The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [36]
“Are you disappointed?” Garnet asked her.
“Oh, only for you girls,” she said, worried that her own disenchantment must have crept into her voice.
Garnet shrugged. Hallie had her chin in her hand. “We’ll probably just come back tomorrow,” she said. “Or the next day. Why not? There’s not a whole lot else to do around here.”
“Sometimes when I went to New Hampshire to visit my grandmother, I felt exactly the same way,” Emily confessed. “The stores were boring, there was no TV reception. I didn’t know the kids there so I didn’t have any friends. But the place kind of grew on me.”
“You were just visiting, Mom.”
“I know. But …” She stopped speaking when she heard Hallie’s small sniffle, and she turned her full attention on the child. The girl missed her friends in West Chester. Both twins did. “Oh, sweetie, I know it’s hard. But you’ll meet kids, I know you will. You’ll make new friends. I promise.”
Hallie nodded and wiped her eyes with the palm of her hand. Garnet patted her sister on the knee. And neither girl said a word. If they couldn’t put into concrete sentences the reasons why their family had moved, they understood how brittle their father had become and the need to retreat from Pennsylvania. From civilization. And they accepted that, because they were his children, this move was a part of their lot.
The notion made Emily want to cry, too.
You find yourself studying the transcript of the final seconds of your final flight and hearing over and over in your head the actual recording that was played in the NTSB hearing. You sat through all three days of the investigation, you listened to the tapes, you watched the computer simulations. You were transfixed by the cell phone video made by a tourist who happened to have been eating an ice cream cone at the Burlington boathouse when you ditched your plane in the water. (She would drop the ice cream on the wooden dock when she saw the regional jet bearing down amidst the boats on the lake.) Then, those nights on the news, you watched yourself in the hearing room staring at that video or listening to testimony or—one day—testifying yourself, and you were struck both by how much your hair had thinned and by how impassive you seemed in your rolling chair beside that long mahogany table. You wore your uniform (again, a last time) when you testified.
You always sounded calm and controlled in the recording. You never raised your voice. You never panicked. Same with your first officer. Amy, like you, was a study in professionalism. Yes, she screamed reflexively when the wave careened into the wingtip of the jet and you went perpendicular to the water. But you didn’t. You didn’t curse, you didn’t cry out (though the woman recording the cell phone video certainly did, exclaiming, “Oh, my God, oh, my God, it’s flipping! It’s flipping!”). You kept your composure even then, even when death appeared imminent. There was an involuntary grunt because the sensation was not unlike being punched hard in the stomach and the chest, and the yoke slammed up into your thumbs with such force that it’s a small miracle they didn’t break. But otherwise you stayed with your controls until all control was completely out of your hands. You flew your aircraft until, pure and simple, you couldn’t.
And then, the day after the crash, you endured the interrogation by the NTSB. It was all about alcohol, sleep, and food. Thank God, you recall thinking at the time, you hadn’t had even a glass of wine the night before the plane hit the birds. And you clicked shut your hotel door that evening and fell asleep watching a Red Sox game on a hotel cable station. When you flew your three legs that day, you had been sober and well rested; you had eaten well.
People have told you that you would have had a better chance of succeeding that August afternoon in an Airbus than in a CRJ, because the Airbus uses more fly-by-wire technology: A computer prevents a pilot from flying either too fast or too slowly and assures that the aircraft’s pitch and turn angles never exceed the plane’s capabilities. But the issue