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 themselves 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.
Just him? she asked.
So far. But we’re looking.
She woke Doug and told him they had to go to a hospital on Long Island.
Now? he said.
She drove, putting the car in gear before Doug, his fly undone, sweatshirt half on, had even gotten the door closed. She told Doug there was a plane crash somewhere in the ocean. That one of the passengers had swum miles to shore, carrying the boy. She wanted him to tell her not to worry, that if they survived, then the others had survived as well, but he didn’t. Her husband sat in the passenger seat and asked if they could stop for coffee.
The rest is a blur. She remembers jumping out of the car in a loading zone at the hospital, remembers the panicked search for JJ’s room. Does she even remember hugging the boy, or meeting the hero in the bed beside him? He is a shape, a voice, flared out by the sun. Her adrenaline was so high, her surprise at the magnitude of events, at how big life could get—helicopters circling wave caps, naval ships deployed. So big that it filled the screens of three million televisions, so big that her life was now a historic mystery to be discussed, the details viewed and reviewed, by amateurs and professionals alike.
Now, in the conference room, she makes her hands into fists to fight off the pins and needles she’s feeling, and tries to smile. Across from her, Larry Page smiles back. There are two lawyers on either side of him, split by gender.
“Look,” he says, “there’ll be time for all the minutiae later. This meeting is really just to give you an overview of what David and Maggie wanted for their children in case of—in the eventuality of their death.”
“Of course,” says Eleanor.
“How much?” asks Doug.