still watching, she wasn’t going to do anything to incriminate herself until she had something to offer him.
Dex slipped the tickets into his coat and put his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. “Whatever you need to get the job done.”
Claire
Friday, February 25
Recovery workers report that your wife’s seat was empty.
I stare at that line from the NTSB, trying to make sense of it, my mind leaping between two competing questions—could Eva have somehow gotten off the plane, and what might Rory do when recovery workers tell him there isn’t any trace of me.
I open a new tab in my browser and Google Recovery of remains in a plane crash, ocean. At least twenty articles pop up about the crash of Flight 477, all of them written in the last four days. “The Latest: Searchers Recover Remains and Debris.” Another one is titled “Vista Airlines Crash: Flight 477 Goes Down off the Coast of Florida.” I try something else. How are human remains recovered after a plane crash? Again, I get a long string of articles updating the search and recovery efforts, outlining Vista’s poor safety rating, speculation as to the cause of the crash, but nothing that will tell me what I need to know—whether they will be able to definitively say I wasn’t there, or whether it’s possible that they can’t recover everyone.
And the bigger question: How could Eva have gotten off that plane? I try to imagine her out there somewhere, using my name as I’m using hers, flashing my driver’s license to check into hotels. Or perhaps she sold it the minute she landed somewhere else. I paid Nico ten thousand dollars for my Amanda Burns documents. I have no idea what a real driver’s license would sell for. Maybe identity theft was Eva’s side business, how she paid cash for a duplex in Berkeley.
I turn to Google again. Can you scan onto a flight but not get on it? I find a thread on a discussion board where someone is wondering if they can do this in order to get enough miles to bump them up to the next frequent flier level. But responses are not encouraging:
No way to get around the final head count. If it doesn’t match, everyone deplanes and they run everyone through security again. There’s no way to achieve that without screwing yourself and every other passenger on the plane.
Another response reads
It’s impossible to have your boarding pass scanned and then not get on the flight. Think about it. You get scanned about six feet from the Jetway. You think a flight attendant is going to scan your pass, then watch you walk away? This entire thread is stupid and a waste of mental energy.
Right. The head count. Eva had to have gotten on that flight.
I’m startled by the buzzing of Eva’s phone on the desk next to me. A call from Private Number. I stare at the bright screen as it rings two times. Three. Four. I picture myself answering it. Pretending to be Eva. Asking questions that might lead to answers about who she really was. What she did. Why she might approach a stranger in an airport bar with an outrageous story about a dying husband. The buzzing stops, and silence fills the room again. After a minute, the screen lights up with a new voicemail. I punch in the new code I set the other day and listen.
It’s a woman’s voice on the other end. Hi, it’s me. Checking in to see how it went. If you’re okay. I thought I’d hear from you by now, so call me.
That’s it. No name. No callback number. I listen to the message again, trying to grab at any details—the age of the woman, any background noise that might tell me where she’s calling from—but there’s nothing.
My mother once took Violet and me on a trip to the beach in Montauk. She gave each of us an empty egg carton, telling us to fill the spaces with treasures. Violet and I walked for miles, searching for sea glass and intact shells that looked black on the outside, but when you turned them over revealed the pearly pink of cotton candy and ballet slippers, or the purply blue of music boxes and baby blankets. We sorted our treasures by type, by color, and when we’d filled our cartons, we returned to the rental house to show our mother.
Trying to figure out Eva’s life is like trying to fill one of