Barbara answered the phone on the fifth ring, just as Joe was beginning to despair.
“It’s me, Joe Carpenter,” he said.
“I was just—”
Before Barbara could say anything that might reveal the extent of the revelations she’d made to him, Joe said, “Listen, I wanted to thank you again for taking me to the crash site. It wasn’t easy, but it was something I had to do, had to see, if I was ever going to have any peace. I’m sorry if I badgered you about what really happened to that airplane. I was a little crazy, I guess. A couple of odd things have happened lately, and I just let my imagination run wild. You were right when you said most of the time things are exactly what they appear to be. It’s just hard to accept that you can lose your family to anything as stupid as an accident, mechanical failure, human error, whatever. You feel like it just has to be a lot more significant than an accident because… well, because they were so significant to you. You know? You think there have to be villains somewhere, that it can’t be just fate, because God wouldn’t allow this to happen. But you started me thinking when you said—the only place there’s always villains is in the movies. If I’m going to get over this, I’m going to have to accept that these things just happen, that no one’s to blame. Life is risk, right? God does let innocent people die, lets children die. It’s that simple.”
Joe was tense, waiting to hear what she would say, whether she had understood the urgent message that he was striving to convey so indirectly.
After a brief hesitation, Barbara said, “I hope you find peace, Joe, I really do. It took a lot of guts for you to go out there, right to the impact site. And it takes guts to face the fact that there’s no one to blame in the end. As long as you’re stuck in the idea that there’s someone who’s guilty of something, someone who’s got to he brought to justice… well, then you’re full of vengeance, and you’re not healing.”
She understood.
Joe closed his eyes and tried to gather his unravelled nerves into a tight bundle again.
He said, “It’s just… we live in such weird times. It’s easy to believe in vast conspiracies.”
“Easier than facing hard truths. Your real argument isn’t with the pilots or the maintenance crew. It isn’t with the air-traffic controllers or with the people who built the airplane. Your real argument’s with God.”
“Which I can’t win,” he said, opening his eyes.
In front of the newsstand, the storyteller and the Dodgers fan finished their conversation. The storyteller departed.
“We’re not supposed to understand why,” Barbara said. “We just have to have faith that there’s a reason. If you can learn to accept that, then you really might find peace. You’re a very nice man, Joe. You don’t deserve to be in such torment. I’ll be praying for you.”
“Thanks, Barbara. Thanks for everything.”
“Good luck, Joe.”
He almost wished her good luck as well, but those two words might be a tip-off to whoever was listening.
Instead, he said, “Good-bye.”
Still hummingbird tense, he hung up.
Simply by going to Colorado and knocking on Barbara’s door, he had put her, her son, and her son’s entire family in terrible jeopardy—although he’d had no way of knowing this would be the consequence of his visit. Anything might happen to her now—or nothing—and Joe felt a chill of blame coil around his heart. On the other hand, by going to Colorado, he had learned that Nina was miraculously alive. He was willing to take the moral responsibility for a hundred deaths in return for the mere hope of seeing her again.
He was aware of how monstrous it was to regard the life of his daughter as more precious than the lives of any hundred strangers—two hundred, a thousand. He didn’t care. He would kill to save her, if that was the extreme to which he was driven. Kill anyone who got in his way. Any number.
Wasn’t it the human dilemma to dream of being part of the larger community but, in the face of everlasting death, always to operate on personal and family imperatives? And he was, after all, too human.