“I'm beginning to wonder where your sympathies lie.”

“I've never made it a secret.”

But she didn't pursue it, so it was between us for the rest of the day, along with a few other things. Later, after she'd had some time to come at it from another angle, she said, “I know you have some life changes you're trying to cope with, but sometimes it helps to keep busy. You might be surprised how getting back into the harness keeps your mind off your troubles. We'd love to have you back. What do you say, Thomas?”

“I haven't buried Kathy yet.” Besides Kathy's, there were still five other bodies missing, though they'd brought up the fuselage two days before. One of the pilots, Sheffield, two aides, and the producer for the commercial were unaccounted for. And Kathy.

“Well, sure, I understand. Give it some thought, Thomas. You can come back part-time or full. Whatever makes you feel comfortable. We miss you.” When she said that, she took her right hand off the steering wheel and reached over for my hand, but I moved it and she accidentally laid her hand across my thigh. “You're sweet, Thomas.”

We didn't say another word on the drive. We didn't say much at the service, either. There were thousands of people in attendance, crowds in the street outside, bagpipers, a bugler, more U.S. flags than I'd seen anywhere in a long time, and a special seating section for VIPs. We sat up high to the left of the stage, where we had a fair view of the room.