“Accident,” Mom said, finishing the word. “And then the girl laughed, Karen. She said, ‘Phil should have thought of that before he bought the second policy. I did not understand any of it. I only understood that it was your name, and that they were talking about airplanes.” I sat on the edge of my own bed with my mother holding my hand, and I thought about the Tokyo flight that had been canceled for a hydraulic fault at the gate. I thought about the thermos Phil always filled for me, with my coffee, before every trip, because he said it was his way of helping.
I did not drink from that thermos again. It was still in my flight bag in the hall closet, nearly full. I handed it to the Scottsdale detective, a thoughtful man named Ruiz, in a zippered plastic bag, and he sent it to the state laboratory with a rush request. Ms. Begay brought the second piece of the puzzle that same afternoon. Phil had opened a life insurance policy on me in March for two million four hundred thousand dollars, with a double payment clause for death in an aircraft accident. My signature was on the application. It was a lovely signature. It was also not mine.
The laboratory called on Thursday. The coffee in the thermos contained a heavy dose of a prescription sedative, enough to make an experienced captain drowsy within an hour of takeoff. A bottle of the same medication was in the glove box of his car, filled under his own name. The detective laid the evidence out for me on the kitchen table. I looked at the bottle for a long time. For twenty seven years I have been trained to trust my instruments, and I had never once thought to check my husband.
Some of us learn to trust the instruments, and then one night the instruments are a mother on a pool float.
They arrested Phil at the golf club in Fountain Hills, in the clubhouse, in front of two foursomes and a waiter holding a tray of iced tea. He asked whether this could wait until Monday. Garrett and Kaylee were picked up in a hotel in Mesa, still wearing the gold watch and the pearls. The wedding planned for June was canceled by the police. Kaylee, who had thought she was only borrowing from an old woman, burst into tears when she learned what the thermos was for, and she gave a full statement in under an hour.
She said she had never known. She said Garrett told her the coffee was a vitamin supplement that his father mixed for me, because I got so tired on long flights. I believed her, more or less. The judge did not. Kaylee received four years for theft and exploitation of a vulnerable adult, Garrett five, and Phil, who had planned it all in a spiral notebook with a title on the cover, received twenty two years for attempted murder and fraud. I was not in the room for the sentencing. I was in the kitchen with Mom, making tortilla soup.
Every piece of jewelry came home. The pawn shop owner, a gruff man in a Diamondbacks cap, wrapped the diamond ring and the pearls in tissue paper and refused to take a dime. “That is a family heirloom, Captain,” he said. “I should have called the police in August.” The gold watch of my father was returned to my mother by a young officer who held it out on both palms. She put it on her own thin wrist, where it spun like a bracelet, and she did not take it off for a month.
Mom took her room back on the first of December, the downstairs guest room with the French doors to the garden. A crew from my airline came on a Saturday, pilots and flight attendants and two mechanics who had heard the story. They repainted her walls, put up new shelves, and replanted the dead flower beds outside her window with winter pansies. A gate agent named Luis, who is built like a refrigerator, carried in a king size mattress by himself and then asked, quite seriously, whether the pantry could be turned into a wine cellar.
I asked the company for domestic routes. They gave me Phoenix to Denver and back, same day, home for dinner. The pay is lower, and the days are shorter, and the afternoon light on the Rockies is just as lovely from thirty seven thousand feet as it is from anywhere. I come in the front door at six and call out “Anybody home?” and a voice comes back from the kitchen, always in the same cheerful pitch, and I hang my cap on the hook and feel something unclench in my chest.
The pink pool float, I should say, was not thrown away. Mom would not allow it. She had it cleaned, patched, and inflated, and now it sits on the shallow end of our pool in the afternoons with her on it, in her sun hat, with a glass of lemonade, floating like a queen of Egypt. She says it is the most comfortable raft she has ever owned. She says it deserves a better life than a pantry floor.
On her eighty fourth birthday, I flew her to Seattle for the weekend. She sat in the first row, and I made the announcement myself from the flight deck. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a very special passenger in seat two A today, celebrating her birthday. Please be kind to her. She raised me.” The cabin applauded. When I came out after landing, Mom was still glowing. “Karen,” she said, “that was the nicest bed I ever had.” I was not sure which she meant, the seat or the sky.
