Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

We are working in concert with local, state, and federal authorities. Our primary purpose in these difficult hours is to assist the family members of the passengers and crew of Flight 503 in any reasonable way.

She had a script but could not say the words. Lemko whispered at her again, “The card.” This was how mistakes were made, how cops who’d said the Miranda warnings a few thousand times ended up watching a criminal skate because they didn’t feel like reading what was on the card. She tried to chase the irrelevant details from her mind but instead kept thinking of a movie in which the cop kept his Miranda card inside his hat.

“On behalf of the chairman of Panorama Airlines, Ellison Gem—” she began, and Lemko showed her a palm.

“You’re forgetting the confirmation,” he said, pulling a piece of paper from inside his jacket pocket. He still sounded out of breath.

“Right. Forgive me.” She took and unfolded the paper and read from it instead. “You are Richard Llewellyn MacMurray, brother of Mary Elizabeth MacMurray Blumenthal, age forty-seven, lately a resident of Garland, Texas?” Nessen was aware that she had just identified the deceased in the exact manner of newspapers and anchormen.

Richard nodded.

“I’m sorry, sir, but our procedure requires that you verbally answer the question. She is your sister?”

Richard said, “Yes. My sister. Where are you going with all this? I’m going to need you to spell it out.”

Nessen moved back to the card and read from it. “On behalf of the chairman of Panorama Airlines, Ellison Gem, and our entire family of employees, we wish to offer our sincere condolences. Your sister, Mary Elizabeth, was a passenger on board Flight 503.”

Richard stood and smoothed his shirt and looked at Carol Nessen, held her gaze until she broke eye contact and lowered her head. He looked so familiar to her, but she still couldn’t place it. He went to step past her, but the police sergeant—who until this moment had busied himself with inspecting the books and magazines around the apartment as if conducting a forensic examination—was in his way, and they both stepped in the same direction, as if dancing.

The sergeant said, “Sorry.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Richard mumbled, then headed out the door to the balcony.

Nessen began gathering up the juice glasses, ate the last couple of cashews. She fidgeted when she was nervous, Lemko knew that. In a minute, she’d start fluffing pillows and dusting blinds.

“Carol. Stop,” he said.

She took the pile of newspapers at the edge of the couch and began ordering them all in the same direction. “I just can’t get over the feeling that I know this guy from somewhere.”

The sergeant said, “You do. Television.”

GABRIEL HEARD everything, every mention of the words weird and strange. They were the words most familiar to him because he heard them at school, the daily mantra of his tormentors. He accepted them as an accurate definition of his personality.

On his fifth birthday, when his mother asked what he thought he might want to be when he grew up, he knew enough to understand that she expected him to say something that would please her, astronaut or doctor or lawyer or even insurance man (those were really the only jobs he’d heard of). But he could not resist the truth, its awkward blurtings, and said, Lonely. When she questioned him, he repeated himself— I will always be lonely —because even then he equated lonely with strange. As an adult, he would remember those words not as a self-fulfilling prophecy but as deft insight. He was lonely on his fifth birthday, and so still he was lonely now, playing on the floor in the solitary games of his imagination.

Weird and strange. He heard those words being whispered by the partygoers, and it made him want to be strange. He wanted to astound them with his acts of defiance, his weirdness.

When his mother returned, he was going to propose a remedy, a manner in which he could pretend to be more like the other kids. He needed a sidekick. A dog, maybe, but more likely a brother. He’d have to look into this, see if it was possible somehow to have his mother find him such a protector. For now, what he needed was a friend. But there were some issues that needed to be addressed. First, there was the fact that no kids lived around him. His mother’s apartment complex was filled with well-meaning young professionals who liked mixed drinks by the pool and loud music and spent most of the summer outside grilling burgers at one of the four built-in community grills; from them Gabriel had learned another word: mascot. He was the office mascot, too.

He was smart enough to know that the women of the Mike Renfro Agency who surrounded him with minor affections did so because they felt sorry for him. He did not know enough yet of the larger world to understand why, but he knew he was treated differently, that his concerns were addressed with the utmost seriousness, that conversations in his presence frequently stopped or devolved into whispers. He suffered the truest indignities of being an only child: School became a safari into the unknown wilds of torment; an amusement park was a place where he was forced to sit next to strangers on rides that shook him until he was terrified. He feared showing his classmates the width and breadth of what he knew, how he could look around the room and see how they were going to end up. It wasn’t clairvoyance or any particular gift other than being observant; he spent hours lost in books and in the elaborate fantasias of his mind. His stuffed animals were chattering misfits. He was trailed by a cadre of imaginary friends. Herewith, his own prayers on New Year’s Day were not to be left alone, never again to be consigned to the care of the women from Mr. Mike’s office, who passed him around that afternoon enough that he embarrassed them all when he asked, “What’s a hot potato?”—another phrase he’d learned by observation and repetition. He wanted the camaraderie of team sports, the bonding and instruction that came with it. He prayed again for a sibling, someone with whom he could create the private language of brothers, someone to whom he could teach the intricacies of Legos and video games, someone he could volunteer to play with so that his mother would not have to leave either of them alone with these people. All of these things—he knew from six years’ experience watching television—required a father.

THIS, THEN, is a portrait of Richard’s grief.

Grief is the American flag, folded in tricorner pattern and stowed in a Plexiglas case, an oft-overlooked relic that sat on the corner of a desk cluttered with newspapers, magazine clippings, small electronic devices and their associated chargers. Grief is the oil stains on the heavily ribbed grosgrain of military medals, fingered as talismans by the surviving members of a dead man’s family.

You never wanted grief to be like this, dull and ordinary, delivered to your front door like the Washington Post.

Grief, too, meant these strangers in his living room.

Grief is the phrase that he’d overheard the woman use to describe him: only known living relative.

Richard did not know what to call the people from the airline, the ones who came to tell him that his sister was dead. And what the hell was a cop doing there, standing in the kitchen, drinking his juice and talking on his telephone? He couldn’t even remember who poured the juice. Richard walked straight past him and out onto the balcony; he’d seen in that woman the flash of recognition that usually meant the person knew, but could not place, his face.