He took his hands from her shoulders.
She opened her eyes.
Joe picked up the spatula he had taken from her. He put it down again. He didn’t know what he was doing.
She said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I was hoping… I thought… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
Self-deceit was a suit that didn’t fit him well, and even as he lied to Mercy Ealing, he stood naked to himself, excruciatingly aware of what he had been hoping, thinking. He’d been in a fit of searching behaviour again, not chasing anyone into a convenience store this time, not stalking an imagined Michelle through a mall or department store, not rushing to a schoolyard fence for a closer glimpse of a Chrissie who was not Chrissie after all, but heart-deep in searching behaviour nonetheless. The coincidence of this mystery child sharing his lost daughter’s age and hair colour had been all that he needed to send him racing pell-mell once more in pursuit of false hope.
“I’m sorry,” Mercy said, clearly sensing the precipitous downward spiral of his mood. “Her eyes, the mole, the smile… just don’t ring a bell. But I remember her name. Rachel called her Nina.”
Behind Joe, at the table, Barbara got up so fast that she knocked over her chair.
4
At the corner of the back porch, the water falling through the downspout produced a gargle of phantom voices, eager and quarrelsome, guttural and whispery, spitting out questions in unknown tongues.
Joe’s legs felt rubbery. He leaned with both hands on the wet railing. Rain blew under the porch eaves, spattering his face.
In answer to his question, Barbara pointed toward the low hills and the woods to the southwest. “The crash site was that way.”
“How far?”
Mercy stood in the open kitchen door. “Maybe half a mile as the crow flies. Maybe a little farther.”
Out of the torn meadow, into the forest where the fire died quickly because it had been a wet summer that year, farther into the darkness of the trees, thrashing through the thin underbrush, eyes adjusting grudgingly to the gloom, perhaps onto a deer trail that allowed easy passage, perhaps across another meadow, to the hilltop from which the ranch lights could be seen, Rose might have led—or mostly carried—the child. Half a mile as the crow flies, but twice or three times as far when one followed the contours of the land and the way of the deer.
“One and a half miles on foot,” Joe said.
“Impossible,” Barbara said.
“Very possible. She could have done it.”
“I’m not talking about the hike.” She turned to Mercy and said, “Mrs. Ealing, you have been an enormous help to us already, a really enormous help, but we’ve got a confidential matter to discuss here for a minute or two.”
“Oh, of course, I understand. You just take all the time you want,” said Mercy, hugely curious but still too polite to intrude. She backed off the threshold and closed the kitchen door.
“Only a mile and a half,” Joe repeated.
“On the horizontal,” Barbara said, moving close to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Only a mile and a half on the horizontal, but more than four miles on the vertical, straight down, sky to ground. That’s the part I can’t accept, Joe.”
He was struggling with it himself. To believe in survivors required faith or something very like it, and he was without faith by choice and by necessity. To put faith in a god would require him to see meaning in the suffering that was the weft of human experience, and he could see no meaning to it. On the other hand, to believe that this miracle of survival resulted somehow from the scientific research in which Rose was engaged, to contemplate that humankind could reach successfully for godlike power—Shadrach saving Shadrach from the furnace, Lazarus raising Lazarus from the grave—required him to have faith in the transcendent spirit of humankind. Its goodness. Its beneficent genius. After fourteen years as a crime reporter, he knew men too well to bend his knee before the altar in the First Church of Humanity the Divine. Men had a genius for arranging their damnation, but few if any were capable of their own salvation.