I went to pick Helena up that night. Like I pick up Gabriella. The same flight. The same time. But by nine thirty, it hadn’t landed. No one knew what was happening. We waited and waited for some announcement from American Airlines. People went upstairs to the counter. Downstairs. They kept saying the plane was about to land.
I had a bad feeling about the trip ever since she told me she was coming. A two-day trip—right before Christmas! But she said she needed to come. She had some urgent business. But she couldn’t stay over the holidays. She wanted to get back to spend the holidays with Gabriella and Marcus.
Your grandfather was with me that night. It’s the last time he ever went to the airport. But if it hadn’t been for him…
We were getting frantic when someone came running and said the plane had crashed. Well, people went crazy. They ran upstairs to mob the American counter.
Everyone kept shouting, “Where! Where!”
Oh, God. Women were wailing. I felt like I was watching a movie. I couldn’t conceive that the plane had crashed, that Helena could possibly be inside. It was too—unreal.
But there was an ambulance right outside, and my husband stopped them, said he was a doctor. And of course, they knew who he was and they let him go along. He wanted to send me back home with Edgar, but I—I just couldn’t do that. We finally decided Edgar and I would follow them in the car.
We just drove and drove. I don’t know where the ambulance driver was getting his information. Somebody was probably radioing them. But we drove for hours on that dark highway. I later learned that the plane had crashed just five minutes before landing. I still don’t understand how it could have been so far. But it was.
We finally got to the base of the mountain, where the road ended. They said we had to go on foot or wait for helicopters to take us.
Under normal circumstances, I don’t think we would have been allowed to go up, but because my husband was a doctor, and there was no one else there—we were the first ones—they let us go on the first helicopter.
We circled and circled. There was so much fog, and it was so dark, it was hard to see with just the spotlight from the helicopter.
There were, oh, God, there were Christmas presents hanging from the trees. Ribbons. Clothes. Jackets and blankets. I mainly remember the Christmas presents and the wrapping paper. There were dolls. A tennis racket. I remember a tennis racket. I was in hell.
We couldn’t land. It was too dark, too dangerous. The pilot couldn’t find a place to land. So we had to go back to the foot of the mountains, and the soldiers and the Red Cross went back up on foot with flashlights.
We spent the night in the car. I couldn’t fathom going anywhere without finding her first. At five in the morning, we went up again in the helicopter. But nearly eight hours had passed. Afterward, when they found the two survivors, they said they thought more people might have been alive, because the crash hadn’t been a full-speed, frontal crash. But who knew?
It was so cold up there. All I could think of was my Helena, without a jacket. She never traveled with a jacket.
It’s quite amazing, if you think about it clinically, what happens in a plane crash. We followed the things. There were objects everywhere. But we couldn’t find the people. The soldiers finally found the first ones, almost a kilometer from where we were. There were no severed limbs or anything like that. Thank God. They told us it was because the plane was already preparing to land. The pilot had already put down the landing gear and the plane had slowed down, so the impact wasn’t as great.
The authorities didn’t know what happened. Later, after they investigated, after the lawsuits, we learned that it had been a pilot error. Apparently, the pilot programmed the automatic pilot to the wrong destination. It’s a rare thing, but it can happen. They say that an alarm would have sounded out to signal the pilot that he was approaching a mass, the mountain in this case. He was going to crash against a mountain.
About a year afterward, I ran into one of the survivors—he was a friend of Helena’s, as it turned out. He didn’t remember anything. He just remembers waking up in the cold. I hope Helena didn’t hear that alarm, either.
Every time I get on an airplane, I think about that crash. I think about my daughter, my daughter, fastening her seat belt. Looking out the window perhaps. Combing her hair. And then, I think about this awful, loud siren. I wonder what she thought. I wonder if she knew she was going to die. What could she have thought of at that moment?
I like to think that the alarm never went off, because if it had, Helena would have looked startled or frightened. But she didn’t. No one did.
The people I saw, looked… asleep. They weren’t burned. Some were bruised but not burned. Some were still strapped to their seats. It was like a giant dollhouse, full of misshapen dolls, with their limbs twisted in the wrong direction. That’s what made it look so wrong. And the silence. So quiet. You couldn’t even hear a bird chirp. No insects. It felt as if everything had been stunned to death and covered with a huge blanket of sadness.
I couldn’t find her. I didn’t know what she was wearing, but I kept telling everyone: She has long, curly hair; she has long curly hair. Please find my daughter with long, curly hair.
They found two people alive. Two. I was certain she had to be one of them, because I hadn’t felt her die in my heart. I loved Helena so much, I just didn’t think it was possible that she could die and I couldn’t feel her light flicker off, no matter the distance.
But I was so wrong.
When Gabriella was younger and would try to summon her with that horrible Ouija board, I knew there was no spirit world in which to look for her.
People die, and they die.
That’s what I discovered that day. But I didn’t have the heart to tell Gabriella that.
For a long time I wondered if maybe Helena was alive after the crash. Maybe she died during the night, and we weren’t able to save her. And for a long time I thought I would have known. I thought I would have somehow felt her calling me, heard her through the night. But I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t hear her call me. I didn’t even hear her say good-bye.
I wasn’t even the one who found her.
One of the Red Cross medics did. He remembered the hair—with Helena, you told people she had long, curly hair, and then they would actually see the hair and know exactly what you meant—that’s what he told me later. He told me he saw them bringing her to the helicopter and he saw the hair. And he ran to get me.
She looked—Oh. She looked so beautiful. Even like that. There was nothing in her face to indicate that she’d been in such a terrible accident. That she had fought against anything. That’s been my consolation all these years. That perhaps she never knew what happened.
She was just so terribly pale. Not pale. Gray. Even when she was asleep, Helena just burst with life. Her soul was too large for that little body. When she was a child, I used to come into her room late at night, and I would just watch her breathe in and out, her breathing trying to keep up with her heart. You could see the blood bubbling underneath her skin. The waking hours were never enough for her.
But there was none of that left when I got her back. As if someone had sucked the life out of her. And, of course, that’s what had happened. She was so cold, and so white. I kept rubbing her hands, but they never warmed up.
She was wearing that red gauze shirt and jeans. We never found her shoes.
We took her to Cali right away. My husband called everyone he knew to make sure things went smoothly. So things wouldn’t be painful for me. And we buried her the very next day, as soon as Marcus arrived. I never felt she had a proper funeral because there was no time to mourn her properly. But those days, there were funerals every day. Twenty, thirty funerals a day.
My poor husband. In retrospect, I think he might have had that first stroke that very night, but he never said anything. I didn’t even know there had been a first stroke until the second one killed him two months later. I just wasn’t myself. I missed all the signs, all the details. I didn’t take care of him, either.
They called me about her things around the same time. They said they had personal effects that they thought were Helena’s. So I went to the airport, to the department of aviation. They took me to this room full of lockers. Rows and rows of belongings in little cages.
They opened one of them and gave me the purse. Wrapped in plastic, with some identifying document. Incredible. A red leather purse, made by hand, survived a crash against a mountaintop. But the people didn’t. We are so frail. And we really can’t take anything to the grave.