by Noah Hawley
O’Brien listened to everything Gus said, then called in the helicopter.
Now, in the kitchen, Agent O’Brien makes a show of taking a small notebook out of his pocket. He removes a pen, unscrews the cap, lays it next to the pad. Gus can feel Scott’s eyes on him, questioning, but he keeps his focus on O’Brien, as if to signal to Scott—this is where you should be looking now.
They have agreed not to discuss the case on the phone, not to put anything in writing until they find out how O’Brien’s memo was leaked. From now on, all conversations will take place in person. It is the paradox of modern technology. The tools we use can be used against us.
“As you know,” says O’Brien, “we found the plane. And Mrs. Dunleavy, I’m afraid I have to tell you that, yes, we have officially recovered the bodies of your sister, her husband, and your niece.”
Eleanor nods. She feels like a bone that has been left to bleach in the sun. She thinks about the boy, in the living room watching TV. Her boy. And what she will say to him, or should say to him. She thinks about Doug’s last words this morning.
This isn’t over.
“Mr. Burroughs,” says O’Brien, turning to Scott, “you need to tell me everything you remember about the flight.”
“Why?”
“Because I told you to.”
“Scott,” says Gus.
“No,” O’Brien snaps. “We’re done holding this guy’s hand.”
He turns to Scott.
“Why was the pilot outside the cockpit during the flight?”
Scott shakes his head.
“I don’t remember that.”
“You said you heard banging before the plane crashed. We asked if you thought it was mechanical. You said you didn’t think so. What do you think it was?”
Scott looks at him, thinking.
“I don’t know. The plane pitched. I hit my head. It’s—they’re not memories really.”
O’Brien studies him.
“There are six bullet holes in the cockpit door.”
“What?” says Eleanor, her face draining of blood.
The words push Scott back in his chair. Bullet holes? What are they saying?
“Did you ever see a gun?” O’Brien asks Scott.
“No.”
“Do you remember the Batemans’ body man? Gil Baruch?”
“The big guy by the door. He didn’t—I don’t—”
Scott loses his words, mind racing.
“You never saw him pull a gun?” O’Brien asks.
Scott racks his brain. Somebody shot up the cockpit door. He tries to make sense of that. The plane pitched. People screamed and somebody shot up the door. The plane was going down. The captain was outside the cockpit. Somebody shot up the door trying to get in.
Or was the gun pulled first and the pilot—no, the copilot—put the plane into a dive to—what? Throw him off balance? Either way, they’re saying this wasn’t mechanical error, or human error. It was something worse.
There is a visceral twist of nausea in Scott’s guts, as if it’s only hitting him now how close he came to death. And then a wave of light-headedness as the next thought strikes him. If this wasn’t an accident, then it means someone tried to kill him. That instead of an act of fate, he and the boy were victims of an attack.
“I got on the plane,” he says, “and took a seat. She brought me some wine. Emma. I don’t—I said, No, thank you, asked for some water. Sarah—the banker’s wife—was talking in my ear about taking her daughter to the Whitney Biennial. The game was on TV. Baseball. And the men—David and the banker—they were watching, cheering. My bag was in my lap. She wanted to take it—the flight attendant—but I held on to it, and as we taxied I started—I started going through it. I don’t know why. Something to do. Nerves.”
“What made you nervous?” asks O’Brien.
Scott thinks about it.
“It was a big trip for me. And the plane—having to run for the plane—I was discombobulated—a little. It all seems meaningless now, how much it mattered. Meetings with art reps, gallery visits. I had all the slides in my bag, and—after the run—I wanted to make sure I still had them. For no reason.”
He looks at his hands.
“I was in the window seat, looking out at the wing. Everything was foggy, and then suddenly the fog cleared. Or we rose above it, I guess is what happened. And it was just night. And I looked over at Maggie, and she smiled. Rachel was in the seat behind her, listening to music, and the boy was asleep with a blanket over him. And I don’t know why, but I thought she might like a drawing, Maggie, so I took out my pad and started sketching the girl. Nine years old, headphones on, looking out the window.”
He remembers the look on the girl’s face, a child lost in thought, but something in her eyes—a sadness—hinting at the woman she would one day become, and how she had come to the barn that day with her mother to look at Scott’s work, a growing girl all legs and hair.
“We hit a couple of bumps going up,” he says. “Enough to shake the glasses, but it was pretty smooth, otherwise, and nobody seemed worried. The security man sat in the front with the flight attendant for takeoff on the—what do you—jump seat, but he was up as soon as the seat belt sign was off.”
“Doing?”
“Nothing, standing.”
“No drama?”
“No drama.”
“And you were drawing.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
Scott shakes his head. He remembers chasing his pencil across the floor, but not what happened before. The lie of an airplane is that the floor is always level, the straight angles of the plane tricking your mind into thinking you’re sitting or standing at a ninety-degree angle to the world, even when the plane is on its side. But then you look out the window, and find yourself staring at the ground.
The plane banked. The pencil fell. He unbuckled his seat belt to chase it, and it rolled across the floor, like a ball going downhill. And then he was sliding, and his head hit something.
Scott looks at Gus.
“I don’t know.”
Gus looks at O’Brien.
“I have a question,” Gus says. “Not about the crash. About your work.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s the woman?”
Scott looks at him.
“The woman?”
“In all the paintings—I noticed—there’s always a woman, and it’s always—from what I can see—the same woman. Who is she?”
Scott exhales. He looks at Eleanor. She is watching him. What must she think? Days ago her life was a straight line. Now all she has are burdens.
“I had a sister,” says Scott. “She drowned when I was—she was sixteen. Night swimming in Lake Michigan with some—kids. Just—dumb kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Scott wishes there was something profound he could say about it, but there isn’t.
* * *
Later, after the boy is asleep, Scott calls Gus from the kitchen.
“Was that okay today?” he asks.
“It was helpful, thank you.”
“Helpful how?” Scott wants to know.
“Details. Who sat where. What people were doing.”
Scott sits at the table. There was a moment, after the helicopter departed and Eleanor and Scott were left alone, when both of them seemed to realize that they were strangers, that the illusion of the last twenty-four hours—the idea that the house was a bubble they could hide in—had dissolved. She was a married woman, and he was—what? The man who rescued her nephew. What did they really know about each other? How long was he staying? Did she even want him to? Did he?
An awkwardness arose between them then, and when Eleanor started cooking, Scott told her he wasn’t hungry. He needed a walk to clear his head.
He stayed out until after dark, wandering back to the river and watching the water turn from blue to black as the sun set, and the moon came out.
> He was farther than he’d ever been from the man he thought he was.
“Well,” Gus tells him over the phone, “nobody knows this yet, but the flight recorder’s damaged. Not destroyed, but it’s gonna take work to get to the data. I’ve got a team of six guys in there working now, and the governors of two states are calling every five minutes for updates.”
“I can’t help you with that. I can barely open a tube of paint.”
“No. I’m just—I’m telling you because you deserve to know. Everybody else can go to hell.”
“I’ll tell Eleanor.”
“How’s the boy?”
“He’s not—talking, really, but he seems to like that I’m here. So maybe that’s therapeutic. Eleanor’s really—strong.”
“And the husband?”
“He left this morning with luggage.”
A long pause.
“I don’t have to tell you how that’s going to look,” says Gus.
Scott nods.
“Since when does how a thing looks matter more than what it is?” he asks.
“Two thousand twelve, I think,” says Gus. “Especially after—your hideout in the city. How that made the news. The heiress, which—I said find someplace to hide, not shack up in a tabloid story.”
Scott rubs his eyes.
“Nothing happened. I mean, yeah, she took off her clothes and climbed into bed with me, but I didn’t—”
“We’re not talking about what did or didn’t happen,” says Gus. “We’re talking about what it looks like.”
In the morning, Scott hears Eleanor down in the kitchen. He finds her at the stove making breakfast. The boy’s on the floor, playing between rooms. Wordlessly, Scott sits on the floor next to him and picks up a cement truck. They play for a moment, rolling rubber wheels on the wooden floors. Then, the boy offers Scott a gummy bear from a bag and he takes it.
Outside, the world continues to spin. Inside, they go through the motions of daily life, pretending that everything is normal.
Chapter 37
Emma Lightner
July 11, 1990–August 23, 2015
It was about setting boundaries and sticking to them. You smiled at the client, served them drinks. You laughed at their jokes and made small talk. You flirted. You were a fantasy to them, just like the plane. The beautiful girl with the million-dollar smile making men feel like kings as they sat on a luxury jet, talking on three cell phones at once. Under no circumstances did you give out your phone number. You certainly did not kiss an Internet millionaire in the galley or have sex with a basketball star in a private bedroom. And you never went with a billionaire to a second location, even if that second location was a castle in Monaco. You were a flight attendant, a service professional, not a prostitute. You had to have rules, boundaries, because in the land of the rich it was easy to lose your way.
At twenty-five, Emma Lightner had traveled to all seven continents. Working for GullWing, she had met movie stars and sheiks. She had flown with Mick Jagger and Kobe Bryant. One night after a cross-country flight—LAX to JFK—Kanye West chased her onto the tarmac and tried to give her a diamond bracelet. She didn’t take it, of course. Emma had long since stopped being flattered by the attention. Men old enough to be her grandfather routinely suggested she could have anything she wanted if she joined them for dinner in Nice or Gstaad or Rome. It was the altitude, she sometimes thought, the possibility of death by falling. But what it really was was the arrogance of money, and the need of the wealthy to possess everything they saw. The truth was, Emma was nothing more to her clients than a Bentley or a condo or a pack of gum.
To female passengers, wives of clients or clients themselves, Emma was both a threat and a cautionary tale. She represented the old paradigm, where beautiful women in conical bras catered to the secret needs of powerful men in smoky clubs. A geisha, a Playboy Bunny. She was a stealer of husbands, or, worse, a reflection in the mirror, a reconstruction of their own paths to moneyed wifery. A reminder. Emma felt their eyes on her as she moved through the cabin. She endured the steely-tongued jabs of women in oversize sunglasses who sent back their drinks and told her to be more careful next time. She could fold a napkin into the shape of a swan and mix a perfect gimlet. She knew which wines to pair with oxtail stew or venison paella, could perform CPR, and had been trained to do an emergency tracheotomy. She had skills, not just looks, but that never mattered to these women.
On the bigger jets there would be three to five girls working. On the smaller plane it was just Emma, in a short blue skirt suit, handing out drinks and demonstrating the safety features of the Cessna Citation Bravo or Hawker 900XP.
The exits are here. The seat belts work just so. Oxygen masks. Your seat may be used as a flotation device.
She lived her life in turnaround time, the hours and days spent between flights. The travel company kept apartments in most major international cities. It was cheaper than buying hotel rooms for the crew. Anonymously modern with parquet floors and Swedish cabinetry, each apartment was designed to resemble the other—the same furniture, the same fixtures—in the words of the company handbook, “in order to lessen the effects of jet lag.” But to Emma, the uniformity of the space had the opposite effect, increasing her feeling of displacement. It was easy to wake in the middle of the night and not know which city you were in, which country. Occupancy of any company safe house usually hovered around ten people. This meant that at any one time there might be a German pilot and six South Africans sleeping two to a room. They were like modeling agency apartments, filled with beautiful girls, except in one room there’d be a couple of forty-six-year-old pilots farting in their sleep.
Emma had been twenty-one when she started, the daughter of an air force pilot and a stay-at-home mom. She had studied finance in college, but after six months working for a big New York investment bank had decided she wanted to travel instead. The luxury economy was exploding, and jet companies and yacht companies and private resorts were desperate for attractive, competent, bilingually discreet people who could start right away.
The truth was, she loved planes. One of her first (and best) memories was of riding in the cockpit of a Cessna with her dad. Emma couldn’t have been more than five or six. She remembers the clouds through the tiny oval windows, towering white shapes her mind transformed into puppies and bears. So much so that when they got home Emma told her mother that her dad had taken her to see the zoo in the sky.
She remembers her father from that day, seen from a low angle, strong-jawed and immortal, his close cropped hair and aviator sunglasses. Michael Aaron Lightner, twenty-six years old, a fighter jet pilot, with arms like knotted ropes. No one in her life would ever be a man the way her father was a man, sharp-toothed and steely-eyed, with a dry Midwestern wit. A man of few words who could cut a cord of firewood in ten minutes and never wore a seat belt. She had seen him once knock a man out with a single punch, a lightning strike that was over before it began, the knockout a foregone conclusion, her father already walking away as the other man crumpled to the ground.
This was at a gas station outside San Diego. Later, Emma would learn that the man had said something lewd to her mother as she went to the restroom. Her father, pumping gas, saw the exchange and approached the man. Words were had. Emma doesn’t remember her father raising his voice. There was no heated argument, no macho chest bump or warning shove. Her father said something. The man said something back. And then the punch, a whip crack to the jaw that started at the hip, and then her father was walking back to the car, the man tipping backward and toppling, like a tree. Her dad lifted the nozzle from the gas tank and set it back on its arm, screwing the gas cap in place.
Emma, her face pressed to the window, watched her mother return from the restroom, saw her glance at the unconscious stranger and slow, her face confused. Her father called to her and then held the door for his wife before climbing into the driver’s seat.
Emma knelt in the backseat and stared out the back window, waiti
ng for the police. Her father was something else now, not just a dad. He was her knight, her protector, and when they taxied down private runways, Emma would close her eyes and picture that moment, the words exchanged, the man falling. She would fly high into the troposphere, into the dark recesses of space, slipping weightless inside a single perfect memory.
Then the captain would turn off the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign and Emma would snap back to reality. She was a twenty-five-year-old woman with a job to do. So she’d stand and smooth the wrinkles of her skirt, already smiling her collusive yet professional smile, ready to play her part in the ongoing seduction of wealth. It wasn’t hard. There was a checklist you went through as you prepared for takeoff and another one as you started your final descent. Jackets were distributed, cocktails refreshed. Sometimes, if the flight was short and the meal comprised more than four courses, the plane would sit on the runway for an hour while dessert and coffee were served. When it came to high-end private travel, the journey was the destination. And then, after your guests had disembarked, there were dishes to be cleared and stowed. But the real dirty work was left for the locals, Emma and the others descending the gangway and sliding into their own sleek transport.
Emma Lightner lived her life in turnaround time, but it was the turnaround she found the most depressing. It wasn’t just the luxury of her work surroundings that made it difficult to return to a normal life, wasn’t just the town car that took you to and from work, or the Swiss-watch precision and opulence of the plane. It wasn’t simply that you spent your days and nights surrounded by millionaires and billionaires, men and women who, even as they reminded you that you were their servant, also (if you were beautiful like Emma) made you feel like part of the club—because in today’s economy beauty is the great equalizer, a backstage pass.
