“I will definitely be there,” says Pez, raising an eyebrow. “Um, Caitlyn, your phone is ringing.”
“I know,” I hiss. I gingerly remove the phone from my pocket, letting the jingle repeat until I’m ready to commit to the inevitable.
The screen shows a grainy, shaky video of Bernard’s helicopter flying over an empty field. It is Middle America, probably Pennsylvania farmland. I wonder for a moment if it might literally be Gettysburg.
The bottom drops out of my stomach.
Pez sees me stricken and maneuvers out of his seat to come stand behind me. We watch as the helicopter rotors stall in the sky. The helicopter starts to wrench sideways, advancing jerkily in first one direction and then another. Then the camera zooms in, so the helicopter takes up the entire frame. I think I can even see a pale white face looking out. Suddenly the helicopter snakes out of view and there’s a mishmash of blue sky and green field and the sickening boom of a crash.
The helicopter doesn’t explode. Nothing so dramatic as that. When the camera finds its target again and pans back, we see the helicopter crushed beyond recognition in the field, smoking, silent, motionless.
Pez and I stare at the screen, willing someone to climb out of the wreckage, to stumble from the crumpled mess and then to run toward whoever is holding the camera and snatch it from them and punch them in the face.
But no one gets up. The camera zooms in close again and I see bodies in the belly of the ruins, twisted and lifeless. We watch for what feels like a solid minute. And then the feed goes dead, returning to the character-creation screen, which shows me that I have only one life left.
“Call the police,” I say. “That has to be Pennsylvania. Surely the helicopter has some kind of GPS chip or something? Maybe call the helicopter company first. That’s what the police would do. Maybe somebody saw it go down. They could still be alive.”
Pez nods. He runs out the door.
I feel sick. I fumble around under my desk for the tiny wastepaper basket that is largely ceremonial, since my office is cleaned several times a day and I do all my work at the computer, generating basically zero paperwork. Every so often I toss a bag of chips or a takeout clamshell into it, but thankfully right now it is empty.
I heave out my guts into the tiny trash can. I puke up my hangover and the Indian food and the toxic swirl of anxiety and despair overtaking me. Bernard is dead. I know it. Even if he managed to survive the crash, the first person to arrive on the scene will be whoever was taking the video, and it won’t be much work to make sure that whatever is left of Bernard doesn’t make it to a hospital.
Three Nylo men dead in one week. The contractions of my stomach turn into sobs and I don’t give a fuck if anybody hears me or not.
32
I wimp out and let the cops go to Bernard’s house to break the news to Phoebe. It should be me who tells her what happened, but I am simply not brave enough. I want to talk to her, but I don’t want to be the one who tells her that her husband is dead.
And he really is dead. I got a confirmation from the tunnel and subway detectives within an hour of seeing the video. The police are still trying to figure out what happened. Perversely, against all circumstantial evidence, they think it was some kind of pilot error. They see no reason to assume that it was murder.
Even though he’s the third Nylo to die this week.
So the police are clearly not going to help. At this point, the FBI should get involved. If I wanted, I could bring that kind of pressure on the city and make it happen. But I can’t stand the idea of the agents’ smug faces as they go through our phones, our computers, our lives.
I don’t want to travel in a helicopter to Long Island. Not after what happened. I can’t land on Bernard’s lawn in a helicopter and give Phoebe even a fleeting glint of hope that it might be him.
Plus, I don’t think I could bring myself to climb aboard a helicopter right now. Instead, I take a car. I arrive with Ed and Mel an hour or so after the cops. On the way I try to call Gabriella and Alistair, but they are still avoiding me, possibly afraid I might try to bend them to my will, like Pez said I do to people. But didn’t they see the video? Bernard is dead, for fuck’s sake.
Phoebe’s au pair answers the door, a dowdy Irish woman in her fifties. She shakes her head when she sees me and opens the door wide. I hear wailing from deeper inside the house. The two boys are standing by the foot of the stairs. The littlest one runs up to me and hugs my legs.
“Make it stop,” he says. “Make her stop.”
“I can’t, little guy,” I say, rubbing Julian’s back as he clings to me. “I can’t turn this one around.”
“Yes, you can,” says Maxim with a sneer. “Yes, you can! You can do anything you want. You need to bring our dad back here and make Mom go back to normal.”
I leave them at the stairs; there’s nothing else I can do. They let me go, unsure whether my silence is acquiescence or defiance. I suppose they are going to have to get used to the ambivalent feeling of absence from the ones they love. This won’t be good for either boy, but it will be especially bad for Maxim, who is already a toxic soup of behavioral problems.
I find Phoebe in one of the small libraries on the ground floor. There is a packet of papers on the table in
