Red, White and Dead Part 3

"Really?"

"I remember a few things. I remember what he looked like. I remember what Mom wore on the day he died. Remember that belt she had on?"

I nodded. I could see the scene as if it were playing in front of me.

When I was eight and Charlie five, my mother had to tell us that our dad was dead. We lived in Michigan then. It had been a magnificent, sunny fall day, and Charlie and I were playing in the leaves in the backyard. I would rake and form piles, then Charlie and I would take running, shrieking leaps and dive into them. Then Charlie would sit, and I would rake, and we would do the whole thing again.

We had been doing that for at least an hour when my mother came out of the house. She wore jeans and a brown braided belt that tied at the waist. She walked across the lawn slowly, too slowly. She was usually rus.h.i.+ng outside to tell us it was time to eat or time to go into town. The ends of her belt gently slapped her thighs as she walked. Her red-blond hair was loosely curled around her face, as usual, but that face was splotched and somehow off-kilter. I remember stopping, holding the rake and studying her, thinking that her face looked as if it had two different sides, like a Pica.s.so painting my teacher had shown us in art cla.s.s.

She sat us down on the scattered leaves and asked us if we knew where our dad was that day.

"Work!" Charlie said.

My father was a psychologist and a police profiler. I knew that much, although I really didn't understand what those things meant.

"No, he-" my mom started to say.

"The helicopter," I said, jumping in. My father already had his pilot's certificate and was training for his helicopter rating.

"That's right." My mom's eyes were wide, scared. The helicopter my father was flying had crashed into Lake Erie, she explained. And now he was dead. It was as simple and awful as that.

Charlie seemed to take the news well. He furrowed his tiny brow, the way he did in school when he knew he was supposed to be listening to an adult. But when she was done, he leapt to his feet and scooped up an armful of leaves with an unconcerned smile.

"I'm surprised you remember that," I said to Charlie now. "I thought you didn't really understand what was going on."

"I didn't, not until later. But I remember that day. Always will."

We both stared at the pond. The father had gotten his twins to sit still, and they paddled away from us, all of them laughing.

"Do you ever think you see him?" I asked Charlie.

"Who?"

"Dad. You know, do you ever think you see him or hear his voice?"

"You mean, someone that reminds me of him? Not really."

"I do."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie turn his head and look at me. "What are you talking about?"

I said nothing for a moment, then, "I think I saw him last night."

"Are you serious? You think you saw Dad?"

I nodded.

"C'mon, Iz, don't start losing it on me now."

I forced a fake laugh. "Maybe I am losing it. But last night..." How to explain? I took a breath, and in a rush, I poured out the story, leaving out the fact that I was working for Mayburn, making it sound as if I'd had some trouble with some weird dudes I met at a bar, but telling Charlie exactly how the man saved me, telling him exactly about those words-You're okay now, Boo.

Charlie said nothing for a while. I could tell he was thinking hard, turning over what I'd said in his mind. Charlie was the type who couldn't be hurried, and he couldn't be shamed into pretending to comprehend something he didn't.

Finally, he looked at me.

I turned my body to face him. "What do you think?"

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. "I think this guy probably said something, and you heard it as 'Boo.' I think it was a stressful situation, and you wanted someone like your father to save you."

It was possible. I'd heard that endorphins and adrenaline could do strange things to your mind. "You don't think it was him?"

"Iz, he's dead."

"Supposedly."

Charlie searched my face.

"I know," I said. "I feel like a prize idiot now that I'm saying this out loud, but there was something familiar about him when I saw him."

"You said you didn't really see him. He had a hat on and then it was dark in those stairs, right?"

"Yes."

"And are you positive he said Boo? I mean, it could have been any word. He could have said you or something like that."

"I guess. That's what I've been telling myself. It's silly, right?"

Charlie leaned forward and ruffled my hair. It gave me a pang of wistfulness because it seemed like something I would do to him. I was usually the stalwart of common sense, the logical one, and now it was Charlie getting a job, Charlie forcing reality into his sibling's world.

He looked at his watch. "I have to get back to that resume."

"Right. I'll walk you."

We strolled to my mom's house in silence. We climbed the front steps and went inside. I thought I'd get a gla.s.s of water, then go home. But my mom and Spence were there, in the kitchen-a room with an octagonal breakfast table tucked into the big bay window. They were taking food out of grocery bags, talking rapidly as if they'd just run into each other, not two people who spent nearly all their days together.

"Izzy, sweetie." My mom kissed me on the cheek. Victoria McNeil was a graceful woman. Her hair was still strawberry blond, although slightly shorter and more styled than she used to wear it. She had a manner that drew people to her-a sort of mysterious melancholy that made people want to know her, to take care of her.

"h.e.l.lo, darling girl," Spence said. It was what he'd always called me. Spence was a tall, slightly overweight guy with a perpetually pleasant air. He had thinning brown hair gone mostly white now, which he let grow more on the sides to compensate for the balding up top.

Charlie shot me a look, as if to say, Are you going to tell them?

I shook my head no.

Spence glanced at the clock above the fridge. "Four o'clock," he said. He looked around at the rest of us. "Well, it's five o'clock somewhere, right?"

He opened a bottle of wine, and we slid into the evening like so many others. Spence and my mom put out a series of small plates of food-some soft goat cheese surrounded by sliced figs; sliver-thin smoked salmon, small dishes of blanched almonds seasoned with truffle salt-and we sat at the breakfast table and feasted slowly, talking quickly. That table was my mother's favorite spot in the house. She had decorated the living room at the front of the house in different shades of ivory, and the room was beautiful, but in the afternoons as the sun slid around the house, it fell into darkness, and my mother, who was p.r.o.ne to depression, always moved into the kitchen, where she could get a few more hours of the daylight that seemed to feed her. And on days like today, with the windows open, the backyard garden green and lush, my mother's sometimes tight personality seemed to unfurl and relax.

A former business a.s.sociate of Spence's had died that week, and he told us about the visitation service that morning. "I'll just never get used to it," he said, "seeing a body like that in a casket. I've been to probably a hundred funerals and wakes in my life, but I just can't stand it." He turned to my mother. "Remember, if I die-"

"I know, my love." She gave him a patient smile that said she'd had this conversation before. "A closed casket."

"There was a closed casket for Dad, wasn't there?" I said.

Everyone went still, looking at me. Spence often talked, even joked, about his death, and in general death was not a conversation we s.h.i.+ed away from in my family. Except we rarely spoke of my father's anymore. My mother had slipped into a severe depression after he died, and I'd often thought we all still acted afraid, as if any mention of the topic could send her reeling again.

But my mother nodded and answered quickly now. "Yes, a closed casket. That's what they'd always done in your father's family. But it was also required because they never found his body."

"So no one ever saw him? Like, to identify him?"

The silence returned, hardened. I felt Charlie nudge me with his knee under the table.

"I'm just curious," I said, as lightly as possible. "I don't know why. I'm sorry..." My words trailed off.

"Don't be sorry," my mother said. "You're ent.i.tled to ask such questions. We probably should have had more discussions like this in the past. But the answer is no. When a helicopter goes down like that, the water is as unforgiving as the ground, and so it shattered on impact." She closed her eyes, as if seeing it, then opened them again. "They found wreckage, which is how they knew the location of the crash. But they couldn't find a body. I was told that's fairly typical for a crash into a large body of water like Lake Erie."

"Something went wrong with the blades, right?"

"From the wreckage and from his last call, it sounded like the blades flexed in a way they weren't supposed to and they cut the tail off."

"Wouldn't they notice a problem like that before he went up?"

"He did an inspection with the instructor and didn't see any problems. The instructor told me later they thought your father had gotten into some kind of problem, something about oscillation. They think he overcorrected and caused the blades to flex."

"Who was the instructor?"

My mother looked up in the air, as if searching for the answer there, then shook her head. "He was with the local aviation company. R.J. was his first name. I can't remember his last." Another shake of her head. "Maybe I don't want to remember."

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but I felt my brother staring intently at me. When I looked at him, he shook his head slowly and gave me a look that seemed to say, Enough, Izzy. Enough for now.

5.

I climbed the stairs of the Old Town building-a converted brick three-flat-to my condo faster than normal. I didn't stop at the threshold the way I usually did to appreciate the s.h.i.+ny pine floors and the marble turn-of-the-century fireplace with its bronze grate. Instead I walked quickly through the front room, then through the European kitchen on the other side, and went straight to the second bedroom, which I used as an office.

I got on the Internet and did a search for any flight schools in the Detroit area that provided helicopter instruction. There was only one. I picked up the phone and dialed.

The woman who answered the phone said they were about to close, but when I mentioned flight lessons, she launched into a sales pitch to get me signed up.

"I'm in Chicago," I finally said. "I really can't take flight lessons there, but I have a question about someone who did about twenty years ago."

"Oh." A pause. "Well, the owner has been around for thirty years."

"Is he available?"

"Might have left for the day. One sec."

I was put on hold. I stared out the window at my neighbor's side yard, watching a young dad pull a blond toddler on a wagon. Was it even possible that my dad was alive? What would he look like now? Would he still have the messy, curly brown hair that looked so much like Charlie's? Would he still wear the copper wire gla.s.ses over eyes that always looked as if they were laughing, or would he have contacts now, or maybe he'd gotten eye surgery? I thought about the man last night. The only time I'd seen him in the light was outside of Gibsons, and his face had been down, his hair covered by the baseball cap. I'd turned so quickly, run so fast that no other details had registered.

I looked at my watch. I'd been on hold for about five minutes and was considering hanging up when I heard a jovial, "Bob Bates, how can I help you?"

I gave him my name, asked if he was the owner and when he gave me a friendly You bet, I forged ahead, saying I was looking for information about a flight instructor who used to teach there almost twenty-two years ago. "I believe his first name was R.J., but I don't know the last."

"R.J. Hmm. Sometimes these guys come and go, but that doesn't sound too familiar. I could be forgetting someone, though."

"I'm sure it's hard to remember." I tried not to let my disappointment creep into my voice.

"Why do you ask?"

"Well, my father used to take lessons from your company."

"Who's that?"

"Christopher McNeil."

"Ah, Jesus. You're McNeil's kid? Now, there's a name I won't forget. That's something you never get used to in this business, losing a pilot."

"Do you remember now who his instructor was?"

"Well, yeah, I do remember the guy. He wasn't one of mine."

"What do you mean?"

"He was government. Came in just to train guys when the government needed him to."

I blinked a few times, didn't know what to think about that. "Which government exactly?" I told him my dad had worked for the Detroit police as a profiler. "Was the instructor someone from the county? Someone with the police?"

"No, the instructor was with the Feds. That's all I knew. They paid me up front for the flight time, runways, hangar fees, tie-downs. I leased them the choppers, same way I do to the news stations. Couldn't believe it when he went down over Lake Erie. It's awful when it's on your watch."

"Do you remember the name of the instructor?"

"Hold on, I'll see if I still have any records." He put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back. "Yeah, I found it. R. J. Ohman. O-H-M-A-N."

6.

M y Internet search for R. J. Ohman revealed nothing.

For the moment, I gave up on finding him and went to the closet in my office, removing boxes of winter stuff-the scarves and gloves that were so prevalent during the winter and seemed like foreign, faraway objects now. Chicagoans are seasonal amnesiacs. In the summer, we literally forget what the winters are like, the warm winds sloughing away our hard-edged memories of January.