“Buddy swore by those things. He got so cold once he wassick. He didn’t have any fat left. He wore that blanket in the car. I put it over him in the hotel bed.”
“I can picture him on the plane, this great big silver man.”
“Ten minutes after we took off, he was asleep, and every time the flight attendant came by, I said, let him sleep, let him sleep. Then I went to sleep. We were both tired. When I woke up, he was dead. We were still an hour, hour and a half out from landing.”
“My heart just stopped.”
“I had rolled up my jacket for him to use as a pillow and the jacket had slipped. When I leaned over to fix it for him—”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. He was dead. I mean, no one was going to save him. I was terrified if anyone knew they’d have to land the plane and put us off in Erie or Elmira or wherever we were flying over, and then what was I going to do? I wanted to get him home. My uncle Jay was meeting us at the airport and I knew he would help me.”
“So you just sat there?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. He died of a pulmonary embolism, by the way. They did an autopsy. He might have thrown a blood clot without being on a plane, but the plane certainly didn’t help. Leda says if I would do some work, I could probably get the whole thing sorted out in my mind, put the trauma in the trauma box and the grief in the grief box, but I don’t want to. Buddy’s life ended and my interest in being on an airplane ended at the exact same time.”
“Sure,” Eddie said. “You live in New York. There’s no place you need to go.”
“That’s what I think.”
“So how did it end?”
I thought about it for a minute. I thought of Buddy and me in a parking lot at the beach, looking at the waves. “It was sad. That’s all it was. When the plane landed, I told the flight attendant and she went around quietly and told the other flight attendants. There was no announcement. Everyone got off the plane in the usual way. Then two of the flight attendants came back and sat in the seats across from us. They were so kind. What you realize in a situation like that is not only are you not the first person whose father has died on a commercial flight, but they’ve trained for this. There’s protocol. We had to wait for the medical examiner to get there and pronounce him. The flight attendant asked if there was anyone meeting us and I gave them Jay’s name, and fifteen minutes later, there’s Jay. Once I saw Jay, I fell apart because he was crying and I felt so sorry for him. I gave him my seat and he sat down next to his brother. All their lives they’d been together, pretty much every day. The flight attendant asked me if there was anyone I should call, and I thought of that hospital administrator, Jonathan Fuller. Jonathan Fuller would know how to get Buddy back to Gloucester. Nine o’clock at night, a Sunday night, and Jonathan picked up the phone right away and I told him what had happened. He said he’d take care of it. That was pretty much it for me. In all the sadness and confusion, there was also this overwhelming gratitude. If he’d shown up with an ambulance and a justice of the peace, I would have married him on the plane.”
“People have no understanding of how love works,” Eddie said. “They don’t take gratitude into account. They don’t think about relief.”
I nodded. “Oh, the relief was huge. Jonathan got there before the medical examiner. I can’t imagine all the things he had to doto get through security, to get on that plane, but he did it. When the examiner came with the transport people, Jonathan said Jay and I should go down the jet bridge and wait, so we did. We just wanted someone to tell us what to do. Fifteen minutes later, they brought Buddy out. He was in a body bag on a rolling stretcher.” I shook my head. “Jesus, this was not a good story to be telling you at chemo.”
“It’s better than the story I told you about Mary Carter seeing all her dead relatives when we were freezing to death in the car.”
I conceded the point. “Maybe,” I said. “A little.”
“How did your mother take it?”
Sometimes I forgot that Eddie knew my mother, that Eddie had once been married to my mother. “Her head blew off.”
Eddie nodded. “That would have been my guess.”
“Really? It wasn’t my guess. My mother wouldn’t hear a word about Buddy. When we were growing up, we knew not to talk about him. That never changed. I might have said that he’d been sick, but I never told her I’d been going to Gloucester to see him. I certainly didn’t tell her I’d bought first-class plane tickets to take him to California. But then I told her he had died. I told her over the phone. Huge mistake.”
“Your mother never got over Buddy Zabriskie.”
“Are you serious?”
“College love, first love, true love. It was one of the things we had in common. I loved Skip and she loved Buddy. When Buddy came to see Leda in the hospital but he didn’t come to see her? It was awful. Then Skip came to see me in the hospital. She wanted Buddy to come back for her then. She wanted him to see how much she needed him.”
“Okay, maybe then,” I said, still not believing it. “But by thetime Buddy died, she and Lucas had been married for going on twenty years. They had the boys.”
Eddie shook his head. “It didn’t matter. Your mother had traded down. Lucas Ekker was no Buddy Zabriskie.”
5
Two months later, my mother found Lucas dead in the backyard. He liked to circle their property every morning while my mother drank coffee in bed. That morning she’d gone back to sleep for a while. She wasn’t entirely sure how long he’d been out there.
“Still, that’s a nice death,” Eddie said when I called to tell him.
I’d thought the same thing, the result of spending one’s adulthood with a hospital administrator who went straight to the obituaries every morning and reported the deaths of the day every evening when he came home from work. Lucas had enjoyed above-average health throughout his life, along with a below-average outlook. I had to think he didn’t suffer, or didn’t suffer much, but no one did autopsies on ninety-year-old men who died in the garden, and so there was no way to know which part of him had failed. Not that it mattered. Lucas had been telling my mother for some time (at top volume) that he had no intention of leaving their house. She could move to a condo if she wanted, but he was staying put. Every night he pulled himself up the long staircase to their bedroom to prove that he still could, while my mother climbed the stairs behind him, her hands hovering inches from his back as if she could catch him.
