Dark Screams: Volume Two Page 4

  “This one?” she asked, pointing to a Robert Braynard, listed with a local address.

  “Yes.” The man’s eyes pleaded with her—as if she could not only admit him into the conference room, but also had some power over his partner’s fate.

  Was her boss listening? Wade seemed busy with his own crowd, the pregnant mother trying to coerce answers from his vague, avoiding mouth. Wade was a stickler for rules, especially when he made them himself. Family members only, as legally defined—and their conservative legislature wasn’t anywhere close to approving same-sex marriage. Wade wouldn’t let this guy in.

  Michelle thought about her friend’s brother who’d gotten sick a few years back—pneumonia as a complication from AIDS—and remembered how Alice’s parents wouldn’t allow her brother’s lover to visit the hospital room. Alice still hated her mom and dad for that. Her brother was dying, and it wasn’t their place to judge. Grief is what it is; love is what it is.

  And Michelle knew the others in her line were watching, waiting to see if she followed her boss’s example. Their airport served a small city, mostly white, mostly Southern Baptist, and many of them would agree with the strict legal definition of family. At the same time, people who traveled by plane tended to be more worldly than the town itself—recruits connected with the downsized military base, for example; international students attending Graysonville University and professors who moved here from out of state. She’d like to think—even here in the middle of the Bible Belt—she’d like to think people would be more compassionate in a time of shared crisis.

  She barely looked at the driver’s license the man held up. “Go ahead in,” she told him.

  —

  After they’d admitted that initial group, Michelle and Wade moved inside. Other people showed up individually or in small clusters, lured by the loudspeaker’s monotonous chant or directed there by Joanie or Erika or an indifferent recorded message on the airline’s answering machine. These new people peered through the thin rectangular window in the door frame, then tapped at the wire-meshed glass. When Michelle opened the door partway to check their identification against her printout, she tried not to meet the gaze of those who lingered outside the room, banished to the hallway as if their friendship had no value.

  Did the people inside count as the lucky ones? There were fifty of them in the conference room now, all suspended over the cliff of a horrible grief. Occasionally, a ripple would start in one row or another, the beginnings of a protest eventually stifled by decorum. And false hope.

  Wade held them off with a partial announcement at ten o’clock, told them simply that radio contact with the plane had been lost. It may have been diverted to a different airport. We’re working on locating it now.

  But Michelle had seen enough on Wade’s laptop to prepare herself. The projected image remained constant, but her boss periodically cycled through the other camera views on his private screen. He tried to do this subtly—when none of the family members were close to his lectern, and therefore couldn’t catch a stray close-up of metal scraps, torn and burnt and bloody fabric, or a crisp white sheet on a stretcher pulled over shapes that didn’t quite add up to a complete body.

  Each glimpse was enough to force Michelle back into a noncommittal smile, to send her among the rows to collect napkins folded over half-eaten doughnuts or see if anyone needed a different magazine or a coffee refill, decaf or regular, and no, we haven’t heard anything new, not since the last time you asked, I’m sorry.

  She grasped for a general way to refer to them in her mind, these almost widows and nearly orphans, these older men and women who’d soon cast the name of parent painfully into the past tense. Without intending to, she’d attached nicknames to some of them. Big Gulp for the woman with the soda tumbler; Surfer Dude for the twenty-year-old with a slurred California accent. Then there was the stocky middle-aged man who looked like he’d slept in his clothes. His short brown hair had an uneven part on the left side, his face scratchy with a pepper stubble of beard. Maybe she’d been influenced by Wade’s predictions, but this man’s eyes, dark and darting around the room, seemed to take notes. So she’d dubbed him the Reporter. The nicknames weren’t meant to be unkind—just a way to identify people, yet keep them at a distance. If Michelle registered the real name of the elderly black woman—if it was Gladys, for example, and if she held an infant granddaughter named Tammy—the knowledge would only make their suffering more tangible.

  Occasionally she’d hear the ring of a cellphone or overhear the tentative, nervous half of a phone conversation. She gathered nobody at home had information, either: Whatever happened or hadn’t happened wasn’t yet enough to attract the national media, and local news sources remained silent or unaware. Unlike typical cell conversations, loud to the point of rudeness, people here whispered into their phones, unwilling to amplify their anxiety to the room. They hugged phones to their ears, turned their heads to hide the electronic devices as Michelle passed.

  An unconscious symbolism seemed to control them. Michelle was playing at stewardess, and Wade had seated them as if they were on a spacious flight. People stayed mostly in their seats, for fear of missing an announcement the instant it was conveyed—but just as strong was the sense that leaving was impossible, would break the air seal of the cabin, send them from safety into rooms governed by cruel gravity, with no solid footing beneath them.

  A few of them, however, felt free to roam about the “cabin,” in particular, the boy who strayed frequently from his pregnant mother (slumped in the first row, her legs stretched wearily in front) and Robert’s friend, who seemed more alone than any of them, an outsider in this group of legally sanctioned relatives. Each time he got up for more coffee or to select from the snack offerings or choose a new section of USA Today, he returned to a different spot.

  He settled near the African American family now, leaving a respectful empty seat between them. The husband had turned away slightly to stare at the wall. The thin, neatly dressed woman held a baby, most likely a grandchild. Michelle wondered how the baby could be comfortable seated in the woman’s sharp-boned lap, but the infant smiled, adorable and oblivious in a sun-yellow dress, with a white lace bonnet bow-tied beneath her chin. She seemed to enjoy the rhythm as her grandmother tapped one leg nervously.

  “It will be all right,” Robert’s friend said to the old woman. “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “What I told my husband, the Lord wouldn’t send us more than we could handle.”

  “No,” Robert’s friend said. “No, He wouldn’t.”

  “This here’s our granddaughter. We took care of her this week while our daughter was in Nashville.” She spoke inclusively, but her husband didn’t acknowledge the conversation. “Vanessa’s been no trouble at all, have you, dear?” She adjusted the bonnet, actually tilting it slightly off center. “ ’Course, the nice thing about grandkids is, you can hand them back to their mommy before they get to be a bother.” Her voice shook on the last words, her lower lip trembling.

  “She’ll be happy to see her mother again.” Robert’s friend reached a long arm across the empty seat and patted the woman on the knee. For a moment, her leg ceased the nervous tapping; the infant looked startled but remained peaceful. The old woman smiled back at him.

  It was good of him to offer comfort, Michelle thought. It was good of the grandmother to accept it.

  —

  Time passed with agonizing slowness. The tension was nearly unendurable to Michelle, and she imagined it was exponentially worse for those with loved ones on Flight 1137.

  Yet people remained remarkably calm. When the granddaughter cried, as babies will, everyone waited without comment for the sound to end. But at some point their civility and polite denial would break under the strain. And Michelle knew the shift would be dramatic, with one screaming outburst triggering a domino effect of fear and rage. And who could they take their anger out on? God wasn’t here. Just her and Wade, two represent
atives from the airline.

  Five minutes before ten-thirty. She wondered if people expected the announcement to be timed to the half-hour, like the start of television shows.

  Wade needed to tell them. The longer he waited, the worse it would be.

  Michelle backed away from the lectern and stood to the side. Most of the people sat up straight in their chairs and faced the front of the room. They stared at the projected status board as if it were a curtain ready to open. Each instant the imaged refreshed, a horrible ripple of anticipation trembled through the crowd.

  Tell them, Wade. Tell them gently, but tell them.

  In the middle row, Robert’s friend looked directly at her boss instead of at the screen. He studied Wade, as if he could read something in his face.

  All the while, her boss clicked at his keyboard. Was he composing some message? Michelle noticed a shifting cascade of colors reflected in the lenses of Wade’s glasses. The images were too small, she was certain. It was impossible that someone could decipher a reflected picture in those tiny ovals of glass.

  In the waiting audience, Robert’s friend continued to focus on Wade.

  Then the calm finally broke, in a shrill chaos more spectacular than anything Michelle had predicted.

  —

  “What was that?”

  Several voices at once. The scuff of rubber-tipped chair legs on thin carpet.

  “My baby. My baby.”

  People clutching at their chests or squeezing their faces in their hands.

  “Alan’s briefcase?”

  Standing abruptly, a half-empty coffee cup spilling to the floor.

  “Sandra’s jacket. That looked like Sandra’s jacket!”

  A rustle of newsprint. Quiet sobs in an awkward silence.

  “It couldn’t be…”

  “Isn’t that—?”

  And the pregnant woman, closest to the front, crossing the gap with a sprinter’s speed, tiptoed and stretching one arm over the lectern to grasp Wade’s lapel and pull his face closer to hers, her voice an awful, resonating snarl: “What kind of sadistic fucking game are you playing?”

  Because, on the public screen—only for a split second, an almost subliminal flash—an image so horrific…Michelle couldn’t be sure, it had happened so fast. But she thought she’d seen a nightmare collage, some awful collection of the worst fears in this room, carefully joined into a single terrible picture then projected onto the screen. All this time, had Wade simply been working on this perverse Photoshopped image?

  “What?” Wade, flustered, looked behind him at the familiar status board that had been projected for so long. “What? I didn’t—” But he also snapped shut the lid to his laptop, turning off the computer in a quick, guilty motion.

  “Oh, Lord, oh, Lord.” The grandmother hugged the baby against her frail chest.

  Wade stepped beside the lectern, and the pregnant woman’s hand hovered in the air where she’d previously held the lapel of his suit coat. Clearly, the group was ready to shout him down, attack him, but something about his defenseless manner made them pause. Michelle stayed back, not wanting the blame that came with Wade’s authority. She felt the crowd lean forward, tensing, as if to decipher the words of a man who stuttered or spoke in a foreign tongue.

  And that’s what it sounded like: an odd rasping whisper of syllables that started and stopped, less decipherable with each attempt. But he was trying to speak, Wade was trying, which was more than he’d done before, so they gave him space, they listened and waited for some meaning to break through.

  As a result, the other voice broke through clearly, even at a whisper. “You did this.” An accusation, from the man she’d come to think of as the Reporter. His glowering eyes focused on Robert’s friend.

  Where she stood, Michelle could see them both. Most people faced forward as her boss’s voice cracked further and further from coherence, but the Reporter had turned ninety degrees in his chair, his legs in the aisle and chin near his shoulder, to stare at the man across the room and two rows back.

  “What?” One arm flew up, wrist flapping limp as if he’d been startled into a stereotypical flamboyant gesture. Robert’s friend didn’t check to see if the Reporter intended someone else nearby, and Michelle thought she understood. A gay man in this southern town no doubt lived through years of harassment: misunderstood by his parents; teased at school; jeered at outside bars by predatory frat brothers; finally finding love, but denied legal status by a government that should protect him. And all the while, a target for blame, as if just by existing he corrupted children, undermined the nation’s morality, weakened the economy and the employment rate. You did this, the Reporter had said, and of course the word this meant everything, from the tension in the room to the strange projected flash of horror to the plane crash itself. Robert’s friend was startled by the accusation, but not surprised.

  “I know what you are,” the Reporter said. “You shouldn’t be here.” He had obviously listened carefully when she’d bent the rules to admit Robert’s friend into the room.

  The gay man summoned a nervous laugh, then a wry, resigned, half-smile.

  “It’s not funny,” the Reporter said. One leg was anchored beneath the chair, the stocky torso and a clenched fist rising from the seat to lunge across the aisle.

  In the instant it took Michelle to cross to the space between them, she had the uneasy realization that, moments before, if the crowd had chosen to attack her boss, she would have allowed it. She would have stood back, let them knock Wade to the ground and punch and kick him, maybe would have raced for the door and left him behind without a second thought.

  But this man had been her ally, comforting others even as he suffered the same terrible uncertainty. She would protect him. She didn’t have a choice.

  Her frame was slight, but she counted on southern gallantry. The Reporter wouldn’t dare hit her.

  “Miss, out of my way—”

  “Return to your seat,” she said, as confident as a stewardess repeating federal regulations. Smoking is forbidden in the airplane lavatory. Please wait until the captain has turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign.

  “You don’t understand. You have no idea.” He wouldn’t hit her, no, but he put one palm flat against her shoulder and shoved her out of the aisle. Michelle caught herself on the back of a chair, practically falling into Surfer Dude’s lap. As she regained her balance, she was pleased to notice Robert’s partner had escaped. And people from outside, the non–family members Wade hadn’t permitted to enter, caught the door before it crunched shut. They surged into the conference room, agitated by the commotion of agony and confusion they’d heard through the walls.

  The Reporter ran toward the doorway, and he wedged his thick body through the entering crowd. Michelle hadn’t been able to stop him, but at least she’d given Robert’s friend a head start.

  The entire situation was too big for her to grasp, so she’d fixated on this tiny battle of wills. Michelle couldn’t revive dead bodies from the wreckage, but she could damn well fight against prejudice and exploitation.

  She followed the Reporter.

  —

  She found him outside the room, the only person in the baggage claim area at this late hour. He aimed a digital camera at empty conveyor belts. So she’d been right about him all along. Michelle thought of movie crime scenes where a police chief grabs a reporter’s unauthorized camera and pulls a loop of film from the compartment, recorded images flashed away in an overexposed instant; or where a sheriff’s boot heel cracks through a lens and view screen, scrapes metal and plastic into the asphalt next to a bloodstain and chalk outline. She didn’t have that kind of bullying authority—only the force of her indignation. “Which newspaper?” she asked.

  The Reporter held the camera at arm’s length, between thumb and fingertips, with a continual pan and pivot of his wrist. “I’m sorry?”

  She called his bluff. “You don’t know anyone on that plane,” Michelle said.

&nb
sp; “No. I don’t.” But his confession wasn’t the triumph she expected. There was a glimmer of weakness in his flat statement, something with the flavor of authentic grief. “This tragedy isn’t mine,” he said, and for a moment, despite herself, she pitied him.

  But her emotions, held in check for most of the evening, now responded in quick reflexive jolts. When the Reporter next said, “He can’t have gone far,” a sneer in the pronoun set her off again. Michelle was certain she’d heard it: He used ironically, as if a homosexual doesn’t deserve the masculine reference.

  “Why are you looking for him? Maybe you need someone to blame for the sake of a story. Or maybe it’s something personal?” Her voice got louder as she climbed inside rediscovered anger. “But it’s chance. Random wind currents or pilot error or engine flaws or some other combination of bad luck. You can’t scapegoat an innocent man simply because—”

  “He’s not innocent,” the Reporter said. “And he’s not a man.”

  “That’s enough!” And she was pointing at him, jabbing his shoulder with her forefinger for emphasis. “You can’t blame someone because you don’t like the way he looks. Because you don’t like the way he loves.” How did she summon the nerve to touch him like that?—a small-framed girl against this stocky bigot who no doubt played football or wrestled in high school, lifted weights twenty years later to fight back the gut from weekend drinking. And even more surprising, her outburst seemed to work. He dropped the arm with the camera and stepped back, a sadness and realization on his face, and she felt as if, in a one-minute confrontation, she’d startled him out of a lifetime of prejudice. No miracles for people on Flight 1137, sadly, but maybe a small miracle here.

  “You’re mistaken.” He shook his head. “I’m not homophobic. He lies. That’s what he does.” Again the irony and scorn in the pronoun.