A Soft Place to Land: A Novel Read online

  Mimi did not keep a tight rein on Julia, and so Julia was not usually home until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. She would have stayed out even later had it not been for Ruthie. Sometimes Julia would swing home after play practice, pick her little sister up in her Saab 900, and take her out to dinner with her friends. And somehow, even though she, too, had lost her mother, she, too, had lost Phil (he was “only” her stepfather, yes, but she was closer to him than she was to her real dad), Julia was able to give Ruthie comfort.

  Whether it was allowing her little sister to accompany Julia to Mick’s for chocolate pie with her stoner friends, or allowing her little sister to sleep in her bed at night because it comforted both of them to be near each other, Julia alone made Ruthie feel better. Sometimes at night Ruthie would wake up crying and Julia, more often awake than not, would wrap her arms around her sister, would hold her tight, would use enough pressure to contain the radiating loneliness Ruthie felt.

  It was funny. Ruthie wasn’t used to hugging Julia. As close as they had always been, as much as they had always relied on each other, they had never been huggers. No one in their family was. Even Phil and Naomi, who were so much in love, were not big huggers. Phil always embarrassed Ruthie to death by sensually massaging Naomi’s neck during parents’ events—award banquets and such—at Coventry, and every night while watching TV Phil would rub Naomi’s feet, but they did not hug good-bye in the morning before Phil left for the office. Phil would give his wife a wet smack on the lips, announce, “I’m off,” and be gone.

  Before the accident, the only time Julia and Ruthie hugged was while playing Egg and Biscuit. Egg and Biscuit was a game that Julia created, and because she created it, she got to make up all of the rules, the primary one being that Julia was always the Egg, Ruthie was always the Biscuit. Julia would stand on the far side of the room, looking forlorn, casting her eyes about but never resting them on anyone or anything until they rested on Ruthie, who stood across the room, her back to Julia.

  “B-B-Biscuit?” Julia would ask, disbelieving.

  Ruthie would turn, would look at Julia, would squint her eyes. “E-E-Egg?”

  “Biscuit?” Julia would say again, hope creeping into her voice.

  “Egg!?” Ruthie would ask.

  “Biscuit!”

  “Egg!”

  Finally the two girls would run toward each other, screaming, “Biscuit! Egg! Biscuit! Egg!” They would meet in the middle of the room, Julia lifting Ruthie off the floor and twirling her around and around in a hug while each of them cried, “Oh, my yummy Egg! Oh, my fluffy Biscuit!”

  They never really outgrew this game, continuing to play it even after Julia began high school. Of course, it was a private thing for them. Nothing they would play in front of others.

  For Ruthie, it was easier to imagine the night before the accident rather than the day of. The night before, her parents were still safe, still tucked inside their fancy hotel with the glittering, flashing lobby and a myriad of overpriced restaurants to choose from. And even though their hotel room was on the twenty-sixth floor, they were, for all practical purposes, grounded. They would not plummet from the sky at the Mirage. And what they did there—the gambling excepted—was not all that different from what they did on Saturday nights in Atlanta. Get dressed up. Leave Ruthie at home with a sitter. Go somewhere expensive for dinner where Phil would order them each a glass of champagne to start and Naomi, temporarily unburdened from her motherly responsibilities, would lean back in her seat, would begin to relax.

  Julia was unlike Ruthie in that she obsessively imagined the details of her parents’ final day and she seemed to relish doing so. They did not know yet, during the months that followed their parents’ death, that Julia would one day be a successful writer, would indeed one day write the story of her mother’s early adulthood: her decision to leave her first husband, her young child—Julia!—in tow, in order to marry Phil, the man who had captured Naomi’s heart during their brief romance when she was a freshman at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he was a senior at Duke. Phil would head to Nashville to begin law school shortly after his graduation. And because she was angry at Phil for dashing off to Vanderbilt without seeming to give a speck of thought to their budding relationship, Naomi finally agreed to go on a date with Matt Smith, a North Carolina State sophomore who had already asked her out three times.

  It was Matt she would marry, Matt who would give her Julia, and Matt whose heart she would eventually break when she left him for Phil.

  And so it made sense, retroactively, that Julia the writer was able to imagine Phil and Naomi’s last day in such unflinching detail. And while Ruthie did not want to imagine the details herself, she allowed Julia to tell of them, because it fixed a story to the horror, which somehow made it less random. (Nothing chilled Ruthie more than the possibility that the world was a random place where parents could die for no reason.) Julia’s story, which she embellished with details plucked from the encyclopedia about the Ford Trimotor, was comforting—to an extent—because it had a defined villain, Dusty Williams, the pilot. In Julia’s version Dusty had started his day with a six-pack of beer, followed by a little weed. In Julia’s version, Dusty’s plane had twice failed inspection.

  (In truth, Dusty had possessed a clean flying record, and was by all accounts a model pilot. His plane had recently been inspected. Yes, it was old, but it was in good shape. It should not have crashed. Why it did remained a mystery. Maybe there was a bad fuel load? Maybe Dusty had a heart attack once the plane was up in the air, and no one else on board knew how to fly the old Tin Goose? No one would ever know. It wasn’t as if Dusty’s Trimotor was equipped with a black box.)

  “Well,” said Julia. “You know that they got off to an early start. That Phil woke first and went down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee for Mom.”

  “With cream and Equal,” said Ruthie. Her mother always took her coffee with real cream and Equal, an incongruity that Julia and Ruthie used to tease Naomi about.

  “Right. Mom would have gotten out of the bed and pulled back the curtains, revealing a gorgeous day, the rising sun still a little pink in the sky. She would have looked out the window at the empty hotel pool, blue and sparkling all of those many feet below, too cold to swim in but nice to sit by. She might have wondered why they were leaving the hotel, were driving so many miles only to see the canyon and return to Las Vegas that night. She might have even considered asking Phil to cancel the trip, telling him that she had a headache and that the drive across the desert might make it worse.”

  “No,” interrupted Ruthie. “She was looking forward to seeing the Grand Canyon. She told me before she left. Plus, Dad was so excited about driving that Mercedes.”

  “I know, I know,” said Julia, impatient. “I’m just thinking that maybe that morning she had second thoughts about all of that driving. You know how bad a driver Phil was. But then he would have burst into the room holding her coffee in one hand, a Danish in the other, looking so eager, so excited, that she would have abandoned her misgivings and gotten dressed for the trip.”

  “It was a cool day,” said Ruthie. “That’s what the newspapers said.”

  “Cool but not too cold. Perfect for her brown linen pants and crisp white sleeveless shirt that she wore with a thin black cardigan. Phil was wearing khakis and one of those white linen shirts Mom was always buying him, a sweater tied around his waist.”

  “Alex’s mom says you’re really not supposed to wear linen until the summer,” said Ruthie.

  “You think they gave a shit what Alex’s mom thought of them way out in the desert?”

  Ruthie shrugged. No, of course not. In Buckhead, their tony Atlanta neighborhood, and among the other Coventry mothers, Naomi worried about all of the rules she didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have cared out there.

  “They would have kept the windows of the convertible rolled up, even though the top was down, so Phil’s shirt wouldn’t get dirty from all of the dust kicked up on the
drive.”

  “They were on the highway,” said Ruthie. “It wasn’t like they were driving through the desert.”

  “They would have had the windows rolled up anyway. To protect Mom’s hair from getting all windblown.”

  Their mother, like Julia, had been a natural redhead, auburn, really. But while Julia’s hair grew in loose curls, Naomi’s was straight like Ruthie’s. Naomi, who had been self-conscious about her looks, about her long nose and the little gap between her front teeth, always said that her red hair was her best feature.

  “She would have wrapped a scarf around it,” said Ruthie. “One of the silk ones she and Dad bought in Florence.”

  “Right. That’s right. A Ferragamo. So they were all dressed and ready to go—no need to pack the luggage; they were coming back late that night—but just before they left the room Mom suggested that they call home, just to check on you, just to say hello.”

  In fact, her parents had not called the morning of the accident, and the possibility that Naomi had considered doing so caused Ruthie’s throat to tighten, caused her to have to lay her head on Julia’s bed to account for the heaviness she suddenly felt.

  “But Phil said no. If Mother Martha answered they would have to talk with her for at least ten minutes—she was so hard to get off the phone—and besides, they had spoken with you just the night before. Plus, it was already nine A.M., they had a long drive ahead of them, and they did not want to waste away the morning in the hotel room. So Mom said fine, she’d call tomorrow when she could tell you all about seeing the Grand Canyon.

  “Phil would have already arranged to have the rental car dropped off at the hotel, and so they would have stepped outside the lobby doors to find the cherry red Mercedes convertible waiting for them, keys in the ignition, top already down.”

  “Otherwise Dad wouldn’t have been able to figure out how to do it,” Ruthie said.

  (Phil’s lack of mechanical know-how had always been a running joke between the two girls. They used to tease him mercilessly about his habit of watching This Old House every Saturday afternoon.

  “Do you even know how to hammer a nail?” Ruthie would ask her father.

  You had to be careful about teasing Phil, because if his feelings were hurt he might lash out fiercely. But he always had the same response to his daughters’ jokes about his devotion to This Old House.

  “I need to know what to look out for when I supervise the help,” he would say, and Julia and Ruthie would groan and roll their eyes.)

  “They would climb in the car, which smelled of new leather, and Phil would slip The Eagles—Their Greatest Hits, brought from Atlanta, just for the occasion, into the CD player. Mom would check and make sure he had his driving directions with him, and he would wave away her concern but then go ahead and pat his breast pocket to make sure the directions were there. And then they were off.”

  There was not too much they could imagine about the drive to the Grand Canyon, besides the wind whipping around their parents’ hair, despite the windows of the convertible being rolled up. Neither Ruthie nor Julia had been anywhere out west besides San Francisco, so they didn’t really know what the scenery looked like. They imagined that the road was empty, the sun was big, and there were cacti everywhere.

  The noise from the wind would have made it too loud for their parents to talk during the drive, but Julia imagined that Phil slipped his hand onto Naomi’s leg once they made their way out of the city of Las Vegas and onto the open road. And both girls imagined that Phil drove way too fast, for he always sped, even when his daughters were strapped into the back of the car. Ruthie remembered one time when they were driving to Union City, Tennessee, to attend Naomi’s parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and Phil took the car up to 100 mph. Naomi was asleep in the front seat, her head leaning against the window, but Julia, who was sitting behind Phil in the back, noticed where the needle on the speedometer was and pointed it out to Ruthie, who screamed, convinced that they were all going to die in a fiery crash.

  “Phil must have driven even faster than normal to the Grand Canyon, because they arrived at Grand View Flights by two P.M. And we know they stopped for lunch before doing that.”

  That detail had been revealed in the front-page story about the accident that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Metro section ran. Of course, you had to read past the jump to learn that Phil and Naomi last dined on huevos rancheros at a gas station in Arizona that housed within it a breakfast counter known for good Mexican food. The owner of the gas station, Javier Martin, a white-haired man with a waxed mustache, said the couple stood out to him, and not just because they were the only folks eating.

  “They just seemed real in love, is all,” Javier was quoted as saying. “Making googly eyes and touching their knees together like they was on their honeymoon.”

  To Javier Martin, Ruthie and Julia’s parents must have seemed like a couple from a movie: Naomi with her vibrant red hair, her silk scarf, her linen pants and crisp white shirt; Phil with his linen shirt, Stetson hat—surely purchased sometime during the vacation, for it was mentioned twice in the newspaper article, but neither Ruthie nor Julia had ever seen it—and cherry red Mercedes.

  Perhaps even Phil and Naomi were aware of the cinematic nature of their jaunt to the Grand Canyon; perhaps that was why they readily signed the pages of release forms at Grand View Flights, agreeing not to sue should anything happen to them on their flight. Perhaps the whole day felt a little unreal and so they took a risk that they might not normally have taken, because, hell, they were on vacation, it was a beautiful day, they were dressed so elegantly: what could happen?

  “You know Phil talked Mom into it,” said Julia. “You know she would have been nervous about boarding that rickety old plane, she would have suggested they just look at the canyon through a telescope, or even ride a donkey down into it. And Dad would have thrown his hands up in exasperation, said, ‘Naomi! You look for a snake under every rock.’”

  This was something Phil often said to Naomi, who was a worrier like Ruthie. Or he would say, “See what I have to put up with?” when Naomi scolded him about driving too fast, or told him Julia was absolutely too old to order off the children’s menu, despite the deal, or refused to use the “nearly new” Kleenex he dug out of his pocket when Naomi sneezed, the folded halves of which were stuck suspiciously together, even though he promised he had not used it to blow his nose. He would grin at his daughters, repeating himself: “See what I have to put up with?” While everyone—Phil included—knew it was Naomi who had to put up with him.

  “He might have talked her into it, but she wouldn’t have boarded the plane if she didn’t really want to do it,” said Ruthie. “She liked adventure.”

  “And so they got in, waved to Dusty at the controls, his headphones already on, his eyes a little bloodshot from the six-pack of beer he had finished at his trailer earlier that day. The plane’s interior was elegant if antiquated, its wicker seats bolted to the floor. There was room for ten passengers on the plane, but there was only one other couple besides Mom and Dad on board. A childless couple in their fifties, on vacation from Canada. The rows were only one seat wide, so Mom and Phil had to hold hands across the aisle. They fastened their safety belts tightly against their laps. They waited to take off, excited. And then the engine noises intensified, and they were moving forward, picking up speed until the plane was going fast enough to lift off the ground.

  “Everything was so loud around them, louder even than it had been on the convertible ride across the desert, and then they were going up, up, up, toward the clear blue sky. And Mom would have whispered, ‘Off we go, into the wild blue yonder,’ because she always whispered that at takeoff on airplanes. And her heart would have lifted at the excitement of what she and Phil were doing, she would have felt light and free and alive, and then she would have heard a terrible noise and the plane would have shook—”

  “Stop,” said Ruthie. “I don’t want to think about that. I don�
�t want to think about the actual crash.”

  But clearly Julia was feeling devilish, was feeling charged. She wanted to finish her story; she wanted to tell all its details, including the conclusion: the nosedive that ended in an explosive crash against the side of the canyon, the crash that left all five of them, the childless couple from Canada, Dusty, Phil, and Naomi, dead. To tell the story was to control it somehow.

  “What did Mom think about during those last few seconds? Did she think about what would happen to us? Was she furious at Phil for pressuring her into boarding the plane? Did she try and pretend that everything still might turn out okay, that the plane might touch ground lightly, despite all evidence to the contrary? Did she pray? Did she cry? Did she and Phil kiss?”

  Ruthie could not listen to her sister anymore. She banged her fists against her sister’s chest and shoulders, yelling, “Shut up, Julia. Just shut up!”

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Spring 1993

  When the call came from Grand View Flights in Arizona, Ruthie was in the kitchen fixing dinner while her grandmother—stepgrandmother, really, but she had served as Phil’s mother since he was three—was sitting in the sunporch, sipping from an Amaretto sour that Ruthie had prepared.

  Ruthie loved to prepare and serve food. She had been doing it since she was a little girl and would squish Cool Whip between Nilla wafers and invite Julia to a tea party. More often than not Julia said no, preferring that the time she spent with her little sister be on her own terms. Naomi would come to Ruthie’s tea parties, when she wasn’t too busy cleaning up around the house or fixing dinner. Some Saturdays when Naomi was off getting her nails done, Ruthie was able to talk her father into joining her, though he often acted bored, and would bring the newspaper to read while she poured tea and served him Nilla sandwiches.