Chapter 5 - Best Pilot Ever
The recording is what ended his career, and there's a bitter joke buried in that which I've made exactly once, to Paula, and never again.
I filmed it to show him my son's face.
What it turned out to be was a hundred-and-thirty-witness document of a captain using the cabin PA, on a paying flight, at the gate, to make a personal announcement about a woman who wasn't even on the airplane. Two other passengers had filmed it too. One of them tracked me down later through the airline.
The company doesn't have a rule that says don't do this, because nobody ever thought one was needed. It has about nine other rules it lands under.
There was a hearing in February. He kept his license. He did not keep the job.
The Nevada marriage is void — a civil matter, handled in six weeks. What is not a civil matter is that North Carolina treats what he did as a felony, and the county prosecutor's office made that call without any help from me. Walt Brenner made one phone call, and Walt is a man whose phone calls get returned.
They asked whether I wanted to be involved. I said I'd answer any question anybody asked me honestly and that I would not be doing anything beyond that, and that is exactly what I've done.
The divorce was final in September. He has Cody every other weekend, supervised for the first year — a judge's decision, not mine, and I didn't fight it in either direction.
Cody is nine now.
People always want to know what happened between me and Marissa, and the honest answer is: not a friendship, and not nothing.
We text maybe once a month. She sends me news about the case when she hears it before I do. I sent a card when her father had his knee replaced. Neither of us has ever floated the idea of dinner and I don't think we ever will, because we both know exactly what we'd be doing at that table, and it's the only conversation we have in common.
She moved out of the Washington Park apartment in June. She got most of the thirty-one thousand back, eventually. She's not working for her father and says she never will now, which strikes me as the cruelest single thing to come out of this whole story, and it landed on the person who did the least.
The last time we really talked, she said something I've held onto.
"Everybody keeps telling me I dodged a bullet," she said. "I didn't dodge anything. It went straight through me. I'm just still standing up."
Cody knows a version of it. Not all of it — not the apartment, not the two visits, not the fact that he already met her — because his therapist and I agreed he gets that when he's older and asks, and he will ask, and I'll tell him.
He stopped drawing airplanes for about eight months. Then he started again, which I've been told is the single most hopeful thing that's happened in this family.
Six weeks after the flight, a padded envelope showed up at the house with no note inside.
Inside was the drawing, folded once, scuffed along one edge.
I'd left it in the seatback pocket of 32C. I don't remember deciding to. I remember standing up when we finally got off in Denver with Cody's hand in mine and the drawing balanced on my knee, and then walking off that airplane without it, and I have never been able to say whether that was grief or spite or just a woman who couldn't carry one more thing.
Paula found it on the turn. She'd read the name on it. It took her six weeks to get our address, because she had to go through the company to do it, and she did go through the company, and she put the stamp on it herself.
I gave it to Cody and told him he could do whatever he wanted with it. I meant that. I had a whole speech ready about how it was okay to throw it away, how sometimes we outgrow the things we made when we were small.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he took it upstairs.
It's in his desk drawer. I've seen it. He hasn't changed one thing about it — not a line, not a letter.
BEST PILOT EVER, in giant crooked capitals, pressed hard enough to go through the page.
I asked him once, carefully, why he keeps it.
He shrugged the way nine-year-olds shrug and said, "Because it was true when I made it."
I don't know what to do with a sentence like that except write it down.
May you like
He was right, though. That's the thing. At 9:04 on a Saturday morning in March, on our kitchen floor with a marker in his fist, it was true. Everything that happened at 9:14 doesn't reach back and take that away from him.
It took me two years and a courtroom to understand what my son worked out in about four seconds with a desk drawer.
