Sole Survivor

For a while he couldn’t speak.

Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.

Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, “Santorelli’s last word was a name.”

“Susan.”

“Who is she?”

“His wife.”

“I thought so.”

At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

11

From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

“Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,” she said. “But what does it matter?”

When Barbara first arrived in the meadow on the morning after the crash, the shredded and scattered debris of the 747–400 had not resembled the wreckage of an airliner. Only two pieces had been immediately recognizable: a portion of one engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

He said, “Three seats, side by side?”

“Yes.”

“Upright?”

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?”

“Joe—”

“From what part of the plane?” he repeated patiently.

“Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The center rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.”

“Damaged?”

“Of course.”

“Badly?”

“Not as badly as you’d expect.”

“Burned?”

“Not entirely.”

“Burned at all?”

“As I remember…there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.”

“In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?”

Her broad, clear face now clouded with concern. “Joe, no one survived this crash.”

“Was the upholstery intact?” he pressed.

“As I remember…it was slightly torn. Nothing serious.”

“Blood on the upholstery?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Any bodies in the seats?”

“No.”

“Body parts?”

“No.”

“Lap belts still attached?”

“I don’t remember. I suppose so.”

“If the lap belts were attached—”

“No, it’s ridiculous to think—”

“Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.

Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.”

“I know that,” he assured her. “I know.”

But how he wished.

She met his eyes again.

He said, “They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.”

“So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.”

“If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy — that’s at least some small corroboration.”

“Of what?”

“Her story.”

“Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.

“That she survived.”

Barbara shook her head.

“You didn’t meet Rose,” he said. “She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such…power, presence.”

On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theater-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit- and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive force—”

“I understand that.”

“God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe — but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew…in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like bread-sticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel — a spray as fine as an aerosol mist — explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”

Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.

He said, “You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander — and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”

“That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”

“Some of the families of survivors…Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is…they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It’s more than mere belief.” He remembered Georgine Delmann’s shining eyes. “It’s a profound conviction.”

“Then she’s a con artist without equal.”

Joe only shrugged.