Songs of the Humpback Whale

With love,

  Joley

 

  39 REBECCA Friday, July 13, 1990

 

  Midwest Airlines flight 997 crashed on September 21, 1978, in What Cheer, Iowa-a farming town sixty miles southeast of Des Moines. Newspaper reports I have read say there were 103 passengers on the plane. There were five survivors including me. I do not remember anything about the crash.

  You get the feeling that anybody in What Cheer would be able to direct us to Arlo van Cleeb?s farm. This is the place where the plane crashed and in fact it was Rudy van Cleeb, the man?s son, who took the famous picture of me running away from the plane and waving my arms. He is also the one who drove me to the hospital. I would like to thank him but it turns out he is dead. Killed in some accident that involved a combine.

  Arlo van Cleeb is very surprised to see me. He keeps pinching my face and telling my mother how nice I grew up. We are sitting in his living room, and I am listening to my mother tell him the story of my life. We are only up to age eight, when I played a molar in a school play about dental hygiene.

  ?Excuse me,? I say. ?I don?t mean to be rude but maybe we should just go on out there.?

  ?The good Lord loves patience,? Mr. van Cleeb says.

  Seventy million years later, my mother stands up from the flowered couch. ?If you don?t mind.?

  ?Mind!? Mr. van Cleeb says. ?Why would I mind! I?m flattered that you?ve come.?

  Corn is a funny thing-it?s much higher and thicker than I?d expected. When you drive through Iowa, you have to inch out at the intersections because cars coming in the other direction can?t see you through the thatch of stalks. I can see why we didn?t decide to just wander out here on our own. Most likely, we never would have found our way back. Mr. van Cleeb turns and cuts through the corn like there are actually paths. Then he spreads the final wall of stalks.

  It is a wide open area about the size of a football field. The ground is jet black. In the middle of this is a rusted frame, cracked at the middle and the seams like a lobster. One wing sticks out like an elbow. There are several sections, too, sitting here and there: a row of seat skeletons, the huge fan of an engine, a propeller the size of my body.

  ?May I?? I ask, pointing to the plane. The farmer nods. I walk up to it, touching the rust and rubbing it between my fingers. It comes off orange and powdered. Although it is broken into pieces, it still looks like a plane. I crawl through a gash in the body and walk down what is left of the aisle. There are weeds wrapped around the metal.

  It still smells like smoke. ?Are you okay?? my mother yells.

  I count down the holes where windows used to be. ?This is where I sat,? I say, pointing to a hole on the right side. ?Right here.? I step down into the place where the seat used to be. I keep waiting to feel something.

  I walk the rest of the way down the aisle. Like a stewardess, I think, only the passengers are ghosts. What about all those people who died? If I were to dig through some of the twisted steel at my feet would I find carry-ons, jackets, pocketbooks?

  I cannot remember anything about the crash. I do remember being in the hospital, and the nurses who sat with me and read me nursery rhymes. Jack and Jill went up the hill, they?d say, and they?d wait to see if I could finish the rest. I slept for a long time when I got to the hospital and when I woke up both my parents were there. My father had brought a yellow teddy bear, not one from home but a new one. He sat on the edge of the bed and my mother sat on the other side. She brushed my hair and told me how much she loved me. She said the doctors wanted to make sure I was just fine and then we would all go home and everything would be better.

  Because it was a special circumstance, my parents were allowed to stay overnight in the hospital. They slept on the little bed next to mine. A few times during the night I woke up to make sure they were there. At one point I had a nightmare; I don?t remember about what. I had lost that yellow bear because my arms relaxed in sleep. But I woke up terrified and looked over to the other bed. There wasn?t much room there so my parents had curled into a little ball. My father?s arms were wrapped around my mother, and my mothers lips were pressed against my father?s shoulder. I remember staring at their hands, at how they were locked together. I had been asleep and I couldn?t hold onto that stupid bear, so I figured this was something truly special. My parents were holding onto each other. It just looked so, well, solid, that I closed my eyes and forgot about my nightmare.

  I cannot remember anything about the crash. I crawl out from another gash in the metal and sit on the edge of the wing. I close my eyes and try to imagine fire. I try to hear screams, too, but nothing comes. Then there is a wind. It sings through the metal like a giant flute. The corn begins to whisper and when it does I know where all those people are, all the people who have died. They never left here. They are in the earth and wound around the frame of the plane. I stand and run away from the wreck. I press my hands over my ears, trying not to hear their voices, and for the second time, I outdistance Death.

  40 JANE

  Midwest Airlines flight 997 crashed on September 21, 1978, in What Cheer, Iowa-a farming town sixty miles southeast of Des Moines. The entire crew died but the black box tapes suggest the crash had something to do with a failure of both engines. The pilot was trying to land in Des Moines.

  These are all things I have read, and told my daughter. They do not prepare me in any way for what Arlo van Cleeb shows me in the middle of his cornfield.

  It is a black snaking skeleton stretched over one hundred yards of black ground. In several places the rain and mud of twelve years has covered parts of the plane. Half of the tail is now buried, for example. There are large pits and gaps where the metal was broken or torn to remove the corpses. The red and blue logo of Midwest is scarred with moss. When Rebecca moves towards the frame of this airplane, I reach out to grab her but then I stop myself. As she crawls through a cockpit window the farmer speaks to me. ?You can?t figure out what?s missing, can you?? I shake my head. ?It?s the fire. There?s no fire, and no water gushing all over the place. This plane is just dead, now. It?s not the way you remember from the pictures.?

  I suppose he is right. When I think of the plane the image I have is one made by the media: firemen pulling wounded people from the wreckage, scarred farmland, flames that reach as high as God.

  ?Rebecca,? I call, ?are you okay?? It smells like smoke. Rebecca sticks her head out of a hole in the frame. I wave at her. I don?t know, I keep expecting this monstrous metal creature to swallow her whole.

  I wonder if she will get upset. Start to cry. She never really has. She?s never really spoken to anyone about it. She claims she cannot remember a thing.

  Oliver and I had this pact when we got married: we weren?t going to have children right away. We were going to wait until Oliver got a promotion, at least until he moved back to the East Coast. We expected that we would have to go to California, but we didn?t think it would be permanent. I guess I was too young at the time to really have given much thought to whether or not I wanted a baby. Anyway, Oliver didn?t.

  But when he got promoted and we moved to San Diego, it became apparent that this was not a case of paying one?s dues to get back to Woods Hole. San Diego?s Oceanographic Institute was far more prestigious. Maybe Oliver knew that all along and maybe he didn?t. But it became clear to me that I was three thousand miles away from my friends, from my home. Oliver was too involved in his new job to pay attention to me, and we couldn?t afford for me to get a master?s degree in speech pathology, and I started to get lonely. So I poked pinholes in my diaphragm.

  I got pregnant quickly and things started to change. At first, Oliver actually seemed excited by the idea. For a few months he did the usual things: told me to stay off my feet, and held his ear to my belly. Then work got very busy for him, and he got a promotion earlier than expected, and he started to travel with other researchers. He missed Rebecca?s birth, but by that time I didn?t really care. I had a daughter and I t
ruly believed she was everything I could ever want.

  When the plane crash happened my first thought was that this was my punishment for tricking Oliver. Then I thought it was my punishment for leaving Oliver. Whatever the reason, it was clearly my fault. My father had been watching a baseball game on TV and it was interrupted with a special bulletin on location in Iowa. He yelled into the kitchen that some plane had crashed and I didn?t even have to hear the flight number. I knew. It is that way between mothers and daughters.

  I flew to Iowa and I remember looking at the other people on the flight. Were any of them relatives of other people on the Midwest plane? What about the woman in the pink jumpsuit? She was crying on and off. Did it have to do with the crash in What Cheer?

  By the time I arrived in Des Moines the survivors of the crash had been taken to a hospital. I met Oliver at the front door; he was pulling up in a taxi too. We ran through the green corridors, calling out Rebecca?s name. I would not go into the morgue to identify bodies. Oliver did that for me, and came out smiling. ?She?s not there,? he said. ?She?s not there!?

  We found a Jane Doe in pediatrics. They had been calling her Jane all this time; I found that very strange. She was asleep, heavily sedated, when we were let into her room. ?Came out hardly with a scratch,? one nurse said. ?She?s a lucky little girl.?

  Oliver held my hand as we walked over to Rebecca, so tiny and white against the dotted hospital sheets. She had a breather tube in her nose, and a kidney-shaped bruise on her forehead. Oliver had brought her a yellow teddy bear. I started to cry, realizing that Edison, Rebecca?s old teddy bear, had probably burned in the crash. ?It?s all right,? Oliver said, holding me against him. He smelled of the shampoo we had at home in San Diego. It took me several minutes to realize that the whole time, he was crying too.

  She was released two days later. We went back to the site of the crash. I don?t remember it looking like this; I wonder if some of these pieces-the seats, the engine, what have you-have been moved as the years went by. I excuse myself to Arlo van Cleeb and begin to circle the remnants of this plane.

  Metal ribs poke into the sky at odd angles, and although many of the hinges are intact, the doors of the plane are nowhere to be found. There are pretzeled knots of black steel at the sides of the wings. All the windows are gone. I remember hearing they exploded due to the change in pressure, when the plane was plummeting to the ground. Suddenly I realize I cannot see my daughter. I run around the plane trying to peek through the holes and the gaps, trying to catch a glimpse. Then I see her coming towards me. Her eyes are shut tight and her hands are pressed against her head as if she is trying to keep it from splitting. She is running so fast her feet are kicking up a stream of mud. I do not think she realizes it but she is screaming at the top of her lungs. ?Rebecca!? I cry out, and Rebecca?s eyes fly open, that startled shade of green. She crashes against me, demanding to be protected, and this time I am waiting there to catch her.

  41 OLIVER

  Midwest Airlines flight 997 crashed on September 21, 1978, in What Cheer, Iowa-a farming town sixty miles southeast of Des Moines. When the pilot realized he would not be able to land in Des Moines he coasted into a farmer?s cornfield. The plane landed on its own fuel tanks and exploded.

  These are the reports, as faxed to me by my secretary, that lead me to the site of the crash. It was not easy to find a facsimile machine in What Cheer, Iowa, either, but I have had two days? advance time.

  I know of Arlo van Cleeb but I have never been a fan of intermediaries. Therefore I set up shop in his cornfield without him ever noticing. I have a small folding beach chair and a thermos of coffee. A portable clip-on fan; the heat gets intense at this elevation. I sit behind a fringe of corn stalks, hidden by the greenery and yet strategically able to peer through the vertical bars. For two days I have been waiting for Jane and Rebecca, binoculars in hand.

  It has not been an entirely idle forty-eight hours. You see, the partially obscured view I have of the wreckage gave me a slightly different perspective from the one splashed across the oily faxes of the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post. When I first perceived the airplane?s frame, blackened by fire and age, it was through the haze of corn that forms my camouflage. And quite honestly, at first glance I thought it was a beached whale. Enormous in proportions, with the sun glinting off its slightly sunken tail-have you ever noticed the parallels between humpbacks and airplanes? The elongated body, the hub of the cockpit and the whale?s jawbone, the wings and the fingered fins, the cross section of the tail and the fluke? I have never thought of whales in terms of aerodynamics but of course it makes sense. What is streamlined underwater serves the same purpose in flight.

  It has been a tedious trip here, and I have to say I?m glad it?s all coming to an end. I can take my family home with me; I can get back to my research.

  I am just pouring my second cup of coffee (a lousy habit I?ve picked up on this tracking voyage, I?m sorry to say), when I see the farmer van Cleeb push his way through the corn stalks. Then out of this sea of green steps Rebecca, her hair pulled away from her face. Following her, in close pursuit, is Jane.

  She stands tall with her hands on her hips, talking to the farmer. She seems to be holding a conversation but her eyes betray her, running over the framework of the plane, assessing it; carefully checking the movements of Rebecca. She has this down to an art, I think. How is it I have never really watched her act as a mother?

  Rebecca points to the plane and then moves closer. She steps into the gashes in the metal body, as I did two days ago. She runs her hands over everything, it seems, cataloguing and processing the information. Her eyes are wide, and from time to time she bites her lower lip. She is standing only feet away from me when she says, quite clearly, ?This is where I sat. Right here.?

  I push my hand through the stalks in front of me and pull them aside so that I can really see her face. She looks like me, in many ways. My hair, my eyes. And she has always been able to hide her emotions. Even after the crash, she would not talk about it. Not to me, not to Jane, not to the psychiatrists. They tried to get her to act the crash out on dolls and models, but Rebecca refused. At the time I thought it interesting to find such willfulness in a four-yearold. Now I have my doubts.

  I could take my daughter in my arms and tell her it is all right. And she will smile like the sun itself, so surprised to see me. Like she used to do as a child when I came home from Brazil or Maui, wherever. I?d hide toys in my pockets, and shells and small bottles of sand. I told her I would always bring her back a piece of the place that took me away from her.

  I am ready to push through the corn when I see Jane from the corner of my eye. She is calling Rebecca. She starts to walk towards me.

  I let the corn free, a shade. I am breathing arhythmically. I am terrified of speaking to Jane.

  For one thing, I haven?t any idea what I am going to say to her. I know, I am supposed to have prepared something elaborate, something akin to wooing, but everything that has crossed my mind in the past two days has simply disappeared. What I am left with is how I feel, and what am I supposed to do about it? I want to just walk up to Jane and say that I miss the way she flips pancakes. That no one but her has ever left me a love note on a steamed-up shaving mirror. I want to tell her that sometimes, when the sun is setting over the unfurled fluke of a humpback, I wish I had her beside me. That when I give a speech, I wish I could see her face in the first row. How stupid you are, Oliver, I think. You can write circles around any scientist in your field. You?ve published more than any researcher your age. You are supposed to be the expert. But you don?t know how to tell her that you can?t live without her.

  The week before Rebecca?s plane crash, Jane and I had a terrible-argument. I do not remember what it was about, but it could not have been any less ludicrous than this latest one about Rebecca?s birthday. The next thing I knew she had driven me to such a point that I hit her.

  It was a slap,
not a punch, if distinctions matter. And after I did it I thought I would die. I knew about her childhood, her father. I knew what I wasn?t supposed to be.

  Jane took Rebecca to her parents? place in Massachusetts. I wanted her back so badly I could taste it. But, like now, I did not know what to say. I just knew that where Rebecca went Jane would follow: she lived for Rebecca then, as she does now. So I threatened litigation if she didn?t send the child back. I expected her to come too, even if I didn?t say so directly.

  When I heard about the crash over the car radio, I started to shake so badly that I had to pull off the highway. This has not happened, I told myself. You have not lost your entire family at once.

  I drove to the airport and parked at a two-hour meter, the illogic of which struck me only after I had purchased a ticket to Iowa. I picked up a teddy bear-wishful thinking?-before I boarded. I looked around the plane wondering who else was headed to Des Moines because of the crash. When I arrived in Iowa, the wounded had already been shuttled to a hospital. My taxi pulled up directly behind another taxi, and Jane stepped out. I almost fell to my knees, seeing her there with mascara running down her face and her nose dripping. I stared at her and all the words defining forgiveness caught in my throat and for the life of me I couldn?t understand why Rebecca had not come out of that taxi as well. Stupefied, I asked where Rebecca was. I did not know that Jane had not been on fight 997; I did not learn that until several minutes later, and then only by deduction.

  We were asked to go to the morgue, along with the other frantic-relatives, to survey the bodies that had been pulled from the wreckage. Jane stood outside, cleaving to a fire extinguisher on the wall, while I crept into the refrigerated rooms. I do not remember looking at the bloodied shrouds of infants and children. If Rebecca?s body had been there, I am not certain I would have admitted it to myself or the coroners, anyway.

  We found Rebecca in pediatrics, tangled in wires and tubes. I lifted Rebecca?s arm and tucked the cheaply-made yellow bear underneath it. I pulled Jane close to me, burying my nose in her hair and rubbing my palms against her familiar shoulder blades. I never really had to say anything to get Jane to come home. I do not think I read the signals wrong when I believed that she understood.