The Good Father by Noah Hawley Page A

to find a smoother altitude. A second jolt hit the plane, then a third. The fourth jolt opened several overhead compartments, loosing luggage. Drinks spilled. A passenger was struck in the head by a woman’s laptop. This was when the first scream rang out.
    Outside the windows, passengers could see lightning strikes. Rain buffeted the wings and fuselage. My son sat alone in a plane full of strangers. The lights flickered and went out. The plane’s electrical system had shut down. In the cockpit warning sirens came on. The plane started an uncontrolled descent, a free fall. What must that feel like? To fall from the sky? The terrifying, weightless plunge. The violence of speed. An airplane without propulsion tumbles like a mountain through space. In the main cabin, the screams multiplied. People began to shout and beg.
    In the cockpit, the captain fought to bring the plane out of its dive. He knew he had seconds to correct the situation before the plane and allaboard were lost. His first officer had frozen. Without electrics, the captain knew he would never keep the plane in the air. His only chance was to turn everything off and restart the engines, hoping that this would reset the electrics. It was an insane risk. Once off, the engines might not restart. The ground was, at most, seven to ten minutes away. But the captain was out of options. Every second that passed they lost more and more altitude, descending into the heart of the storm. So the captain barked orders to his crew. He said a little prayer, and then he reached over and turned off the plane.
    In the main cabin my son sat gripping his armrests. He was eight years old. For his last birthday we’d had cake from Carvel and played racing games at the arcade. The icing from the cake stained his lips blue, like a corpse, turning him into a tiny, pale-faced zombie. Danny thought it was funny and I agreed. I was used to the look of death. I wasn’t superstitious about it. I knew the difference between a living child with sugar-blue lips and a corpse.
    For his birthday, Daniel had gotten a skateboard from his mother, a science kit from me. He seemed happy. He appeared untroubled by the fact that his mother and father couldn’t stand each other. That they needed to put three thousand miles between them in order to have a civilized conversation on the phone. He went to bed that night with sticky fingers, still in his clothes, long after his bedtime. He was happy, he said. But was that true? Or had he already begun to tell me what I wanted to hear?
    Now, twenty-five thousand feet above Ohio and dropping, my son clung to the armrests of a dead airplane, falling like a ball of paper tossed into a garbage can. In the cockpit, the captain counted to fifteen, then flipped the switches to restart the engines. For a brief moment nothing happened. His prayers went unanswered. The crew and passengers were all dead. Then the port engine roared to life, followed by starboard. The electrical system flickered, once, twice, and came back on. He had power. The captain and first officer, working together, pulled the plane out of its dive. The world stabilized. The screaming in the main cabin slowly stopped, and cheers of disbelief rang out.
    Did my son cheer? Did he feel relief? Did he cry? A small child all alone in the face of death. Did he vomit or urinate in his pants? I saw the story on the news later that night, a plane that had lost power over theMidwest. Heart in my throat, I called his mother, who said that Daniel seemed fine. The plane had landed on time, and when she asked him how the flight was he said, “Long.” I sat up all night crying, consumed by thoughts of my only son dying. My poor boy. No one should have to face that kind of fear alone.
    I thought of him now, handcuffed to some hospital bed, a bullet in his leg, arrested for a crime he could not have committed. Was this fear worse? Did the perspective of age make the fear of death greater? In this respect, maybe,