Falling by T.J. Newman

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

AN INTERMITTENT BEEP SOUNDED FROMone of the many machines that flanked the bed. The acrid smell of sterility filled the room and the chair Jo sat in was uncomfortably firm. Out in the hallway, a doctor was paged to another part of the hospital.

“I didn’t think of them once, Bill,” Jo said quietly.

Bill’s chest barely rose and fell. Gray-and-purple bruises blossomed under the tubes and bandages that covered his unmoving body. His eyes were closed, the right one swollen and black. The mass of gauze taped to his shoulder was the brightest shade of white, a contrast to the stitches underneath that held the bullet wound shut.

“They say,” she continued, reliving the scariest moments of the flight in her mind, “your whole life flashes before your eyes. I’ve read all these stories of near-death experiences. Or people who died and came back. They all say the same thing.” She swallowed. “That before they died, they thought of their family. Their children. Their spouse. That it was all they could think about.”

Jo walked to the window and stared at the blue sky outside. Her back to the bed, tears flowed freely. She didn’t catch them and they slid all the way down her neck. Her voice broke.

“Not even then. My husband, my sons, my parents, my sister, Theo, my friends… none of them. What kind of woman am I? What kind of wife, what kind of mother?”

A machine beeped and another beeped in return. Jo dropped her head. Her body shook with her sobs.

“Thank you,” a faint voice whispered.

Jo turned on her heels.

“Thank you for having that much faith in me.”

An unexpected lightness filled her chest as the guilt she’d carried since the flight lifted. Stepping forward, she took his hand and they both cried.

Jo wiped her cheeks before grabbing a tissue to gently wipe the tears from his. “You were supposed to be asleep.”

Bill’s left cheek raised in a half-smile. “Sorry to disappoint. Where’s Carrie?”

“At the cafeteria with Theo and the kids getting frozen yogurt.”

“I hear he got a promotion.”

Jo smiled proudly. “He most certainly did. He also got a one-month unpaid suspension. But after that, a promotion.”

“Silver lining.”

“One of many,” said Jo with a comic gesture toward the massive bouquet of red and purple flowers on the table across the room.

“Coastal went all out,” said Bill. “I appreciate the four months of paid time off more.”

“You and me both. Did Chief O’Malley sign the card?”

Bill’s face darkened. “Hard to do from prison.”

The door opened slowly with a knock. Big Daddy poked his head inside and, at seeing Bill awake, thrust the door all the way open.

“Hallelujah! He is risen!” he said, raising a bottle of champagne above his head. Kellie followed him into the room carrying a small bouquet of flowers with a brightly colored balloon floating above.

The IV antidotes and topical treatments the crew and the passengers had received from the medics and hospital staff immediately after the flight were nothing short of miraculous. Daddy’s face had almost fully returned to his normal color, and after he removed the oversized sunglasses, Jo could see the whites of his eyes were once again white.

Jo wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Bill smile so broadly. He tried to blink back his tears but failed. Kellie lost her battle immediately, the balloon bobbing with her sobs. Jo laughed and wrapped her up in a hug. Daddy busied himself opening the bottle, his nostrils flaring in his failing attempt to not cry as well.

They were sad. They were confused. They were angry. And Jo knew they had only scratched the surface of processing the trauma they had endured. But they were also joyful. It was a joy to be together, to be in the company of the only other people who knew what the burden they had carried, as a crew, felt like. To be with family who truly understood who you were and what you’d seen.

The cork shot out of the bottle with a pop. Kellie pulled plastic cups from her purse. Daddy poured. Standing at the sides of Bill’s bed, the surviving crew of Coastal Airways Flight 416 raised their cups.

“To battle scars,” Jo said.

They smiled. They drank. They wiped their tears.

Bill sat at a round table with Ben and Sam. Each man had an empty teacup in front of him, and a single teapot sat in the center of the table. One by one, the men poured from the pot, each man pouring for another, the pot producing a different drink each time. Sam received a cup of English breakfast. Ben, coffee with cream and sugar. Bill, coffee as well—black—the way he took it. The men blew on their cups, waiting until the liquid was cool enough to drink. Silently they sat, just looking at each other. Waiting. Finally, they drank. And as they drank the three men slowly broke into smiles. Soon, infectiously, the smiles gave way to laughter. The three men laughed so hard they cried, and it was only when the men pounded the table and threw their heads back in ecstasy that Bill woke up.

Drenched in sweat, his chest heaved. Staring at the ceiling fan for some time, he waited for his pulse to slow, the adrenaline to run its course.

Careful to not wake Carrie, he swung his feet over the side of the bed, the movement releasing a cold pain in his shoulder, the area sensing a phantom wetness as the nerves continued to realign themselves even three months later. He knew it would take a while longer before he could get his medical back. No doctor would sign off on his current state as “fit for duty.” But he’d heal, and he’d get there eventually.

Walking quietly through their rental house, he checked on Scott and Elise, finding them both asleep, unbothered, and, most wonderfully: children. Carrie and he had marveled at their resiliency, especially Scott’s. They knew what had happened would be with Scott for the rest of his life, but so far the effects seemed manageable. Most of the time he still just wanted to play.

Bill clicked on the desk lamp in the downstairs office and jiggled the computer’s mouse. The screen illuminated, displaying the dozen or so open tabs on his browser. Grabbing a book off the stack next to the monitor, he opened to where he’d left off, highlighter and red circles covering the page.

An hour passed. He laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes.

“I’d give anything to come in here and find you messaging another woman.”

Carrie leaned against the doorframe in her oversized T-shirt, white tube socks on her feet.

Bill sat back, the office chair reclining. “Worse odds of that happening than what actually did.”

Carrie smiled.

“The teapot again?”

Bill nodded.

Crossing the room, she climbed into his lap, her head resting on his shoulder as he rocked them both. She looked at the notebooks full of scribbles, the piles of books with Post-it notes sticking out of the top. She pointed at one of them.

“Have you gotten to the part where she talks about what Saddam Hussein did?”

Bill ran a hand through his hair with a sigh, recalling the atrocities the book described. One hundred and eighty thousand killed with the same poison gas as used on the plane. Nearly every village in that area of Kurdistan had been destroyed. “And how President Reagan did nothing.”

Carrie stared at the cover of the book. “But neither did we. I didn’t even know it happened until I read it. One hundred and eighty thousand people, Bill.” She shook her head. “I think about what we’re going through. How hard it is to deal with the pain, the anger. How hard it is to deal with the trauma. But think about it: every person on that plane walked off alive.”

Bill looked to the pair of silver wings that sat on the desk next to the books, the name BEN MIRO engraved with block letters under the Coastal logo.

“Not everyone,” he said.

Carrie wrapped her arms around his neck. Her warm breath was moist on his skin.

“I wish he was still here,” Bill said.

“I know.”

“I feel like I’m trying to fix something I don’t know how to fix.”

Carrie sat up, laughing. Bill watched her, a smile spreading across his face. “What’s so funny?”

She placed a hand on his cheek. “Bill. You grew up in rural Illinois and now you live in Los Angeles and you’re lactose intolerant and you drive your car through a fancy car wash every other Saturday and you’re telling me you think you are going to come up with the answer for how to fix this?” She motioned to the stack of research.

Bill reminded her of his promise to Ben.

“You didn’t promise him you’d fix it. He would’ve laughed in your face. You promised him you’d do everything you could to help. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We’re going to keep learning and keep listening and when we think we know enough—which we won’t—we’re going to look for the people who do know how to fix it. And we’ll help them in whatever way we can.”

Bill looked at her in awe. She was right. This articulate, sensitive, intuitive goddess he was lucky enough to have as his compass in life. He was not sure he deserved her.

“Do you hate them?” he asked.

Her smile faded and her eyes went somewhere else momentarily. Bill thought of the night after he’d gotten home from the hospital when they’d lain in bed together and he’d held her as she wept while telling him what it had been like for her and the kids. The image of Sam wiping his son’s nose haunted him. The way Carrie had rolled up the terrorist’s sleeves did too.

“I hate what they did,” she said, after some consideration. “But I don’t hate them. Do you?”

Bill looked at the wings.

“I haven’t decided,” he said.

Taking her hand, he gently kissed the tips of her fingers one by one before placing his lips into her palm, his faced covered. He didn’t move for a long time. Finally he removed her hand and said, “I’m sorry, Carrie.”

She frowned. “For what?”

“For being me. If I hadn’t picked up the trip. If I’d stayed home—”

She placed the tips of her fingers over his mouth.

“I knew exactly what I was getting when I chose a life with you. And it was the best decision I ever made.”

His face crumpled in shame. “How can you say that now?”

She smiled. “I say that especially now.”

Nestling deeper into his body, she pulled her legs up against her chest, a position he saw Scott often take in Carrie’s lap. Bill rocked her in the same way she rocked the boy.

“Do you think we’ll ever be okay?” he said.

She burrowed into his chest as he tightened his arms around her. “We already are.”