Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Action required. He said the words to himself. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do now. The mileage charts in the atlas told him it was almost 1,300 miles to his house in Dallas. At some point he’d have to stop again and call Sarah Hensley and make arrangements for her to stay another night. He’d be home by lunchtime tomorrow, sooner than he would if he waited for the next available flight, and he could be the one to take Gabriel onto his lap and tell it to him, man to man. He owed Mary Beth that much.

IT HAD been fourteen years since Panorama’s last crash, when an L1011 had failed to achieve adequate lift on takeoff, slid off the runway at Denver’s old Stapleton Airport. Thirty-seven dead and twenty-three injured, ten with life-altering burns. In the language of the reports, a minor incident, with fatalities. A contretemps between pilot, copilot, and head flight attendant captured on the cockpit voice recorder led to new rules promulgated in the Code of Federal Regulations requiring a sterile cockpit, that all conversations be directly related to the operation of the aircraft; the pilot’s inquiry, “Anybody get laid last night?” would become as famous in the industry as the last words recorded on the flight deck of Panorama 503, First Officer Bill Zimmer’s almost involuntary Oh, shit.

The decade-plus gap between the two incidents meant that of all the teams assigned to the task of in-person notifications, only the Washington DC–area Adam and Eve Team was staffed with someone who’d done this before. That was Carol Nessen, senior vice president of corporate communications, chosen specifically because the day-to-day rigors of her normal job required a certain discretion. She was also the only one who had volunteered to work this crash; this was the kind of duty that left its mark, and the few people who had been on Adam and Eve Teams after Denver and were still with the airline stayed silent in the manner of combat veterans who no longer wanted to talk about the shit they’d seen.

Nessen drafted an attorney named Brad Lemko as her teammate. He was one of the airline’s fourteen associate general counsels. Tall, well built, and tan, he flew Warthogs in the naval reserve and kept himself in flying trim. The last time he’d been in the simulator he’d test-crashed any number of planes, gaming the possible outcomes: a slide off the runway at Logan into the tea-black muck of Boston Harbor, hitting hard and short at Reagan National, getting buffeted by tropical crosswinds approaching no land 30 (a pilot’s nickname for runway 30R) at Miami International. Like most pilots, he gave off an aura of competent authority, one that the teams depended on in the event of a particularly difficult notification.

Nessen and Lemko had traveled together often enough on unrelated matters to have a rhythm, as if they were long-partnered cops. But those trips usually involved a lawsuit, human resource issues; they flew in, checked into a hotel, took a deposition in the morning, had lunch, reviewed the preposterous and contradictory facts during their flight back to Dallas headquarters. On their travels, Lemko always picked up the rental car, and he always drove, and at the airport, Nessen always asked, What kind of car? Lemko, while kicking the tires and watching the rental attendant note the scratches and dings and cigarette burns, always managed to mumble, This is not your father’s Oldsmobile, whether it was a Ford Taurus or a Toyota Camry or any of the other indistinguishable sedans they rented.

As they rode from Reagan National, skirting the river and passing the landscape of monuments, Carol felt they were driving right onto the back of the ten-dollar bill.

The first contact lived in a small saltbox colonial just over the Key Bridge, in one of Northern Virginia’s tonier suburbs. The Adam and Eve Team knew her husband had been seated near the back of the plane; he’d be among the most easily identifiable victims. The contact answered the door wearing a bathrobe over a red cashmere sweater, and from the sight of the tissues tucked into her sleeve cuff, Nessen assumed that she already knew.

“This is about Clem, isn’t it?”

Nessen nodded, kept the speaking to a minimum, standard procedure. She asked the contact if she was related to a Clement Benjamin, employed by the United States Department of Labor.

The woman answered, “I’m his wife. Diana.” She directed them to sit, a conciliatory gesture. Nessen remembered from her training that this was an early sign; there would be no trouble here.

The wife kept repeating, “I’m just not sure what you people are doing here.”

The training dictated letting the contact talk. “I was watching the news,” she said. She hadn’t realized her husband’s flight connected through Dallas, she explained, even though every flight seemed to connect through Dallas or Atlanta these days. At least, she hadn’t realized it until she saw his sweater, lime green, the color of sherbet and toddler’s toys; the sweater had been a gift from their daughter a couple of Christmases back. “I told him that he should never wear it. Not outside the house. That’s what a good wife does, right?”

Mrs. Benjamin laughed, a quick snort, then used her palm to wipe the underside of her nose. “He looked like a fucking Popsicle,” she said between sniffles. Nessen realized that the daughter she’d been thinking of as an adult was probably something like ten.

Mrs. Benjamin said, “I didn’t even know he was on that plane,” until she saw the news, the hint of green sleeve awash in a charred field. She’d hoped against hope that her husband would be the exception, the miracle of Flight 503, but she’d already gotten confirmation from an overzealous reporter who had called to confirm details for the obituary. “A wife knows these things in her heart,” she said, but only because she’d seen the broadcast footage of her husband’s sweater and, within it, his lifeless arm.

She said wife, and Nessen thought contact, and Lemko thought widow.

A widow she was, beautiful and wronged; Lemko secretly hoped she would get angry and stay that way, break things and get violent and pound on his chest with closed fists. Trying to imagine himself in this situation, indeed trying on any cloak of empathy, felt impossible. What did he know about the subworld of death? He was a bachelor; his parents were not only alive but healthy, even in their mideighties. His father played tennis every morning, and his mother swam in the cold chop off Narragansett Beach every afternoon, weather permitting. He’d be the one who died with no one to remember him.

Lemko’s briefcase contained a heavily annotated paperback of Kübler-Ross, part of the short course in required reading for each Adam and Eve Team, and here was a woman whose reactions were textbook. Lemko guessed Mrs. Benjamin to be thirty-four, thirty-six tops, and among the contingencies of her new life as a widow would be a settlement check from the airline and a settlement check from a credit card company (the airline’s ticket audit noted that the contact’s husband had purchased travel insurance, that frivolous lottery ticket). Perhaps the $750,000 of accidental-death-and-dismemberment coverage could push her past stage one of the grief cycle, denial.

She kept repeating “No, no, no,” and with each sob her resolve seemed to soften, until each breathy no seemed affixed with a question mark at its end, followed by a series of more assertive no s, exclamations that Lemko’s legal mind appreciated; there was something beautiful about the process, denial followed by its almost imperceptible transmogrification into fury, the anger of conspiracies and incompetencies that almost all litigation, at its heart, was built upon.