He nodded.
“Promise me,” she said.
“Promise.”
“She’s gone, Joe.”
“Maybe.”
“Armour your heart.”
“We’ll see.”
“Better go,” she said.
He opened the door and got out into the rain.
“Good luck,” Barbara said.
“Thanks.”
He slammed the door, and she drove away.
As he unlocked his rental car, Joe heard the Explorer’s brakes bark less than half a block away. When he looked up, the Ford was reversing toward him, its red taillights shimmering on the slick blacktop.
She got out of the Explorer, came to him, put her arms around him, and held him tightly. “You’re a dear man, Joe Carpenter.”
He embraced her too, but no words came to him. He remembered how badly he had wanted to strike her when she had pressed him to forsake the idea that Nina might be alive. He was ashamed by the hatred that he had felt for her then, ashamed and confused—but he was also touched by her friendship, which meant more to him now than he could have imagined when he first rang her doorbell.
“How can I have known you only a few short hours,” she wondered, “and feel as if you’re my son?”
She left him for the second time.
He got into his car as she drove away.
He watched the dwindling Explorer in the rear-view mirror until it turned left into Barbara’s driveway, two blocks behind him, and disappeared into her garage.
Across the street, the white trunks of the paper birches glowed like painted doorjambs, the deep moody shadows between like open doors to futures best left unvisited.
Soaked, he drove back to Denver with no regard for the speed limit, alternately using the heater and the air-conditioner, trying to dry out his clothes.
He was electrified by the prospect of finding Nina.
In spite of what he had said to Barbara, in spite of what he had promised her, he knew that Nina was alive. One thing in this eerily altered world seemed absolutely right again at last: Nina alive, Nina out there somewhere. She was a warm light upon his skin, a spectrum of light beyond the ability of his eyes to detect, as were infrared and ultraviolet, but though he could not see her, he could feel her shining in the world.
This wasn’t at all similar to the portentous feeling that had so often sent him spiralling into searching behaviour, chasing after ghosts. This hope was rock under his hand, not mist.
He was as close to happiness as he had been in more than a year, but each time that his heart swelled too full with excitement, his mood was dampened by a pang of guilt. Even if he found Nina—when he found Nina—he would not also regain Michelle and Chrissie. They were gone forever, and it seemed callous of him to be too happy about reclaiming only one of three.
Nevertheless, the desire to learn the truth, which had motivated him to come to Colorado, was the tiniest fraction as powerful as the wrenching need to find his younger daughter, which now raged in him to a degree beyond the measurements used to define mere compulsion or obsession.
At Denver International Airport, he returned the car to the agency, paid the bill in cash, and retrieved his signed credit-card form. He was in the terminal again fifty minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart.
He was starving. But for two cookies in Mercy’s kitchen, he had eaten nothing since the two cheeseburgers the previous evening on his way to the Vadance house and later a chocolate bar.
He found the nearest restaurant in the terminal. He ordered a club sandwich with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.
Bacon had never tasted half as good as it did now. He licked mayonnaise from his fingertips. The fries had a satisfying crunch, and the crisp dill pickle snapped with a spray of sour juice. For the first time since another August, he not only consumed his food but relished it.
On his way to the boarding gate, with twenty minutes to spare, he suddenly took a detour to the men’s room. He thought he was going to be sick.