Down Around Midnight (18 page)

I'm naturally skeptical of this kind of gibberish, but then I was never very good at math. Given my connection to Missy Boyd by way of her brother Brian, Paul's connection to Parmenter by way of a shared relationship to both Wendy and Grover Farrish, Suzanne's connection to Jim Bernier by way of an acquaintance with me, and yet another, similar connection, revealed to me later, between an alarm technician and a caretaker who crossed paths at a summerhouse in the town of Chatham—all of whom had been present on the night of the tragedy, separated in each case by a single degree—I was becoming something of a believer. And my susceptibility was exacerbated by the nagging realization that I was likewise separated from Guare himself, the dramatist who popularized the phenomenon and gave it a name, only by the professor under whom we both studied playwriting in college.

When I finally reached Jonathan Ealy in Anchorage, he confirmed that he had graduated from the Duke University School of Law in 1985. That they might not have recognized each other is understandable, considering the circumstances of their original meeting, but it's a good bet that Ealy, crossing the Durham campus, occasionally nodded hello to Paul Boepple, who was doing his pediatric residency there at the same time.

More than four months passed between the evening Brian and I talked on the phone and the day we finally got together. He and his family—his wife, a fashion consultant, and two daughters, ages eleven and fourteen—were visiting Missy in Brewster, and he took a morning out of his vacation to keep an appointment with me. We met at the general store on a Monday in early July. It was eight A.M., and the place was busy. It was the start of the tourist season on Cape Cod. Everything was picking up. The sun was shining, and along with several of the Boyds' other patrons, Brian and I sat on the benches out front sipping carryout coffee.

Clean-cut, athletically built, he still had a youthful air about him. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and Top-Siders, but he's one of those people who can wear anything—he would have looked just as laid-back in a suit. He appeared to be a guy who took care of himself, and everything else about him told me he was probably pretty well fixed, something I'd first suspected when I came across his address. His hair had grayed, but he had all of it, and his haircut cost more than mine. In addition to the sense of humor I'd first picked up from him over the phone, he had all the confidence and sophistication you'd expect to find in an educated guy who negotiated the international currency markets out of an office in midtown Manhattan. It says something about me, not about him, that a part of me reacted as one might to a younger brother who'd gone out and done well for himself. My arithmetic put him at forty-seven years old.

He was the third survivor I talked to, and he was the first to express curiosity about the injuries I'd sustained in the crash.

“I didn't realize you were hurt that bad,” he said.

His memory was that I'd been pretty active.

“Not for long,” I assured him.

He was treated that night at the emergency room and released with a broken collarbone. Thirty-six hours later, he was carried from his sister's house on a stretcher and taken back to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a hip pointer, which is a contusion of the iliac crest, the bony prominence that can be felt along the waistline. Following X-rays, he was released with pain pills. (I don't know who initially treated him, but I'm guessing we shared an orthopedist, who, while undoubtedly having attended medical school, was apparently absent the day they covered the pelvis.)

He remembered the moment of impact in detail.

“It was a long ten minutes,” he said, of the interval between the landing announcement and the plane's ultimate contact with the trees. “I heard stuff hitting the bottom of the plane. . . . The lights blinked. I remember thinking,
I'm about to die.
”

Then came the sound of the crash.

“I just let go. I said,
This is it.
”

Thrown into the aisle, facedown on the deck (he was the first thing I saw when my vision cleared), he continued his inner monologue as the plane came to rest.

“I remember asking myself,
Am I dead?
”

He had his answer within seconds:

“I tested my limbs. . . .
I'm still alive.
”

And the first voice he heard was not that of God.

I remember asking him if he was OK and helping him up off the floor. As soon as it was clear he could walk, the evacuation began.

Brian confirmed that it was he who had helped carry the eldest sister from the plane. “She was a mess,” he said, and he remembered that “her legs caught on the door” as he carried her through. “Yes,” he verified, “she was unconscious. We didn't take her far.”

It was unquestionably Suzanne with whom Brian had carried the young woman to the rear of the cabin—Suzanne remembers her being hot to the touch—and whether it was Suzanne or the middle sister with whom he carried her off the plane, he remembered that he and the middle sister walked away from the craft together. He stayed with her, not the eldest, as we settled in, waiting to be rescued, her head leaning against his chest as we huddled in the dark. Her injuries were not visible either to Brian or to me, but being extremely talkative, she exhibited sufficient distress to indicate that she was suffering from shock. In fact, her injuries were such that upon arrival at the hospital, she was admitted.

The middle sister and the youngest had been seated on the right-hand side of the cabin, just aft of the cockpit bulkhead, the youngest sitting on the inboard side. Behind them, in a string of double seats, in order of proximity, sat Jon, Brian, Suzanne, and Paul. The left-hand side of the aircraft, the pilot's side, was lined with single seats. The two people seated on that side of the cabin were the eldest sister and I. She was sitting up front. Our side had taken the worst of the impact. The cockpit on our side of the plane was destroyed. Crushed four feet back on the other side, it was crushed nine feet back on our side, torn away along with the bulkhead and a portion of the front cabin, the area in which the young woman was sitting and into which her youngest sister's seat extended.

The oak tree standing inside the airplane had passed through the captain's position. Sometime during the crash sequence, his restraint system had released and he was ejected from the cockpit. His body was found twenty-five feet forward of the wreckage. The failure of his harness, triggered by impact damage to the buckle, did not influence his chances of survival. His fatal injuries, according to the government crash report, “were caused by trees impacting the left cockpit and by the collapsing cockpit structure as the aircraft descended through the trees.”

 

 

Brian, going into his sophomore year at Boston College, survived the crash to celebrate his nineteenth birthday in July. His brother Bill was married three weeks after the crash, and at the wedding, Brian received a standing ovation.

“It's always what
could
have happened,” he told me. “It affects the people not involved more than the people involved.”

His brother Denis had driven him to the airport that night, and seeing Brian after the crash, “he couldn't speak” for a few seconds. “That close . . . What
if
?” were the first words he uttered.

Such moments, Brian said, undercut all his bravado.

“You say it's no big deal, but it
is
a big deal. You appreciate them, the family, that much more.”

In helping me recapture a fuller sense of that night, an appreciation of events as perceived through the prism of his experience, Brian punctuated the conversation with what he identified as “remarkable moments.” And virtually all of them concerned his family: “the love in her voice” when he first talked to Missy; his brief call from the hospital “to let my family know I'm alive”; and his father, “not a touchy-feely guy,” carrying it all in the sound of his voice, the weight of all that emotion, when he told Brian, “We're on our way.”

Hearing these things in the context of what I knew about the McCann family served to verify my belief in the therapeutic quality of love.

Bob and Janice Billingsley, who spend every Christmas Eve with the Boyds, attending church with them in Manhattan, know Missy's family not only to be close-knit but also to be very tightly tied across generational lines. “When you go to a party at Missy's, the entire family is there,” says Bob, who has attended gatherings at the Boyds' apartment in Manhattan. “I have met all her brothers and sisters-in-law and all the nieces and nephews, all the relatives, even the cousins.” And the familial bond is mirrored in another kind of unity that he finds remarkable. “They all look alike. Try to guess which ones are her brothers, and you'd get eight out of ten.”

In the summer, the entire family heads en masse to the Cape.

“Everybody, all eleven people and all their children go to Missy's on the Fourth of July.” Missy, the second oldest of the eleven children, the only daughter, is “the family matriarch,” Bob says. “To understand the family is to understand her.” Janice describes the July get-together as a “three-or-four-day” affair, an extravaganza marked by pageants and skits in which the children are expected to perform. Missy's orchestration of the event is a long-standing tradition that Janice sees as part of “the glue that pulls the family together.” And there is no question, she says, that “the family being so accessible helped get [Brian] through.”

In as many ways as not, the story I was unearthing was a story about families, and what moved me most about Brian's experience was how familiar it seemed, how accurately it reflected mine, and how for me, as for him, an appreciation of that night would have been inexpressible from any frame of reference that did not include the members of my family.

O
ptimism is a blessing that was conferred on me at birth. It has been a lifelong article of faith with my mother that “Things always work out for the best.” Hearing her say it when I was growing up was as predictable as hearing “Don't forget to brush your teeth” and “Call us when you get there.”

I was no older than eleven or twelve when I learned the meaning of the word
optimist.
The first time I remember hearing the word was when my aunt Julia, my father's sister, applied it to me. “I see you're an optimist,” she told me, one Sunday at her home in Boston, walking up behind me and looking over my shoulder while I sat at her dining-room table solving a crossword. “What's an optimist?” I wanted to know. “Someone,” she said, “who does crossword puzzles in ink.” I confess that, for at least a while thereafter, I believed it to be the literal definition, as if the English language were so all encompassing as to have a word for someone who did that:

So what do you do for fun, Bob
?

I like to play baseball, and I'm also an optimist
.

You can find
optimist
defined, as I eventually did, in a dictionary, but you will look in vain to find a more splendid embodiment of the word than my mother. Well into my adulthood, Easter remained one of the holidays on which the entire family gathered, my brothers and sisters and I traveling to my parents' house from wherever we happened to be to observe the occasion together. It was also a holiday on which one of the big-screen Bible epics depicting the life of Christ could inevitably be found on television, and whether it was
The Robe
or
The Greatest Story Ever Told,
it was a broadcast my mother seldom missed. It is safe to say that, on the occasion of the Easter story I'm about to tell, my mother had seen the movie in question about twenty times. And she'd been familiar with the source material since long before the film was made. It was the life of Jesus. She'd read the book.

It was sometime in the afternoon that Terry and I, while we were talking, heard a cry of distress from my mother, who was busying herself in the kitchen. We turned to look in on her. We asked if she was OK. She was sitting at the table with a paring knife in her hand. The television was on, and whatever she might have been slicing was receiving only half her attention. My mother, ever conscientious, always careful not to alarm, was quick to assure us that she was fine, but from the disappointment in her voice, it was evident that something was wrong.

“What is it?” Terry wanted to know.

My mother sighed. She shook her head.

She said, “They picked Barabbas.”

They, the multitude in the movie on television, they'd shouted, “Give us Barabbas!” choosing him over Jesus when they were asked by Pontius Pilate, the empire's man in Judea, which of the two biblical troublemakers deserved to have his sentence commuted.

I looked at Terry, who looked right back at me. Her smile said,
You're surprised?
I asked my mother the question to which Terry and I both knew the answer.

“Did you think it was going to go the other way?”

The three of us were laughing now.

“No . . . no,” she said. My mother has a way of laughing and showing frustration at the same time. “But . . .”

But nothing. My mother was really holding out hope that it might be different this year. She really believed, somewhere deep in her heart, that if things broke her way, the multitude might actually pick Jesus this time, that two thousand years of Christian history would still play out just fine if Rome, laying a foundation for what the Church would one day recognize as the spiritual acts of mercy, had slapped Jesus with a desk-appearance ticket, maybe hit him with something like a D felony, rather than crucify him.

I know exactly what she was thinking, because it's the way I tend to think, too. Or did. Until that night in the woods. After that, I think, at least for a while, my innate optimism went south, along with some of my confidence.