Why couldn’t she remember losing him? She had him and then he was gone and she couldn’t remember. Why?
She was uneasy about herself and her actions. She shouldn’t have allowed them to carry her off. She shouldn’t have left the airport.
Carla braced her elbows against the stretcher and pushed up.
The medic said, “Whoa,” and gently stopped her progress with a hand, coaxing her to lie down.
“I can’t go to the hospital without my son. I got to go back and help them find him.”
“Everybody’s out of the plane. They’re taking everybody to the hospital, okay? You’ll see him there.”
He was lying. He didn’t know a thing about Bubble.
She was nauseated suddenly, so powerfully that she threw up all over the blankets without giving a thought to how disgusting she was being.
“I’m sick,” she told them after it was out.
“Jesus,” one of them muttered.
She fell back and watched the blue sky while they cleaned her up.
Max accepted a drink of orange juice from a Red Cross volunteer and watched the mother and baby enjoy their reunion. He moved away from them, however, in order not to overhear whether they had been traveling with the father. He didn’t want to learn that she had been widowed.
He caught sight of the blond mother standing beside a fireman, intent on the people and bodies they brought out of the wreckage.
A man wearing a uniform and a name badge and carrying a clipboard with what Max presumed to be the DC-10’s passenger manifest stopped at his elbow. “Were you on the plane?” he asked breathlessly, pen ready to check him off.
Max disliked this fellow. Although the airline official was in his twenties, his hair had thinned, his belly had grown, and he had the nervous sweaty manner of a middle-aged bureaucrat. Max crumpled the half-sized paper cup and shook his head no.
The airline man frowned at this response and hustled over to the blond mother. She answered him, her mouth moving angrily. She gestured at the plane, pointing.
Where had she been sitting? Max tried to find which of the three sections of destroyed plane had been hers. It was the first part. A bite had been taken out of the right side of that piece. It was charred and disintegrated, scarring the cornfield. Max turned away.
I’m alive, he thought without shame. He looked at the glass walls of the terminal. A gang of people had stayed indoors to watch. He walked toward them.
His face was very hot. Nobody stopped him from entering the terminal. He didn’t know what airport this was, although it was obviously somewhere between New York and Los Angeles. He found a water fountain just inside the building’s doors. A reporter and a cameraman came through jangling equipment and went out onto the runway while he splashed himself with cold water.
Jeff is dead.
That was a complicated thought and he had no desire to consider its implications.
He walked away from what had everybody else’s attention, making a reverse commute into the heart of the building. The baggage carousels were bare and still. The car rental counters were deserted. The ticketing terminals flashed green at nobody.
He found a newspaper vending machine. The local paper inside told him he was in Canton, Ohio. If he remembered correctly then he was at the home of the Football Hall of Fame. That seemed funny.
“My big chance,” he said aloud.
Max went out the airport building entrance. He saw a few empty cabs. Farther along, standing at the edge of a chain-link fence, were a number of men who might be drivers. They were watching the wreck and the rescuers. A bench against the wall invited Max to sit, and he was tired enough to accept, but he wanted to keep going, to move away from the crash and its cover-up, the steady accumulation of details all designed (he knew this now, understood the process so much better) to reassure the rest of humanity that it couldn’t happen to them.
He walked up to the men and asked if they were taxi drivers.
Two said yes, one a haggard young man with long unkept hair, the other a fat elderly man wearing an electric-green short-sleeved shirt.
“Is there a good hotel nearby?”
“Sheraton’s the best,” said the young man.
“Give me a ride there?”
The young man looked at the scene: at the trucks, still spewing liquid; at the smoking slices of plane; and farther back, at the hangar where a semicircle of survivors limped into the arms of volunteers or peered back in shock or wept beside the ambulances and cars. “Think I should stick around,” he said, leaning his elbows into the fence.
Max noticed that a man on the other side of the driver was recording the scene with a home video camera.
“I’ll take you,” the fat man said.
Max followed the shimmering green shirt to a white station wagon.
“No bags?” the old man asked Max before getting in.
The interior had been cooked by the sun. Its upholstery smelled of manure. “Sheraton?” the driver asked.
Max nodded. He felt guilty, as if he were fleeing a crime.
With tantalizing slowness and grace the old man drove around the circle that led them out of the airport. He had to dodge a number of cars stopped at random, presumably abandoned by rescuers in too big a rush to park properly. “Were you in that crash?” he asked as they straightened out and exited onto a regular road.
Max denied it with a vigorous shake of his head. “Thank God,” he added.
A young man in a blue hospital gown looked at Carla’s leg and at her left hand and flashed a penlight into her eyes. “She’s okay,” he said in a clipped dismissive voice, almost a rebuke. He hurried away, followed by an attentive nurse.
Because of him Carla noticed for the first time that the back of her hand had an inflamed red stripe across it. She remembered the burning sensation she had felt during the crash. Other sensations and images came fast: Bubble wedged in her lap, his hair brushing against her chin; the spinning people and seats, the roaring tigers, and the horrible shock of her empty arms.
“Help me up!” she called. She tried to will her legs over the edge of me gurney. The broken one refused her order.
She looked around. She was in a hallway. Blue letters pasted on a glass panel told her she was outside the emergency room. Through the window she saw a middle-aged man’s chest split open like a chicken on the butcher’s counter, his mouth overwhelmed by tape and a white funnel. The sight was fleeting — they drew a curtain around him. Everywhere there were people and hurried activity.
The people here are really sick, Carla. So lie down and shut up. You’re all right.
“Oh God,” she said sadly. A state trooper glanced over at her. He stood with his arms folded facing the entrance’s double doors, as if expecting wrongdoers to make a charge. She waved to him. He frowned. And then he came over. He made noise when he walked. His belt was loaded with things. “You seen a two-year-old boy with black hair?” she asked.
“They took the kids to Pediatric Emergency,” he said, still stern, as if she were at fault for not knowing they would. “Looking for your son?”
His accent squeezed the sounds into a whine. She had to repeat his sentence to herself before she understood it. “Yeah,” she drawled. Her tongue was thick and slow. Must be the shot. “What did they give me?” she asked. When the cop didn’t understand her question Carla mimicked an injection with her thumb and fingers.
“Don’t know. Could be morphine. I’ll ask somebody about your boy.”
He moved off behind her. She attempted to turn herself in order to watch where he went. Her eyes were surprised by the glare of the fluorescent panels on the ceiling. She blinked, her elbows slipped, and she fell back with a thud.