When the 747–400 fell, the Delmanns lost their eighteen-year-old daughter, Angela, who had been returning from an invitation-only, six-week watercolor workshop at a university in New York, to prepare for her first year at art school in San Francisco. Apparently, she had been a talented painter with considerable promise.
Georgine Delmann herself answered the door. Joe recognized her from her photo in one of the Post articles about the crash. She was in her late forties, tall and slim, with richly glowing dusky skin, masses of curly dark hair, and lively eyes as purple-black as plums. Hers was a wild beauty, and she assiduously tamed it with steel-frame eyeglasses instead of contacts, no makeup, and gray slacks and white blouse that were manly in style.
When Joe told her his name, before he could say that his family had been on Flight 353, she exclaimed, to his surprise, “My God, we were just talking about you!”
“Me?”
Grabbing his hand, pulling him across the threshold into the marble-floored foyer, pushing the door shut with her hip, she didn’t take her astonished gaze from him. “Lisa was telling us about your wife and daughters, about how you just dropped out, went away. But now here you are, here you are.”
“Lisa?” he said, perplexed.
This night, at least, the sober-physician disguise of her severe clothes and steel-rimmed spectacles could not conceal the sparkling depths of Georgine Delmann’s natural ebullience. She threw her arms around Joe and kissed him on the cheek so hard that he was rocked back on his heels. Then face-to-face with him, searching his eyes, she said excitedly, “She’s been to see you too, hasn’t she?”
“Lisa?”
“No, no, not Lisa. Rose.”
An inexplicable hope skipped like a thrown stone across the lake-dark surface of his heart. “Yes. But—”
“Come, come with me.” Clutching his hand again, pulling him out of the foyer and along a hall toward the back of the house, she said, “We’re back here, at the kitchen table — me and Charlie and Lisa.”
At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, Joe had never seen any bereaved parent capable of this effervescence. He’d never heard of such a creature, either. Parents who lost young children spent five or six years — sometimes a decade or even more — striving, often fruitlessly, merely to overcome the conviction that they themselves should be dead instead of their offspring, that outliving their children was sinful or selfish — or even monstrously wicked. It wasn’t much different for those who, like the Delmanns, had 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.