Red, White & Dead

“Yeah. Actually, I think I already have the job. They just need my résumé for office purposes, to put it in my file.”

“What’s the job?”

“An internship at WGN. The radio station.”

“The one with the glass studio on Michigan Avenue?”

He nodded.

“Wow.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “That sounds like a big gig.”

“No, it’s being an assistant—or intern or whatever—to the producer for the midday show.”

“So you’ll be going there every day?” Somehow this concept seemed impossible.

“Yeah. I’m going to be working, Iz.” There was a note of pride in his voice I didn’t recognize. He studied my face. “I mean, c’mon, I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Actually, I wish everyone would stop asking me what I want to do with my life. What does that even mean?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t be of any help there.

“But it’s time to do something,” he continued. “Maybe this radio thing could be for me.” He shrugged, too. “You know Zim?”

I nodded. “Zim” was Robby Zimmerman, a friend of Charlie’s from high school.

“Well, his dad is in radio sales, and he got me the job. There’s no money in it, like no money, but—”

“You’re going to work for free?” Financially, I was appalled, but this sounded more like the Charlie I knew.

“Yeah. At least at first. Because I have to try something, Iz. I’m twenty-seven.” He said this like, I’m eighty-three.

Charlie’s birthday was just a few days ago, and he was taking it even more seriously than I was my upcoming thirtieth.

“I can’t sit around on my ass forever.” He frowned and looked out at a duck being chased by a toddler who was being chased by her mother.

“Why not? You do sitting on your butt better than anyone I know.” Somehow, this whole notion of Charlie as a member of the working class freaked me out, made me feel as if my world was shifting even more. Things in my life kept skidding around, and I hated the fact that I had no idea where they would all land.

Charlie laughed. “You don’t want me to get a job, because you don’t have a job.”

“Exactly. It’s the beginning of summer and both the McNeil kids are lazy good-for-nothings. Let’s make the most of it and spend the summer on the lake.” Suddenly, I could envision it—Charlie and I walking from my mom’s house to North Avenue Beach, maybe sitting on the roof deck of the restaurant that looked like a boat and eating fried shrimp for lunch, lying under an umbrella in the sand for the rest of the afternoon, barbecuing with my mom and Spence in the evenings. Ever since the breakup with Sam—and Theo and Grady—I craved my family like never before. Even more so now that it felt as if I was about to lose Charlie somehow. Or at least the Charlie I knew.

“You should do that,” Charlie said. “Have yourself a lazy summer. Pretend you’re me, and I’ll go to work and pretend I’m you.”

I frowned. I wasn’t enjoying the prospect of suddenly being the sloth of the family. I didn’t think I could pull off slothful with exuberance and elegance the way Charlie had. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.

Then I had an idea. “How about we go to Italy? Tell the radio station you can start in a month or even a few weeks.” If we could stay with our aunt and I could use my airline miles, it might be doable. Charlie loved the concept of traveling, had been talking about Europe the last year, and if I planned the trip for him, the ease of it all might just push him over the hump and get him to agree.

“Can’t. Their other intern quit. They need me on Wednesday.”

“Like in two days, Wednesday?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” I hardly knew what to say. “Congratulations, Charlie.” I squeezed his hand.

“Thanks.” He smiled—that great Charlie McNeil smile that made the few freckles on his face dance and his hazel eyes gleam. If there was a famous McNeil smile, as Mayburn had suggested, it belonged to Charlie, not me.

I turned and looked at the pond, at a dad with twin girls on a paddleboat. The girls were laughing, pointing. The dad appeared stressed and was trying to stop them from falling over the side.

“Remember when we got to do things like that with Dad?” I gestured at the boat.

Charlie crossed his arms and studied the family. “Not really. I don’t remember much about him at all.”

“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 rushing 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 Picasso painting my teacher had shown us in art class.

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 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 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 glasses 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

My 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.

At the back of the closet, I found what I was looking for.

For months after my dad died, my mother left his belongings exactly as they were. His ratty blue-and-maroon robe still hung on a brass hook on the back of their bedroom door in Michigan. His shoes—the tan boat shoes he wore so often—were right inside the garage door, as if he might step into them, and back into life, at any moment. His books were still in the office he’d made for himself in a corner of the basement, makeshift shelves lined with psychology texts, but also the mystery novels he loved to read.

When we moved to Chicago from Michigan, my mother got rid of most of those things. She kept some of his books, divided up others between Charlie and me. The clothes she gave to the Salvation Army store. My brother and I used to love to play in that store, trying on goofy hats and ridiculous shoes that someone’s grandmother had left behind. But later it filled me with a queer sickness to think of some other kid trying on my dad’s ratty bathrobe, laughing at his scuffed boat shoes.

From my closet now, I extracted a cardboard box, reading my mother’s handwriting on the side—Isabel/Christopher. Seeing my name next to my father’s like that always gave me a chill.

Inside the box, I sifted through whatever my hands came across—cards, scraps of notes, a dinged-up metal glasses case my father used to carry with him. I put some items aside, studied others. I thought about the last time I’d seen my father, the night before he died when he put me to bed and he read to me. I searched through the box for the book—Poems & Prayers for the Very Young. I remembered the illustration of the boy and girl on the cover; they were looking out the window into a starry night. My father would point to that picture and say, That’s you, Izzy. And that’s Charlie, and I would gaze at him in awe and think that my father must have been the most spectacular man since he could get a drawing of his children on the cover of a book.

I reached to the bottom of the box, and although there were a few more cards there, I realized that I didn’t have the book. I only had the memory of it, one that was sharp and vivid. I had other memories, too—of his soft voice reading to me, of the way he sometimes repeated phrases he loved or wanted to make sure I’d heard.

I sifted through the stuff in the box some more. I found a birthday card he’d given me for my eighth birthday, just a few weeks before he’d died.

The card was one that you might give an adult woman, not a child. On the front it had crimson cursive writing rimmed with gold that spelled out Happy Birthday on ivory linen paper.

In a few weeks, I would be thirty. If he were alive, my father would have been fifty-seven. If he were alive. If …

I read the words he’d printed inside the card.

Happy birthday, Boo.

I am so lucky that God chose me to be your father. You have been my little girl for 8 years, but I love you like it has been forever. Already you live life as if it is yours for the taking, with your big-eyed curiosity, your ability to embrace and overcome anything, and the unfailing kindness toward others that I know you got from your mom. You will be great, no matter what happens to me. Remember, you will always be in my heart.

I love you, Boo,

Dad

When I’d read the card as an eight-year-old, I knew they were nice words. I knew my dad loved me. I was secure in the way children are, sure that nothing will ever change, that happiness will always be at the forefront of life.

And so on that night of my birthday, the last birthday where I felt I was truly young, truly a child, I had put the card aside, moving on to the wrapped gifts that my mother and father had stacked on our kitchen table.

I didn’t pick the card up again until six months after his death, and that’s when I really read it, studying the words like an archeologist who finds a shard of an ancient urn in the dust.

No matter what happens to me. The words of the card had torn through me, stealing my breath. I kept that card in my nightstand for years after he died. And although it pained me to do so, I took it out of the drawer every few weeks, whenever I was really missing him, and I read it again, marveling at the words he had written, the words that made it seem as if he had somehow sensed his approaching death, although no one could ever have predicted a helicopter crash.

After a few years, I put the card away. It was too sharp, caused too many knife slits in the still delicate skin of my psyche. But now, I looked at the card and examined it from more of an emotional distance. Had he told anyone about this sense of foreboding? Or did he carry it around by himself, thinking it too morbid, maybe embarrassed to be having such thoughts. He wasn’t sick. So why that wording, as if he were reassuring himself that I would be okay without him when he was gone?

I thought back to my phone call with the owner of the airport, and then I thought about my dad’s profession as a psychologist and a profiler. The pilot thing was something I understood he did on the side, a hobby. But then why the government instructor? Was he working for the federal government? Did that mean the crash had something to do with his job? Maybe he’d been working on a case when he died; maybe it had to do with a helicopter? And … and … then what? It all seemed so vague.

I flipped through some of the other cards and letters I’d taken out of the box and found those from my aunt Elena, my father’s only sibling. Most were postmarked from Rome. They all bore her small, pristine handwriting. In the left corners, she’d written her married name, Elena Traviata.