72 EVIE
E VIE
Over the days and weeks that followed, we learned more about what had happened.
After flying from London, they’d been in Mexico City.
That was where he’d been when he left the voice mail on my phone.
They were traveling from there to Rio de Janeiro overnight.
Somewhere along the way, air-traffic controllers received a distress call from the pilot.
A combination of bad weather and mechanical failure.
The rest of it was still under investigation, but they knew that the plane had gone down in a remote area shortly after passing over the Venezuelan border in the early-morning hours.
The press had covered the crash nonstop for the first day, and then less so.
Comparisons were made to other tragedies in music history—names like Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Otis Redding, and Lynyrd Skynyrd—similar plane crashes, along with other early deaths, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison and other greats.
Carter, of course, was the highlight of most of the stories.
They called him a “legend in the making.” It’s sad, isn’t it?
The way people become legendary after they’re gone.
The pairing of Carter and Alex—Wills and Winters—was counted among iconic musical partnerships like Page and Plant, Bono and The Edge, Jagger and Richards.
There were services for each of them—small, private gatherings with close family and friends—where they were memorialized at a small church in Yorkshire near the town where they had all grown up.
But that didn’t stop the media, who staked out Carter’s home in particular, with a fleet of press and fans.
But behind closed doors, in contrast to the larger-than-life mark they’d left on music history, they were remembered quietly—attended by only a few, myself included.
The cloying scent of funeral flowers and aging walls permeated the air over several days, and there were bittersweet comments about how Tommy would’ve been cracking jokes and making fun of it all.
His wife, Haley, remained close by, moving in the methodical, slow-motion way that people do in the midst of tremendous grief; as if moving too quickly would bring on a fresh wave of pain.
I was standing in a corner by myself at one point, looking off into the bleary distance, when a figure loomed next to me.
I turned, and suddenly, all the strength I had left in me gave out, and I fell into his arms.
“Okay, honey, okay.” Fred wrapped me into an awkward bear hug. He guided me over to a nearby chair in a quiet, private corner and sat next to me. I leaned on the man who had been witness to it all, from the explosive beginning to the tragic end.
Fred had flown to Rio a day earlier with the rest of the crew to advance the show, instead of traveling with the band on the private jet.
The grief he felt over the loss of his “boys,” as he called them, was etched into his face so deeply that it was like looking at the face of a father who had lost his sons.
Although never one for words, he had a quiet that would then be born of loss more than predisposition.
I curled into him as I would a father, and he held me as such.
“Come on, honey, you’re okay. We’re okay.
” He handed me a handkerchief. I blotted my eyes and sat up.
Just as I did, I became aware of Iliana eyeing me with interest from a distant corner.
After a moment, we nodded at one another in grim understanding of a shared loss.
Fred noticed the exchange. “Hey. Look at me.” He took my chin in his hand.
I saw in his face a reflected sorrow in the red rims of his drooping, basset-hound eyes.
“No matter what happened, no matter what you did or what he did, it was always the two of you. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I know I never will again. ”
I was surprised to eventually feel a sort of fondness for Iliana.
She had genuinely cared for Carter and was the only woman in the world who could understand even a fraction of what I was going through.
To the press and the rest of the world, it would be Iliana, of course, who would go on to be considered the great, final love of Carter Wills.