A woman at the reception desk refused to acknowledge what was so painfully obvious to every reporter, street vendor, and kook on the street outside: clearly the Falling Woman was somewhere inside Via Christi.
“Sir,” the receptionist said, “I’ll need the patient’s name before I can direct you.”
“I’m part of the investigative team on the accident. You know who I’m here to see.”
“Without a name, sir, there’s nothing I can do.”
After another long delay, Radford demanded to speak to a supervisor. Despite the gatekeepers’ obstructionism, he admired their scrutiny. Ten minutes passed before a Catholic priest arrived. The man was lean and muscular in appearance, more like an Olympic sprinter than a clergyman, except for his black shirt and clerical collar.
“I’m Father George Otten,” he said. “I’m Via Christi’s chaplain.”
Radford explained that he wasn’t leaving until he had answers, until he’d talked with the woman. He was uncomfortable being so impudent with a priest.
“You understand our concern,” Father George said. “Things have been rather topsy-turvy for a few days.”
A moment later, a door opened behind the reception desk and another man emerged, this one dressed in a gray business suit. He appeared to be about thirty years old but carried himself with the serious purpose of a much older man. Dark hair, big smile, broad shoulders.
“I’m Jack Liu, an attorney,” the man said. “I represent the Diocese of Wichita.”
“Why do I need to talk to a lawyer?” Radford asked.
The priest guided them through the lobby and onto the elevator. The situation had all the makings of a bad joke: a priest, a lawyer, and an accident investigator step onto an elevator. Radford could only hope that he wasn’t about to become the punch line. No one spoke as the elevator climbed to the third floor. They walked past several rooms with closed doors before they arrived at a nurses’ station. Two women glanced up but kept working. Liu smiled and pointed Radford toward a small conference room.
“I need to speak to her,” Radford said, turning to the priest.
“We paged Dr. Lassanske,” Father Otten said. “She’ll be here soon.”
An awkward silence filled the room. Radford resisted the urge to stand up and leave. He was supposed to interview the flight captain’s widow today, but if Ulrich wanted a report on the mythical Falling Woman, then he’d give his boss a damn report. He wanted it to be over and done with. He had no intention of becoming the in-house conspiracy theorist.
A few minutes passed. Jack Liu kept his eyes glued to his phone. Father Otten appeared to be praying, his eyelids half closed. Radford jotted down their names, along with the time and date, in his notepad. Don’t be smarter than the evidence, he thought, though nothing he’d seen so far qualified as evidence. When the doctor entered the room, Radford stood up.
She was tall and pretty, with long straight hair but tired eyes. She couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of training. Radford wondered if they’d sent her on purpose, to distract him with her beauty. She extended her hand to him and forced a smile.
“Mr. Radford?” she said, “I’m Dr. Lassanske.”
She was the first person in Via Christi to shake his hand.
“We’d like to go on the record, right now,” Jack Liu said, suddenly participating again, “that Via Christi places the utmost care on patient privacy.”
“You’ve seen what’s going on outside?” Radford asked. “It’s a circus out there.”
“We have done everything we possibly can to ensure hospital security,” Jack Liu said. “Not a single reporter has been spoken to. Not one has entered the lobby.”
The priest asked if they could say a quick prayer. Radford lowered his head while the chaplain asked for peace, comfort to the grieving, and for a resolution about the accident.
“There are all kinds of stories going around,” Radford said as soon at the priest finished. “The woman who was brought here on Sunday. I need to talk to her, to clarify all this confusion. I need to ask her some questions.”
Jack Liu paused and then nodded at the doctor.
“You understand there are limits to what I can say,” Dr. Lassanske said. “We are required to protect patient privacy.”
“She’s not in trouble,” Radford said. “I’m simply trying to clarify what’s happened.”
“She came in as a Jane Doe,” the doctor said. “Her most significant injury was a large contusion on her sacroiliac region. Her hip. Some degloved skin on her hands. Cuts and scratches here and there.”
“What did you think happened?” Radford asked.
“I suspected a motorcycle accident upon exam,” the doctor said. “But then one of the ambulance drivers came in and said she’d fallen from the plane.”
Jack Liu looked at his notes and the priest closed his eyes.
“Were her eardrums intact?” Radford asked.
“I’d like you to know,” Jack Liu said, “that her presence has significantly disrupted our routine operations. With the intense security, the media coverage, our resources are pretty much at the breaking point.”
“I want to resolve this just as fast as you do,” Radford said.
Jack Liu again nodded at the doctor.
Dr. Lassanske said, “She had persistent amnesia, and some confusion about where she was.”
“She’s said nothing about the accident?” Radford asked.
“Well,” Dr. Lassanske said, “not exactly.”
The priest stood. Jack Liu glanced at the priest and then at the doctor.
“Why all the mystery, folks?” Radford asked.
“Are you a religious man?” the priest said.
“I’m an accident investigator,” Radford replied. “I’m just interested in the facts. I have 123 families that deserve answers.”
“Her scans were clear,” the doctor said. “Her tests were all negative. Except for the cuts and bruises, she was, essentially, healthy.”
“I just want to talk to her. That’s all. Hear what she has to say. I have families that need to stop holding on to false hope that a loved one may have survived. Right now, every second this goes on, my job gets harder.” Radford paused. “Most people at my agency think she’s lying, probably looking for attention in a very sick way.”
The priest shook his head.
“She’s not lying, Mr. Radford,” the priest said. There was a gravity to the man’s voice, and in his conclusion, a kind of solemn prayer. Radford tried to shake it off.
“Let me talk to her then, so we can move forward,” Radford said. “She’s not in trouble. I just need to clarify some questions.”
Jack Liu smiled. The priest folded his hands. Both men turned toward Dr. Lassanske.
“She’s not here,” the doctor said.
“What?” Radford said.
“The woman who came in Sunday night, presumably the woman you are here to see, walked out the hospital yesterday morning. We don’t know where she is.”
18
Almost a year before, the last time they came to the cabin, Adam read to Erin from Kawabata’s novel Thousand Cranes. She was seeing the specialist for the first time later that week, but she had told Adam nothing, only that she was fighting a cold. She curled up in his arms while he read from the book.
The novel, set in postwar Japan, portrayed an ancient culture crumbling in the aftermath of bombing and death. She drifted in and out of sleep while he read. The pain in her abdomen hadn’t yet become so acute she couldn’t sleep. The passionate story, sad and haunting, reminded her of her passion for Adam. She knew something was wrong with her body, maybe even something grave and life altering, but that weekend she still clung to hope. It couldn’t be cancer, at least that’s what she tried to convince herself. She had so much life left, so much yet to do. But as hard as she tried to pretend, some part of her knew.
At night, he kissed her forehead tenderly, the way a father might. He placed water by her side,
draped an extra blanket over her, and turned off the light. They spent three days that way at the cabin. She loved hearing the wind, the water from the creek. She loved waking up in the morning to birdsong. Three perfect days. Reading. Making love. Laughing. She didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to face what lay ahead.
And now what lay ahead was here. So much had changed in a year.
At the once-familiar cabin, parts of her past came rushing back, not as memories but as something else, as raw emotion cut off from thought, like a river of smells, sights, and sounds. The wooden front porch. The chirp of tree frogs. Pine resin and leaf litter and the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. The world felt suddenly familiar. After being gone for a very long time, she’d come back.
Outside, wind rushed through white pines and oaks. This time, she told herself, she would never leave.
She slept soundly but alone that first night. The next morning passed quietly. She had trouble placing what day it was, but knew that time had passed. In place of passion, an awkward silence filled their hours together. He did not touch her, did not offer to rub her back, did not read her books. He swore he wasn’t angry, only stunned, flabbergasted was the word he used. She didn’t know if he meant by her or by her decision, or some combination of the two.
“How did this happen?” he asked, over and over.
During the afternoon, he cleared brush from outside, bought groceries, cleaned the grill on the porch, chopped firewood, cut back the weeds growing around the house. She suspected he snuck away to call his wife, because he returned with a guilty look on his face. He was avoiding her, perhaps hoping she’d come to her senses. She knew that he no longer saw the woman he once loved. He saw a freak, a sideshow performer who wanted to abandon her family. She could hardly blame him.
“You have to call home,” he kept saying.
She didn’t respond. Not with anger, not even with an explanation. Her memory was hazy, detached, as though unmoored from her brain, but she did know that something had happened. She knew that there’d been an accident of some sort, but she couldn’t remember the full event. Just flashes of it. The cold. The fire. Debris in the air. Gasping for breath. The smell of rain. Otherwise, there was a gap, a blank space, a portion of her memory scrubbed clean. Was it caused by trauma and shock? Was it self-induced? In the end, it didn’t matter.
Adam remained cautious around her. He didn’t press but worked slowly on her defenses, trying to guide her back toward a rational path. But it was becoming apparent that rational and reasonable rules no longer applied.
When he came in from outside, he found her sitting at the small table. He stood by the stove, staring down at her with a serious expression.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
She didn’t want to answer but knew he would give her little choice.
“I have these flashes,” she said, “wind and fire, cold air. I have strange, almost hallucinatory dreams, but I don’t know what is real and what isn’t.”
The first full day passed, and another night, and then the second morning came. He told her he had to leave for home. He was expecting her to leave with him. Late Thursday afternoon, Adam began to pack. They’d been at the cabin since Tuesday night, all but cut off from the outside world.
“We’ll leave in an hour,” he said. Suddenly, he was back in a courtroom, controlling the argument. Had he forgotten, though, that she too knew her way around an argument?
“I’m not sure I can go,” she said.
“That makes no sense. Of course you’re going home.”
“I think I am home,” she said. But Adam had turned away from her and didn’t seem to hear.
She loved him so much before she got sick. He had stormed into her life like a tornado, and the wreckage had been exquisite. He challenged her assumptions about what was possible. But then came the questions and the doubts: Was she the kind of woman who cheated on her husband? Could she leave her family? Would she get divorced? The questions were entirely new. Growing up, she was so awkward around boys. She never had a boyfriend, rarely even received a hint of interest. Boys looked past her, at the prettier girls, at the wilder girls who would kiss and, later, do much more. After her father died, she stopped believing in love. It could disappear so fast. What claims she made toward passion arrived later in life, maybe too late since Doug never seemed to notice. She had been a gangly and awkward teenager who wore braces until graduation, and it was only later that she fit into her body. The body that Adam would worship. The body that cancer would ravage.
She’d met Doug after a nasty breakup with the man she’d been dating her junior year of college. Her ex turned out to be leading a secret life—sex with men in bathroom stalls, and drugs she’d never even heard of. She didn’t just feel betrayed; she felt fooled. Foolish. She’d crept out from behind a wall of fear only to be tricked. She took every test available, and somehow, they all came back clean. After that, all that mattered was security, stability, sanity. Doug came along prepackaged, a man so safe and stable he quickly became inert. At twenty-two, she couldn’t see into the future, couldn’t imagine that someday she’d be the one running off for sex with someone who wasn’t her husband. She must have asked herself a thousand times, What am I doing? Sneaking away to a cabin with a man she barely knew. Risking both their marriages, their families. Abandoning the life she’d worked so hard to build. In the end, it didn’t matter. Her body decided for her.
Now, rather than staying inside the cabin with Adam while he packed, she walked toward the small creek that crossed the property. A thin bridge, slick with moss, connected to a trail on the other side of the water. She hesitated on unsteady legs. Between the two cycles of chemo, and who knows what other toxic chemicals she’d ingested over the past six months, not to mention the bruises and cuts from her long, long fall, she no longer trusted her body. But she took a first step, and another, and soon walked across the slippery bridge and onto the trailhead.
The trail wound through mountain laurel and milkweed, which gave way to ash, fir, and spruce farther up the hill. She loved the woods. Before the illness, when she still believed in the future, she swore that one day she’d quit the firm and go work for the National Park Service as a naturalist. She dreamed about going back to school, pursuing a degree in ecology or land management. What the hell had she waited for? She knelt and touched a fiddlehead fern before heading up the trail.
Walking loosened her bruised hip. The stiffness in her lower back eased. A morning rain shower had released earthy resins from the forest, the petrichor of musty earth mixing with last fall’s decomposing blanket of leaves, spicing the air, now suddenly aromatic. Midges danced in light shafts. Clouds moved above the treetops.
After a few minutes, footfalls crunched leaves behind her, growing closer. She didn’t slow, but she didn’t speed up either.
“You need to go home,” Adam said, catching up to her. “You need to let your family know you are alive. You can’t hide out here and think that’s okay.”
She ignored him, barely hearing his words. He stopped and grabbed her wrist.
“You need to stop this and go home,” he said. “Your husband thinks you’re dead.”
“I am dead,” she said. “I’ve been dead for almost a year. Not that you noticed.”
Adam released her wrist. “That’s not fair. You didn’t even tell me you were sick.”
She wanted to scare him, wanted to do something wild to make him run away. And at the same time, she wanted him to promise to stay.
“I can’t go back to the world,” she said. “I won’t.”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She didn’t respond. She was tired of talking.
Back at the cabin, he helped her into the shower. He touched her skin tenderly but without passion. He changed the bandages on her hands, where the fingers remained raw and sore. A persistent bell still rang in her ears, day and night, with little relief.
“You have to come with me,” he sa
id, but he was pleading now. And she was aware of a new certainty, aware the argument was settled.
19
For days after Radford visited the hospital, he was more confused than ever. Who was this woman? Why would she have disappeared? He had no answers, and realized now he’d asked the wrong questions. All that week, he dodged the other investigators. He avoided Ulrich and Ellsworth in particular. Ulrich because every hour he spent on the Falling Woman was an extra hour of work away from the bodies; Ellsworth because talk of the Falling Woman only increased his scorn.
He promised that he was working hard, promised that he’d have answers by the end of the week. And now it was Friday morning, and the daily progress meeting loomed that afternoon.
All week he’d retreated to the sanctuary of his hotel room. From there, he’d conducted phone interviews with the EMTs, the firemen, the police officers who found the woman in the barn. He talked to the orderlies at the hospital, the nurses, techs, and doctors, anyone who had even the briefest contact with the woman. No one could offer much of a description. A white woman, middle-aged, who didn’t say much, didn’t stand out in any way. Radford began to wonder who the hell had been brought into the hospital. When these interviews offered little, he began to examine the archival material Lucy had sent him.
He’d read Lucy’s thesis on survivor stories. Most of the report was standard investigator speak: safety recommendations and systems failures. But then at the end, in an appendix, she covered stories that seemed to defy the logic and science: a 757 that crashed into the mountainside in Colombia, killing everyone aboard except for four passengers. The “miracle” girl who survived a crash in the Indian Ocean by floating on a piece of wreckage. A toddler who alone survived a crash in Detroit, a copilot who was the lone survivor of a crash in Kentucky. As staggering as these tales were, Lucy’s thesis didn’t mention, nor could it explain, a woman falling out of an exploding plane and surviving.
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