Flight #116 Is Down (16 page)

Teddie, unable to speak, nodded under the plastic mask. But her blue lips closed and her little cheeks sagged.

Heidi was displaced; helicopter personnel took Teddie’s stretcher, men who clucked like sets of grandmothers, stroking and soothing.

Heidi was somewhat irritated that the majority of the rescuers were men. Heidi had never had a feminist thought in her life. It was totally not interesting to her whether a man did something or a woman did. Now she cared. For every Robyn working, there were ten Mr. Farquhars. Heidi wanted more women out there saving lives instead of making coffee.

She pictured her few girl friends. She could not imagine Karen or Jacqueline planning to serve the sick and the wounded instead of spending the day at the mall. Or would they, too, have risen to the occasion? Done their very best? Been their very kindest?

“Give me a hand,” said Gorp to her, and she ripped open an envelope of bandages for him.

She had not dared ask questions before; the pace was too desperate; but now everything had slowed. She pointed to Gorp’s hands. Although he was outdoors as much as in, he was not wearing winter gloves but thin disposable white surgical gloves. Almost all the real rescue workers—the ones in uniforms; the trained ones—were also wearing disposable gloves.

“Why?” she asked Gorp.

“AIDS.”

She stared at him. “At a plane crash?”

He laughed without humor. “Who knows who’s on board?” he said. “It’s fine to rescue people, but it’s not so fine to contract a fatal disease while you’re doing it. Gloving is protocol for every rescue group in the state. Lots of squads require double gloving.”

She stared down at her hands, the bare hands that had briefly held Carly’s and Teddie’s and so many others.

Gloving is protocol, she repeated in her head.

Other people’s jargon took time to be understood.

The three words zinged around in her already rata-tat-tatting head, and somehow as she considered it, the “g” fell off, until the words that thrummed for Heidi were, Loving is protocol.

Saturday: 8:42
P.M.

Tuck MacArthur would worship Ty Maronn the rest of his life.

When the school bus pulled up into the courtyard, and the eighteen walking wounded climbed on, Tuck looked around longingly. “I’ve never driven anything in my life,” said Tuck sadly. “I’m thirteen, and my father was going to let me start driving, but they got divorced, and I live with my mother, and she’s a scaredy-cat about everything and probably won’t let me drive until I’m ninety.”

Ty knew how serious this was. He had a mother like that, too, but luckily his parents had not divorced, and his father had sneaked him out real young. They used to go out at dawn to practice driving when his dad said the laws didn’t count because nobody else was on the road. Ty had a lot more years of driving experience than anybody his age was legally allowed to have.

Ty pulled the skinny little kid toward him so a passenger considerably more wounded could get on the bus. “Keep your voice down, kid,” said Ty. He figured this Tuck was the type who probably snitched forbidden chocolate and forgot to wash his mouth off afterward. “You be good,” said Ty, “and when we get on the straightaway, I’ll let you drive.”

Tuck’s mouth sagged. He stared at Ty in awe. In love. “Let me drive?” he repeated.

“Shh,” said Ty.

The bus filled.

The walking wounded were by now much more bored than they were hurt. They had helped a great deal during the first hour, assisting others up to the house, and so forth, but then what seemed like several hundred disaster-trained volunteers appeared on the scene, and the walking-wounded set was retired to the back of the house. It was like being in jail. They got reprimanded whenever they tried to escape. Their keepers brought them food—odd food, like coleslaw; these people were really peddling coleslaw—but basically, when they left their room, they were in the way and got sent back.

Tuck had been sent flying through the air when his seat ripped loose, but his only real wound was a split lip. He and two others went the wrong way trying to reach safety from the fire and spent some time in the woods. They finally circled the flaming wing, way off through a bumpy stumpy field, and one of the survivors got hung up on some old barbed wire, so they had to peel him loose from that, in the dark, and they all fell into another little stream, of which the property seemed to have dozens, and when they finally reached the house on the hill, they were frozen stiff and got sent up to a bathroom to rest their feet in warm tub water.

Tuck had asked everybody about his brother, but when he said they’d been sitting near the wing, and it was wrenched off in front of him, everybody got vague, and said, Well, now! How about a doughnut! Or some coleslaw?

Tuck was trying not to think about Daniel. Of course, he’d been trying not to think about Daniel most of his life, that was the kind of brothers they were, but this was different.

He was going to be very mad at himself if the only kind of brother he would ever have been was a rotten one.

He touched the embroidered jacket the bus driver wore. “You have the same initials as me. T.M.,” he said.

“Yeah? You better drive good, then.”

“You really gonna let me?”

“Said I would, didn’t I?”

“You can’t believe everything people tell you,” Tuck told him.

“What am I—your parent? Believe me.”

Tuck believed him. He kept his eyes fastened on the road, waiting for the straightaway. But there was something wrong here. None of the roads were straight. These roads were Figure Eights. “Who designed these roads?” said Tuck, frowning. Was this America? People drove on these windy little lanes? What were they, insane?

Saturday: 8:45
P.M.

“Heidi, dear,” said Mrs. Camp, “take this tray of hot food and drinks into the barn for the workers there.”

She nodded and set off before she remembered why there were workers in the barn.

The barn was the morgue.

Body bags really were just bags. No matter who you were, no matter what condition your body was in, you were just zippered in, like a parcel. You were no Christmas present, shiny and beribboned; you were brown paper. Ready to be shipped.

She found she could turn her mind off, as if she had electrical connections from which she could take the fuse.

She was okay with the bodies as long as she did not look at the faces or hands. The legs were legs. The shirts were shirts. The backs were backs.

But the hands: they had gender. Bitten nails. Rings. Age spots. Some were small and childlike, hands that had not yet learned how to steer a crayon. The hands were a person, somebody Heidi had not met and never would now. Somebody for whom family waited at an airport, never to hold again.

And the faces: impossible: she could not look at the faces. She blurred them like true crime television programs where the criminal’s features turn watery to prevent identification.

She looked at the bags, not the people going into them. The bags were huge. They could have stuck giraffes in those bags. “Why so large?” she whispered.

“Sometimes,” said the attendant, “you don’t get the victim in until after rigor mortis, and the arms or the trunk can be twisted out and rigid, and you have to have—”

“Don’t tell me any more,” said Heidi. The body bag was plastic, with the longest zipper in the world. Somewhere out there is a factory, she thought, that makes body-bag zippers. Can you imagine doing that for a living? Inserting …

The girl they were zipping into the body bag was bloody from the chest down. She wore a lovely forest green sweater with large gleaming silver buttons on which little raised hearts held hands. A silver chain fell lopsidedly around her neck, and there was something on the chain—a charm, or a heart, or a crystal, but Heidi could not see it. In her arms was cradled, like a baby, another sweater.

Carly! thought Heidi. Carly, Carly, Carly!

She tried to keep herself from looking at Carly’s face, but that was too cowardly. Carly deserved more. Heidi had to do her the honor of looking.

She looked.

Carly’s face was undamaged. Her hair was wet. The wet hair looked alive. The face did not. “Don’t zip it,” said Heidi. She felt frantic, horribly energized, as if her body had captured Carly’s lost strength.

The attendants looked at her in surprise. “She’s gone,” said one gently. “Been gone for a while.”

Been gone for a while, thought Heidi. Sounds like a mountain lovers’ lament;
she’s been gone for a while; she’ll be back ’fore long.

“We lost quite a few of ’em,” said the attendant. “If the site had been better …” he said, slowly, wishfully. “No woods, no hill, no ice.” He shrugged. He said to Heidi, “You okay?” Then he began to zip the bag, closing in the pretty sweater, the silver chain.

Carly was dead.

Heidi was afraid she would weep, or throw up, or run through the woods and over the hills and out of town, anything to get away from this horror. Not Carly, who was going home!

Lost. We lost her. Oh, Carly, where are you now? Are you lost?

Carly, Carly, come back, don’t zip it, don’t zip it.

But he zipped it, and Carly was gone.

Saturday: 8:59
P.M.

Patrick saw her standing between the barn and the triage area. She looked so utterly defeated.

But we’re winning, thought Patrick. We’re getting everybody out, in spite of the chaos; we’ve gotten organized, we’ve beaten the fire, Life Star is making its fourth run.

He came up behind her. He did not know why she would be in school with him this year. Super-rich kids occasionally popped up, usually because they were thrown out of private school for drugs or shoplifting, although drugs were so common now, even the best of schools usually pretended not to see. They’d have no student body if they really focused on drug use.

Her face was a study in misery.

Patrick put his arms around her. “Hey,” he said, not gently or softly because there was so much racket going on he had to shout; chainsaw, engines, helicopters, sirens of departing ambulances, walkie-talkies, portable phones, radios. “Hey, what’s wrong?” he shouted.

She shrugged.

“Who died?” he said, pointing with his mud-stained toe toward the body bags. You’re sick, Patrick, he thought, those’re people in there, people you’re pointing to with your sneaker.

“A girl our age. Carly. Somebody gave her a charm for her silver necklace. Her boyfriend, do you think? Or her parents? She was going home, Patrick.”

He realized that she was sobbing.

“Going home,” she said again. “She told me. She wanted to get there.”

His arms tightened around her and he rocked her slightly, feeling like a physician with his patient, or a lover with his former love. He knew she would never really take the EMT training course. Fire and Ambulance volunteers were always working-type people, not rich-type people. And even if she wanted to, her parents would never let her. They’d let her play polo or tennis or whatever it was rich kids did this year, but they’d never let her hang out at any ambulance barn.

“The man over there,” said Heidi, gulping, “told me if this was a better place, without a fountain wrecking up the courtyard, and no trees, no hills, no ice …”

Patrick said, “You’re responsible for the site the plane crashed into? Get real, Heidi. Look at it this way. What if you lived in a shack? You’re keeping a couple hundred people warm and fed. You’re providing electricity and phones and water. You called in the alarm. What if it happened without you? What if nobody saw it come down? What if these rescue personnel were still looking just to find the plane? What if they had to bulldoze a whole damn
road
in to reach the plane, never mind taking away a few holly bushes?”

“She died, though,” said Heidi.

He said, “You’re fantastic, Heidi. You’ve done a million things to help save people tonight.”

How callous I am, he thought. I don’t know yet that this is real; I’m still an excited kid in the midst of the action. I’m wired. I’m the one who’s flying here.

I’m having fun.

He tried to be horrified by his feelings, but it didn’t happen. He went on being incredibly glad that he had been first on the scene, that he had come through, that he got to be one of the helpers.

She said, “There’s a little boy in one of those bags.”

He did not know what to say to her. He struggled to think of something comforting, like—you were brilliant, thinking up the horse-stall door for our bridge—but she didn’t care about bridges right now.

Patrick’s father yelled, “Hey! You two necking over there? Save it!”

Heidi and Patrick looked at each other.

Patrick’s father yelled. “Get your—uhhh—get up here! I got work for you two.”

“He was about to tell me what part of my body I should get in gear,” said Patrick, grinning. “Then he decided not to.”

“Both of us need to get in gear,” said Heidi. “I don’t know what I’m doing in Neutral when I have to stay in High.”

A spotlight caught her; the sopping hair gleamed, the cold ice-reddened cheeks tilted toward him; a smile of mischief teased him.

For an entire five or six seconds, he thought about sex instead of rescue.

S
ATURDAY: 9:00 P.M.

Mr. MacArthur participated regularly in road races; every morning before breakfast he ran eight miles. He was proud of his physique.

But when the airline personnel had led them to the hotel, he had hardly been able to manage the walk. There had been an upward slope to the corridor. It seemed to him that wheelchairs were going to be necessary if he were to negotiate this hill. How could they build a public-access building with hills?

He thought,
Daniel.

He thought,
Tuck.

They’re going to tell us the plane crashed, he thought. They want us safely away from the thousands of other passengers and the people picking them up. When we start screaming and sobbing and saying NO NO NO NO! they want us behind thick walls and closed doors. They want us together, to make it easier for them.