The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [5]
“When we come to a stop in the water, we are going to race for that window exit,” he tells his girl gently, whispering into her ear, trying to sound as serene as the flight attendant sounds urgent. “Okay? I am going to lift you up and carry you like we’re racing through the crowds on Main Street in Disney World. You remember, when the park’s closing for the night after the fireworks and we’re racing for spots on the monorail?”
“But I can’t swim that far,” she stammers, her voice a little numb.
“That’s why you have a life jacket,” he tells her. “The key is to scoot out of the plane with me, that’s all. Your mom will already be waiting for us because she’s a little closer to the exit.” Then his eyes go back to his wife’s, and her terror is like an electric shock. The cabin is eerily quiet because the engines aren’t working, and the passengers are mouthing their prayers or texting or staring in mute wonder as the plane seems to be descending beneath the Burlington skyline to the east and the Adirondack foothills to the west.
“Do not wait for us!” he finally says to his wife, uncaring that it is like shouting in a cathedral during silent prayer. “I’ll have Ashley! Just get out of the plane!”
Once he has spoken, broken the spell, others start offering advice. Someone, a man, yells for the women and men in the exit rows to be prepared. Someone else starts yelling out how many feet above the lake water he believes they are.
Ethan finally pulls his daughter’s head from the window, kisses her on the cheek, and then pushes her down into the brace position. Then he joins her, but he wraps his left arm around her shoulders, as if he actually believes he is strong enough to protect her from the impact of a passenger jet augering into a lake at 150 miles an hour.
The captain never thought the door in the basement in any way resembled the over-wing exit doors on an airplane. Or even a main cabin door. Which, of course, it did not. But much later his new therapist, when the captain and his family had moved from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, would probe this connection. A squat door? A pilot with PTSD? How could a psychiatrist not mine this possible connection? But of all the things the captain saw in the door in that dusky corner of the basement in the house they had bought, a locked and armed passenger jet door was never among them.
And, indeed, a Hudson River–like landing is precisely what might have occurred, and you might have wound up a media darling just like that Sully Sullenberger. But soon after you have told the cabin to brace for impact and your plane has skimmed onto the lake—tail then underbelly then nose, a hard landing but picture perfect—there is a high wave. It curls up from the wake of one of those ferryboats—the one that had been churning its way west—as it starts to turn around to aid the plane that is bearing down fast upon the water. The crest is just tall enough and just sudden enough that it smacks the left wingtip of the aircraft. For a tiny fraction of a second you are eye to eye with the foam. And then, before you know it, the one thing you had wanted to avoid is occurring. Suddenly the CRJ is not coasting along the glass of the lake as you had planned—had envisioned—but is vertical to the water. And then it is somersaulting, slamming down hard, that great metal underbelly facing the sun, and the passengers, who had been merely terrified into a prayerful silence, are now disoriented and screaming. You hear them through the metal door of the flight deck. Others already are dead, though you will only learn this later, because when the plane bangs back into the water that second time, it breaks into halves and the passengers in rows ten through fourteen are slammed headfirst into the fuselage as it collapses or are decapitated by the jagged metal edges. Others are starting to drown that very instant as the lake water—yes, warmer than the Hudson that day in January but still a shock to the system if you are upside down in an airplane and strapped tight by a strong nylon belt into a seat—begins filling the