Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

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 truly 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.