Red, White & Dead. Laura Caldwell

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 résumé.”

      “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 glass 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.

      “Hello, 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 prone 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 associate 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 shied 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 entitled 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 shiny 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