“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 along a precipitous length of track. Although he was alone in the car, he heard the screams of passengers, faint at first and then louder, not the good-humored shrieks of thrill seekers at an amusement park, but cries of genuine anguish.
As though from a distance, he listened to himself whispering, “No, no, no, no.”
A brief gap in traffic allowed him to angle the Honda off the pavement. The shoulder of the freeway was narrow. He stopped as close as possible to the guardrail, over which lush oleander bushes loomed like a great cresting green tide.
He put the car in Park but didn’t switch off the engine. Even though he was sheathed in cold sweat, he needed the chill blasts of air conditioning to be able to breathe. The pressure on his chest increased. Each stuttering inhalation was a struggle, and each hot exhalation burst from him with an explosive wheeze.
Although the air in the Honda was clear, Joe smelled smoke. He tasted it too: the acrid mélange of burning oil, melting plastic, smoldering vinyl, scorched metal.
When he glanced at the dense clusters of leaves and the deep-red flowers of the oleander pressing against the windows on the passenger side, his imagination morphed them into billowing clouds of greasy smoke. The window became a rectangular porthole with rounded corners and thick dual-pane glass.
Joe might have thought he was losing his mind — if he hadn’t suffered similar anxiety attacks during the past year. Although sometimes as much as two weeks passed between episodes, he often endured as many as three in one day, each lasting between ten minutes and half an hour.
He had seen a therapist. The counseling had not helped.
His doctor recommended anti-anxiety medication. He rejected the prescription. He wanted to feel the pain. It was all he had.
Closing his eyes, covering his face with his icy hands, he strove to regain control of himself, but the catastrophe continued to unfold around him. The sense of falling intensified. The smell of smoke thickened. The screams of phantom passengers grew louder.
Everything shook. The floor beneath his feet. The cabin walls. The ceiling. Horrendous rattling and twanging and banging and gong-like clanging accompanied the shaking, shaking, shaking.
“Please,” he pleaded.
Without opening his eyes, he lowered his hands from his face. They lay fisted at his sides.
After a moment, the small hands of frightened children clutched at his hands, and he held them tightly.