Read Online Down Around Midnight by Robert Sabbag - Free Book Online Page A

explained to her fifth-grade teacher what she had not explained to anyone at the Air New England counter, which was everything she knew at the time from the call she’d received from Cape Cod Hospital: that her husband, sometime in the middle of the night, had been admitted through the hospital’s emergency room. His name was Paul. He was twenty-five. He was a medical student. He’d been in a plane crash.
    It was something I had seen him reading.

“ I was reading the New England Journal of Medicine. ” Paul Boepple, since I’d seen him reading that night on the plane, had lost some of his hair, and what remained of it had lost some of its color. His facial index had dropped a few points, but the sharp line of his brow and the severity of his gaze were all the visual evidence I’d have needed to pick him out of a lineup.
    Sitting in my living room, wearing shorts and sandals and sipping a beer, he appeared to have lost none of the personal qualities in evidence when I’d first encountered him. He showed the same thoughtful, introspective reserve of the young medical student who during the flight had kept quietly to himself, the same seriousness of purpose that had led me, when the plane was taking off from LaGuardia, to single him out among my fellow passengers as the one grown-up onboard. In outer aspect and demeanor, he was much of what you would expect in a doctor and everything you would want in a pediatrician.
    On a Sunday afternoon in June, taking a couple of hours out of a weekend visit to Wendy’s mother in Centerville, he and Wendy had driven down to my place. Meeting this way proved easier for them than coordinating time in their schedules at home, and it saved me a trip to Boston, where Paul practices and teaches pediatric endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Wendy works as an emergency room nurse at North Shore Medical Center in Lynn.
    Paul had brought with him some newspaper clips and a copy of the accident report. He obviously had kept a file at some point, and it was neater and better organized than mine. Among the news clips he showed me was the wire story that the Associated Press had moved in the early morning hours right after the incident. Headlined “Air Crash Kills Pilot; Woods Slow Rescue” and datelined Yarmouth, Massachusetts, the story had been cut by Wendy’s father from the Kansas City Star. George Parmenter had not been the only one flying that night. Angus Perry, on Monday morning, in the cockpit of a 727, had been preparing for takeoff from Little Rock, Arkansas, when someone handed him the paper, and there, buried in the twelfth paragraph of the seventeen-paragraph story, he read the name of his good friend George. Leaving the cockpit to telephone home, he returned a few minutes later with the information that his son-in-law had been aboard the plane that Parmenter had been flying.
    In an exchange of correspondence before he and I talked, Paul had pointed to “some personal threads of the story that impact my perspective,” conditioning his cooperation with me on knowing more about my “planned coverage of the events.” After I outlined for him what I intended to do, he revealed his wife’s connection to Parmenter, explaining that he was thus “sensitive to how the incident is portrayed.” In none of our subsequent conversations did either he or Wendy frame the events of that night in a context that would suggest how difficult a time it must have been for them. But the simple accretion of detail they provided, in its matter-of-fact way, evoked a stark poetic sentiment: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, / But in battalions.”
    Falling on the eve of the couple’s wedding anniversary, the tragedy marked the end of a weekend that had found them flying from New England to New York City, where Paul’s father, stricken with colon cancer, was undergoing