Michelle, who had taught Joe Carpenter most of what he knew about love and compassion, was snuffed out in that merciless moment. Chrissie, seven-year-old ballerina and baseball player, would never again pirouette on point or run the bases. And if animals felt the same psychic connection with Nina that she felt with them, then in that chilly Colorado night, the meadows and the wooded hills had been filled with small creatures that cowered miserably in their burrows.
Of his family, Joe Carpenter was the sole survivor.
He had not been with them on Flight 353. Every soul aboard had been hammered into ruin against the anvil of the earth. If he had been with them, then he too would have been identifiable only by his dental records and a printable finger or two.
His flashbacks to the crash were not memories but exhausting fevers of imagination, frequently expressed in dreams and sometimes in anxiety attacks like this one. Racked by guilt because he had not perished with his wife and daughters, Joe tortured himself with these attempts to share the horror that they must have experienced.
Inevitably, his imaginary journeys on the earthbound airplane failed to bring him the healing acceptance for which he longed. Instead, each nightmare and each waking seizure salted his wounds.
He opened his eyes and stared at the traffic speeding past him. If he chose the right moment, he could open the door, step out of the car, walk onto the freeway, and be struck dead by a truck.
He remained safely in the Honda, not because he was afraid to die, but for reasons unclear even to him. Perhaps, for the time being at least, he felt the need to punish himself with more life.
Against the passenger-side windows, the overgrown oleander bushes stirred ceaselessly in the wind from the passing traffic. The friction of the greenery against the glass raised an eerie whispering like lost and forlorn voices.
He was not shaking any more. The sweat on his face began to dry in the cold air gushing from the dashboard vents.
He was no longer plagued by a sensation of falling. He had reached bottom.
Through the August heat and a thin haze of smog, passing cars and trucks shimmered like mirages, trembling westward toward cleaner air and the cooling sea. Joe waited for a break in traffic and then headed once more for the edge of the continent.
3
The sand was bone white in the glare of the August sun. Cool and green and rolling came the sea, scattering the tiny shells of dead and dying creatures on the strand.
The beach at Santa Monica was crowded with people tanning, playing games, and eating picnic lunches on blankets and big towels. Although the day was a scorcher farther inland, here it was merely pleasantly warm, with a breeze coming off the Pacific.
A few sunbathers glanced curiously at Joe as he walked north through the coconut-oiled throng, because he was not dressed for the beach. He wore a white T-shirt, tan chinos, and running shoes without socks. He had not come to swim or sunbathe.
As lifeguards watched the swimmers, strolling young women in bikinis watched the lifeguards. Their rhythmic rituals distracted them entirely from the architects of shells cast on the foaming shore near their feet.
Children played in the surf, but Joe could not bear to watch them. Their laughter, shouts, and squeals of delight abraded his nerves and sparked in him an irrational anger.
Carrying a Styrofoam cooler and a towel, he continued north, gazing at the seared hills of Malibu beyond the curve of Santa Monica Bay. At last he found a less populated stretch of sand. He unrolled the towel, sat facing the sea, and took a bottle of beer from its bed of ice in the cooler.
If ocean-view property had been within his means, he would have finished out his life at the water’s edge. The ceaseless susurration of surf, the sun-gilded and moon-silvered relentlessness of incoming breakers, and the smooth liquid curve to the far horizon brought him not any sense of peace, not serenity, but a welcome numbness.
The rhythms of the sea were all he ever expected to know of eternity and of God. if he drank a few beers and let the therapeutic vistas of the Pacific wash through him, he might then be calm enough to go to the cemetery. To stand upon the earth that blanketed his wife and his daughters. To touch the stone that bore their names.