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

surgery. From New York, Wendy returned to work in Burlington. Paul returned to Cape Cod. As part of his curriculum at the University of Vermont, Paul was serving an externship on the Cape, attached to a community practice in Hyannis, seeing patients and making rounds with a local primary-care physician—a program for “getting out into the real world”—between his third and fourth years of medical school. He was staying with Wendy’s parents in Centerville. Wendy’s mother, a nurse who worked as a clinical instructor in the Coronary Care Unit at Cape Cod Hospital, had helped him secure the position, and it was she who was scheduled to meet him at the airport.
    The plane crashed on Father’s Day.
    Paul was admitted to the hospital after being carried out of the woods. Wendy was notified at two A.M. Information was sparse. “The guy who called didn’t know anything,” she said.
    She was hastening to her husband’s bedside when she met Mrs. Klimm on the bus, and throughout her rush to the Cape, she was unaware that there was a fatality associated with the crash he had survived. Nor had she any reason to wonder who had been flying the plane that had almost cost her husband his life.
    â€œI didn’t know George had been killed,” she said.
    Three days later, at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, the summer parish of the Kennedy family, she joined some five hundred people at Parmenter’s memorial service.
    â€œIt was a very conflicting place to be,” she told me. “I had conflicting emotions about what happened.” But there was nothing equivocal about her grief. “He was my uncle.”
    Parmenter was cremated that day and his ashes released from an airplane over Cape Cod Bay. As his friend Van Arsdale said in his eulogy, “A long, full day in an airplane would seem an appropriate way to end George’s life.”
    Paul, for his part, didn’t know Parmenter personally. “I knew of him, but I never met him,” he said.
    Wendy remained on the Cape for a week. Three or four days into her stay, Paul was released from the hospital. The injuries he had sustained were clearly more serious than had been apparent to me in the wake of the crash. His collision with the seat back in front of him, in addition to breaking his nose, had broken the bottom of both orbital sockets.
    â€œIt was like a two-by-four across the face,” he told me.
    I had taken the same two-by-four just above the eye.
    A year after the crash, he would have follow-up surgery to correct the damage to his nose, but the blow-out fracture of the orbits, as the injury to the floor of the eye sockets is known, would permanently affect his sight.
    â€œMy left eye is sunken a millimeter or two, and I have some double vision.”
    The double vision is of minor concern, he said, limited to a very specific positioning of his eyes when lowered. Whether the condition had any practical consequence is a question he shrugs off, but the symptom would seem to have limited his choices when it came to pursuing a specialty. A surgical residency was probably not in the cards. But all that would come much later. Amid the chaos of the crash itself, dwelling on his injuries was a luxury Paul could not afford.
    In the silence that enveloped the aircraft at the moment it came to a stop, Paul’s faith in the natural order of things went largely unrewarded.
    â€œI was waiting for the voice of authority,” he said.
    Mine was clearly insufficient to his needs.
    â€œI was wearing clogs,” he remembered. “I spent the first minute looking for my shoes.”
    From the time he was able to find them to the time I was able to crack the door, several minutes passed. And as soon as the door was open, Paul escaped the wreck. He was the second one through. While he was moving away from the plane, Suzanne, climbing out of the underbrush, was coming back aboard. Paul, all the activity