Flight #116 Is Down (2 page)

The lane into Dove House was nearly a half mile long. One vehicle wide, edged by low stone walls, it was romantic and spooky. Branches of overhanging trees formed a tunnel. Rhododendron bloomed purple in the spring, followed by mountain laurel in pale pink. Deer were as plentiful as squirrels.

Heidi loved the drive in any weather: summer, fall, winter, spring. By the gatehouse was a stone bridge that arched like a fairytale illustration, and there the school bus waited for her on Rockrimmon Road. Rockrimmon was also winding and curving, as New England roads are, fitting between glacial boulders and skirting ravines. The school bus tooted to be sure nobody was coming the other way before risking the many blind curves.

There were neighbors, but Heidi and her parents knew few of them; houses here were invisible from the road.

Heidi’s parents were the happiest people she knew. They loved their work. Her father was a consultant in international trade with Eastern Europe. Mr. Landseth was always flying to Budapest or Prague and writing up reports in his New York City office. He spoke several languages and sometimes helped the State Department. Her mother was a journalist with a specialty in medicine. If there was a new type of heart surgery in Dallas or an interesting medical phenomenon in San Francisco, Mrs. Landseth was off and interviewing. The Landseths loved cameras, and the house was loaded with color photographs of their latest expeditions. For a year or so they went on a video kick, but the cameras were too bulky and they gave it up. Heidi was relieved. She could pretend to admire a pack of photos for ten seconds, but a video required seating, and snacks, and lights off, and commentary. There was a limit to Heidi’s interest.

There was one problem with such happy parents, however.

What kept them happy was either out of town or out of the country.

There had always been a housekeeper, a grounds keeper, and a nanny for Heidi, but her parents had never been away at the same time until she was ten. Even then, they were both careful to be home weekends. But ninth grade for them was a sky opening up like blue velvet to let in freedom. Heidi would be settled in boarding school, where parental occupation didn’t matter; where both Mr. and Mrs. Landseth could be away months at a time, and their daughter would be fine.

Heidi hated boarding school.

Get involved!
her parents would write, phone, and demand.
Join! Be active!

Okay, but how?

The school was competitive to get into, and competitive to survive in. Heidi did not make the tennis team; she did not get a part in the play; upperclass students filled the costume, lights, and stagehand slots. She loved to sing, but her voice was ordinary. She did not qualify for the concert choir. She got into something called “General Chorus,” which was of such low musical level it never gave a concert. The school would have been embarrassed to present General Chorus to an audience.

Heidi consistently got C’s. No matter how hard she tried, there was a C at the top of the paper. If she
didn’t
try, there was also a C. That was even more depressing; there ought to be a difference between trying and not trying.

Heidi understood why kids rebelled. You wanted to be good at something. Hardly anybody failed to get stoned or drunk if they really tried. Hardly anybody behind the wheel of a car got a C in speeding.

But Heidi disliked anything that meant loss of control. The idea that she would behave weirdly, or loudly, or crudely, horrified her. She wanted to know what she was saying and see what she was doing. She didn’t want to wake up the next day and wonder what her most recent history included.

So of course her roommates were party girls who found Heidi the most pitiful excuse for a human being they’d ever come across and spent freshman year laughing at her and excluding her.

By the end of her first year she had slowly, painfully, made precisely two friends, Karen and Jacqueline … both of whom transferred elsewhere the following year.

That year, her second, Heidi came home for Christmas and refused to go back. Her parents began rotating home-attendance duty.

“Will you just leave?” Heidi kept saying to them. “Mrs. Camp is here, Burke is here, I’m fine.”

Burke, the grounds keeper, was very unappreciated. Basically nobody cared how he kept or didn’t keep the grounds. This gave him plenty of time to indulge his hobby, which was repairing player pianos. When Heidi was little, she used to spend a lot of time at the gatehouse, watching, but you could only be interested in broken pianos so long, and then you needed to do something else.

Mrs. Camp, the housekeeper, was a single parent who had raised three kids of her own at Dove House. They were much older than Heidi, and she hardly knew them. Mrs. Camp’s rooms were on the second floor of the wing connecting Dove House to the garages and stable.

Burke and Mrs. Camp made all decisions regarding Dove House, from plumbing repairs to grocery shopping, which was the way everybody liked it. “We’ll earn the money,” Heidi’s mother would say, “you spend it.” Burke and Mrs. Camp thought this was a fine arrangement.

Burke had National Guard this weekend and was off somewhere cleaning tanks and priming guns, or whatever Weekend Warriors did.

Mrs. Camp had the flu. Heidi had taken her a bowl of soup, but Mrs. Camp moaned, “Don’t come in, you’ll catch this from me. I’ll be okay in twenty-four hours, Honeybunch.”

Mrs. Camp had called her Honeybunch since birth. Burke called her Horse, which Heidi hoped referred to her former hobby and not her looks. Her father called her Heidi Lynn, and her mother said Heidi-eidi-O.

At boarding school, nobody had called her anything.

But if she had expected things to be better in town, she was mistaken. The regional public high school was large, and she knew nobody because she had gone to Country Day through eighth grade. She seemed unable to introduce herself or to break in. The class had an impermeable membrane around it; she felt as fragile as a soap bubble lying on its exterior.

Heidi had become curiously resigned to her exile. She even thought of it that way: she was in another country and would someday go home.

S
ATURDAY: 5:15 P.M.

Kissing their mother good-bye made them feel guilty, so they hadn’t.

Daniel, the older, was fifteen and still so consumed by anger it was difficult for him to face either parent. His mother should have behaved differently, that was all, and kept the marriage together. Daniel could not forgive Mom for allowing Dad to divorce her. As for Dad, he should not have played around with Linda. Dad certainly shouldn’t be marrying the woman. Daniel could not imagine calling Linda “Mother.” He couldn’t imagine calling her anything except four-letter words, all of which he had practiced on Linda in the past.

But this was a wedding. You couldn’t say things like that at weddings. And Linda’s family would be there; she had a huge family. Dad made them sound like the best family in the world, ignoring the fact that up until two years ago, Dad, Daniel, Tuck, and Mom had been the best family in the world. Daniel was going to have to be polite at this wedding, an unimaginable thing, but he had promised both his grandmothers.

Politeness rots, thought Daniel.

Daniel was rather hoping for a high set of stone stairs down which to throw Linda just prior to the wedding vows.

He looked out the plane window. His brother, of course, had the window seat. If there was anything to see, Daniel could not see it. A whole country slipping by beneath him, and he didn’t even have a window seat.

His brother, Tucker, was barely thirteen. Tuck was no use to anybody at any time and worse now. Tuck had no skills at all, no visible personality, no nothing going for him. Daniel didn’t even like Tuck.

He used to like Tuck. Two years ago, when they were a family, Tuck had been a person. Now he was thirteen; divorce had made Tuck worse than bat urine. Daniel supposed some things could not be blamed on the divorce, such as war and inflation, but other than that, Daniel held his mother, father, and this Linda creep one hundred percent responsible.

“Maybe you’re failing English because you didn’t read the assignments,” his father said a few weeks ago on the phone.

“No,” said Daniel implacably, “it’s because I’m under such stress since my family collapsed. I’m going to two counselors now, Dad.” This was half true: he was going, but he wasn’t talking. They were nerdballs; Daniel could not imagine telling these people how to make ice cubes, let alone exposing his heart to them.

His father heaved a huge sigh. Daniel loved that sigh. He figured enough of those sighs and his father would come home.

But no; his father was marrying Linda.

Linda would probably wear some floor-length white gown and have ten bridesmaids dressed in vegetable yellow, and a church full of smelly flowers, and all these relatives who would coo at the sight of Dad’s handsome sons. Daniel wished he were six, because a six-year-old could puke on demand, ruin everybody’s clothes, and get away with it, but a fifteen-year-old had to be pleasant.

Pleasant. What a disgusting thought.

It was enough to make him hope the plane crashed. That would delay the old wedding a few hours.

Or better yet, somebody should die. Dad wouldn’t get married if his son had to be buried because of going to Dad’s wedding. That would ruin Dad’s life pretty well.

Daniel decided it would be better for Tuck to die than him, because Tuck was virtually dead anyway, with that personality.

Saturday: 5:17
P.M.

Teddie sat very still. This was only her second plane flight. She was not worried about the plane staying in the air, but she was worried that when it came down, Mommy and Daddy might not be at the airport to meet her. Gramma and Poppy had insisted that Mommy and Daddy would be there. “But what if they’re not?” Teddie asked.

“Then you stay with the airline hostess until they come.”

“But what if that’s a year?”

“It won’t be a year, Teddie. Ten minutes if they can’t find a parking space.”

“But what if they never find a parking space?”

“Then Daddy will keep driving in circles while Mommy runs in to get you.”

“But what if Mommy gets hit by a car and nobody ever comes for me?”

“That won’t happen,” said Gramma. “Now, stop worrying, Teddie. You’re a big girl. Big girls fly by themselves across the country all the time. You just look out the window and have a good trip.”

“But what if I get hungry?”

“Then the flight attendant will bring you a snack.”

“But what if she can’t tell I’m hungry?”

“Then you flag her down and ask her to bring you something.”

“But I don’t have a flag.”

Poppy said she could use her hand. Teddie didn’t want to stick her hand out in the aisle. She wanted it safely in her lap, around Bear. Bear was exceptionally soft; his stuffing could squash down into almost nothing if you really wanted to cram him into a small space, and if you didn’t, Bear would burst out in cuddly white softness and fill up your arms.

“What if I have to make a phone call?” said Teddy.

“We put a card in your pocket, honey, you know that. It has our phone number and Mommy and Daddy’s phone number.”

“But what if I don’t have money for the phone?”

“Then you ask the flight attendant to help you.”

“But what if she’s busy?”

“You don’t need money, anyway,” said Poppy. “That bottom number on the card, that’s the credit card number; you tell the telephone operator that number.”

“It’s too big,” said Teddie. “What if I get the numbers wrong?”

Gramma and Poppy came up with a quarter, which they taped to Teddie’s palm with two Mickey Mouse Band-Aids. The quarter was warm now, and she could feel its roundness against her palm. If she had to make a phone call she could do it without using all those numbers. Teddie was not fond of numbers. She wasn’t fond of letters, either.

She had expected she would learn to read the first day of kindergarten, and she was depressed that she had been in kindergarten forever and ever and ever, and still she could not read. It seemed so unfair that in order to read books like grown-ups, you had to know all those letters.

Everybody else on the plane had read a plastic card in the pocket attached to the seat in front. Teddie pulled hers out and studied the pictures. There were ways to get out of the airplane by sliding down little chutes. Teddie frowned at the pictures. It looked as if she would have to let go of Bear to do that. Teddie resolved to take the regular way out. She wasn’t doing anything if she couldn’t do it with Bear.

Saturday: 5:20
P.M.

Darienne hated waiting.

She had had to wait in line to check her luggage and wait in line to board the plane, and now she had to wait in the aisle of the plane while old ladies wondered dimly where seat 37B was (“Right there,” said Darienne sharply) and overweight middle-aged men stopped to wriggle out of too-small overcoats before sitting down.

When, finally, she had gotten into her seat, she was next to some little girl clutching a teddy bear. Darienne could not believe it, but the girl’s name was Teddie and the bear’s name was Bear.

A family strong in imagination, Darienne thought. Probably have a dog named Dog.

Darienne had gotten the last available magazine, which turned out to be
Sports Illustrated.
Darienne despised sports. Anything involving sweat made her ill. Across the aisle from her, an obese woman in a poorly fitting corduroy suit that looked as if she had gotten it at a garage sale had
Glamour.
“Will you please switch magazines with me?” asked Darienne, taking the edge of the woman’s
Glamour.

“I haven’t even opened it yet,” the woman said. (As if reading
Glamour
was going to help
her
any.)

Then the woman left her magazine unopened on her lap, just to be obnoxious.

The plane, of course, had been late taking off.

Darienne wanted to scream.

She had a connection to make, and there was only an hour and ten minutes between flights. If they screwed up, and she missed her flight to London, she would commit several homicides. She hated people who did not have their act together.