Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  It occurred to Richard that maybe he had been a reclamation project the whole time. There were new shirts, shoes, CDs, and thrift-shop knickknacks, like a Fiestaware vase for his apartment that Cadence kept filled with cut flowers. She fed him salad, even on the nights when he wanted nothing more than to restore himself with pepperoni pizza and a six-pack from the weird Greek-Italian-Mexican deli on the corner. They would go to a restaurant, and she’d talk gently about the many different varieties of fish, the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids.

  Richard was nervous, but he stopped trying to censor himself and just started talking. “We came here on our second date.”

  “You tried to get me drunk.”

  The waitress came, and Richard ordered two beers. “How did I do? Was I successful?”

  After a long gulp and a swallow of her water, Cadence said, “You twisted my arm.” A satisfied smile expanded from the corners of her mouth.

  Richard took her arm at the wrist and turned it a quarter clockwise, pantomiming that he might twist it further.

  “That’s exactly what you did,” she said. “You twisted my arm. I was just happy you were touching me.” She pushed some hair behind her left ear and raised her eyes to meet his.

  “I missed that.” Richard was still holding her, his fingers encircling her remarkably thin wrist, an autonomic response. When she looked down at his hand, he shyly released his grip.

  “You missed a lot.”

  “I meant I wasn’t sure you’d want me to touch you. I wasn’t even sure it was a date,” he said.

  “What convinced you?”

  The beers arrived, in frosted glasses, already dripping rings onto the tabletop. “When you straddled me on my couch, I was pretty sure,” Richard said, and the departing waitress rolled her eyes toward her overdyed Bettie Page bangs. “I think that’s how I finally figured it out.”

  He slid his fingers back into Cadence’s, interlocking them like a child’s mismatched plastic building blocks; they fit together, but something wasn’t right, either the tension or the alignment, so he withdrew and used the same hand to pick up a napkin and move it around the tabletop. It left a wet sheen across the brown Formica like a Zamboni resurfacing a hockey rink. “It’s really something,” he started again. “You never expect to get to someplace like this. What are we even doing here?”

  Cadence picked up the napkin Richard had wadded up, put it in the ashtray, and moved the ashtray to the edge of the table near the aisle. “We’re having a beer. We’re being friendly.”

  “How friendly are we going to be?”

  Cadence smiled because this sounded like the usual innuendo that passed between the two of them until seven weeks ago. “I’m not sure. Friendly, but perhaps not as friendly as we used to be, for example.” She laughed.

  The humor felt one-sided to Richard, like joking with the clerk at the DMV. There was no easy way to say what he needed to say about Mary Beth, about the ways in which his life had irretrievably changed in the past few hours. It seemed ridiculous to blurt it out and equally artificial to wait. For now, he chose silence.

  “We are going to be friendly, right?” Cadence had her hands on her knees, as if she was ready to spring backward, up, out of the booth.

  “And civilized.”

  She took a decent slug of beer and shook her head as she swallowed. “So what couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

  He finished the last ounce of his first beer and thought about fleeing to the men’s room. How he hated the telephone, but now he would have given anything to have blurted out the truth the hour before and avoided this moment. His stomach tightened, and he felt a sudden pressure in his temples as if he’d been squinting at a document riddled with fine print. All he could manage was, “It’s my sister.”

  52

  IN THE four days that she had been Gabriel’s temporary caretaker, Sarah Hensley had gotten used to summarizing his activities for his mother, shaping the routine events of the day into a narrative that sounded as if his solitary efforts at play had been great teachable moments. She had no reason to think that this was anything other than an ordinary holiday. She was watching the news, almost inadvertently, as a live shot of the rescue equipment and floodlights that brightened the edge of the airfield filled her screen. She’d been flipping channels, looking for something to pacify the kid, and now that she was paying attention, she saw the chyron along the bottom of the screen: 77 PASSENGERS AND 6 CREW. FLIGHT 503 WAS HEADING TO DALLAS–FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FROM SALT LAKE CITY. She checked her watch. How random. Mary Beth’s flight wouldn’t be in for another two hours. She’d need to start the daunting task of cleaning up the house but was having a hard time getting motivated. She flipped past to another football game. Gabriel played along, unimpressed.

  Sarah sank into the couch to watch as Gabriel played with Lincoln Logs and Legos, designed the imaginary skyline that made up the cityscape of his mind; she watched as he built houses and office buildings and the secret lairs of millionaire superheroes, populated the mise-en-scène with the appropriate set of vehicles, and then swept it all to untimely destruction. Monsters from Tokyo Bay, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

  Gabriel took a break to eat a repast richly loaded with trans fats and American processed-cheese food product, washed down by a fruit punch that contained no actual fruit juice. An inadvertent nap followed, wherein he slept for about ninety minutes while the party went on around him; Gabriel nodded off, leaning against the couch in the den, and Sarah carried him to the quiet retreat of his room, then eased into the bed next to him. Contorting herself around his body was a challenge, given the twin mattress. Gabriel pushed closer to the wall. Sarah spooned in, and when he awoke, they watched football. During the halftime report, Sarah switched the channel from an update about the crash of Panorama 503 to a channel in the middle of a Looney Tunes marathon. Gabriel sat transfixed by a cartoon in which the child was not a child at all but a Martian superbaby, misdelivered by the stork into the comforting custody of a suburban family; the cartoon boy built himself a flying saucer for his escape from earthly bonds, the return trip to Mars. “All he wants to do,” Gabriel said, “is see his dad,” clearly admiring the Martian boy (his name was Yob) and his single-minded purpose. Mary Beth had never spoken to Sarah about Gabriel’s father, and neither had Gabriel, as if the word were absent from his vocabulary.

  Soon after, the party dissolved in the usual way, one person leaving and many following. Sarah had not even noticed as the bulk of the crowd began to leave; a few girls she didn’t really know had bagged up the plastic cups and paper plates, taken out bags of garbage. One of the other women from Mike’s office still sat on the leather couch in the den, talking on the telephone with her legs folded beneath her, giving every appearance that she was moving in. Sarah went to clean the kitchen, where she found the counter still strewn with dishes of half-eaten snacks, congealed melted cheese, smears of ketchup and salsa and guacamole; a hubcap (she had no idea where it had come from) had been inverted and used as an ashtray, and she guessed there were more than a hundred cigarettes crushed out in it. The disposal’s maw was stuffed with the snapped spines of limes. Pizza boxes covered the round table.

  She put Gabriel to work finding bottles all over the house, promised him a nickel for each one, a trick she’d learned from her grandfather when she was about Gabriel’s age. Sarah opened the garage door and carried out more garbage. Gabriel emerged from the den with his arms loaded down with brown bottles. A woman in a pantsuit that Sarah did not know stood behind him, and she bent to Gabriel’s level and took the bottles from him one by one, placing them on the counter.

  Sarah jutted out a hip, asked, “Can I help you?” A challenge. This wasn’t a random partygoer.

  The woman in the suit ignored Sarah and talked to Gabriel. “We’re going to need to get your things together. Do you think you could help me do that?”

  “I’m not supposed to go with strangers,” Gabriel answered. He was well trained in this
area. All men and women Gabriel did not know, anyone he had never seen in his house, they were all strangers.

  Sarah stepped forward. “Do I need to call somebody? In other words, what are you doing in my kitchen?”

  The woman in the suit picked up her briefcase, cleared off a small space on the kitchen counter, and opened it, produced a stack of documents. The answer was there in the papers, but the woman spoke anyway. “There’s no need to call anyone. In fact, I have sheriff’s deputies sitting in a squad car in the driveway. I’m hoping that it won’t be necessary to involve them, that we can manage everything that we need to do here and keep our focus on the larger issues.”

  Sarah peered out the kitchen window to confirm that there was in fact a police interceptor sitting in the driveway, engine and signal lights running. Perhaps a neighbor had called the cops. Who knew? She told Gabriel to play in the den.

  “You can put the TV back on. There are more cartoons,” she said. He turned to leave, and Sarah noticed that he was still carrying two mostly empty bottles. She pointed, and the woman in the suit stopped Gabriel, took the bottles from him.

  Sarah turned back. “And just what are the larger issues?”

  “The best interests of the child, of course.”

  The perspective of the woman in the suit: the best interests of the child were easily determined by observation; the first step in protecting him would be to get him out of this house. That’s what the deputies were for, in the event that any of the persons on the premises decided to interfere. The paperwork in her hand and a laminated identification card and badge gave her name as Maura Valle, court-appointed special advocate, and she was there to take temporary custody of Gabriel, oversee his transfer into foster care for the evening and ensure his appearance the following morning in family court, where presumably a surviving family member would appear before the judge. The name of the family member was there somewhere in the paperwork, but the crash had called her away from her own dinner table, and she hadn’t really even had time to look over the temporary custody order for any other detail beyond the child’s name.

  Now, looking around the kitchen, Maura hoped that this woman in front of her wasn’t a blood relative, would have no claim to the child. The kitchen looked as if a party had been going on for the better part of a few days (true), and the young woman—wearing jeans unsnapped at the waist and a man’s white T-shirt on top of a navy-blue bikini top—had all the appearances of being under the influence of alcohol and perhaps narcotics. Identifying the telltales of substance abuse was part of Maura’s training too, but she did not need any expert help to know a sad scene when she wandered into one. Food moldered in open containers, the house smelled as if something had recently burned, and beneath the cluster of nauseating odors in the kitchen was something rank enough to make Maura keep looking around for a forgotten pet.

  “The best interests of the child?” the young woman said. “I would think the best interests of the child will be covered once he goes back to his mother. She should be here”—she checked her watch—“before too much longer. Ninety minutes tops.”

  This was the worst part of the job, in Maura’s experience, having to tell people things they didn’t know. She often had to tell people their neighbors had reported them as potential abusers, that their stepdaughter had accused them of molestation. She knew it to be an exaggeration, but at that moment, she felt as if never once in six years of being a child advocate had she given someone good news, and now this woman clearly did not know. Maura was going to have to be the one to tell her.

  “Could you tell me, please, how it is that you are acquainted with Mary Beth Blumenthal?” Maura asked.

  “After you tell me how it’s any of your business.” Sarah returned to the busy work of cleaning the kitchen. She used the spray nozzle and began rinsing the sludge out of the sink.

  “That is a card you don’t want to play. Trust me. I’ve got a reason to ask. I’m going to need to see some identification.”

  Sarah found her purse among the countertop clutter and meekly handed over her driver’s license. “I work with her. We work at the Mike Renfro Agency. This is Mike’s house. Mike and MB are away for the holiday, and I’m watching her kid, but, like I said, I’m expecting her at any moment.”

  Maura looked at the floor. No one had told this woman, at least no one from the airline. The answer popped into her head. They would have no reason to tell Sarah. They would be looking for a spouse, a blood relative.

  When Sarah said it, I’m expecting her at any moment, this bureaucrat in the kitchen refused to meet her eyes, and the lack of eye contact told her the enormity of it. Maura could see the series of deductions as they registered on Sarah’s face, as her expression sagged with the demonstrable recognition that Mary Beth would not, in fact, walk through that door.

  Gabriel returned to the kitchen carrying a stack of small plates, a handful of crumpled napkins. The two women went to him, and they both crouched in front of him, to his eye level. Maura knew that whatever words she could find to begin to explain the mysteries of death to a six-year-old boy would take away the unbridled brightness of childhood from his eyes, most likely forever.

  Sarah thought, for her part, this was not her duty. Not what she signed up for. She let her legs go slack, sank to the floor. Jesus.

  53

  RICHARD HAD learned precious little from his past except that bad news needed to be delivered quickly, with a minimum of equivocation. Certainly she’d seen the news about the plane, Salt Lake City to Dallas. Just the facts. There had been a crash. His sister had been on the plane, but not his nephew. Cadence did not make Richard spell out the details. What more did she need to know, anyway? He’d given her the outline, thin on the specifics because he simply did not have any. Seventy-seven passengers and six crew. Tomorrow morning, Richard would get on a plane and fly to Dallas, and when he arrived, he would walk into his uncertain future.

  Once she had said everything that a person was expected to say in these types of conversations, she found herself at a loss.

  She felt encumbered by her body. It was something she didn’t want at the moment. It interfered with her thinking. The comfort she felt in Richard’s presence was a distraction. She loved the solid manliness that he presented—another thing she’d missed for the past seven weeks. He wasn’t the kind of guy to pose, and he certainly wasn’t going to shave his arms so he looked better at the gym. Still, she did not want to be thinking of his body, the comfort she took from being across from him. She hoped her being here would give him some peace. She wanted the crystallized thinking that came from adrenaline and movement and cold air in her lungs. She wanted to put her hands on Richard’s face and see if she could intuit his thoughts, like a Vulcan mind meld.

  Cadence felt his pain would be impossible to measure. He rarely talked about his sister except to identify her as the only other living member of his family, as if he often forgot entirely about his nephew. She was used to looking at Richard, and just from his face she could tell how serious the wound was, how invasive a treatment would be required. Now she had nothing for him, nothing except this body, and so she slipped out of her side of the booth and onto the seat beside Richard, and once she was there, he began to speak.

  Her first thought was of the boy, and she did not even have to ask the question, because now, for the first time since she’d known him, his concern for the boy was primary and all-consuming, and she could see it.

  “I’m going to Dallas tomorrow to get him. We’ll have to do some things with lawyers, I guess; I don’t know how these things work in Texas. I don’t know how any of this will work. We’ll get someone to pack up his things, and then I’m coming back. We’re coming back. Jesus.” She imagined that he was only now beginning to understand the duties that fell to him, not just the boy, but dealing with practical things, his sister’s apartment, her clothes, her bills. Jesus.

  She held his hand, ran her fingers over it. He kept on.

  �
�Before Gabriel was born, I read those baby books, and I stayed with Mary Beth for two weeks. This one pamphlet they had at the hospital talked about all the things that needed to be secured, removed from your home, in preparation for the birth of a child. I just can’t remember what things. I keep thinking that if I’d read each of those pamphlets, actually studied them, I’d be better prepared. My dad always said that you need to be prepared for every eventuality. But really, how can you be prepared for something like this? Something random. Who is his pediatrician? What does he like to eat? What is he afraid of? And then I look at my apartment and I wonder where he’s even going to sleep. Shit, I don’t even know what school district I live in. And suddenly that seems like something I need to know.”

  It was a daunting prospect, enough to merit a long silence punctuated by swigs of beer and one or both of them again mumbling Jesus.

  Richard talked for nearly twenty minutes without interruption, a few highlights about his sister, the occasional story of a particular visit. “Sometimes it feels like all we ever did was go to restaurants and fight. There ought to be more to tell,” Richard said.