The Night Strangers (2 page)

“No relight,” Amy tells you, essentially reiterating what she shared with you just a moment ago, speaking louder now because, in addition to having to be heard over the synthetic Cassandra telling you to
pull up
,
pull up, pull up
, your flight deck is alive with emergency chimes and bells and a controller who wants you in Burlington or Plattsburgh or (Did you hear this correctly?) the interstate highway in New York that runs parallel to the lake. But the asphalt linking Albany and Plattsburgh is no more an option than the asphalt on the runways at the airports on either side of the water. No, you will use the lake the way Chesley Sullenberger used the river, and soon your passengers will be wrapped in blankets on the decks of the ferries.

T
he plane is eighteen rows long along one side but only seventeen on the other so there is room for a second lavatory at the front of the aircraft. There are two doors at the front of the plane and two over the wings at row fourteen (though that is actually the unnamed thirteenth row). Everyone in the passenger cabin is agonizingly aware of their proximity to those four exits, but perhaps no one is more focused upon them right now than Ethan Stearns as he sits in an aisle seat in the very last row, barely a foot and a half from the rear lavatory. It is not his own safety that has him calculating in his mind the speed with which he will be able to fight his way through the chaotic, merciless swarm to those exit windows, assuming the plane actually remains intact after it hits the surface of the lake; it is the safety of his young daughter, Ashley, who is sitting in the window seat beside him. His wife, Ashley’s mother, is ten rows ahead of them. The plane is not full, but it seemed like a lot of work to have the gate agent reassign their seats so they could be closer together on the short trip to Philly. So, instead of his wife in the row ahead of him, there is a man he knows nothing about and a woman who, based on something she said into her cell before the doors were locked and armed, had just interviewed at the IBM facility in Essex Junction, Vermont.

His wife, he realizes, is five rows from the exits over the windows and just seven from the front doors of the plane. He and Ashley are five rows from their only real shot from the aircraft, the window exits. His mind has already done the triage and the odds: His wife is more likely to survive than either he or their eight-year-old daughter. His eyes meet his wife’s when she turns back to glance at Ashley and him. He smiles; somehow, he smiles. He reminds himself as he gazes around his lovely little girl’s head—which is pressed so close against the glass that he can barely see out of it—that the guy who landed an Airbus in the Hudson got everyone out alive. It’s not like they’re about to slam into a mountain or a skyscraper. He makes sure that her life jacket is tight around her waist and he understands how to inflate it once they are outside the plane. He had barely had time to find it under her seat and figure out how to pull it from its bag and unfold it. He never did find his. He guesses no more than three or four other passengers have donned life jackets.

“Brace for impact!” the flight attendant is telling them. “Brace for water landing! Heads down, heads down, heads down!”

“When we come to a stop in the water, we are going to race for that window exit,” he tells his girl gently, whispering into her ear, trying to sound as serene as the flight attendant sounds urgent. “Okay? I am going to lift you up and carry you like we’re racing through the crowds on Main Street in Disney World. You remember, when the park’s closing for the night after the fireworks and we’re racing for spots on the monorail?”

“But I can’t swim that far,” she stammers, her voice a little numb.

“That’s why you have a life jacket,” he tells her. “The key is to scoot out of the plane with me, that’s all. Your mom will already be waiting for us because she’s a little closer to the exit.” Then his eyes go back to his wife’s, and her terror is like an electric shock. The cabin is eerily quiet because the engines aren’t working, and the passengers are mouthing their prayers or texting or staring in mute wonder as the plane seems to be descending beneath the Burlington skyline to the east and the Adirondack foothills to the west.

“Do not wait for us!” he finally says to his wife, uncaring that it is like shouting in a cathedral during silent prayer. “I’ll have Ashley! Just get out of the plane!”

Once he has spoken, broken the spell, others start offering advice. Someone, a man, yells for the women and men in the exit rows to be prepared. Someone else starts yelling out how many feet above the lake water he believes they are.

Ethan finally pulls his daughter’s head from the window, kisses her on the cheek, and then pushes her down into the brace position. Then he joins her, but he wraps his left arm around her shoulders, as if he actually believes he is strong enough to protect her from the impact of a passenger jet augering into a lake at 150 miles an hour.

T
he captain never thought the door in the basement in any way resembled the over-wing exit doors on an airplane. Or even a main cabin door. Which, of course, it did not. But much later his new therapist, when the captain and his family had moved from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, would probe this connection. A squat door? A pilot with PTSD? How could a psychiatrist not mine this possible connection? But of all the things the captain saw in the door in that dusky corner of the basement in the house they had bought, a locked and armed passenger jet door was never among them.

A
nd, indeed, a Hudson River–like landing is precisely what might have occurred, and you might have wound up a media darling just like that Sully Sullenberger. But soon after you have told the cabin to brace for impact and your plane has skimmed onto the lake—tail then underbelly then nose, a hard landing but picture perfect—there is a high wave. It curls up from the wake of one of those ferryboats—the one that had been churning its way west—as it starts to turn around to aid the plane that is bearing down fast upon the water. The crest is just tall enough and just sudden enough that it smacks the left wingtip of the aircraft. For a tiny fraction of a second you are eye to eye with the foam. And then, before you know it, the one thing you had wanted to avoid is occurring. Suddenly the CRJ is not coasting along the glass of the lake as you had planned—had envisioned—but is vertical to the water. And then it is somersaulting, slamming down hard, that great metal underbelly facing the sun, and the passengers, who had been merely terrified into a prayerful silence, are now disoriented and screaming. You hear them through the metal door of the flight deck. Others already are dead, though you will only learn this later, because when the plane bangs back into the water that second time, it breaks into halves and the passengers in rows ten through fourteen are slammed headfirst into the fuselage as it collapses or are decapitated by the jagged metal edges. Others are starting to drown that very instant as the lake water—yes, warmer than the Hudson that day in January but still a shock to the system if you are upside down in an airplane and strapped tight by a strong nylon belt into a seat—begins filling the two halves of the blackened cabin.

But the fuel does not explode and the surface of the lake will not become a firestorm. And so not everyone will die. Of your forty-three passengers, four crew members (including yourself), and one deadheading flight attendant, nine will survive. Nine somehow will manage to unhook their seat belts, though in some cases their heads already are underwater, and claw or swim their way the six or eight yards to those gaping holes in the fuselage. (All that talk in the plane about exit doors, all that calculation about proximity and survival? None of it mattered for most of the passengers, because the plane split in half like a baguette torn in two.) They will push past those who are already dead, past dangling wires, laptop computers, briefcases, backpacks, magazines, seat cushions, slim plastic bags with uninflated life vests, and the daggerlike shards of metal, everything—the harmless and the murderous—bobbing together amidst the bubbles like jellyfish. Despite broken bones and deep cuts and sprained legs and arms, they will kick their way away from the plane before the largest pieces start to disappear completely underwater.

As, somehow, will you. Reflexively you will release your five-point shoulder harness (it will only be later that you will see and feel the eggplant-colored bruise the buckle left just below your sternum), and you will unbuckle your first officer, squinting in the tiny flight deck that already is filling fast with lake water, not completely disoriented because there are streaks of light to your left that must be afternoon sky. You hope Amy is merely unconscious and not dead (only that evening will you look back on the moment and realize by the way her skull was dangling that her neck was broken and your efforts were meaningless). Then you pull open the door to the cabin, initially twisting the chrome knob the wrong way because you are upside down, and the water rushes in and knocks you and your first officer against the back of your seat, but you wrap one arm around her and take a deep breath and swim into it, your eyes above the surface of the water and then, suddenly, not. So you swim with physical references, a combination of muscle memory and what you saw before the water was over your head, feeling along the flight attendant’s jump seat (he’s not there, a good sign, perhaps) and then to the exit door. You pop your head above the roiling water inside the aircraft, desperate for air, discovering that what had been perhaps three feet of air is now down to inches because of the speed with which the plane is sinking. You take another deep breath and paw your way down the metal until you have found the door’s emergency lever. Again, momentarily you forget that the aircraft is floating upside down, and you can’t understand why you can’t open it. But then you recall where you are and manage to flip the lever and shoulder the door free, and with Amy still a great, dead rag doll in your arms, you shimmy through the opening against the water, briefly catching the cuff of your uniform pants on an edge, and out onto the surface of the lake. Miraculously, you are free. You are alive. Perhaps everyone is alive. (Later, you will wonder how you could possibly have thought that for even a moment.) You hold Amy under her arms, treading water madly, strangely aware of your shoes, gulping in great gasps of air, your throat and your sinuses on fire from the water that has gone up your nose, until there is someone beside you—no, above you and beside you—in a sailboat. Someone is in the sailboat, the sail a beautiful, billowing red canvas that is blocking out the sun, and he is reaching down for you. And someone else from that sailboat is jumping into the lake, a fellow perhaps half your age, and together they are lifting your first officer from your arms and into the small craft. There are sirens you hear clearly, and so automatically you turn your eyes to the east, surprised by how well you can see the Burlington waterfront and the crowds that are forming along the ferry dock and along the bike path and along the walkway beside the aquarium. Boys in T-shirts and shorts, and girls in wispy summer dresses. It’s as if they are lining the streets and expect a parade.

Again, however, this is an image that only registers in your mind later, when you are on a boat. One of those ferryboats. Perhaps the one that had inadvertently finished up what the geese had started, destroying your aircraft once and for all. Mostly what you are seeing as you kick through the agitated ripples and waves, the water in your mouth at once earthy and bitter with jet fuel, are the two halves of your plane starting to disappear, and how the starboard wing is gone. Just gone. Is it already wafting its way in slow motion to the bottom of the lake, alongside all of those seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cannons and warships and Abenaki canoes? Apparently. You are aware of your few surviving passengers, one in an uninflated life jacket, swimming or dog-paddling toward the boats, which now seem to be everywhere. But not all of the survivors are trying to work their way through the water made choppy by all those boats and a plane that doesn’t belong. There is a woman, perhaps thirty-five, looking around madly and crying out someone’s name as she treads water. It is a girl’s name. Ashley. And you have a sick sense that she is crying out the name of the child you happened to notice board the aircraft with a Dora the Explorer backpack. She had blond spit curls and was seven or eight years old. Perhaps two years younger than your own little girls. Your and your wife’s twins. She had peered into the flight deck and smiled at you, and so you had smiled back. There is a man whom you pegged as your age, somewhere around forty, who keeps coming up for air and then diving back under the water, and finally starts swimming back toward the slowly disappearing rear half of the jet. And so you swim that way, too, once your first officer has been lifted from your arms, to see if there are other survivors you can pull from the fuselage, swimming past and between the floating bodies of people in short-sleeved sport shirts and summer-weight business jackets. But you don’t get far because out of nowhere two strong-armed college boys appear in the water beside you and are—as if they are lifeguards—pulling you away from the wreckage of the plane. Your plane.

You try to resist them, to explain to them who you are, but you haven’t the strength and your words are lost in the sobs and wails and the idling engines of the ferries and a Coast Guard motorboat that now has arrived on the scene. Besides, they know. They know precisely who you are. You’re wearing your uniform, all but the jacket and the cap. So, you allow yourself to be brought to that ferryboat and hoisted aboard. And there you stand in silence, suddenly aware of the great gash along your forehead (all that blood you had presumed was simply water) and how there is something wrong with one of your ankles and how your ribs hurt like hell. You stand there, most of your weight on your good ankle, wrapped in a blanket you’re not sure you need, and watch the rear half of the plane, still belly up, recede once and for all beneath the surface of the lake.