Black Box

  sleep. I close my eyes and lean my head back on the headrest. Crush squeezes my hand gently and I squeeze back, but I keep my eyes shut. He squeezes my hand again and my eyelids flash open.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thank you for saving me, too.’

  A rush of euphoria sweeps through me as I realize this is what it’s like to be normal. Going outside and doing stuff like catching a flight with your boyfriend to L.A. so he can record a demo for a hot record producer. Is that normal? Now that I think of it, it does not sound normal. And I can’t even ask myself if it feels normal because I’m not sure I know what normal feels like. Well, if this isn’t normal, then I don’t want to know what is.

  Suddenly, I’m pushed back into my seat by a powerful unseen force as the plane speeds down the runway. I close my eyes, thinking it has to end soon. Please let it end soon. And it does. I get a strange whooping sensation in my belly and I open my eyes to see the airport and the rest of Boston falling away like a jagged, gray dream.

  After a couple of minutes of steady climb in altitude, the plane begins to bank to the right and I quickly look away from the window, as the movement is making me want to vomit.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Before I can answer Crush’s question, two loud banging noises, almost like gunshots, come from somewhere near the left wing. The aircraft dips sharply and the collective gasp of more than one hundred passengers is almost as unsettling.

  ‘What was that?’ I shriek as the plane begins to climb altitude again.

  ‘It’s fine.’ Crush’s thumb rubs the top of my hand as he attempts to reassure me. ‘Takeoff is always a little rough.’

  ‘Just a little turbulence, folks.’ The flight attendant sounds bored as she makes her announcement. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about, but please do remain seated with your seatbelts fastened until the pilot has turned off the seatbelt sign.’

  How can anyone endure this level of anxiety on a daily basis?

  The plane begins to bank to the right again, steeper this time. I turn to Crush to see his reaction, but he’s staring out the window with a worried look on his face.

  I squeeze his hand to get his attention. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. It looks like we’re heading back to the airport.’

  But the steepness of the turn is interrupted by another loud bang, then stillness. I’m no expert in airline safety or aerodynamics, but it sounds as if the engine has stalled. Then the lights go out.

  The eerie gray light of the storm clouds that pierces through the oval windows is not enough. Panic sets in throughout the cabin and this time the pilot attempts to ease our anxiety.

  ‘We’re experiencing some electrical trouble, which has caused an engine stall. We’re pulling back for an emergency landing. Please remain seated with your seatbelts fastened.’

  Just when I’m beginning to think everything is fine, they’re getting us off this rickshaw, I begin to feel lightheaded. Then the engine that seemed to stall earlier is suddenly screaming back to life as the pilot attempts to get the plane horizontal.

  Crush turns to me and says something I can barely hear. ‘I didn’t hear the landing gear deploy. Did you?’

  I don’t even know what it’s supposed to sound like when the landing gear is deployed. Or maybe I’m just feeling too sick to think right now. The deafening whine of the engine combined with the turbulence is making my insides crawl. Then my ears pop and everything sounds even louder.

  The lights flicker again and the cabin temperature begins to plummet as a majority of the overhead bins open, their contents tumbling into the aisle. Something is wrong, but, suddenly, everything feels right. We’re going to die and I’m . . . euphoric.

  The moment you realize you’re going to die is nothing like I imagined it would be. I imagined a deep internal struggle coupled with a visceral, physical response – fight or flight. But there’s no fighting this. I’m going to die.

  It’s possible that everyone on this plane is going to die. I wonder if they feel this overwhelming sense of peace, or if the squeal of the plane engine has drowned out all their thoughts.

  He grabs the oxygen mask as it drops from the compartment and he’s yelling something as he puts the elastic band over my head. He pulls his own mask over his head then he grabs my hand and looks me in the eye. There’s no panic in his eyes. Maybe he feels this same calm I’m feeling. Or maybe he just wants me to know that he loves me.

  He loves me.

  Or maybe the look in his eyes is his way of telling me he trusts that whatever happens to us in the next few seconds is just one of those things that was meant to be.

  Fate.

  I used to think fate was for religious nuts and people who were too afraid to take their fate into their own hands. Now I know the truth.

  Fate is death. No one escapes it. But if you stick around long enough, you might find someone to help you cheat fate for a while. And when you can’t cheat anymore, and fate finally catches up to you, maybe it won’t seem so scary with that someone by your side.

  The voice that comes over the speaker is largely drowned out by the noise in the plane, but I recognize it as the pilot. ‘Ladies and gentleman, this is your captain . . . your oxygen masks tightly secured. The landing gear . . . Repeat: . . . without full deployment of the landing gear. We will attempt to circle . . . dump fuel then . . . come in on our belly. Emergency crews are standing by.’

  A flash of white light engulfs the forward cabin as something explodes in the center of the floor, right next to the bulkhead. A large silver cylinder shoots up, hits the ceiling of the plane and drops back down through the new hole in the floor. The bulkhead wall on the other side of the aisle has splintered and is coming down on top of the two passengers in the first row.

  All I hear is screaming. All I feel is freezing-cold air rushing into the cabin through the gaping hole in the floor. And Crush’s hand. I feel Crush’s hand gripping mine. And it’s as if all my senses return to me at once. I don’t want to die on this plane.

  Then, the impact.

  The force of the belly landing jolts me upward and my mask slides off as my head hits the bottom of the compartment above me. I hear a brief flash of screeching metal on asphalt as the plane skids down the runway on its belly before I lose consciousness.

  My brain claws its way back to reality and I can hear the screaming wail of sirens approaching – and the panic. Passengers are fighting to get off the plane as quickly as possible. The stench of burned metal and some sort of chemical is toxic in the air.

  The male flight attendant is looking down at me. ‘Ma’am? Can you hear me?’

  I can taste blood in my mouth.

  ‘Your head is bleeding.’ I don’t know who said this.

  Instinctively, I look to my left and I can’t breathe. My vision blurs . . . there’s blood trickling from Crush’s head onto the curved ledge of the window. His head. His beautiful head that holds all the most gorgeous words I’ve ever heard.

  I scream words that even I can’t understand as I attempt to tear off my seatbelt, but this simple movement makes the entire plane sway beneath me. I clutch desperately to the armrests to stop the motion, but I can feel my consciousness slipping away, pulsing at the edges of my vision, until the blackness closes in on me.

  Voices . . . There are so many voices . . . There’s blood all over my right hand . . . ‘Wake up!’ . . . ‘Ma’am, stop shaking him!’ . . . ‘Crush! Look at me!’

  The hands are everywhere . . . grabbing me, pinching my arms, holding my waist, yanking me away . . . I’m floating across the seat and into the aisle, vision pulsing with the beat of my heart . . . bodies press against me, pushing me toward the back of the plane . . . I can’t see through the blood and tears.

  All I know is that Crush is gone and the darkness is edging toward me again. This is what it must feel like to die.

  The bumpy movement startles me awake and I’m certain I’m going to open my eyes and find I’m
still on that plane and we haven’t taken off yet. But I’m not. I’m in the back of some sort of emergency vehicle. I try to turn my head to get a better look at the medic on my left, but my head and chin are strapped to two cushioned blocks positioned on either side of my head.

  ‘What’s going on?’ My hands struggle against the restraints that cross my chest and abdomen. ‘I’m not the one who’s hurt.’

  The medic leans forward into my field of vision so I can see his face. He has kind eyes that seem to be filled with genuine concern, but his words don’t match his eyes.

  ‘Ma’am, a couple of the passengers said you hit your head upon landing and that may be why you were upset. We’re trying to minimize any possible injury to your head and neck. The restraints will be removed as soon as we’ve verified there is no cervical or cerebral damage.’

  ‘Cerebral damage? You mean, brain damage?’

  ‘Ma’am, please calm down.’

  ‘Calm down! I was just in a fucking plane crash!’

  The kindness in his eyes disappears and he sits up straight so I can’t see his face. I can feel him moving on my left, but I can’t see what he’s doing.

  He leans forward again and this time I can see the corner of a clipboard in his lap. ‘Ma’am, I need you to answer a few questions. Can you please state your full name?’

  Crush’s bloody head flashes in my mind and the tears rush forth, a guttural sob building inside my belly, mangling my insides, until it stops at my throat, choking me.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ he asks.

  I can’t breathe, I want to say, but the words are stuck somewhere between my lips and my broken heart.

  *****

  The medic lets me grieve in peace for the rest of the ride to the hospital. But as soon as he wheels me through the sliding doors of the emergency room at Mass General, it becomes clear that the hospital staff is not going to let me off so easy. A nurse with ash-blonde curls wheels me into a trauma bay then hovers over me firing off questions. I just keep hoping that the faster I answer, the faster I’ll get to see Crush.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten, one being no pain and ten being the worst pain you could imagine, how severe is the pain in your head?’

  ‘One.’ She shoots me a skeptical look. ‘Two? I swear I’m not in severe pain. I’m fine. Just please get me out of these restraints. Please. I need to find my boyfriend. He was hurt on the plane. Please let me go.’

  The tears slide down my temples and she purses her lips. ‘Oh, goodness. Just do me a favor and touch each one of your fingertips to the tip of your thumb, like this.’

  I quickly do as she says and she sighs, looking over her shoulder as she begins unbuckling my restraints. She removes the straps over my forehead and chin first and I sit up too suddenly. The room undulates beneath me and I clutch the sides of the gurney to keep from tipping over. Luckily, the nurse is too busy undoing the straps on my neck brace to notice my swaying.

  She pulls the brace off my neck and as soon as the cool air hits my neck I can breathe again. ‘Thank you.’

  She nods. ‘Just wait here and I’ll find out where he is. What’s his name?’

  ‘Crush.’

  ‘Crush?’

  I grit my teeth, trying to temper my impatience. ‘I don’t know. Probably Slayer.’

  ‘Crush Slayer?’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Okay.’

  Judging by the look she just gave me, she probably thinks she’s looking for someone with more piercings and tattoos than me. I need my phone. I had that fucking phone turned off for days and now that it’s fully charged, it’s probably lying on the floor of that plane. That stupid plane!

  I slide off the gurney, keeping one hand on the foam mattress to keep from collapsing in case I have a concussion. My feet hit the floor and I peek around the curtain separating this bay from the one next to me. I don’t see the nurse anywhere. She’s probably in one of the nurses’ stations wishing she hadn’t agreed to help me.

  My head does hurt, but it’s more like a four or five on a scale of one to ten. It’s not an unbearable pain. Of course, I’m not sure there’s any such thing as unbearable pain. It all depends on the individual and what each of us is equipped to endure. Apparently, I can endure a lot, but I can’t endure not knowing what happened to Crush.

  I reach up to touch the top of my head and right near the hairline I feel a nasty bump approximately half the size of an egg. My hair is sticky with half-dried blood. What the hell just happened?

  I wait a few moments as more patients are brought into the emergency room. One man is moaning as they wheel him past me, and I note the exasperated expression on the nurse’s face as she pushes his gurney. Then another woman goes by with no head restraints, but her eyes are closed and her arm is bandaged. Every patient that comes in, every opening and closing of the emergency-room doors, just adds to my anxiety, until I can’t take it anymore.

  Fuck this. I’ll find Crush myself.

  My attempt to sneak past the nurses’ station does not go well. Nurse Goldilocks spots me instantly from where she’s hunched over a computer screen.

  ‘Nuh-uh,’ she says, pointing her finger at me and shaking her head as she approaches me. ‘You are not well enough to go gallivanting about this hospital without assistance. You go wait in there and I’ll come back with a wheelchair as soon as I find your boyfriend.’

  ‘What’s taking so long? How are you going to feel if he dies while you’re staring at that fucking computer screen?’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘Young lady, you are testing my patience. And that is not the way you speak to someone who’s trying to help you. Now go lie down and I’ll be back when I know more.’

  Lie down? Yeah, right.

  My stomach is in knots as I turn around to head back to the gurney. Then I feel it. My phone vibrates in my pocket and I frantically dig into my jeans.

  Please let it be him. Please let it be him.

  It’s my mom.

  I almost hit reject, but then I wonder if maybe she knows something I don’t know. ‘Mom?’

  ‘Honey, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Have you heard anything? Do you know what happened to Crush?’

  ‘Crush? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I have to go.’

  I hang up the phone and open up the browser to search the internet for articles about the crash. There has to be something posted already. More than an hour has passed since we landed. I type in the search box logan airport crash january 8, then I hit go. Two articles come up at the top of the results; one posted two minutes ago. I click on that one and scan the article for words like fatalities, injured, victim, and dead. I learn that twenty-two passengers were transported to Mass General with minor to serious injuries.

  Serious injuries? What the fuck does that mean?

  I dial Crush’s number, but it doesn’t even ring. It goes straight to voicemail, but the sound of his voice on the greeting makes me physically sick. I need to see him. I need to know he’s all right.

  Another two patients are wheeled in and I watched eagerly to see if either of them is Crush. The first one is pushed back here to a trauma bay across from me. It’s an obese woman who appears to be having a panic attack or chest pains. The medic is standing next to the nurses’ station, blocking my view of the patient in the gurney next to him. I wait anxiously as two nurses and a woman in a white coat approach the gurney. This patient is different. This must be one of the serious ones.

  The doctor and the medic finally take a step back, and that’s when I see Crush’s jeans and the sleeve of his green hoodie. I race across the emergency room, all sound blocked out by the roaring beat of my heart pounding inside my head. My eyeballs hurt. This is the first thought that comes to mind before the room begins to spin around me. I’m six feet away from him when the vomit streams out of my mouth, burning my throat. Remnants of the breakfast sandwich and coffee Crush bought me splash onto the tile floor.

  ‘Crush,’ I choke out, gri
pping the wall as I attempt to swallow the bits of undigested food in my mouth, but my gag reflex won’t allow it.

  A nurse arrives with a waste bin just in time to catch the next stream of vomit. I’m sweating and my vision is clouded with dazzling sparks of lights. I spit a few more times before another nurse arrives with a paper cup of water and attempts to direct me toward a sink on the other side of the room to rinse my mouth. But I take the cup and rinse my mouth out into the waste bin instead, then I squeeze through them to get to Crush.

  He’s gone.

  ‘Where is he?’ I round on the nurses who were helping me. ‘He was just right there. Where did they take him?’

  ‘Mikki?’ Crush’s voice is like a beacon guiding me to shore. ‘Mikki, where are you?’

  I turn around toward the trauma bays and the nurse points at the middle bay across the aisle. Behind the curtain, I barely glimpse the bottoms of his sneakers. Then they’re gone.

  I hear struggling and I race toward the sound. It’s him. He’s struggling against the restraints around his head. With a soft snap and ripping noise, he tears the straps off his bloodstained face and jumps off the bed.

  ‘Fuck! I thought you were dead,’ he whispers, taking me into his arms. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I am now.’

  He gazes into my eyes and a tear slides down his chiseled cheek. ‘I thought I had lost you. I don’t ever want to feel like that again.’

  I wipe the moisture from his face, leaving a smear of blood and tears behind. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘I’ll do anything for you. What do you need?’

  ‘I need you to teach me how to breathe when you’re gone.’

  I close my eyes as he lays a soft kiss on each of my eyelids, then he wraps his arms around me again and lifts me a few inches off the ground. ‘That’s a lesson I hope you never have to learn.’

  I was nine years old the first time I saw my dad shoot a deer. I remember being sick with anticipation as we lay on the embankment behind the scrub. The blast of his Ruger barely kicked him back and he burst to his feet. I followed quickly after him and I’ll never forget the steam coming out of that buck’s mouth or the desperate plea in its glossy eyes. It was the same thing I saw when Jordan died.

  I was thirteen the first time Jordan told me he wanted to kill himself. He asked me if I could get him one of my dad’s guns out of the safe and I refused. I told my Aunt Deb and Jordan was put on anti-depressants. He became a different person after that. Sometimes he’d want to do crazy shit like ditch class and go to Harvard to hit on chicks three years older than us. Other times, he’d talk to me for hours about wanting to die.

  The night he died, he was drunk and high and threatening to pull a gun on a police office to commit suicide-by-cop. I got drunk with him, trying to convince him to let it go, but he wouldn’t. Finally, I told him I would give him a loaded shotgun and take him out to the woods behind the house so he could get it over with. I thought I was so fucking clever, loading the wrong size shell into that Ruger .270. I thought the gun would jam and he’d get frustrated and change his mind. I never thought my plan would literally backfire on me.

  I wonder now, if I had run into Mikki in that parking lot one year earlier and witnessed the power of fate earlier, would I have loaded that shotgun for Jordan? Or would I have told him to hold on just a little longer? Of course, if he had never died, I would have never been in that parking lot. And Mikki would be dead.

  Fate can save you and it can kill you. Either way, fate binds us through an invisible web of circumstances. Change one undesirable fate and another desirable fate is canceled out.

  Do you think saving someone’s life cancels out taking another person’s life?

  In terms of fate and circumstance, yes. In terms of retribution and contrition, no.

  *****

  The moment doctor’s viewed the results of my CAT Scan, they discharged Mikki and me with instructions for how to care for a concussion. The nurses were pretty enamored with us at this point and one of the older nurses sent us off with a picture they printed on a sheet of printer paper. She had taken the picture of Mikki and me hugging with her phone. It’s a picture of the moment we found each other in the emergency room.

  ‘Look at your face. You look like Carrie,’ Mikki teases me as we wait for our driver to arrive.

  We told Mikki’s parents not to bother coming down to the hospital, since our injuries were minor. We promised them I’d take her home myself. They don’t know that I’m just taking her home so we can tell them that she’ll be spending the