Before the Fall Read online

  “Why are you telling me this?” Scott asks.

  “You asked.”

  “And is that why you brought me out here? Because I asked?”

  Gus thinks about that, human truth versus strategic truth.

  “You said it might help you remember,” he says.

  Scott shakes his head.

  “No. I know I’m not supposed to be here. This isn’t how you work.”

  Gus thinks about that.

  “Do you know how many people survive most plane crashes? None. Maybe being here will help you remember something. Or maybe I’m just tired of going to funerals. Maybe I wanted you to know that I appreciate what you did.”

  “Don’t say for the boy.”

  “Why not? You saved his life.”

  “I…was swimming. He called out. Anybody would have done what I did.”

  “They might have tried.”

  Scott looks out over the water, chewing his lip.

  “So because I was on the high school swim team I’m some kind of hero?”

  “No. You’re a hero because you acted heroically. And I brought you out here because that means something to me. To all of us.”

  Scott tries to remember the last time he ate.

  “Hey, what did he mean?”

  “Who?”

  “In the hospital. When the guy from the feds said Boston played last night. The guy from OSPRY said something about baseball.”

  “Right. Dworkin’s at bat. He’s a catcher for the Red Sox.”

  “And?”

  “And on Sunday night he broke the record for the longest at bat in baseball history.”

  “So?”

  Gus smiles.

  “He did it while you were in the air. Twenty-two pitches in just over eighteen minutes starting the moment you took off and ending within seconds of the crash.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Longest at bat in baseball history, and it lasted the exact length of your flight.”

  Scott’s eyes return to the water. Heavy gray clouds are massing on the horizon. He remembers a game being on, that something remarkable seemed to be happening—at least the two other guys on board were getting worked up about it. Take a look at this, hon, and Can you believe this fucking guy? But Scott was never one for sports and he barely looked over. Now, though, hearing the story—the coincidence of it—he feels the hair on the back of his neck stand. Two things happen at the same time. By mentioning them together they become connected. Convergence. It’s one of those things that feels meaningful, but isn’t. At least he doesn’t think it is. How could it be? A batter in Boston fouling pitches into the stands while a small plane struggles through low coastal fog. How many millions of other activities begin and end at the same time? How many other “facts” converge in just the right way, creating symbolic connectivity?

  “Early reports on the pilot and copilot look clean,” says Gus. “Melody was a twenty-three-year veteran who flew with GullWing for eleven years. No black marks, no citations or complaints. Kind of an interesting childhood, though, raised by a single mom who took him to live with a doomsday cult when he was little.”

  “Like a Jim Jones Guyana cult?” asks Scott.

  “Unclear,” says Gus. “We’re doing some digging, but most likely it’s just a detail.”

  “And the other one?” asks Scott. “The copilot?”

  “A little bit more of a story there,” says Gus. “And obviously none of this is to be repeated, but you’ll probably see a lot of it in the press. Charles Busch was Logan Birch’s nephew. The senator. Grew up in Texas. Did some time in the National Guard. Sounds like he was kind of a playboy. A couple of citations, mostly for appearance—showing up to work unshaven. Probably partied too hard the night before. But no red flags. We’re talking to the airline, trying to get a clearer picture.”

  James Melody and Charles Busch. Scott barely even saw the copilot, has only a vague memory of Captain Melody. He tries to commit the details to memory. These are the people who died. Each had a life, a story.

  Around them the sea has turned choppy. The Coast Guard cutter ramps and banks.

  “Looks like a storm is coming,” says Scott.

  Gus holds the rail and stares out at the horizon.

  “Unless it’s a class four hurricane,” he says, “we don’t abandon the search.”

  * * *

  Scott has a cup of tea inside while Gus manages the search. There is a TV on in the galley, pictures of the ship he is on from a news helicopter, the search in progress live. Scott feels like he’s in one of those mirrored rooms, his image reflecting off into infinity. Two sailors on break drink coffee and watch themselves on TV.

  The image of the search party is replaced by a talking head—Bill Cunningham in red suspenders.

  “—watching the search as it progresses. Then at four p.m. don’t miss a special broadcast, Are Our Skies Safe? And look—I’ve held my tongue long enough—but this whole thing smells more than a little fishy to me. ’Cause if this plane really did crash, then where are the bodies? If David Bateman and his family are really—dead—then why haven’t we seen the—and now I’m hearing, and ALC broke this story just hours after the event, that Ben Kipling, the notorious money manager rumored to be on board the flight—that Kipling was about to be indicted by the Treasury Department for trading with the enemy. That’s right, folks, for investing money illegally obtained from countries like Iran and North Korea. And what if this disaster was an enemy nation tying up loose ends. Muzzle this Kipling traitor once and for all. So we have to ask—why hasn’t the government characterized this crash for what it is—a terrorist attack?”

  Scott turns his back to the TV and sips his tea out of a paper cup. He tries to tune out the voices.

  “And just as important, who is this man? Scott Burroughs.”

  Hold on, what? Scott turns back. Onscreen is a photo of him taken sometime last decade—an artist portrait that accompanied a gallery show he did in Chicago.

  “Yes, I know, they’re saying he rescued a four-year-old boy, but who is he and what was he doing on that plane?”

  Now a live image of Scott’s house on the Vineyard. How is that possible? Scott sees his three-legged dog in the window, barking soundlessly.

  “Wikipedia lists him as some kind of painter, but has no personal information. We contacted the Chicago gallery where Mr. Burroughs allegedly held his last show in 2010, but they claimed never to have met him. So ask yourself, how does a nobody painter who hasn’t shown a painting in five years end up on a luxury plane with two of the richest men in New York?”

  Scott watches his house on TV. A shingled, single-story home rented from a Greek fisherman for nine hundred dollars a month. It needs a paint job—and he waits for Cunningham’s inevitable joke, the painter’s house that needs a paint job—but it doesn’t come.

  “And so now, live on this network, this journalist is asking—if there’s anyone out there who knows this mystery painter, please call the station. Convince me that Mr. Burroughs is real and not some sleeper agent posing as a has-been who just got activated by ISIS.”

  Scott sips his tea, aware of the stares of the two soldiers. He feels a presence behind him.

  “Looks like going home is out of the question,” Gus says, having wandered up behind Scott.

  Scott turns.

  “Apparently,” he says, feeling a completely foreign disconnect—who he is inside versus this new idea of him, his new identity as a public persona, his name pronounced with vitriol by a famous face. And how if he goes home he will walk out of his life and onto that screen. He will become theirs.

  Gus watches the TV for a moment, then goes over and turns it off.

  “You got anywhere you can crash for a few days,” he says, “under the radar?”

  Scott thinks about it, comes up blank. He has called the one friend he has and ditched him in a gas station parking lot. There are cousins somewhere, an old fiancé, but he has to believe that thes
e people have already been discovered in the Google search of modern curiosity. What he needs is someone nonlinear, a name generated seemingly at random, that no private eye or computer algorithm could ever predict.

  Then a name enters his head, some cosmic synapse firing. Two words spoken with an Irish lilt that paint a picture: a blond woman with a billion dollars.

  “Yeah, I think I know who to call,” he says.

  Chapter 13

  Orphans

  Eleanor remembers when they were girls. There was no yours and mine. Everything she and Maggie owned was communal, the hairbrush, the striped and polka-dot dresses, the hand-me-down Raggedy Ann and Andy. They used to sit in the farmhouse sink, facing the mirror, and brush each other’s hair—a record on in the living room—Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie or the Chieftains—the sounds of their father cooking. Maggie and Eleanor Greenway, eight and six, or twelve and ten, sharing CDs, swooning over the same boys. Eleanor was the younger, towheaded and spritely. Maggie had a dance she did, twirling with a long ribbon until she got dizzy. Eleanor would watch and laugh and laugh.

  For Eleanor there was never a time where she thought in terms of I. Every sentence in her head began with we. And then Maggie went to college and Eleanor had to learn how to be singular. She remembers that first three-day weekend, spinning in her empty room, listening for laughter that never came. And how that feeling, of being alone, felt like bugs in her skeleton. And so on Monday, when school started, she threw herself off the cliff of boys, opening her eyes for the first time to the idea of couplehood with someone else. She was going steady with Paul Aspen by Friday. And when that ended three weeks later, she switched to Damon Wright.

  It was the lightbulb behind her eyes guiding her, this idea—never be alone again.

  Over the next decade there was a series of men, crushes and infatuations, surrogates. Day in and day out Eleanor dodged her central defect, locking the door and rolling up the window, eyes doggedly forward, even as its knocks became louder and louder.

  She met Doug three years ago in Williamsburg. She had just turned thirty-one, was working a temp job in Lower Manhattan and doing yoga in the evenings. She lived with two roommates in a three-story walk-up in Carroll Gardens. The most recent love of her life, Javier, had dropped her a week earlier—after she found lipstick stains on his boxers—and most days she felt like a rain-soaked paper bag. Her roommates told her she should try being alone for a while. Uptown, Maggie said the same, but every time she tried Eleanor felt that same old feeling, those bugs climbing back into her bones.

  She spent the weekend with Maggie and David. Helping with the kids is how she remembers it, but really she just lay there on the sofa staring out the window and trying not to cry. Two nights later, she was out with some work friends at a blue-plate hipster joint near the L train when she spotted Doug. He had a heavy beard and wore overalls. She liked his eyes, the way they crinkled when he smiled. When he came up to the bar for another pitcher, she struck up a conversation. He told her he was a writer who avoided writing by hosting elaborate dinner parties. His apartment was full of obscure food prep machinery, vintage pasta rollers and a three-hundred-pound cappuccino machine he’d rebuilt screw by screw. Last year he started curing his own sausage, buying bung from a butcher in Gowanus. The trick was controlling the humidity so botulism didn’t set in. He invited her over to try some. She said that sounded dicey to her.

  He told her he was working on the great American novel or maybe just a paperweight made entirely out of paper. They drank Pabst together and ignored their friends. She went home with him an hour later and learned he slept on flannel sheets, even in the summer. His decor was lumberjack meets mad scientist. There was a vintage dentist’s chair he was rebuilding with a television mounted on the arm. Naked he looked like a bear and smelled of beer and sawdust. She felt like a ghost lying under him, watching him work, as if he were making love to her shadow.

  He told her he had boundary issues and drank too much. She said, Hey, me too. And they laughed about it, but the truth was she didn’t drink that much, but he did, and the great American paperweight called to him at odd hours, inspiring in him fits of self-pity and rage. She’d wake sweating under his flannel top sheet and find him tearing his desk (an old door laid across two sawhorses) apart.

  But during daylight hours he was sweet, and he had a lot of friends who dropped by throughout the day and night, which meant Eleanor never had the chance to be alone. Doug welcomed the distraction, and he’d drop everything to go on a culinary adventure—tracking down a cherry pitter on Orchard Street, or riding the subway to Queens to buy goat meat from some Haitians. He was such a big presence that Eleanor never felt alone, even when he stayed out late. She moved into his apartment after a month, and if she ever felt lonely she put on one of his shirts and ate leftovers sitting on the kitchen floor.

  She got her masseuse license and started working at a high-end boutique in Tribeca. Her clients were movie stars and bankers. They were friendly and tipped well. Doug, meanwhile, did odd jobs—random carpentry and the like. He had a friend who remodeled restaurants and would pay Doug to track down and refurbish vintage stoves. In Eleanor’s mind they were happy and doing what young couples should be doing in the modern age.

  She introduced him to David, Maggie, and the kids, but she could tell that Doug didn’t enjoy being around a man as accomplished and moneyed as David. They ate in the dining room at the town house (it was easier for the kids than going out) at a table for twelve, and she watched Doug drink a bottle of French wine and inspect the top-of-the-line kitchen appliances (an eight-burner Wolf range, a Sub-Zero fridge) with envy and disdain (“you can buy the tools, but you can’t buy the talent to use them”). On the subway home, Doug railed against her sister’s “Republican sugar daddy” and acted as if David had rubbed their faces in their inadequacy. Eleanor didn’t understand. Her sister was happy. David was nice, and the kids were angels. And no, she didn’t agree with her brother-in-law’s politics, but he wasn’t a bad person.

  But Doug had the same clichéd overreaction to wealth that defined most bearded men his age. They defamed it, even as they coveted it. He launched into a monologue that ran from the 6 train, through the change at Union Square, and all the way to their bedroom on Wythe Avenue. How David was peddling hate to white people with guns. How the world was worse off now than it had ever been, because David trafficked in extremism and hate porn.

  Eleanor told him she didn’t want to talk about it anymore and went to sleep on the sofa.

  They moved to Westchester in May. Doug had gone in on a restaurant in Croton-on-Hudson with some friends, more of an empty space really, and the idea was that they would move up there and he and his friends would build the place out from scratch. But money was tight, and one of the friends pulled out at the last minute. The other put in six months of half time, then knocked up a local high school girl and fled back to the city. And now the space sat half built—mostly just a kitchen and some boxes of white tile rotting in a spray of standing water.

  Doug drives over there in an old pickup truck most days, but just to drink. He’s set up a computer in the corner and will work on his paperweight if the mood strikes him, which it usually doesn’t. The lease on the space expires at the end of the year, and if Doug hasn’t managed to turn it into a functional restaurant (which feels impossible at this point), they will lose the space and all the money they’ve invested.

  At one point, Eleanor suggested (just suggested) that David could maybe lend them ten grand to finish the space. Doug spit at her feet and went on a two-day rant about how she should have married a rich asshole like her fucking sister. That night he didn’t come home, and she lay there feeling the old bugs crawling back inside her bones.

  For a time it seemed their marriage would be just another houseplant that had failed to thrive, choked to death by the lack of money and the death of dreams.

  And then David and Maggie and beautiful little Rachel died, and they found t
hemselves with more money than they could ever spend.

  * * *

  Three days after the crash they sit in a conference room on the top floor of 432 Park Avenue. Doug, under protest, has put on a tie and brushed his hair, but his beard is still shaggy and Eleanor thinks he may have gone a day or two without a shower. She is wearing a black dress and low heels, and sits clutching her purse. Being here, in this office tower, facing a phalanx of lawyers makes her teeth itch—the import of it. To unseal their last will and testament, to be read the provisions of a document meant to be read in the event of death, signifies with irrefutable evidence that someone you love is dead.

  Eleanor’s mother is watching the boy upstate. Eleanor felt a twist in her stomach as they were leaving. He looked so vacant and sad as she hugged him good-bye, but her mother assured her they’d be fine. He was her grandson, after all, and Eleanor forced herself to get in the car.

  On the ride in, Doug kept asking how much money she thought they were going to get, and she explained to him that it wasn’t their money. It was JJ’s and there would be a trust and as the boy’s guardian she would be able to spend the money to care for him, but not for their own personal gain. And Doug said, Sure, sure, and nodded and acted like Of course I know that, but she could tell from the way he drove and the fact that he smoked half a pack of cigarettes in ninety minutes that he felt like he’d won the lottery and was expecting to be handed an oversize novelty check.

  Looking out the window she thinks about the moment she first saw JJ in the hospital, then flips to the moment three days earlier that the phone rang and she found out her sister’s plane was missing. And how she sat there under the covers long after the call was over, holding the receiver while Doug slept beside her, on his back, snoring at the ceiling. She stared into the shadows until the phone rang again, sometime after dawn, and a man’s voice told her that her nephew was alive.