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Sport 40: 2012

What the Plane Crash Made of Her

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What the Plane Crash Made of Her

Adam flew better than most of the birds he studied before he crashed his plane.

After the plane crash his family were very good to Jane, even though they didn’t know her well. She and Adam had been together for five years, but they’d spent most of that time in Montana and had only returned to Wellington six months before, and they’d been busy those six months. Their needy house in Seatoun consumed their spare time, and they were both supervising too many PhD students.

After the plane crash Adam’s family tried to surrender the role of primary mourner to Jane, but she failed to take it up. She didn’t want to mourn Adam, she wanted to reanimate him. She wanted everyone to admit that the whole plane crash story was part of some kiwi hazing ritual, an initiation with thirteen steps and Adam waiting at the end to congratulate her.

His mother, Margaret, patted and kissed her. Patted and kissed, patted and kissed, as if by performing these acts of consolation she could take back something of Adam from Jane’s skin. John, Adam’s father, made embracing Jane part of his terrible open display. He was the Tom Jones of mourners, and Margaret and Sarah, Adam’s sister, were his back-up criers. The embraces hurt Jane’s neck but did not trigger her grief.

Marty, Sarah’s fiancé, offered the Kleenex around and took empty cups back to the kitchen and buried his sad but dry face in the sandy- blond curls that sat on Sarah’s shoulders. A few times, when he wasn’t busy helping or holding, he asked Jane if she was doing okay. Beneath his concern disappointment lurked.

Between the day of the policeman’s visit and the day of Adam’s burial, Jane spent a lot of time in his parents’ living room, failing to meet expectations. ‘Thank you,’ she’d said to the policeman who brought the news. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the aunts who included her page 113 in the rounds of tea. ‘Yeah,’ she said to Marty each time. ‘Thanks.’

And then at the burial, Jane understood that Adam was down there in that pit and so were the children they had been about to start making and raising. She sat down with her legs dangling into the hole, and then she eased herself off the edge, fell six feet and thudded against the lid of Adam’s coffin.

When she landed she wondered what she was supposed to do next. Prostrate herself and sob and pound the coffin lid with her widow’s lily-white hands? Embarrassed by the dramatic act she’d performed, she stood there with her black flats planted shoulder-width apart on the beech box her husband had never chosen for himself and looked up at the sky without expectation of rescue. But the uncles came and reached down to her.

At the wake she sought the hands and lips of Margaret, the arms and tears of John, Sarah’s sisterly advances. She drank the tea the aunts made and accepted consolation from strangers, all of whom claimed to have loved Adam. She cornered Marty late in the afternoon. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I am not okay.’

That night, she slept in Adam’s old room and in her sleep she saw what the plane crash made of him, his wrecked, empty, buried body, his removal.

In the morning she understood it would be easy to stay in Adam’s room, in Adam’s family, that his room and his family were in danger of becoming his shrine. She went downstairs and found that the aunts had made breakfast. Only Marty and the uncles were really eating, but everyone was sitting together at the table. Jane didn’t sit. She said she needed to get going, that she had things she needed to do back at the house. No one tried to stop her but it was evident this cost them effort.

In the weeks after the burial, Jane received a lot of cards, a lot of floral arrangements heavy on the lilies. The cards required answers and the lilies stank with a headache stink and dropped their brazen pollen. Jane wished people would just use the phone.

People did use the phone.

Her mother called to ask Jane when she was coming home.

Just to hurt her mother, who’d been ‘too tied-up’ to come to the page 114 funeral, Jane tried to lie. Thousands of miles away from Montana she said, ‘I am home,’ and realised it was true.

Friends who were very far away called to say they wished there was something they could do. People who lived nearby whom she didn’t know very well called to issue open invitations for her to drop in anytime and to let them know if she ever needed anything. I need dates and times, Jane would think, thanking them. I need fucking casseroles.

Margaret and John were very good about dates and times. They invited Jane to dinner every Sunday night. Wary of the shrine, she never once accepted, but they never stopped inviting her. When it came to Christmas, Margaret was firm.

‘You are not spending Christmas alone,’ she said.

The celebration was populous but muted, except for the children. The children shrieked and ran around as though nobody ever died ever and people remarked on this, how nice it was to have the children’s happiness and maybe it would prove infectious. The children’s happiness did not infect Jane. It was a hot day, and bright, and the curtains were drawn in the living room to maximise the effect of the Christmas tree, the feeble glow of the lights on skin bared by summer clothes. On the table there was roast turkey with stuffing and root vegetables, but the folding doors were open between the dining room and the yard and outside the children and later some of the adults played ball games on the lawn.

Right before the beginning of the next academic year, Jane quit her job. All of the summer and much of the fall she spent most of her time shut up inside the needy house. She finished projects and enshrined a selection of Adam’s T-shirts that she had rescued from the laundry hamper after the burial and kept folded up on a shelf in the closet under a pile of sweaters. The T-shirts gave her the dream about what the plane crash made of him, but it didn’t stop her from sleeping beside them until the end of June, when she finally accepted that the shirts were grief porn and it would probably be healthiest to wash them, give them away, and move. She put the needy house on the market and took her young widow’s purse (a prize, a consolation prize) shopping on the other side of the harbour.

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On the other side of the harbour she viewed a series of tiny houses once used only on weekends or in the summer, when everyone could live outside. She told the agent that Days Bay was out of her price range but he insisted she come with him to see a place on Korimako Road. It was a narrow white box near the end of the street, placed high on a large, steep, mostly useless but north-facing section. The garage was down at street level with the full weight of the hill behind it.

‘Thirty-seven steps,’ Jane said, as they stood before the front door and the agent sifted through his collection of keys. ‘With groceries. In the rain.’

‘Shush,’ said the agent, whose fondness for her seemed genuine enough. ‘This place is perfect for you. And between you and me, the vendors are keen as mustard.’

The north side of the house had large windows that looked out across the valley to the opposite hillside all covered in green-black bush. But otherwise the place was like all the others she’d seen, with a renovated kitchen and bathroom, strange, poor lighting design and a tiny converted porch selling itself as an office or second bedroom. A trap door in the main room opened down into a box room that smelled of cat piss and had a floor of bare earth. The kitchen and bathroom had tiny, barred windows that opened into a gap between the house and a great concrete retaining wall.

Jane stood next to the largest window and looked at the view as she waited for the agent to wrap up his spiel: tiles, gas, good bones, cosy, sunny, etc. She was reviewing the places she’d seen, hoping that what she saw next would grab her because she was tired of looking, when the white flash of a wood pigeon’s courtship dive made her say,

‘Keen? How keen? Drop-the-price-by-75-thou-keen?’

The agent, interrupted in mid-spiel, did not seem affronted. ‘Can’t hurt to ask,’ he said. ‘Let me give them a tinkle and we’ll get this party started, eh?’

‘Okay,’ Jane said. She looked back out the window and saw another white flash and slid her hands into her jacket pockets to hide her crossed fingers.

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The place was hers by September and she moved in the same day her new neighbours (one came round, shirtless, to see if she needed a hand with anything) heard the first shining cuckoo of the spring. Jane heard it too, and the almost subsonic woman-murmuring-in-another-room of the kereru, and unpacked the ornithology books first. Then she unrolled her carpets and for the rest of the afternoon she wallowed in the great pools of sunlight that fell on them.

The last hour of daylight she spent outside. She walked uphill to the end of the road and then curved down through the bush to the beach. The harbour was flat and clear grey, and across the water the hills of town stood black with the sun behind them. She walked on the hard margin of damp sand and concentrated on the jetsam, and filled a pocket with beach glass which she made into a molehill under the jetty before she left the beach. As she walked back up the hill through the bush a small shadow flew across the track in front of her, so silent it sucked the sound out of the air around it. She identified it as a morepork, and hoped that the moreporks of Days Bay spoke a different dialect to the moreporks of Seatoun.

She assembled her dinner by the light of the fridge and stood by the largest window as she ate it. Outside different darknesses formed layers, and stars demarcated hill and sky. She brushed her teeth without turning on any lights and went to bed and lay there listening to the moreporks hunt and perch. They sounded just like their Seatoun cousins.

In her sleep she saw what the plane crash made of him. A bird man perched upon a summit with his bird children. Below them a strong wind churned the trees. The sea rolled up and crashed into their island. Above them the sky was blown blue.

*

The next morning Jane tried to take her breakfast back to bed. But she caught herself still in her nightie with one knee on the mattress and a plate of toast in her hand and knew this was no way to begin her first day in her new house. After she’d eaten, it would be too easy to stay in bed, to lie there covered in crumbs as the room grew brighter, then dimmer, then dark. She needed to start moving through her days with purpose, from one thing to another. She needed scheduling.

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‘Nope,’ she said, and steered her plate back out into the main room. ‘Nine-oh-five: breakfast and newspaper.’

In the paper she found an ad she’d seen before but had ignored. The needy house had precluded void-fillers such as the museum’s user-pays exhibition of Impressionist painters. The new house needed nothing from Jane and encouraged her to go along, to queue for an hour to shuffle through rooms of minor works with the other widows of the city. Her schedule (nine fifteen: shower) would allow her plenty of time to catch the ten thirty ferry.

By eleven twenty-five she was at the museum in a queue, a rope of women knotted in places with the few husbands they’d managed to keep alive. The exhibition hall was hot and crowded but the pictures were cool and shady: bridges, water, flowers, girls in boats. After gazing into that world for an hour, Jane’s eyes found everything too sharp and fast. She looked for somewhere quiet to rest and followed emptiness through the museum until she stood beside a boulder bathing in a font. A sign invited her to scour the boulder with coarse, wet sand, to imagine this would help to reveal the precious green concealed by a pallid mineral skin. She ran her hands across the top of the boulder like it was the body of an animal, and then dried them on her trouser legs as she walked into the main space. The early afternoon sun spilled stained-glass colours onto the carpet: red, blue, and yellow, shaped into three peaks. The peaks pointed to a stage covered by a whare roof with legs and arms and ribs all covered in gods and demi-gods and ancestors rendered in pale colours. The floorboards of the stage whispered beneath the sock feet of a flock of old women in the visors and bright leisure suits that marked them as passengers from the cruise ship dominating the northern end of the day’s skyline. Beneath the brothers who had tethered and slowed the sun, the women read brochures and fiddled with their cameras. Jane ducked a little and retreated, as if to observe them from a hide. She stood by the font, scouring the boulder, wondering which one of the women she would grow up to be. When the women filed past Jane and the boulder on their way somewhere else, she tacked herself onto their tail and trailed them around the museum and into the bird exhibit.

This was your usual depressing assemblage. Dark walls framing page 118 dioramas of stuffed birds, interpretative panels read only by school kids with worksheets to fill in, an attempt at interaction: in this case a winding ramp that carried visitors up from the ‘forest floor’ to a plywood canopy, interpretive panels all the way.

It never surprised Jane that people didn’t give a shit about ecology when most experienced it through zoos and museums and nature reserves, places they visited. Jane had worked for months in places so removed from civilisation she’d started talking to herself and then stopped talking altogether. She’d been challenged by grizzly bears on their hind legs in untracked wilderness and once the bear had charged, stopped short, turned around and charged again. Jane didn’t think she was special, but she knew that she was lucky. She knew how your pulse takes over all your senses when your heart feels threatened.

She stood next to a small group of the cruise ship women and looked at the sea bird diorama. She could barely feel her pulse with her fingers. Then she heard a kokako.

Jane and Adam met at a conference at the Isaak Walton Inn in Essex, Montana. It was bald eagle breeding season and the inn, an old railway hotel on the border of Glacier National Park, had been taken over by professional twitchers. On the first day Adam and Jane had identified each other as the only people under thirty in attendance, but they didn’t meet until cocktail hour on the second evening. Adam approached Jane because she was too shy (too arrogant, he thought) to approach him. The closer he came, the cuter he got. Sandy, Jane thought, as she watched him walk towards her. Freckles. By the time they had completed introductory formalities, she was practically in love with him. Green eyes. Big hands. Then he said that he thought the paper she’d delivered that morning on habitat fragmentation was

‘pessimistic’.

‘Whatever,’ Jane said. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’

‘Yeah, no,’ said Adam. ‘New Zealand. But I’ve got this adjunct gig at U of M.’

‘I meant this planet.’

There was further banter, but Adam’s real response to her argument was the paper he delivered the next day, about birds spreading through habitat corridors and breeding up significant populations on island page 119 reserves and in fenced mainland enclosures. Jane wrote New Zealand ain’t North America in her notebook, but she liked Adam all the more for his assertion that everything wasn’t completely fucked, and four years after the conference she returned with him to the Isaac Walton Inn and married him there with a couple of waiters for witnesses. Half a year after their wedding and thirteen hours after taking off from Los Angeles, they touched down in New Zealand.

They spent their fourth full day in Wellington at Karori Wildlife Sanctuary. Adam knew Jane’s views on such places, that they were like recycling, they made people think everything was going to be okay when it just so totally wasn’t, but he took her there anyway. She allowed herself to be a little impressed by the abundance of birds there, the success of the laissez-faire breeding program and the forest regeneration that had already taken place, but she didn’t allow herself to show it.

‘You have to imagine what it will be like in five hundred years’ time,’ Adam told her as they stood in the middle of a long stretch of concrete, the old dam that used to hold back the city’s water supply.

‘Sweetie,’ said Jane, ‘I am imagining what it will be like in five hundred years’ time. That’s my problem.’

Adam put his arm around her and drew her in. Her nose touched his neck. ‘You’re your problem,’ he said.

Next he took her to Kapiti, an island inviolate since 1906, cleared of sheep and goats and given back to indigenous organisms, and now cut by tracks and open to any visitor with a permit from the Department of Conservation and the forty-five dollars to cover the boat ride. Again, Jane was largely unimpressed but had to admit that at least there were enough birds living in the island’s sloping forests to make real noise.

At the beginning of their climb to its summit, Adam stopped, crouched down and picked up a feather. A kiwi’s feather, he said, and showed her the ostrich-y thing. He cupped it in his hands as though it were not a kiwi feather but a kiwi chick. Then he let the wind catch it and they kept walking.

Near the top of the island, as they stood to one side of the path to watch a saddleback forage, a long line of tourists streamed past with just a glance in its direction.

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‘Dicks,’ said Jane. ‘They have no idea what they aren’t seeing.’

‘Well,’ said Adam, ‘he is just a black and brown bird having a feed in a rotten log.’

‘Humanity deserves what it gets.’

‘Smile when you say that.’

‘I did. Inside. Deep inside my black little heart.’

And then, because she was still muttering about the island being one big viewpoint, when Adam whispered, ‘Hey! Hear that?’ she had to reply, ‘Hear what?’

Jane had read a description of the kokako’s song in Adam’s Heather and Robertson: ‘...a slow string of very loud, rich, mournful organ- like notes’. But the notes were nothing like an organ’s, and ‘mournful’ didn’t touch their tone. There was something grey and blue in the song, and in Jane as she listened to it, that reached beyond anything people had named or could feel unless the kokako sang and they were somewhere close enough to hear it.

‘That,’ said Adam, when the kokako had finished its song.

‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘Yes, I heard that.’

In the bird hall Jane stood beside the cruise ship women and listened to the kokako’s voice and then she walked away from the cruise ship women towards the sound. There was a mid-grade boy, eight or nine years old, standing by a column covered in blue plastic buttons. Next to each plastic button was a back-lit transparency of a bird photograph. The boy pushed the button beside the picture of a kokako and out came the song. He went to push it again and Jane covered his hand with hers.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Not that one.’ She knew she shouldn’t touch the boy, she was a stranger, but he didn’t seem to mind. He slid his hand out from under hers and reached for the tui and said, ‘How about this one then?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jane. ‘The tui is great. Ecstatic.’ She nodded at the boy and he smiled at her. ‘Go on. Push it.’

He pushed it, and then he pushed it again and the bellbird button at the same time and they made the wonderful discovery that each bird had its own speaker and it was possible to get them all going at once if you worked fast enough, to release a collage of recorded page 121 birdsong. After a moment the boy wandered off, but Jane stayed on pressing the buttons, hard at work in the birdsong factory, and while she worked she could see Adam’s plane whole and empty and covered in moss and fungi like a fallen tree, deep in the bush.

She held the image for a long time. When it faded there was no reason to keep pressing buttons and she let the collage die down one bird at a time until the tui sang one last double note. Then she noticed the school group. The adults slid their eyes in her direction, the kids held their worksheets and stared at her. Some of them giggled. She smiled at the group. It’s okay, she wanted to say. My husband died, that’s all. She pressed a few more buttons to prove she didn’t think she was doing anything weird. Then she looked around for the cruise ship women, but it appeared they had moved on.

*

Sarah and Marty waited a year and a half after the plane crash before they rescheduled their wedding. This past November they mailed out save-the-date cards for an afternoon in February (‘February,’ said Jane’s mother. ‘Who gets married in February?’). Jane’s card was sent to her at the university, and Sarah had added a note about how much she looked forward to seeing Jane, and to congratulate her on her return to work.

That February afternoon has arrived and passed and now there Sarah and Marty sit, married and bookended by bridesmaids and groomsmen at the top table all the way across the museum’s glassy function room from this table of leftover family members. Everyone at the wedding who is of an opinion-sharing nature has opined that Sarah and Marty waited well long enough to satisfy decorum. These opinions, and all other comments about the bride’s lost brother, sail like darts into Jane’s ears. The rest of the party sounds like the crowd noise setting on her white noise app, and the darts cut sharp through this. It makes paying attention to her table companions, all of whom are falling all over themselves not to mention Adam, difficult.

After her move to Days Bay, Jane did not see much of Adam’s family. Margaret telephoned, of course, kept inviting. Jane kept refusing and once offered Margaret an explanation. She told her about the shrine thing.

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‘Dear Jane,’ said Margaret, and then paused as if to pat and kiss. ‘We are all in the same bloody boat. Come and join us for Christmas.’

Another Christmas then, of dim lights, sweating at the table, and lawn games, less muted this time. The day was hard for Jane but this time she had the clarity to understand that it was hard for everyone and she thought maybe they should all do the hard together. She resolved to spend more time with Margaret and John, to accept Sarah’s offered sisterhood. She joined in the games and the clean-up, and left for home a few hours after the Christmas lights had found some darkness to brighten.

But that was six weeks ago and she hasn’t made the resolved effort, hasn’t accepted a single invitation except this one. The sense that Adam’s family are a souvenir from her failed trip to Happy has returned. Their sensitivity to this, perhaps, explains why they have seated her over here in Siberia.

Dinner has not been served so much as meted out in mouthfuls over several hours. The bride and groom and their parents are all vivacious, popular types with large groups of friends, and the pace of dinner has allowed for promiscuous table-hopping among these groups.

Dessert has just been delivered and Jane would gobble it and leave but the party is enclosed in a white and gold and chocolate brown membrane made of festive noise and festive sweat and brightened by hundreds of dim globes of light suspended from thin, expensive wires, and beyond this membrane is the museum at night, a black granite cave network, and Jane is reluctant to trade light and heat and reverberations for darkness and echoes.

To Jane’s left is Rachel, the cousin Sarah flatted with during her first year at the Ministry of Justice. When Rachel and Jane shook hands, Rachel scratched Jane on the wrist, and when the handshake ended she assumed a protective posture, with her inner shoulder lifted and turned, as if she was the one who’d been scratched and the accident was offensive. This has left Jane in the conversational hands of Ted, on her right. Ted is a relation so distant it has occurred to Jane that being seated next to him is a pointed comment on her lame involvement with Adam’s family, except Adam’s family don’t do pointed. Jane does pointed. Adam’s family do considerate. They do sensitive. And positive.

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Ted is boring but Jane admires his tenacity. Each of their lines of chat dwindles to nothing and a few minutes later he fires off another new opener.

‘So anyway,’ he says this time. He rests his fingers on the handle of his spoon and it clatters off his plate onto the table. He is about to mention Adam.

Jane looks at her wrist. Her watch has left a white shadow on her tanned skin. ‘Shoot,’ she says to Ted. ‘I’m going to miss my bus.’ She stands and waves goodbye to Sarah who is bouncing one of the flower girls on her knee and is not looking at Jane. ‘It’s the last 81. I need to run. It was nice to meet you.’

Rachel drops her shoulder and looks at Jane. ‘Yes,’ she says, as if Jane had spoken to her just now, and all evening, and that they have been having a lovely time. ‘Take care.’

‘You, too,’ say Jane and Ted at the same time.

As the heavy glass door closes behind Jane it squeezes down the sound of the party until it is mostly muted, but against the silence of the museum the whispers of gaiety sound like shouts. Jane stands on the dark side of the membrane looking in at the golden light, the dresses and suits and teeth, the dirty china and the crystal smeared with lip marks and greasy finger prints. Her wedding was not like this.

Sarah and Marty laugh to each other over the heads of borrowed children. Jane wishes them every happiness in the world.

‘Lotsa luck, fellas,’ she says, and salutes them before turning to go. With her back to the party, Jane feels like she has left by the wrong door. The museum is dark, and she thinks this must be wrong, too. There should be faint lights in distant galleries, a strip of lights to guide her down the stairs to the foyer and the way out. There is nothing. Even after she has walked away from the function room and no longer casts a shadow and has stood in the blackness long enough for her eyes to adjust, there is no light. She uses echolocation to find her way to the stairs, certain now that she was supposed to leave the party by another door, but she strains and gropes her way forward. She can’t stand the thought of returning to the party just to look for the right exit. When she finally feels the banister in her hand she realises she can also see it. There are lights on somewhere page 124 upstairs, dim as stars. In the bird hall maybe, where the diorama birds would be shadows like the one she clipped out of World magazine and mailed to her grandparents with a note that instructed them to tape it to their picture window and spare the sparrows from battering themselves to death against it, where the column of birdsong would be a silent rectangle.

Jane lowers her foot down onto the first step, transfers her weight and then takes the second step, and so on, because she has to believe that when she reaches the foyer the big automatic doors there will open and let her out into the brighter night.