The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [7]
Again, however, this is an image that only registers in your mind later, when you are on a boat. One of those ferryboats. Perhaps the one that had inadvertently finished up what the geese had started, destroying your aircraft once and for all. Mostly what you are seeing as you kick through the agitated ripples and waves, the water in your mouth at once earthy and bitter with jet fuel, are the two halves of your plane starting to disappear, and how the starboard wing is gone. Just gone. Is it already wafting its way in slow motion to the bottom of the lake, alongside all of those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cannons and warships and Abenaki canoes? Apparently. You are aware of your few surviving passengers, one in an uninflated life jacket, swimming or dog-paddling toward the boats, which now seem to be everywhere. But not all of the survivors are trying to work their way through the water made choppy by all those boats and a plane that doesn’t belong. There is a woman, perhaps thirty-five, looking around madly and crying out someone’s name as she treads water. It is a girl’s name. Ashley. And you have a sick sense that she is crying out the name of the child you happened to notice board the aircraft with a Dora the Explorer backpack. She had blond spit curls and was seven or eight years old. Perhaps two years younger than your own little girls. Your and your wife’s twins. She had peered into the flight deck and smiled at you, and so you had smiled back. There is a man whom you pegged as your age, somewhere around forty, who keeps coming up for air and then diving back under the water, and finally starts swimming back toward the slowly disappearing rear half of the jet. And so you swim that way, too, once your first officer has been lifted from your arms, to see if there are other survivors you can pull from the fuselage, swimming past and between the floating bodies of people in short-sleeved sport shirts and summer-weight business jackets. But you don’t get far because out of nowhere two strong-armed college boys appear in the water beside you and are—as if they are lifeguards—pulling you away from the wreckage of the plane. Your plane.
You try to resist them, to explain to them who you are, but you haven’t the strength and your words are lost in the sobs and wails and the idling engines of the ferries and a Coast Guard motorboat that now has arrived on the scene. Besides, they know. They know precisely who you are. You’re wearing your uniform, all but the jacket and the cap. So, you allow yourself to be brought to that ferryboat and hoisted aboard. And there you stand in silence, suddenly aware of the great gash along your forehead (all that blood you had presumed was simply water) and how there is something wrong with one of your ankles and how your ribs hurt like hell. You stand there, most of your weight on your good ankle, wrapped in a blanket you’re not sure you need, and watch the rear half of the plane, still belly up, recede once and for all beneath the surface of the lake.
It would be the captain’s wife, a lawyer two years younger than the captain who specialized in estate planning and did the heavy lifting when it came to raising their twin girls, who would see the advantages of finding a house that offered both relative seclusion and vistas that might feed her husband’s battered soul. Emily Linton was two years shy of forty when Flight 1611 flipped onto its back like a killer whale at a SeaWorld performance. Her husband was not deemed responsible for the tragedy (that onus would be hung round the remains of the cooked birds), but neither was he Sully Sullenberger. The media’s interest in him would wane once it was clear that he hadn’t made an egregious mistake but neither had he successfully ditched a commercial jet on the water. And their lack of attention was precisely what he desired as he mourned the dead in the lake