Fearless (26 page)

“I’ll wait out here,” Manny said.

She took Perlman’s hand. His fair skin was covered with freckles: light brown spots on a pink background. She thought him ugly. In an oversized, clownish friendly way—but he was still ugly. Perlman kept hold of her hand as they walked into the lobby and down the hallway to the conference room. He swung it back and forth gently, as if they were skipping into a playground. “Come by car?” was his only question. He nodded at her answer.

The room wasn’t as big as she expected and it appeared unfurnished despite the presence of more than fifty folding chairs, the majority still unopened and propped against the rear wall. There were no tables, no lamps, only the chairs, arranged not in neat rows facing in one direction, but haphazardly, at odd angles, sometimes in opposition, sometimes side by side. Apparently thoughtless hotel employees had simply set up a few chairs without rhyme or reason and dumped the rest. Other than the same blue carpet that was in the lobby there was nothing to distinguish it from a storeroom. Carla looked at Perlman, expecting him to be angry.

“Let’s arrange these in a circle if we can,” Perlman said mildly to the woman with the clipboard. “If you want you can sit next to me,” he said to Carla. He tapped the black man who had spoken to Carla on the shoulder. “Can I deputize you to help me with the chairs?” He gestured at two more men. “And you gentlemen? Let’s get them in a circle, even if we have to make them two rows deep.”

Soon almost everybody was busy clanking the chairs as they tried to manage the unfolding and placement. Someone had the idea to space them so that the second row was centered on the gaps of the first, allowing better sight lines. While people moved about there were hellos and hugs of recognition. Many of them seemed to know each other. Carla didn’t. She was disturbed by this until she remembered that the others had been together in the hospital, treated in the emergency rooms and released to be housed in motels, or kept in semiprivate rooms, wandering in and out, talking in the hall, smoking cigarettes in the lounge, sipping coffee in the cafeteria. She was the only one who had been given a private room; she couldn’t have walked out even if she had felt like seeing anyone, and no survivors visited her. Why should they? They had all become friends that first horrible night while she was drugged and alone.

She didn’t accept Perlman’s offer to sit beside him. She took a chair in the second row at the back toward the corner and watched the friendly survivors. To her they were happy. Not hurt by the accident; they had been softened. On the plane they had moved with the stiff protected motions of strangers; in this room they brushed shoulders easily and smiled at each other with their eyes, like tipsy cousins at a wedding. For what seemed to be a long time the room buzzed from dozens of conflicting conversations. Carla stayed silent and looked through the turned heads at Perlman. After delegating the work of setting up, he had taken a seat, folded his hands in his lap and watched. He noticed that Carla had her eyes on him and gestured for her to come beside him. Carla shook her head. She tensed up, ready to run for the door if he came her way. Instead he smiled. He didn’t interrupt all the conversations. He waited. Gradually people fell silent, suppressing others, until Anally only one person was still talking.

“Ooops, I’d better shut up,” that voice concluded and the room chuckled.

“Not really,” Perlman said to the group. “I want you all to talk. But me first.” He smiled and leaned forward eagerly. “You all had a very special experience. I know that sounds funny. It wasn’t good, but that doesn’t make it any less special. You can talk to lots of people about it, you
should
talk to lots of people about it, but only the people in this room will really hear and understand all of what you have to say. I know it can be tough to stand up and talk to a large group of people. And, of course, you don’t have to say anything at all. You can just listen. There are no rules except that nothing anybody says is going to be repeated outside this place unless they want it to be. You don’t have to be interesting, you don’t have to be funny, you don’t have to be nice, you don’t have to make sense. I know some of you have become friends and shared your feelings with each other but that’s not what this is. That’s the way we handle most bad things that happen in life. We talk with family and friends and maybe ministers or priests or rabbis or shrinks. But that’s not what this is. What we’re doing here today is something as old as humankind itself.” Perlman leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Before we made all these machines and people spread out into what we call the nuclear family, human beings lived in tribes. White, black, yellow. We lived in tribes. And when a tribe suffered a calamity, a great flood, an exploding mountain, a terrible shaking of the earth, they sat around their fires, under the skies or huddled in caves, and retold the event, the stories of deaths and destruction, of escape and rescue. I’m not sure why that helps us. We’re still just people, I guess. We haven’t invented a new human being to go with all the new machines. I have a lot of theories about why this group talking helps, but they could be wrong. What’s important is that it helps.” Perlman sighed and lowered his eyes, briefly scanning the circle of faces. “If there’s anyone who wants to stand up and say what happened to them we’d like to hear it.”

Carla did want to hear. She was afraid she would have to talk, but she wanted to listen. She searched for a familiar face. The man who had lost his arm. No. Lisa the flight attendant. No. There was no one she remembered. Maybe these were the wrong survivors.

“I lost my sister,” a woman said. “I lost my sister and my niece and my nephew.”

“Could you stand up?” Perlman asked mildly.

She had blond hair and a deep tan. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. She looked athletic and pretty. To Carla she was the sort of Midwestern American woman who had been a cheerleader in high school. While continuing to speak in a strong clear voice, she stood up: “I was sitting right next to them. Their seats were ripped away. Right in front of my eyes. I’ll never forget it. My sister just—” she gestured into the air, miming something moving off, hovering away, out of reach. “My kids—” she resumed, “my two boys, were on the other side of me. They’re okay—I wish I’d brought them. My mother said no.”

Somebody laughed for a moment and then swallowed it, embarrassed.

The blonde answered the laugh: “Well, she thought it would make it worse for them to relive it. I don’t know how to explain to her you can’t stop—you can’t stop reliving—” Without warning she was weeping. She choked on the tears and doubled up, covering her face with her hands. The people seated on either side of her reached out to support her. A man got up to guide her back to her seat.

Perlman spoke sharply at the blonde: “What’s your name?”

The man trying to help her back to her seat said, “What!” to Perlman as if he were mad.

By now the blonde had forced her tears down. She straightened and looked at Perlman, puzzled.

“Could you say your name, just your first name, and then finish telling your story?” He added quickly to the man supporting her. “You can sit. She’s all right.”

The woman collected herself. She rubbed her forehead. “ Uh,” she seemed to be concentrating. “I’m, uh, I’m—everybody calls me Jackie,” she flashed a shy smile.

“Why don’t you tell us about the crash, Jackie, or even about things that happened before anything went wrong? We don’t just want to know who lived and died. We want to know everything. Tell us from the beginning. Tell it all the way through.”

“Jesus,” a man in Carla’s row mumbled. He stood up and addressed Perlman. “This is going to take forever. I can’t stay. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“What’s your name?” Perlman asked.

“I’m John Wilkenson.”

“Why were you flying that day, John?”

“Pardon me?” Wilkenson had on a gray double-breasted suit. He buttoned the inner flap of the jacket as if preparing to leave.

“What were you flying to Los Angeles for?” Perlman asked.

“I was going on business.” Wilkenson spoke matter-of-factly.

At this answer Perlman tilted his big head. He resembled a quizzical dog wondering if what had been put in his dish was food. He said softly: “You must be very committed to your work.”

John Wilkenson sat down as abruptly as he had stood up. “I’ll wait,” he said from his chair.

It was comical, but no one laughed. “Go ahead, Jackie,” Perlman said.

Jackie told her story. She, her sister and their kids were flying together to visit with their brother in Los Angeles. They planned to see Disneyland. It was the first time all the siblings would have been together since they were teenagers. “Now we’ll never be together again,” she pointed out. Perlman got her attention again with a sharp question and she went on calmly. Carla understood that his behavior was a technique, although she thought it was tricky and unfair.

If listening to other people’s tragedies was supposed to make Carla feel better, then Perlman’s group wasn’t working. Jackie had none of Carla’s problems. From what she said, going outside didn’t scare her, her husband was great to her, and she and her kids had never been closer. Perlman didn’t seem to appreciate Jackie’s easy adjustment either. He interrupted her and said, “Let’s just talk about things that happened the day of the crash. You said you saw your sister and her kids go flying off. What happened to you?”

“I don’t know. I guess I closed my eyes and then there was incredible noise and I couldn’t see anything. I was choking on the smoke and I heard that man—is he here? Are you here?” Jackie asked the crowd.

“Who?” Perlman asked.

“Max Klein.
Newstime
called him the Good Samaritan. I heard him shouting, ‘This way! Follow me!’ And he was standing—” She stopped talking. Carla knew why. Jackie was remembering the bodies she had passed on the way out: a fast look at the crazy-looking dead, at smashed and mutilated bodies. Jackie came to: “Is he here?” she asked Perlman.

“No, he couldn’t come,” Perlman said quickly.

“I couldn’t see anything but him. I only knew my sons were with me ’cause I was holding onto them. That man saved our lives. I came hoping to thank him.”

“How did he save your life?” Perlman asked.

“I was so scared. I couldn’t see. And he sounded so normal. ‘Follow me.’ ” Jackie imitated the call and the way the Good Samaritan had raised his hand and waved. “So I went that way even though I couldn’t tell what was the right direction. Then there was this light behind him. I didn’t know if it was the flames. He disappeared into it. I could still hear him. ‘We’re alive!’ he kept saying and so I wasn’t scared. I took my kids in my arms and jumped into the yellow light. It was the sun shining through the smoke. We landed on the corn and we were okay. I was so scared, my kids were screaming, the smoke was everywhere. We might’ve gone the wrong way and choked on the smoke. I came here today mostly because I wanted to thank him.”

“Same thing happened to me,” someone said.

“Stand up,” Perlman said. One after another six people got up to tell stories of following the Good Samaritan out. Carla didn’t pay attention to them. She leaned forward to see past the heads at Jackie. She wanted to ask her something. Had Jackie searched for her sister and her niece and nephew? Jackie had returned to her seat. Carla moved back and forth to keep watch, in order to see past the shifting heads of the people seated between them. Jackie looked flushed, listening with interest to the other stories of escape. Why didn’t it bother Jackie that she had run away from the plane? She had left her sister and those two children to burn alive. If they were alive. Carla still didn’t know whether Bubble had died from the crash or the fire. She had asked Manny to find out; he came back with the answer that they didn’t know exactly how Bubble had died but they were sure he didn’t suffer. Carla knew that made no sense: how could they know whether he suffered if they didn’t know how he had been killed?

The woman sitting on Carla’s right stood up. “I’m not one of you,” she said.

“What?” said a voice.

“I don’t belong here,” she said. Carla stared up at her. She was a broad-shouldered woman with completely silver-gray hair, although she didn’t look any older than fifty. Her left hand dangled inches from Carla’s face, the fingers clenching and unclenching. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t on the plane. My son died in the crash.” She raised her hands toward Perlman, almost a pleading gesture. “I sneaked in—I don’t belong here.”

“Why did you come?” Perlman asked.

The silver-haired woman moved between the folding chairs to get out of the circle. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“Wait,” Perlman stood up and pleaded. “I wish you had asked me but it’s okay that you’re here. What did you want from them?” He gestured to the curious faces of the survivors.

The gray-haired woman noticed the stares of the group. She was pushed back as if the looks were a strong wind. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to know if anyone had talked to him or knew how it was…” She wound down like a toy with a dying battery and mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and moved back, bumping into the wall.

“Who was your son?” a man called out.

“Where was he sitting?” a woman asked.

The silver-headed woman paused in her retreat along the wall toward the exit. “They said he was in twenty-one C.”

“That was right behind me.” An elderly man stood up. “Did he have red hair?”

“No,” the dead man’s mother answered. “Brown.”

“Kind of a reddish brown?” the old man asked.

“I don’t know,” she stammered. “It might have looked that way. But it was brown.”

“Tall?” the man asked.

“He was six feet tall,” she said with a hint of pride.

“And he was wearing glasses?”

A young man fitting that description stood up. “You mean me,” he said. For a moment the trio stood at different corners of the room and looked from one to another in a triangle of disappointment. The gray-haired woman sagged. The old man blinked. The young man shrugged apologetically. “We were on the other side of the plane,” he said to the mother. “I think you’re talking about me,” he said to the old man. “Remember? We met at the hospital.”