He refilled their cups.
“Why do you do this work?” she asked. “What inspired you to become an investigator?”
“I wanted to be a pilot,” he said. “It was all I dreamed about growing up.”
“And?”
“I was on my way. I was flying and really moving ahead, but then I had a medical problem. A heart valve issue. It prevented me from flying.”
“How old were you?” she said.
“I was twenty-two,” he said. “I was lost, devastated really. My heart was broken, literally and metaphorically.”
“But why this work?” she asked. “Why did you end up investigating airplane crashes?”
The question made him uneasy, as if she was judging him, or if not judging him, then holding a mirror up so he could judge himself.
“I needed to prove myself,” he said.
“To whom?”
“I don’t know,” he said, finishing his wine.
She smiled. “So why no kids?”
He’d almost forgotten she was a lawyer and could turn an argument back against him.
“That really is a strange question coming from a woman who’s hiding from her family.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said.
“Try me.”
He stood and crossed to the window. He glanced outside, but the dark parking lot remained unchanged.
“I love my daughters more than life itself,” she said. “But even Lazarus only had to die twice.”
Radford split the last of the wine between them.
“That’s what I tell myself anyway,” she said. “But there’s hardly an hour that goes by when I don’t question my decision. I miss them terribly. Their voices. Their laughs. The way they smell. But I won’t impose my death on them again.”
She finished her wine and then stood up.
“I guess I don’t have a choice now,” she said.
It was late, and they needed to be up early. He thanked her for the wine and checked the parking lot again. There was something more he wanted to say, some piece of himself he wanted to give her, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe he just appreciated the company, or the chance to be himself, his whole, authentic self in front of someone and not feel judged.
He walked her back to her room and told her that they needed to be on the road early, and then he waited outside her room until he could see, through the crack beneath her door, that her lights went off.
He was coming back to the investigation with an answer, but he wasn’t sure what the question was anymore. If the Falling Woman had something to say, if her presence or absence might change the course of the investigation into Pointer 795, Charlie Radford was no longer sure it mattered.
NTSB: Witness Document 1.18.4.4
Before they found the cancer, I was simply a wife, a mother, a lawyer, a lover. I was an avid gardener, a fiscally responsible Democrat, and a marathon runner. Before the chemo and the radiation scoured my organs and transformed my body, before the endless trips to the hospital, before the track marks in my arms, the blood in my stool, the radiation burns on my belly, before my life veered off in unimaginable directions, I was a suburban working mom who drove a Volvo to weekend soccer matches. Life was normal, privileged, safe, almost idyllic.
I once heard the poet David Whyte speak at a conference. This was a few months before I became sick. Whyte appeared onstage. Tall, rugged, with a square face and bangs that fell over his eye, he spoke with a British accent, each word formed with care and precision. As reverential as a parson, as confident as an actor, Whyte said, “Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light.”
I wanted to ask, “But what if I prefer to stay in the dark?”
Straw fell like snow. Flakes of straw, splinters of wood, sawdust, like golden icicles from the dark, all of it falling from the rafters and gathering, until the straw and sawdust covered me. Scratchy silage, one part blanket, one part torture. Hours and hours of it. Silence and straw. In the barn, after my fall, I lay there in the mud while the straw continued to fall.
I couldn’t move, or if I could, I didn’t, like a willed paralysis. The straw kept coming down, in the penetrating silence. Each stalk landed softly, the way snow sounds against the roof in a storm.
Time had stopped. Thick darkness encircled me. Lightning flashed in a gaping hole in the roof, illuminating the falling straw.
From outside came the lowing of cows. I tasted manure, blood, rusty pennies. Rain dripped from the roof. I had fallen out of the sky, and somehow, by some trick of fate or some quirk of physics, I had survived.
40
Storms threatened as they approached Wichita, the city’s skyline breaking the otherwise perfect flatness of the Great Plains. Compared with yesterday, their trip today had been quiet, sullen. They spoke very little for most of the morning. Erin stared out the window while Radford drove.
He had no idea what he would do when they arrived at the Holiday Inn. The hearing was scheduled to start at 3:00 p.m., and it was half past one now.
He’d bought her some time. He’d given her a chance to organize her thoughts. They’d driven practically halfway across the country, talked plenty, talked the damn thing nearly to death. He understood her story now, understood a bit more about why she’d disappeared. He didn’t want to exploit her publicly; he’d keep her name out of it entirely if that were a possibility. But given the past two days, given the onslaught of media, her narrow escape, the pressure of the public hearing, her name would emerge, whether he wanted it to or not. Hell, for all he knew, the media had already reported it anyway.
“I’ll take you to my room,” he said. “You can shower, take a nap. You don’t have to be at the hearing.”
“It’s not fair,” she said. “The way this is going down.”
“Fair has little to do with any of this,” he said.
They were two minutes from the hotel, in light traffic. The clouds on the horizon had turned gray. Lightning flashed in the distance.
“When my father died,” she said, “I never thought I’d get over it. But I did. I still missed him. I grieved for a long time, but after a while, I was okay. I laughed. I played. I couldn’t help myself.”
Radford turned off the highway. Erin seemed nervous, more agitated than he’d yet seen her. He was nervous too, energized in part by the end of the long journey. But he couldn’t deny his own excitement about the timing of this whole thing. His colleagues had all but shunned him. No one took his work seriously, but they’d have to now. He thought of Shep Ellsworth. This would be as close to a knockout punch as it came.
“I’ve said my goodbyes. My daughters, my husband, they don’t deserve this.”
“What happened to you, it’s . . . ,” he said. “It’s an incredible thing. Almost unheard of. But you’ll get to the other side. Six months from now, you’ll be happy you did this.”
Erin laughed.
“Six months from now, I’ll be dead.”
“You don’t know that,” he said. “You certainly have beaten the odds so far.”
He smiled, but she seemed unamused. Lightning flashed again, closer this time. Tornado warnings blanketed the state. Radford loved weather like this. He loved the anticipation, the moments before a storm hit. It made him feel like a child again.
There was no time to explain. Not now. They turned into the hotel parking garage.
“Look,” he said, “I can’t tell you how this will go down. Call your husband. Your girls. Maybe just let them hear your voice.”
He worried that she’d try to run, but given the nature of what was happening, given all the attention, where could she go? No, he told himself, she was fighting, but inside, she must have known that the road had ended.
“Let’s get you up to my room,” he said.
They took the elevator from the parking garage. He hoped that no one spotted them on the way up. They were both exhausted from the road. He needed a shower too, a change
of clothes, but he had to get down to the conference room. He stood in front of the door fiddling with the key card when he remembered the awful condition of his room. Papers everywhere, trash, mildewed towels, his clothes on the floor. She’d think he was crazy, which maybe he was. He opened the door.
Inside, someone had neatly stacked his files and papers, made the bed, scrubbed his bathroom. Even his clothes were folded. She followed him in and he closed the door. There’d be no time to explain.
He turned to her. She looked wounded, broken, defeated. He hated seeing her that way. But there was nothing he could do. He knew that downstairs the cameras were being set up. He turned on the television. A local news channel broadcast an image from the large conference room. No doubt Ulrich, Lucy, and Shep Ellsworth were there already, gathering near the front of the room.
“Take a shower,” he said. “Make whatever phone calls you need to.”
“Don’t do this,” she said. Her voice sounded desperate, like she was on the edge. He knew he shouldn’t leave her alone, but he had to go.
“You’ll be okay,” he said. “You just need to rest.”
“I won’t go back,” she said. Then she grabbed his arm. “I’m not going.”
“What are you afraid of?” he said.
“I’m not afraid, Charlie. I just want to be left alone. Don’t you see that? All this does is hurt people. Nothing good comes of me going home. It will only hurt the people who love me. It will only exploit their pain.”
Something in her voice had changed. She wasn’t negotiating anymore. His phone vibrated in his pocket.
“I’ll be up after,” he said. “I’ll help you figure this out. Stay in this room. Just let yourself rest.”
The last person Radford wanted to see on his way to the conference room was Dickie Gray, but there he stood in the hall, wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a flannel shirt, chomping on a toothpick. Radford bit down on an urge for physical violence.
Gray smiled, but Radford kept walking, refusing to even acknowledge the man who’d betrayed him.
“Hey, hotshot,” Gray said. “I don’t rate a hello?”
Radford turned. He was exhausted, confused, angrier than he’d been in years. The only thing that kept him from throwing a punch was Gray’s age.
“You’ve got a lot of balls,” Radford said. “I trusted you. I goddamn admired you.”
“What are you talking about?” Gray asked.
“Forget it. You needed to get the last laugh, and you clearly got it.”
Gray pulled the toothpick from his mouth and stepped toward him. He grabbed Radford’s arm and pulled him out of the hallway toward an open door. Radford twisted and tried to rip away, but the old man’s grip held firm. They stumbled together into the hotel’s small business center, and Gray slammed the door.
“You got something to say to me, junior?” Gray said. His mouth was inches from Radford’s face.
“You were the only one who knew where I was going,” Radford said. “I trusted you.”
“And?”
“Why the hell did you call the press?” Radford said.
Then Gray released his arm and laughed. The moment seemed surreal. Radford had been ready for a fight with a man old enough to be his father—actually old enough to be his grandfather—and the man had just doubled over with laughter.
When he stopped laughing, Gray stepped back and wiped a bit of spittle from the corner of his lips.
“You may be the dumbest son of a bitch to shit between two shoes,” Gray said. “But you’re earnest. I’ll give you that.”
“What are you saying?” Radford asked.
“I didn’t call the press,” Gray said. “Son, I’ve been doing this job for as long as you could walk. I’ve never called a reporter. I certainly don’t intend to start now.”
“Who then?” Radford asked. He was still mad, angrier now because of his confusion. “I didn’t tell anyone else.”
“You can’t afford to be this naïve, son. You got caught up in a political battle.”
Radford’s thoughts swirled. Had he really been a pawn all along? Had the agency been using him? Had his work, his ambition, all been to serve someone else’s agenda? Had they just been using him so that someone else could get the scoop?
“What questions do you need to ask?” Gray said.
“Why do this?” he said.
“No. That’s the wrong question. You already know the answer to that. Who is this woman? Why is she hiding?”
“She’s sick,” Radford said. “She doesn’t want to go home and die.”
“You understand what’s happening here?” Gray said.
“Not entirely,” Radford said. “And I’m certainly not sure what to do about it.”
Gray put the toothpick back in his mouth.
“It’s pure theater,” Gray said. “Always has been. The people on the ninth floor have different agendas. The spotlight has to shine on them, at all times.”
“Aren’t we all after the same thing?” Radford asked.
“Don’t be obtuse,” Gray said. “You want to solve the case. They want to advance their political careers. It’s apples and ailerons, and you, my young friend, are about to learn your first valuable lesson in the art of politics. Finding this woman gets Carol Wilson and her cronies on the evening news. The evening news gets watched by a lot of people. Are you following me?”
Radford was stunned. He didn’t care about the publicity. He wanted to do his job well. He wanted his work to count. Wasn’t that what mattered? Or was this all a game?
Gray opened the door and stepped back into the hall. Radford followed, trying to unravel the pieces. Inside the conference room, the TV lights had just come on. Radford didn’t understand the political angles. It made no sense. None of it did, least of all the fact that he was being asked to betray a woman he didn’t want to betray. He’d only wanted to do his job.
They stood outside, still in the hall.
“There’s the stage,” Dickie Gray said. “And you’re expected to play your part. So am I, in some way. If you aren’t comfortable with doing what’s expected of you, then get out of this city.”
Ulrich spotted them and motioned for Radford to get inside. It was impossible to think. He held his notes in his left hand. She was upstairs in his room right now; she’d begged him not to go through with the hearing, not to reveal that he’d found her.
“Why do you do it?” Radford asked Gray. “Why do you play along?”
“I never did this work for them,” Gray said. “I was here for answers. I was here to stop the next plane from crashing. That’s all I could do. The work we do, that’s about getting to the bottom of things, about figuring out what happened. Pure and simple. If you can’t make that commitment, then no one will. What the politicians do, how they spin it, that’s not our concern.” He glanced inside the room. “It took me thirty years to figure that out.”
There simply wasn’t time to think. Gray’s claims of moral ambivalence made sense but hardly offered a satisfying solution. Radford shook his mentor’s hand and then stepped into the large conference room. Ulrich glared at him as he took a seat at the elevated conference table. Carol Wilson sat on the left, with two of her executive assistants. Shep Ellsworth had put on a shirt and tie. A few seconds later, Lucy Masterson came in and sat to his right.
The room was packed. Every seat was filled, and the doors were open in the back, with people spilling out into the lobby. There were dozens of cameras in the front row. Radford could smell his own stale musk on his shirt, and wished the hell he had shaved. He must have looked deranged compared with everyone else at the table.
Lucy flipped through her notes.
“Jesus, Charlie,” she said. “You like dramatic entrances?”
He held his arms close to his sides to stifle his odor.
“It wasn’t Gray,” he said. “It wasn’t Dickie Gray who called the press.”
He knew Lucy understood what Gray meant to him, but she had no wa
y of knowing everything that had gone down in the past few days. She went back to her notes. Radford pulled out his notes too. He had to get his head together, had to figure this out.
For a few minutes, no one spoke. Ulrich seemed to be waiting for a signal from Wilson, who talked into her phone. Murmurs from the audience grew louder.
“Why aren’t we starting?” he asked.
“You haven’t heard?” Lucy asked.
Radford shook his head.
“FBI found bomb residue in a section of the cargo hold,” she said. “Ulrich is waiting for an explosives report. I think it’s Shep’s head that might explode!”
“Now? After three weeks?”
“It’s a shit show,” Lucy said. “No one buys the bomb angle. But the FBI wanted to be onstage too. I sure hope you have something solid.”
Radford thought of the woman up in his room. Erin. The Falling Woman. He wondered if she was watching the hearing. What must she be feeling now? Strange thoughts mixed in his head. Could she be suicidal? Would he walk back to his room and find her hanging from the shower? Would she run? Or would she recognize the futility of her situation and embrace her reentry into the world? Next to a vision of her hanging from his shower stood another, one in which her twin daughters embraced their mother suddenly back from the dead. He pictured shaking hands with the woman’s husband.
From the left, a team of three suited FBI agents entered and crossed up to the front. One of the agents leaned in and whispered to Ulrich. Before long, Shep Ellsworth stood and interrupted the conversation, which clearly grew tenser by the second. When Ellsworth slammed his fist into the table, Wilson put down her phone and broke up the huddle. Lost in the middle of the fight, Ulrich seemed to shrink from the pressure of stronger forces surrounding him.
A moment later, Wilson straightened her suit coat and approached the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here,” she said. “We’d like to remind you that the purpose of this hearing is to update the public about the investigation into the crash of Pointer 795. This is a preliminary report. The analysis remains in the earliest phases. And while a public hearing is a significant milestone, it is not—I repeat, not—the final chapter. And with that, I’m going to turn this over to Gordon Ulrich, the Investigator-in-Charge.”
The Falling Woman: A Novel Page 23
