I can remember these things, but not if I ever saw landing gear, and not that the plane hit a low building and that was where it came to rest and burst into flames, and that it never even made it to the runway. I remember how loud it seemed as it got closer and closer to the ground, and how weird its placement in the sky was, how I was shocked at what it was doing and watched it the whole time, right into the ground, and how I watched it burn, crying and yelling for someone to help the pilot while I did nothing. I yelled until I felt my pinkies losing sensation, which meant I was hyperventilating, but my voice did nothing, stopped nothing, changed nothing.
What my mind knew that I didn’t want it to know was that a man had left the world right in front of me. The official policy following a crash is silence—no phone calls, no texts, absolutely no Facebook. Silence allows the grim rituals space to work—securing the scene, coordinating emergency workers, notifying the next of kin. What do you do on a morning like this, having seen the event take place? You fill the prescription, you go home, you make lunch for your son. You set the ring volume on your phone to max and check the battery level again and again. You fight the fear that despite what you know—small jet, one fin, one exhaust nozzle, your husband scheduled for a flight that shouldn’t have taken off yet—you will somehow get blindsided. You wait. And when the call finally comes, the one where you hear his voice and he says he’s okay, you listen to all the other facts, including which husbands of friends had also been up in the air, fighting the weather and being redirected to other fields, before you finally say, “I saw it happen.” The relief is still a long way off when he says, “Hold tight, I’m coming home.” You won’t actually feel it until he walks in the door and you bury your face in his shoulder and let the snowflakes melt against your skin.
It was only from this distance that I could ask, “Was it anyone we knew?”
“You never met him. He was a contractor flying as an adversary. It wasn’t a Navy plane, but he used to be in the Navy.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yes.” A long pause. “I had to call his boss and tell him and—” Ross stopped, and I looked up at him. His eyes were welling up and he reached up to pinch the tears out one-handed.
Mikayla came over then, windblown and coatless, having run out her front door and along the canal road when she heard from another wife that I’d witnessed the crash. She hugged me once, hard, and said, “I love you,” then ducked out quickly when she saw Ross had come home. We stayed this way for the rest of the afternoon, not talking much but staying close to each other, huddled inside as the storm blew itself out.
—
The question of how long it took, which of those impossibly stretchy awful seconds was the pilot’s last, lay like a giant crack underneath everything I did from the moment his plane hit the ground until many weeks, months, even a year later. Time, time had to be accounted for, so much so that I wrote out a timeline as soon as I got home from the base and as many facts as I could remember and swear to, and I wrote them all down in a list, convinced that I should be ready when someone called needing to know something. I could then hand over my list and maybe it would fit into some larger picture whose unbalanced part could then be found and isolated: here’s why it happened, here’s how it will never, ever happen again. But the call never came and the question of time began to bother me in a different way. What was the last thing he saw? What was his last thought?
So much of writing for me is going back over moments where I can remember my part, imagine someone else’s, and then check with that person and see what it really looked like from their angle and tease out all the nuances that got lost in translation. It’s a way of discovering the exact distance between myself and other people, especially the ones I love. But with the crash, I was stuck in my car, behind a chain-link fence and some trees with the radio playing some song I’ll never remember. One of my sons was strapped in his car seat facing backward into an unforgiving wind of snow and dirt, and the other was trapped inside me listening to muffled screams and awash in cortisol and adrenaline. And the man leaving the world was stuck inside his jet.
Can we shape a moment like that with our minds and with the story we tell ourselves after the fact? Is that maybe even allowed as a kind of grace, since the worst, a man’s death, has so clearly already happened? If so, then I say this:
He died on impact. His last image was of snowflakes. His last thought was of his family.
—