Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  The airline employee gave Mike a stack of paper napkins from the buffet table, and Mike settled enough to blow his nose, the sound a resonant, trumpetlike blurt.

  “Tell me your name,” the man from the airline said.

  “Sorry,” Mike said, and introduced himself.

  “Who did you know onboard Flight 503? Your wife?” The exact question the training materials said never to ask.

  “Her name was Mary Beth.”

  “And she was related to you?” A required question, taken from the laminated card. Physical clues (no ring) suggested Mike was not married, and the man from the airline had memorized the draft passenger manifest, and there was no one with the last name Renfro on board.

  “No. We were dating. She was my…I don’t know what you’d call it. She worked for me.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. What was her full name?”

  Mike answered, “Mary Beth Blumenthal,” a phrase that told the man from the airline seat 26C.

  “I would imagine that you are going to find this entire process very frustrating, Mike. It is all right if I call you Mike?” Clearly whoever had written the training materials for the airline had experience in sales, because Mike could anticipate how the man was going to try to solicit him to say the word yes as many times as he could in the next few minutes.

  “Sure,” Mike said. He regretted being so docile.

  “We won’t get confirmation of anything other than the ticket audit in the next several hours. If you’d like, we can put you up at a hotel here for the next day or so, until…,” and then the man from the airline trailed off.

  “What is it? What were you going to say?” Mike resettled in his chair, and the pressure against the molded plastic back of his seat made him aware of how soaked his lower back was, how his skin had gone clammy with sweat.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” the airline rep said, “I’ve got to look into one thing.”

  Mike knew when to call the question. “Tell me right now. What were you about to say?” Mike stood up and knew that he’d raised his voice. The same people who had turned away at his grief now looked on at the spectacle. Mike was about a foot taller and a full hundred pounds heavier than the man he was speaking to.

  “I was going to say,” the airline rep stood and almost whispered at Mike, “that the airline could put you up until we can get you on a plane to Dallas.”

  “Sounds reasonable. Let’s make that happen,” Mike said.

  “That’s what I need to check on. I am not certain that we can. But if we can, we will. We’ve bumped all the passengers from the next two flights in order to accommodate family members. The earliest I can get you on a plane is going to be around this time tomorrow. Maybe. I don’t mean to be blunt, but there’s going to be a problem here. We’re prepared to deal with husbands and wives and parents and children, but you fall into what we might call a gray area.”

  “A gray area,” Mike repeated.

  “I’m not sure you have any legal standing here. You’re not a designated emergency contact for Ms. Blumenthal, and you aren’t a relative. At this point, it’s unclear whether I should even be talking to you.”

  “Just what exactly is your name?” Mike demanded. The sensation he felt was stunning. His anger ran out of him, his shoulders fell. The pressure in his neck suggested that he was nearing the limit of the stresses a man could tolerate. He sat down and almost missed the chair, stumbling into it. His legs thumped against the conference table.

  The man from the airline opened the other bottle of water and handed it to Mike. “You need to eat something. And you need to relax, if you can. Do you think you can do that for me, Mike?”

  Once Mike nodded, the man from the airline pulled out a small pad and made some notes, then tucked the notepad into his jacket pocket. “There’s no polite way to tell you this, Mike, but your situation…,” and he trailed off again. Mike knew the pause was deliberate. “My name is Arthur McDevitt. Call me Art.” He palmed a business card to Mike. He wanted to say something to Mike that committed him to nothing. “I can’t do anything for you that might infringe on the rights of Ms. Blumenthal’s family. It’s just a strange situation. You’re someone we hadn’t anticipated. A gray area.”

  Mike gave a cursory nod that meant I understand.

  “Do you know who she might want us to contact? A relative? A parent, perhaps?” Art asked.

  Mike took another of his business cards, wrote a name and number on the back of it. “Her brother.”

  The man from the airline stood and went to the front of the room, where he conferred with another man, the two of them glancing at Mike every few sentences. What could he give Mary Beth now? He would forever be in that gray area between boss and husband and boyfriend, and maybe it was odd, but they hadn’t said a thing to him about the body or the procedures, and, most of all, they had not once mentioned the boy. The boy. Gabriel had no idea.

  How do you tell a child? That would be the thought that consumed Mike the rest of the afternoon. His mission now. To protect the boy. To be the one constant in his life, the one source of comfort.

  The man from the airline returned, accompanied by two more identically dressed men. They flanked Mike on either side, as if he’d been a disruption and was being escorted out of the room by security. One of the men was folding a stack of papers, tucking them into his inside coat pocket.

  “You didn’t tell us that she had a son,” one of the new men said. “Where is he now?”

  Mike explained the situation. “I want to be the one who tells him.”

  “When there is a minor involved and there are surviving family members, we leave those decisions to the family.”

  The three men nodded in agreement, and Mike assumed what he was seeing was relief that they would not be asked to take on this disheartening duty themselves.

  They made their way out of the conference room, into a hallway that was nearly empty. It made Mike realize they were afraid of him, of some volcanic eruption. Mike repeated himself, “I need to be the one who explains things to the boy.”

  Arthur nodded, extended his hand. It was the tone of his voice, the perfunctory “Of course,” that told Mike the man was lying.

  Before Mike understood what he was doing, he had made his way out of the terminal to the parking garage. He got back behind the wheel of his rented Jeep and started his way east on the interstate. When he saw the mileage sign for Cheyenne, he thought to stop and fill the tank, made the call to arrange to keep the car for a few more days. We perform our duties out of custom or obligation, and this one, this last bit of service to Mary Beth, was somehow both.

  At the first exit, he pulled off and bought a portable Rand McNally atlas, a large Diet Coke, and a cheeseburger that had been kept warm under a heat lamp. Back on the highway, he thought about Mary Beth at the office, about the ebb and flow of their Mondays, when she would review his calendar for the week, the every-other-Thursday sessions when he signed payroll checks. She’d come into the office with a stack of checks and a stack of documents affixed with yellow stickers that read ACTION REQUIRED.

  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.

  43

  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 ne
w 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 nos, 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.

  Contact number two answered the door while on the telephone with the fraud prevention department of his credit card company. From what Nessen and Lemko overheard, they gathered that the contact had telephoned a mortuary to pay the final $1,000 on one of those prepaid funeral-arrangement plans and had suffered the embarrassment of having not one but two different cards declined.

  Nessen thought briefly of burying her own mother, how the funeral director had stepped out of the room and sent in an underling to talk about payment plans and options—Darla here will talk to you about financing. Nessen, whose own credit cards never carried a balance, signed a contract without even looking at the amount or asking Darla to explain how much. The casket had cost as much as a good used car. And now this contact was explaining into the telephone how demeaning it was not to be able to pay the final $1,000 for his wife’s casket, or for the transport of her body back to the Washington area (she was one of three people on Flight 503 who had been continuing on to the next leg of the flight, from DFW to Reagan National). His wife’s cards had been canceled because she was deceased, but his own cards had inadvertently been marked Deceased as well, and it would take at least forty-eight hours to correct the error. Nessen wanted to interrupt, to be assertive just for once, to defy her training and rip the cordless phone from his hand and end the call.

  She’d explain how Panorama Airlines would make everything okay, bereavement tickets and no charge for the transportation of the caskets and first-class upgrades and limousine service and tarmac permissions to stand at the baggage area and supervise the loading and unloading of th
e loved one’s body (a service that a surprising number of the next of kin accepted). But the very purpose of the visit—the notification of the contact—had already been subverted by the inability of a pair of computer systems to communicate with each other. They had no need to tell him what he’d already learned. Nessen was left to watch as the contact sank into his sofa, hung up the phone without comment.

  The drive back into the northwest section of the city took only twenty minutes, thanks to the relative quiet of a late holiday afternoon. Nessen was happy to let Lemko drive; he’d grown up in the Maryland suburbs and knew his way around the Beltway and the parkways and bridges. He piloted while she read and reread the dossier on the next contact. Only known living relative.

  They double-parked illegally in the middle of California Street, and Lemko stayed with the car while Nessen used the buzzer to try to enter Richard MacMurray’s building. She rang his apartment, but the automated entry system was connected to the telephone, and there seemed to be some problem with the phone line. The operator she called for assistance verified the line as in service, suggested that the phone was simply off the hook.

  After ten minutes of waiting at the door, she gave up. Lemko drove them to the yellow loading zone directly in front of the Third District police station on V Street Northwest, just three blocks away. They moved with the assurance of people tasked with an important mission, and to everyone in the building—the detectives and patrolmen and even the mechanic who changed the oil in the Crown Vic police sedans—Nessen and Lemko looked and behaved like cops.