Hi guys, I've realized I made a huge mistake and one of my reviewers pointed it out, so time is a bit off, Ive mixed up the beginning of the story on July 4th and somehow moving into December. I have gone back and fixed everything. So I'll clear things up : All of this story right now is in July. If you were to look back there is no mention of Christmas, winter, or snow, and the receipt she found for the robe is a reference to her anniversary present . If there still mistakes, point it out to me.
"I wish you would eat something." Elliot said
Across the table, Robert was finishing up a bowl of spaghetti that one of her neighbors had left
"I can't." Olivia said "You were hungry," she said to Robert, studying his empty bowl
He nudged the bowl to the side.
Elliot turns from the stove, a pot of tea in his right hand a cup in the other. He offers it to Olivia.
Earlier she had tried to make an effort of eating a piece of bread with tomato soup, but her throat had refused to swallow it. She had clean clothes on, the ones she had put on in front of Elliot. Her eyes and nose swollen, she'd figured that she'd cried more on the bathroom floor than at any other time in her life. Possibly her life. She felt drained. Emptied. Simply from crying.
"I'm sorry." Robert said
"For what?"
"All of it."
She looks down.
"You're job is unimaginable" Olivia asks "How do you do it?"
Robert looks at her droopy eyes.
"Me? Look at what you do. How do you go around each day, looking at bodies, having to hear gruesome stories, to be around sick perverts all day. All I am is the grim reaper. I tell them they're family member is dead, then I just help them."
She looks down.
He takes out a cigarette and lights up.
"Want one?"
"Sure." She says, taking his lighter and putting the flame to the cigarette
She inhales the fumes.
Elliot looks at her, angry with the way she's abusing her body.
James had hated smokers, he couldn't tolerate being a room with one. She knew he'd be furious with her if he saw her smoking.
"Why do you do it?" She asks, referring to his career choice
"I suppose I'm drawn to moments of intensity." Robert says "In the human experience."
"And you?" he asks, keeping his cigarette between his lips
She's silent. Aware for the first time that there's music in the background. Ralph McTell, Streets of London.
"That's a story for later."
"Do they? Mend?" Robert asks
She realizes he's acting about the victims
"Given enough time, the women usually do. Unfortunately..."
"I'm sorry."
"...the children don't heal as well." Elliot fills in
Robert only nods
"They always say children are resilient. They mutate with disaster and make accommodations. I hardly ever see grief stricken men, not a lot are assaulted. And when I do see men, they're fathers, furious that their wife or daughter could be hurt like that." Olivia says, continuing
"I'll bet they're angry." Robert says
"What happens if you've told the family, the news says it's true, but then it's eventually false?"
"That doesn't happen" Robert says strongly
"Why not?"
"I spend a lot of time outside the driveways on a cellphone, making sure to get total confirmation before I tell anyone. You may find this hard, but I never want to tell a woman her husband has died if in fact he has not."
"Do you mind these questions?" Olivia asks while cigarette smoke curls around her throat
"No, but I'm concerned on why you're asking, but no I don't mind."
"Then let me ask you this, what are you afraid I'll say to the press?"
Robert loosed his tie, unbuttoning the top pat of his shirt.
"A pilot's wife is naturally very distraught. If she says something and the press is there to hear it, it goes on the record. A new widow, for example, might say that her husband had been complaining about the mechanics recently. Or she might blow out, I knew this would happen. He said the airline was cutting corners on crew training."
"Well wouldn't that be ok, it it was true?"
"People say things when they're distraught they wouldn't say later. Things they sometimes don't mean at all. But if it becomes a part of the record, there's no backing away from it."
"What do you do when you're waiting or a crash?" Olivia asks
"It's not like that, I study crash investigations very closely, following up on pilot's families. How old is this house?"
"You're changing the subject."
"Yes, I am."
"1920."
"It's beautiful."
"You've been here four years?"
"Almost five."
"The phone rang then and startled them both. It seemed that it had been twenty minutes, perhaps thirty, since the phone had last rung, the longest break since the first summons in the morning. Elliot reached for the phone, handing it to Robert. She watched Robert answer it.
Olivia watched Robert at the phone. He turned once quickly and glanced at her, then turned back again.
"No comment." he said
"I don't think so."
"No comment."
"No comment."
He hung up the phone and stood looking up at the cabinet above it. He picked up a pen from the counter and began to flip it back and forth, hitting his knuckles.
"What?" Olivia asked
He turned, facing both Olivia and Elliot
"Well, we knew this was going to happen." He said
"What?"
"This will have a shelf life of twenty four hours max. Then it will be history."
"What?"
He looked at her hard and took a deep breath.
"They're saying pilot error."
Olivia shut her eyes. Her lit cigarette resting between her middle finger and index finger.
"It's just speculation." he said "They think they've found some flight data that doesn't make sense. But trust me, they couldn't know for sure."
"Oh."
"Also," he said quietly "They've found some bodies."
Olivia thought that if she kept breathing in and out slowly, that she would be alright.
"No identification yet."
"How many?"
"Eight."
She tried to imagine. Eight? Whole? Pieces? She wanted to ask but didn't.
"There'll be more." he said "They're bringing up more."
"Who was it on the phone?"
"Reuters."
Olivia threw her cigarette into the ash tray, Robert taking and grinding it down. She got up from the table and walked through the hallway and into the bathroom. For a moment, she was afraid she might be sick. It was a reflexive reaction, she thought, the inability to take it in, the desire to cough it out. She splashed water on her face and dried it. In the mirror, her face was almost unrecognizable.
There was a knock on the door and she knew it would be Elliot to follow her.
"Elliot..."
"Before you tell me off just tell me if you're okay."
She appreciates the man's pleading, and opens the door.
He's standing in front of the door, at least two feet away from her. She looks at him with his soft eyes, looking at her. She reaches for him into a hug. His arms wrap around her, his hand rubbing her bag.
"Thank you." she says quietly
When they returned to the kitchen, Robert was on the telephone again. He had one arm across his chest, his hand tucked under the other arm. He was speaking quietly, answering yes and ok, watching her as she walking into the room.
"Later" he said and hung up
There was a long silence. Then a doorbell rang, she assumed the men from the company, or the investigators.
Robert approached the hallway, opening the front door. A series of flashes, and then a slammed door. Treads of several feet, more than one man, she thought. Elliot looked at her, her eyes worried.
"It'll be ok." he said, rubbing her back
Two men in black suits, taller than Robert, at least six five for the both of them, they're faces serious, turn around the kitchen door and approach Olivia.
"Olivia O'Connell?" one of the men said
"Benson."
"We're investigating, on behalf of the airlines."
"I'm sorry for you're loss and I'm sure that you'd like us to be out of you're hair, but we must do proper procedure." the other man says
"Let's just get it over with." Olivia says
It takes a half hour of constant questioning and awkward silences to give her the courage to ask.
"How many of them are pilot error?" Olivia asked
"Seventy percent." one of the men said
"What error? What happened?"
"It's a series of events leading to the last one, and the last one is usually called pilot error because by that time the pilots are deeply involved."
"I see."
"May I ask you something?"
"Yes" Olivia says
He hesitated.
"Was James...?"
"Was James what?" she asked
"Was James agitated or depressed?"
The man across from her paused
"I know it's an awful question" he said "But you're going to have to answer it sooner or later. If there was something, if there's anything you know or you can remember, it would be better if you and I talked about it first."
She considered the question, odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love, soaked, drenched, in love-only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word, every gesture, and then tried to hold onto that intensity for as long as possible. It was the way people worked, Olivia thought, with a need to evolve from being sick with love to making a life with someone who was also changing, altering himself so that the couple could one day raise a child.
Olivia knew some lovers didn't make it, as she was lonely for years until James stumbled into her life. She finally felt as if she could count on someone, as for example her mother didn't have someone. Her mothers fate had made her a rape victim, impregnated, left to deal with it for life, to have Olivia be the reminder of what happened. And when Serena did bring home men, she would beg them to tell her she was beautiful, which caused Olivia to be stubborn, to protect herself from what the future of her mothers alcoholic binge would bring. With for her own young loves, she had gotten serious with one of Serena's colleagues, a professor at Hudson. Her love for the man was intense, and she eventually planed on running away, but when her mother found out, she was given a beatdown, words that she couldn't repeat in her head.
As for her relationship with James, the intensity was strong the first year and then James had started to withdraw ever so slightly from Olivia. Nothing she could point out or articulate exactly. In every marriage, she had always thought, a couple created it's own sexual drama, played out in the bedroom or silently in public or even over the telephone, a drama that was often repeated with similar dialogue, similar stage directions, similar body parts as props to the imagination. But if one partner then slightly altered his role or tried to eliminate some of his lines, the play didn't track quite as well as it once had. The other actor, not yet aware that the play had changed, sometimes lost his lines or swallowed them or became confused by the different choreogrpahy.
And so it had been, she thought, with James and her. He had begun to turn less often to her in bed. And then, when he did, it seemed as though an edge was gone. It was just a gradual sliding away, so gradual as to sometimes be almost undetectable, until one day it occurred to Olivia that she and James hadn't made love in over two weeks. She'd thought at the time that it was his need for sleep that had overwhelmed him, his schedule was difficult, and he often seemed tired. But sometimes she worried that possibly she was responsible for this new pattern, that she had become too passive. Too caught up in her job, in fact married to the job. And so she had tried for time to time to be more imaginative and playful, an effort that wasn't entirely successful.
Olivia had vowed not to complain, she wouldn't not panic, she would not even discuss the matter. Olivia soon realized that there was a gauze, wrapped around her, a veil that kept her and James beyond easy reach of each other. And after a while, the gauze began to make her anxious.
And then there had been the fight, the one truly terrible fight of their marriage. But she wouldn't think about that now.
"There wasn't anything" she said "I think I'll go up to bed."
Robert nodded, agreeing with the idea
"It was a good marriage." Olivia said
She ran her palm over the table
"It was good." she repeated
But actually she thought any marriage was like radio reception, it came and went. Occasionally, it, the marriage, James, would be clear to her. At other times, there would be interference, a staticky sound between them. At hose times, it would be as though she could't quite hear James, as though his messages to her were drifting in the wrong direction through the stratosphere. Before she could leave her chair, Robert popped a question.
"Do we need to notify any others members of his family?"
Olivia shook her head
"He was an only child, his mother died when he was nine." she said, "And his father died when he was in college."
She wondering if Robert already knew this.
"James never talked about his childhood" she said "Actually, I don't know much about his childhood at all. I always had the impression it wasn't a very happy one."
James' childhood has been one of those subjects Olivia had thought there was all the time in the world to talk to him about.
"Seriously, I'd be happy to stay here." Robert said
"No it's okay, I have Margaret and Elliot here if I need someone."
She paused. She watched Elliot guide the two men out the door and into the frenzy of press. Elliot returned and leaning against the doorway.
"When you asked me about James" she asked "about being depressed?"
"Yes?" Robert replied
"Well, there was one time I would say he was not depressed exactly, but definitely unhappy."
"Tell me about it." Robert said
"It was about his job." she said
"This was about three years ago, he became bored with the airline. He began to fantasize about quitting, maybe start his own business, a charter school, maybe sell a few airplanes."
"I used to think about that too." Robert said.
"The company grew too big, too impersonal, a lot of the pilots weren't American, they lived in London. For a while we got a few brochures for an Alaskan airline, a small plane company, doing research and tours all over Alaska, they offered James a job, and he even asked if I was willing to go with him, and I wanted to make him happy, as I had said yes. I was relieved when the subject went off course, and he didn't speak about leaving the airline anymore.
"After that, did he seem depressed?"
"No, not really."
She thought it would be impossible to say with any certainty what accommodations James had made inside himself. He had seemed to put his discontent into the same place he had put his childhood, a sealed vault.
"You looked tired" she said to Robert
"I am."
"You probably should go now." Olivia says
He was silent, getting up from his chair, nodding at the Elliot then Olivia.
"We have to have a funeral don't we?" Olivia asks
"We can talk about that tomorrow." Robert says
"But what if there's no body?"
"What religion are you?" Robert asked
"I'm nothing."
"What was James?"
"Catholic. But he was nothing too. We didn't belong to a church. We weren't married in a church."
She felt Robert's fingers touch the top of her hair. Lightly. Quickly.
"I'm going now." he said "I'll be back in the morning."
He left out the front door and left Olivia and Elliot in the kitchen.
"I trusted him not to die." Olivia said "I feel I've been cheated. Does that sound terrible? After all, he died, and I didn't. He may have suffered. I know he suffered, if only for seconds."
"You're suffering now." Elliot says, putting his hands on her shoulders
"It's not the same."
"You have been cheated." he said "Both you and your daughter."
At the mention of her daughter, Olivia's throat tightened. She put her hands in front of her face, as if to tell him not to say anything else.
"You have to let this happen to you." he said quietly "It has it's own momentum."
"It's like a train rolling over me. A train that doesn't stop."
" I want to help you but there isn't a lot I can do except watch. Grief is messy, there's nothing good about it."
He sits down next to her, having her lean against his chest, feeling his heart beat.
I hope you enjoy this chapter, please review!