Sole Survivor

lost an eighteen-year-old. In fact, it was no different for a sixty-year-old parent who lost a thirty-year-old child. Age had nothing to do with it. The loss of a child at any stage of life is unnatural, so wrong that purpose is difficult to rediscover. Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance.

Yet here was Georgine Delmann, flushed and sparkling, girlishly excited, as she pulled Joe to the end of the hallway and through a swinging door. She seemed not merely to have recovered from the loss of her daughter in one short year but to have transcended it.

Joe’s brief hope faded, for it seemed to him that Georgine Delmann must be either out of her mind or incomprehensibly shallow. Her apparent joy shocked him.

The lights were dimmed in the kitchen, but he could see that the space was cozy in spite of being large, with a maple floor, maple cabinetry, and sugar-brown granite counters. From overhead racks, in the low amber light, gleaming copper pots and pans and utensils dangled like festoons of temple bells waiting for the vespers hour.

Leading Joe across the kitchen to a breakfast table in a bay-window alcove, Georgine Delmann said, “Charlie, Lisa, look who’s here! It’s almost a miracle, isn’t it?”

Beyond the beveled-glass windows was a backyard and pool, which outdoor lighting had transformed into a storybook scene full of sparkle and glister. On the oval table this side of the window were three decorative glass oil lamps with flames adance on floating wicks.

Beside the table stood a tall, good-looking man with thick silver hair: Dr. Charles Delmann.

As Georgine approached with Joe in tow, she said, “Charlie, it’s Joe Carpenter. The Joe Carpenter.”

Staring at Joe with something like wonder, Charlie Delmann came forward and vigorously shook his hand. “What’s happening here, son?”

“I wish I knew,” Joe said.

“Something strange and wonderful is happening,” Delmann said, as transported by emotion as was his wife.

Rising from a chair at the table, blond hair further gilded by the lambent light of the oil lamps, was the Lisa to whom Georgine had referred. She was in her forties, with the smooth face of a college girl and faded-denim eyes that had seen more than one level of Hell.

Joe knew her well. Lisa Peccatone. She worked for the Post. A former colleague. An investigative reporter specializing in stories about particularly heinous criminals — serial killers, child abusers, rapists who mutilated their victims — she was driven by an obsession that Joe had never fully understood, prowling the bleakest chambers of the human heart, compelled to immerse herself in stories of blood and madness, seeking meaning in the most meaningless acts of human savagery. He sensed that a long time ago she had endured unspeakable offenses, had come out of childhood with a beast on her back, and could not shrive herself of the demon memory other than by struggling to understand what could never be understood. She was one of the kindest people he had ever known and one of the angriest, brilliant and deeply troubled, fearless but haunted, able to write prose so fine that it could lift the hearts of angels or strike terror into the hollow chests of devils. Joe admired the hell out of her. She was one of his best friends, yet he had abandoned her with all of his other friends when he had followed his lost family into a graveyard of the heart.

“Joey,” she said, “you worthless sonofabitch, are you back on the job or are you here just because you’re part of the story?”

“I’m on the job because I’m part of the story. But I’m not writing again. Don’t have much faith in the power of words anymore.”

“I don’t have much faith in anything else.”

“What’re you doing here?” he asked.

“We called her just a few hours ago,” said Georgine. “We asked her to come.”

“No offense,” Charlie said, clapping a hand on Joe’s shoulder, “but Lisa’s the only reporter we ever knew that we have a lot of respect for.”

“Almost a decade now,” Georgine said, “she’s been doing eight hours a week of volunteer work at one of the free clinics we operate for disadvantaged kids.”

Joe hadn’t known this about Lisa and wouldn’t have suspected it.

She could not repress a crooked, embarrassed smile. “Yeah, Joey, I’m a regular Mother Teresa. But listen, you shithead, don’t you ruin my reputation by telling people at the Post.”

“I want some wine. Who wants wine? A good Chardonnay, maybe a Cakebread or a Grgich Hills,” Charlie enthused. He was infected with his wife’s inappropriate good cheer, as if they were gathered on this solemn night of nights to celebrate the crash of Flight 353.

“Not for me,” Joe said, increasingly disoriented.

“I’ll have some,” Lisa said.

“Me too,” Georgine said. “I’ll get the glasses.”

“No, honey, sit, you sit here with Joe and Lisa,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

As Joe and the women settled into chairs around the table, Charlie went to the far end of the kitchen.

Georgine’s face was aglow with light from the oil lamps. “This is incredible, just incredible. Rose has been to see him too, Lisa.”

Lisa Peccatone’s face was half in lamplight but half in shadow. “When, Joe?”

“Today in the cemetery. Taking photographs of Michelle’s and the girls’ graves. She said she wasn’t ready to talk to me yet…and went away.”

Joe decided to reserve the rest of his story until he heard theirs, both in the interest of hastening their revelations and to ensure that their recitations were not colored too much by what he revealed.

“It can’t have been her,” Lisa said. “She died in the crash.”

“That’s the official story.”

“Describe her,” Lisa requested.

Joe went through the standard catalogue of physical details, but he spent as much time trying to convey the black woman’s singular presence, the magnetism that almost seemed to bend her surroundings to her personal lines of force.

The eye in the shadowed side of Lisa’s smooth face was dark and enigmatic, but the eye in the lamplit half revealed emotional turmoil as she responded to the description that Joe gave her. “Rosie always was charismatic, even in college.”

Surprised, Joe said, “You know her?”

“We went to UCLA together too long ago to think about. We were roomies. We stayed reasonably close over the years.”

“That’s why Charlie and I decided to call Lisa a little while ago,” said Georgine. “We knew she’d had a friend on Flight 353. But it was in the middle of the night, hours after Rose left here, that Charlie remembered Lisa’s friend was also named Rose. We knew they must be one and the same, and we’ve been trying all day to decide what to do about Lisa.”

“When was Rose here?” Joe asked.

“Yesterday evening,” Georgine said. “She showed up just as we were on our way out to dinner. Made us promise to tell no one what she told us…not until she’d had a chance to see a few more of the victims’ families here in L.A. But Lisa had been so depressed last year, with the news, and since she and Rose were such friends, we didn’t see what harm it could do.”

“I’m not here as a reporter,” Lisa told Joe.

“You’re always a reporter.”

Georgine said, “Rose gave us this.”

From her shirt pocket she withdrew a photograph and put it on the table. It was a shot of Angela Delmann’s gravestone.

Eyes shining expectantly, Georgine said, “What do you see there, Joe?”

“I think the real question is what you see.”

Elsewhere in the kitchen, Charlie Delmann opened drawers and sorted through the clattering contents, evidently searching for a corkscrew.