Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“I’m in bed. Where am I turning around to?”

She laughed. “Cover your eyes, then. Okay, now you can look.”

She knew him well enough to realize that he half-expected lingerie, some erotic costume, but instead Cadence emerged clad in black ski pants, a down parka in a brilliant silver nylon, her head topped with a knit hat that peaked in a giant felt pom-pom of a bright tomato red.

“Very nice,” Richard said. “I had a hat like that as a kid. Mine had a Washington Redskins patch on the forehead. What exactly are we doing?”

“Get your coat,” Cadence said. “We’re going to remind you how to be a kid.”

IN A hotel located between terminals at the DFW airport, six-year-old Gabriel and his temporary guardian, Maura Valle, tried to make the best of it. She’d lied to the boy at least three times; they were going to meet his mother’s plane, she would be late, she would be home tomorrow. She couldn’t imagine lifting the psychic weight that it would take to tell him the truth. The evening felt driven entirely by her guilt. She let him order dinner from room service; she’d worry about who was paying tomorrow, and if it came out of her pocket, it would be the price she had to pay for her lack of courage and her well-intentioned lies.

While Maura made phone calls to various executives at Panorama Airlines, establishing that there was indeed a responsible party (the boy’s uncle) and that he would be arriving in the morning, Gabriel flipped through the channels, at least twice skipping beyond footage of his mother’s crash. Maura took the remote, brought up some animated film from the pay-per-view movies; Gabriel collapsed into one of the two queen-size beds and pronounced his judgment: “That’s kid stuff.”

She picked up the phone and dialed the number that had been forwarded to her by one of the angel teams, the home number for the boy’s uncle. Three hours’ worth of phone calls in fifteen-minute intervals, and she’d gotten the same recording each time: “You have reached the voice mailbox for Richard MacMurray. If you are calling about an on-camera appearance, please leave a number that is available after hours, and I will return the call as soon as possible.”

She hadn’t left a message. She would call, and keep calling, until he answered. Some things should be said only from one human being to another.

She knew too that feeling was hypocritical. She couldn’t find a way to say it to the boy. Maybe it would be easier to explain in the morning, the both of them well rested. Easier still would be to wait until the boy’s uncle arrived, but that seemed callous. She knew she’d already made mistakes here, enough that she felt frozen, unable to act.

Maura managed to suggest that he brush his teeth, then put on the pajamas that she’d salvaged from the mess in Mike’s guest room.

“It’s time to get ready for bed,” she gently reminded him. Gabriel had a certain deferential quality, hadn’t once questioned her authority or why someone who was effectively a stranger had shuffled him off to a nice hotel. She’d blown off his questions at Mike’s house, and he’d been mostly silent during the forty-minute drive to the airport. After she’d decided to stop lying to the boy, all she’d volunteered was that his uncle was coming to visit. She was still working out how to broach the subject. She’d read reams of stuff, the best practical advice on grief, on talking about death with children, and now the entirety of it ran together in her head, a well-meaning muddle. She’d seen other court-appointed guardians struggle with this stuff in the past; that was to be expected. The heartbreaking part usually came later, some remark that showed how the child did not understand the permanence of what had happened. An orphan girl she’d chaperoned for a week kept repeating that her father had gone to sleep and would be up soon; Maura kept thinking how so many of us approached any conversation about death solely with euphemisms, trying to sneak up on the subject. The doctors were the worst. Ever since she’d worked in child protective services, she’d never known a doctor to use the words dead, death, dying. They would walk out of the operating theater still draped in their sterile smock, saying, “We tried heroic measures.” But to have a hero, you had to have a victory.

She did not know for certain how long she’d been in that reverie, only that Gabriel had returned from the bathroom and was standing in front of the television, his toothbrush in his hand, and had changed the channel to FBN and its continuous live coverage. A plane en route to Dallas from Salt Lake City, which earlier this afternoon crashed on approach. There were only so many ways you could say the basic facts. It looked to Maura as if each of the repeated details drew the child a step closer to the screen. The part that Maura would always remember, even more than the sight of the boy running across the terminal to his uncle the following morning, was his hand, in this moment; it dropped from his mouth to his waist, then slowly to its full extension, down, and the toothbrush tumbled out of his grip onto the hotel room’s carpeted floor.

IT IS a kind of delicious cheating to flip ahead, to know how everything turns out; to read the last page is to learn exactly how inevitable the events are in a particular story. But the idea of an ending as inevitable is less than modern. It is quaint and disquieting in all the most pejorative ways. Said another way, the neat ending is directly contrary to the massive disorder of life.

Bob Denovo, Heavy Metal Bob, walked out of the Salt Lake City airport on New Year’s Day and never returned, not even for his final paycheck. Without bothering to gather the few items in his almost-barren apartment, he withdrew what little he had from the bank and drove through the high desert into Wyoming and kept heading north. He entered Manitoba on the afternoon of January 3. Today he works illegally as a short-order cook at a Greek diner in Winnipeg, where the owners pay him in cash under the table.

Funeral services for Captain Grady Williston, fifty-five, of Westlake, Texas, were held on January 7; federal investigators would keep his remains embargoed for forensic investigation for several months’ time, which meant that the centerpiece of his viewing was an empty casket. At the Elder Brothers Mortuary—whose promotional materials include a quarter-page Yellow Pages advertisement with the disclaimer not to be confused with the original Elder Brothers Mortuary —the funeral director provided the casket as a prop for the material benefit of the widow and the dead pilot’s friends and colleagues. Two other captains made repeated trips out of the viewing, to the lobby, to discreetly take telephone calls placing them in charge of the flights scheduled for Captain Williston for the next fourteen days.

Mike Renfro ordered his office closed for the foreseeable future, and then, because he was first and foremost an insurance man, realized that the progression of loss that created the need for insurance would not stop just to make accommodations for his grief, so he rescinded the order. Closing the office was like trying to fight the very notion of what it meant to be human.

He arrived home after his overnight drive to Dallas, expecting to find Gabriel and Sarah; instead, a cleaning lady he did not know was on her hands and knees in the kitchen, and Gabriel was on his way to the airport to be reunited with his uncle. He woke Sarah with an early-morning call, wherein she provided the name of a child advocate and a number for someone at the family court. Mike thought of getting back into the car and driving to the airport, but what would he do once he got there? His duty was to Mary Beth, and by extension that meant some obligations to her son. But Gabriel wasn’t his son, a point that even a six-year-old could make with a surgeon’s precision. Mike could see no way to impose himself into Gabriel’s life that didn’t require lawyers and hearings and social workers, hours of paperwork, sworn depositions. Perhaps his duties had ended with the crash; he had spent his adult life selling people the idea of security, and that was the word that came to mind when he understood what it was that he could do for the boy. He could provide security. Instead of a harried trip to the airport, he decided he could take action. He busied himself with the details of creating a tuition fund for Gabriel, filling out the paperwork, making sure he had the liquidity to start it with a large cash contribution.