“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 grey 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 coloured 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.