Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.
On the third day he stops going outside.
He is living in Layla’s third-floor guest apartment. It is a space of pure white—white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture—as if he has died and moved on to some kind of heavenly limbo. Time, once mired in hard-fought routine, becomes fungible. To wake in a strange bed. To make coffee with unfamiliar beans. To lift rich bath towels from self-closing cupboards and feel their hotel texture against your skin. In the living room there is a bar filled with Scottish malts and clear Russian courage. A cherrywood, mid-century case with an elaborate folding lid. Scott stared at it for a long time that first night, the way a man in a certain mental state regards a gun cabinet. So many ways to die. Then he covered the bar with a blanket, moved a chair in front of it, never to look at it again.
Somewhere, the Kipling wife and that beautiful flight attendant are lying faceup on a steel slab. Sarah, that was her name, and the model in the short skirt was Emma Lightner. Several times a day he reviews the names like a Zen koan. David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, Rachel Bateman…
He thought he had come to terms with this thing, its full import, but there was something about the news that bodies had been found that threw him off balance. They’re dead. All of them. He knows they’re dead. He was there, in the ocean. He dove beneath the wave. There could be no survivors, but hearing the news, seeing the footage—first bodies recovered from Bateman crash—made the whole thing real, the way your legs go out from under you only after a crisis is over.
The mother is still out there, the father and sister. So are the pilots, Charlie Busch and James Melody. So is Kipling, the traitor, and the Batemans’ security man, buried somewhere deep beneath the waves, swaying in permanent black.
He should go home, he knows, back to the island, but he can’t. For some reason he finds himself unable to face the life he once lived (once, in this case, being just days ago, as if linear time means anything to a man who’s survived what he’s survived. There is before and there is after), unable to approach the little white gate on a quiet sandy road, to step over the old slip-on shoes left absently by the door, one behind the other—the toe of the back shoe still resting on the heel of the front, where he stepped out of it. He feels unable to return to the milk in the fridge gone sour, and his dog’s sad eyes. That is his home, the man on TV who wears Scott’s shirts and squints into the lens of old photographs—are my own teeth that crooked? Unable to face the gauntlet of cameras, the endless barrage of questions. Talking to people on the subway is one thing, but addressing the masses—that’s something he can’t handle. A statement becomes a pronouncement when delivered to the crowd. Random observations become part of the public record to be replayed for all eternity, Auto-Tuned and memified. Whatever the reason, he feels unable to retrace his steps, to withdraw to the place he lived “before.” And so he sits on his borrowed sofa of the now and stares out at the treetops and brownstones of Bank Street.
Where is the boy at this moment? In a farmhouse somewhere in the country? At a breakfast table surrounded by spiky green strawberry tops and calcifying oatmeal splotches? Every night before bed, Scott has the same thought. In sleep he will dream of the boy lost in an endless black ocean, dream of his Dopplered cries—nowhere and everywhere at once—as Scott splashes around, half drowning, searching but never finding. But the dream does not come. Instead there is only the deep vacuum of sleep. It occurs to him now, sipping cold coffee, that maybe these are the boy’s dreams. A projection of his anxiety, floating on the jet stream like a dog whistle only Scott can hear.
Is the bond between them real or implied, a product of guilt, an idea he has contracted like a virus? To save this child, to have him cling to you for eight exhausting hours, to carry him in your arms to the hospital—did that create new pathways in the brain? Isn’t the life saved enough? He is home now, this child the world knows as JJ, but whom Scott will always think of simply as the boy. Safe and cared for by a new family, by the aunt and her—well, let’s be honest—shifty husband. An instant millionaire hundreds of times over who will never want for anything, and him not even five. Scott saved his life, gave him a future, the chance of happiness. Isn’t that enough?
He dials information and asks for the aunt’s number in Westchester. It is nine p.m. He has sat alone in the apartment for two days straight. The operator connects him and as he listens to the phone ring he wonders what he is doing.
On the sixth ring she answers, Eleanor. He pictures her face, the rosy cheeks and sad eyes.
“Hello?”
She sounds wary, as if only bad news comes after dark.
“Hey, it’s Scott.”