Sole Survivor

At the funeral, both Joe and Henry had needed to lean on Beth, and she had been a rock for them. Hours later, however, well after midnight, Joe had discovered her on the patio behind the Studio City house, sitting in a glider in her pajamas, hunched like an ancient crone, tortured by grief, muffling her sobs in a pillow that she had carried with her from the spare room, trying not to burden her husband or her son-in-law with her own pain. Joe sat beside her, but she didn’t want her hand held or an arm around her shoulders. She flinched at his touch. Her anguish was so intense that it had scraped her nerves raw, until a murmur of commiseration was like a scream to her, until a loving hand scorched like a branding iron. Reluctant to leave her alone, he had picked up the long- handled net and skimmed the swimming pool: circling the water, scooping gnats and leaves off the black surface at two o’clock in the morning, not even able to see what he was doing, just grimly circling, circling, skimming, skimming, while Beth wept into the pillow, circling and circling until there was nothing to strain from the clear water except the reflections of cold uncaring stars. Eventually, having wrung all the tears from herself, Beth rose from the glider, came to him, and pried the net out of his hands. She had led him upstairs and tucked him in bed as though he were a child, and he had slept deeply for the first time in days.

Now, on the phone with her at a lamentable distance, Joe set aside his half-finished beer. “Is it dawn there yet, Beth?”

“Just a breath ago.”

“Are you sitting at the kitchen table, watching it through the big window? Is the sky pretty?”

“Still black in the west, indigo overhead, and out to the east, a fan of pink and coral and sapphire like Japanese silk.”

As strong as Beth was, Joe called her regularly not just for the strength she could offer but because he liked to listen to her talk. The particular timbre of her voice and her soft Virginia accent were the same as Michelle’s had been.

He said, “You answered the phone with my name.”

“Who else would it have been, dear?”

“Am I the only one who ever calls this early?”

“Rarely others. But this morning…it could only be you.”

The worst had happened one year ago to the day, changing their lives forever. This was the first anniversary of their loss.

She said, “I hope you’re eating better, Joe. Are you still losing weight?”

“No,” he lied.

Gradually during the past year, he had become so indifferent to food that three months ago he began dropping weight. He had dropped twenty pounds to date.

“Is it going to be a hot day there?” he asked.

“Stifling hot and humid. There are some clouds, but we’re not supposed to get rain, no relief. The clouds in the east are fringed with gold and full of pink. The sun’s all the way out of bed now.”

“It doesn’t seem like a year already, does it, Beth?”

“Mostly not. But sometimes it seems ages ago.”

“I miss them so much,” he said. “I’m so lost without them.”

“Oh, Joe. Honey, Henry and I love you. You’re like a son to us. You are a son to us.”

“I know, and I love you too, very much. But it’s not enough, Beth, it’s not enough.” He took a deep breath. “This year, getting through, it’s been hell. I can’t handle another year like this.”

“It’ll get better with time.”

“I’m afraid it won’t. I’m scared. I’m no good alone, Beth.”

“Have you thought some more about going back to work, Joe?”

Before the accident, he had been a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Post. His days as a journalist were over.

“I can’t bear the sight of the bodies, Beth.”

He was unable to look upon a victim of a drive-by shooting or a car-jacking, regardless of age or sex, without seeing Michelle or Chrissie or Nina lying bloody and battered before him.

“You could do other kinds of reporting. You’re a good writer, Joe. Write some human interest stories. You need to be working, doing something that’ll make you feel useful again.”

Instead of answering her, he said, “I don’t function alone. I just want to be with Michelle. I want to be with Chrissie and Nina.”

“Someday you will be,” she said, for in spite of everything, she remained a woman of faith.

“I want to be with them now.” His voice broke, and he paused to put it back together. “I’m finished here, but I don’t have the guts to move on.”

“Don’t talk like that, Joe.”

He didn’t have the courage to end his life, because he had no convictions about what came after this world. He did not truly believe that he would find his wife and daughters again in a realm of light and loving spirits. Lately, when he gazed at a night sky, he saw only distant suns in a meaningless void, but he couldn’t bear to voice his doubt, because to do so would be to imply that Michelle’s and the girls’ lives had been meaningless as well.

Beth said, “We’re all here for a purpose.”

“They were my purpose. They’re gone.”

“Then there’s another purpose you’re meant for. It’s your job now to find it. There’s a reason you’re still here.”

“No reason,” he disagreed. “Tell me about the sky, Beth.”

After a hesitation, she said, “The clouds to the east aren’t gilded anymore. The pink is gone too. They’re white clouds, no rain in them, and not dense but like a filigree against the blue.”

He listened to her describe the morning at the other end of the continent. Then they talked about fireflies, which she and Henry had enjoyed watching from their back porch the previous night. Southern California had no fireflies, but Joe remembered them from his boyhood in Pennsylvania. They talked about Henry’s garden too, in which strawberries were ripening, and in time Joe grew sleepy.

Beth’s last words to him were: “It’s full daylight here now. Morning’s going past us and heading your way, Joey. You give it a chance, morning’s going to bring you the reason you need, some purpose, because that’s what the morning does.”

After he hung up, Joe lay on his side, staring at the window from which the silvery lunar light had faded. The moon had set. He was in the blackest depths of the night.

When he returned to sleep, he dreamed not of any glorious approaching purpose but of an unseen, indefinable, looming menace. Like a great weight falling through the sky above him.

2

Later Saturday morning, driving to Santa Monica, Joe Carpenter suffered an anxiety attack. His chest tightened, and he was able to draw breath only with effort. When he lifted one hand from the wheel, his fingers quivered like those of a palsied old man.

He was overcome by a sense of falling, as from a great height, as though his Honda had driven off the freeway into an inexplicable and bottomless abyss. The pavement stretched unbroken ahead of him, and the tires sang against the blacktop, but he could not reason himself back to a perception of stability.

Indeed, the plummeting sensation grew so severe and terrifying that he took his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brake pedal.

Horns blared and skidding tires squealed as traffic adjusted to his sudden deceleration. As cars and trucks swept past the Honda, the drivers glared murderously at Joe or mouthed offensive words or made obscene gestures. This was Greater Los Angeles in an age of change, crackling with the energy of doom, yearning for the Apocalypse, where an unintended slight or an inadvertent trespass on someone else’s turf might result in a thermonuclear response.

His sense of falling did not abate. His stomach turned over as if he were aboard a roller coaster, plunging