Sole Survivor (20 page)

Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, “Santorelli’s last word was a name.”

“Susan.”

“Who is she?”

“His wife.”

“I thought so.”

At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

11

From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

“Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,” she said. “But what does it matter?”

When Barbara first arrived in the meadow on the morning after the crash, the shredded and scattered debris of the 747-400 had not resembled the wreckage of an airliner. Only two pieces had been immediately recognizable: a portion of one engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

He said, “Three seats, side by side?”

“Yes.”

“Upright?”

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?”

“Joe—”

“From what part of the plane?” he repeated patiently.

“Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The center rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.”

“Damaged?”

“Of course.”

“Badly?”

“Not as badly as you’d expect.”

“Burned?”

“Not entirely.”

“Burned at all?”

“As I remember…there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.”

“In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?”

Her broad, clear face now clouded with concern. “Joe, no one survived this crash.”

“Was the upholstery intact?” he pressed.

“As I remember…it was slightly torn. Nothing serious.”

“Blood on the upholstery?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Any bodies in the seats?”

“No.”

“Body parts?”

“No.”

“Lap belts still attached?”

“I don’t remember. I suppose so.”

“If the lap belts were attached—”

“No, it’s ridiculous to think—”

“Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.

Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.”

“I know that,” he assured her. “I know.”

But how he
wished
.

She met his eyes again.

He said, “They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.”

“So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.”

“If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy—that’s at least some small corroboration.”

“Of what?”

“Her story.”

“Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.

“That she survived.”

Barbara shook her head.

“You didn’t meet Rose,” he said. “She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such…power, presence.”

On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theater-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane
shattering
around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive force—”

“I understand that.”

“God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe—but
do
you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew…in most cases the flesh is literally
stripped
off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like bread-sticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel—a spray as fine as an aerosol mist—explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”

Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.

He said, “You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander—and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”

“That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”

“Some of the families of survivors…Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is…they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It’s more than mere belief.” He remembered Georgine Delmann’s shining eyes. “It’s a profound conviction.”

“Then she’s a con artist without equal.”

Joe only shrugged.

A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of gray rain fell to the east.

“For some reason,” Barbara said, “you don’t strike me as a devoutly religious man.”

“I’m not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday school and church every week, but I didn’t go. It was the one thing I didn’t share with them.”

“Hostile to religion?”

“No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash…I took the one step left in my ‘spiritual journey’ from disinterest to disbelief. There’s no way to reconcile the idea of a benign God with what happened to everyone on that plane…and to those of us who’re going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.”

“Then if you’re such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?”

“I’m not saying Rose Tucker’s survival was a miracle.”

“Damned if I can see what
else
it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,” Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.

“No divine intervention. There’s another explanation, something amazing but logical.”

“Impossible,” she said stubbornly.

“Impossible? Yeah, well…so was everything that happened in the cockpit with Captain Blane.”

She held his gaze while she searched for an answer in the deep and orderly files of her mind. She was not able to find one.

Instead, she said, “If you don’t believe in anything—then what is it that you expect Rose to tell you? You say that what she tells them ‘lifts them up.’ Don’t you imagine it’s got to be something of a spiritual nature?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

Repeating Joe’s own words heavily colored with exasperation, she said, “‘Something amazing but logical.’”

He looked away from her, toward the trees along the northern edge of the field, and he realized that in the fire-blasted aspen cluster was a sole survivor, reclothed in foliage. Instead of the characteristic smooth pale trunk, it had scaly black bark, which would provide a dazzling contrast when its leaves turned brilliant yellow in the autumn.

“Something amazing but logical,” he agreed.

Closer than ever, lightning laddered down the sky, and the boom of thunder descended rung to rung.

“We better go,” Barbara said. “There’s nothing more here anyway.”

Joe followed her down through the meadow, but he paused again at the rim of the impact crater.

The few times that he had gone to meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had heard other grieving parents speak of the Zero Point. The Zero Point was the instant of the child’s death, from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes and wants—which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams—was turned on end and emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations. In a clock tick, the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation—and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.

He had existed at the Zero Point for more than a year, with time receding from him in both directions, belonging to neither the days ahead nor those behind. It was as though he had been suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen and lay deep in cryogenic slumber.

Now he stood at another Zero Point, the physical one, where his wife and daughters had perished. He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle’s claws at his viscera. But at last he wanted something else as well: justice for them, justice which could not give meaning to their deaths but which might give meaning to his.

He had to get all the way up from his cryogenic bed, shake the ice out of his bones and veins, and not lie down again until he had dug the truth out of the grave in which it had been buried. For his lost women, he would burn palaces, pull down empires, and waste the world if necessary for the truth to be found.

And now he understood the difference between justice and mere vengeance: genuine justice would bring him no relief of his pain, no sense of triumph; it would only allow him to step out of the Zero Point and, with his task completed, die in peace.

Down through the vaulted conifers came fluttering white wings of storm light, and again, and still more, as if the cracking sky were casting out a radiant multitude. Thunder and the rush of wind beat like pinions at Joe’s ears, and by the many thousands, feathered shadows swooped and shuddered between the tree trunks and across the forest floor.

Just as he and Barbara reached her Ford Explorer, at the weedy end of the narrow dirt lane, a great fall of rain hissed and roared through the pines. They piled inside, their hair and faces jeweled, and her periwinkle-blue blouse was spattered with spots as dark as plum skin.

They didn’t encounter whatever had frightened the deer from cover, but Joe was pretty sure now that the culprit had been another animal. In the run to beat the rain, he had sensed only wild things crouching—not the far deadlier threat of men.

Nevertheless, the crowding conifers seemed to provide ideal architecture for assassins. Secret bowers, blinds, ambushments, green-dark lairs.

As Barbara started the Explorer and drove back the way they had come, Joe was tense. Surveying the woods. Waiting for the bullet.

When they reached the gravel road, he said, “The two men that Blane named on the cockpit tape…”

“Dr. Blom and Dr. Ramlock.”

“Have you tried to find out who they are, launched a search for them?”

“When I was in San Francisco, I was prying into Delroy Blane’s background. Looking for any personal problems that might have put him in a precarious psychological condition. I asked his family and friends if they’d heard those names. No one had.”

“You checked Blane’s personal records, appointment calendars, his checkbook?”

“Yeah. Nothing. And Blane’s family physician says he never referred his patient to any specialists with those names. There’s no physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist in the San Francisco area by those names. That’s as far as I carried it. Because then I was awakened by those bastards in my hotel room, a pistol in my face, and told to butt out.”

To the end of the gravel road and onto the paved state route, where sizzling silver rain danced in a froth on the blacktop, Barbara fell into a troubled silence. Her brow was creased, but not—Joe sensed—because the inclement weather required that she concentrate on her driving.

The lightning and thunder had passed. Now the storm threw all its energy into wind and rain.

Joe listened to the monotonous thump of the windshield wipers.

He listened as well to the hard-driven drops snapping against the glass, which seemed at first to be a meaningless random rattle; but gradually he began to think that he perceived hidden patterns even in the rhythms of the rain.

Barbara found perhaps not a pattern but an intriguing puzzle piece that she had overlooked. “I’m remembering something peculiar, but…”