“It’ll get better with time.”
“I’m afraid it won’t. I’m scared. I’m no good alone, Beth.”
“Have you thought some more about going back to work, Joe?” Before the accident, he had been a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Post. His days as a journalist were over.
“I can’t bear the sight of the bodies, Beth.”
He was unable to look upon a victim of a drive-by shooting or a car-jacking, regardless of age or sex, without seeing Michelle or Chrissie or Nina lying bloody and battered before him.
“You could do other kinds of reporting. You’re a good writer, Joe. Write some human interest stories. You need to be working, doing something that’ll make you feel useful again.”
Instead of answering her, he said, “I don’t function alone. I just want to be with Michelle. I want to be with Chrissie and Nina.”
“Someday you will be,” she said, for in spite of everything, she remained a woman of faith.
“I want to be with them now.” His voice broke, and he paused to put it back together. “I’m finished here, but I don’t have the guts to move on.”
“Don’t talk like that, Joe.”
He didn’t have the courage to end his life, because he had no convictions about what came after this world. He did not truly believe that he would find his wife and daughters again in a realm of light and loving spirits. Lately, when he gazed at a night sky, he saw only distant stars in a meaningless void, but he couldn’t bear to voice his doubt, because to do so would be to imply that Michelle’s and the girls’ lives had been meaningless as well.
Beth said, “We’re all here for a purpose.”
“They were my purpose. They’re gone.”
“then there’s another purpose you’re meant for. It’s your job now to find it. There’s a reason you’re still here.”
“No reason,” he disagreed. “Tell me about the sky, Beth.”
After a hesitation, she said, “The clouds to the east aren’t gilded any more. The pink is gone too. They’re white clouds, no rain in them, and not dense but like a filigree against the blue.”
He listened to her describe the morning at the other end of the continent. Then they talked about fireflies, which she and Henry had enjoyed watching from their back porch the previous night. Southern California had no fireflies, but Joe remembered them from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. They talked about Henry’s garden, too, in which strawberries were ripening, and in time Joe grew sleepy.
Beth’s last words to him were: “It’s full daylight here now. Morning’s going past us and heading your way, Joey. You give it a chance, morning’s going to bring you the reason you need, some purpose, because that’s what the morning does.”
After he hung up, Joe lay on his side, staring at the window, from which the silvery lunar light had faded. The moon had set. He was in the blackest depths of the night.
When he returned to sleep, he dreamed not of any glorious approaching purpose but of an unseen, indefinable, looming menace. Like a great weight falling through the sky above him.
2
Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.
He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him, and the tyres sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception of stability.
Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.
Horns blared and skidding tyres squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words, or made obscene gestures. This was greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear response.