Sole Survivor

“They’re nice people.”

“A lovely quiet life.”

“And you’re a good reporter.”

“When the assignment matters to me.”

Her eyes were midnight-dark but luminous lakes, and Joe could not tell whether the secrets sunk in them would drown or buoy him.

She said, “I’m so sorry about all the people on that plane. Sorry they went before their time. So sorry for their families…for you.”

“You didn’t realize that you were putting them in jeopardy — did you?”

“God, no.”

“Then you’ve no guilt.”

“I feel it, though.”

“Tell me, Rose. Please. I’ve come a long, long way around to hear it. Tell me what you’ve told the others.”

“But they’re killing everyone I tell. Not just the Delmanns but others, half a dozen others.”

“I don’t care about the danger.”

“But I care. Because now I do know the jeopardy I’m putting you in, and I’ve got to consider it.”

“No jeopardy. None whatsoever. I’m dead anyway,” he said. “Unless what you have to tell me is something that gives me a life again.”

“You’re a good man. In all the years you have left, you can contribute so much to this screwed-up world.”

“Not in my condition.”

Her eyes, those lakes, were sorrow given substance. Suddenly they scared him so profoundly that he wanted to look away from them — but could not.

Their conversation had given him time to approach the question from which at first he’d cringed, and now he knew that he must ask it before he lost his courage again. “Rose…Where is my daughter Nina?”

Rose Tucker hesitated. Finally, with her free hand, she reached into an inner pocket of her navy-blue blazer and withdrew a Polaroid photograph.

Joe could see that it was a picture of the flush-set headstone with the bronze plaque bearing the names of his wife and daughters — one of those she had taken the previous day.

With a squeeze of encouragement, she let go of his hand and pressed the photograph into it.

Staring at the Polaroid, he said, “She’s not here. Not in the ground. Michelle and Chrissie, yes. But not Nina.”

Almost in a whisper, she said, “Open your heart, Joe. Open your heart and your mind — and what do you see?”

At last she was bringing to him the transforming gift that she had brought to Nora Vadance, to the Delmanns, and to others.

He stared at the Polaroid.

“What do you see, Joe?”

“A gravestone.”

“Open your mind.”

With expectations that he could not put into words but that nevertheless caused his heart to race, Joe searched the image in his hand. “Granite, bronze…the grass around.”

“Open your heart,” she whispered.

“Their three names…the dates…”

“Keep looking.”

“…sunshine…shadows…”

“Open your heart.”

Although Rose’s sincerity was evident and could not be doubted, her little mantra—Open your mind, open your heart—began to seem silly, as though she were not a scientist but a New Age guru.

“Open your mind,” she persisted gently.

The granite. The bronze. The grass around.

She said, “Don’t just look. See.”

The sweet milk of expectation began to curdle, and Joe felt his expression turning sour.

Rose said, “Does the photo feel strange to you? Not to your eyes…to your fingertips? Does it feel peculiar against your skin?”

He was about to tell her no, that it felt like nothing more than what it was, like a damned Polaroid, glossy and cool — but then it did feel peculiar.

First he became conscious of the elaborate texture of his own skin to an extent that he had never before experienced or imagined possible. He felt every arch, loop, and whorl as it pressed against the photo, and each tiny ridge and equally tiny trough of skin on each finger pad seemed to have its own exquisitely sensitive array of nerve endings.

More tactile data flowed to him from the Polaroid than he was able to process or understand. He was overwhelmed by the smoothness of the photograph, but also by the thousands of microscopic pits in the film surface that were invisible to the unassisted eye, and by the feel of the dyes and fixatives and other chemicals of which the graveyard image was composed.

Then to his touch, although not to his eye, the image on the Polaroid acquired depth, as if it were not merely a two-dimensional photograph but a window with a view of the grave, a window through which he was able to reach. He felt warm summer sun on his fingers, felt granite and bronze and a prickle of grass.

Weirder still: Now he felt a color, as if wires had crossed in his brain, jumbling his senses, and he said, “Blue,” and immediately he felt a dazzling burst of light, and as if from a distance, he heard himself say, “Bright.”

The feelings of blueness and light quickly became actual visual experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.

Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.

The blue brightness snapped to a small point in the center of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.

Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.

Joe peered into her commanding eyes — and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw — or thought he saw — some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.

As though reading his thoughts, she said, “Joe, what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you’re truly afraid of is opening your mind to something you’ve spent your life refusing to believe.”

“Your voice,” he said, “the whisper, the repetitive phrases—Open your heart, open your mind—like a hypnotist.”

“You don’t really believe that,” she said as calmly as ever.

“Something on the Polaroid,” he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“A chemical substance.”

“No.”

“A hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.”

“No.”

“Something I absorbed through the skin,” he insisted, “put me in an altered state of consciousness.” He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.