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.
A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of gray rain fell to the east.
“For some reason,” Barbara said, “you don’t strike me as a devoutly religious man.”
“I’m not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday school and church every week, but I didn’t go. It was the one thing I didn’t share with them.”
“Hostile to religion?”
“No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash…I took the one step left in my ‘spiritual journey’ from disinterest to disbelief. There’s no way to reconcile the idea of a benign God with what happened to everyone on that plane…and to those of us who’re going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.”
“Then if you’re such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?”
“I’m not saying Rose Tucker’s survival was a miracle.”
“Damned if I can see what else it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,” Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.
“No divine intervention. There’s another explanation, something amazing but logical.”
“Impossible,” she said stubbornly.
“Impossible? Yeah, well…so was everything that happened in the cockpit with Captain Blane.”
She held his gaze while she searched for an answer in the deep and orderly files of her mind. She was not able to find one.
Instead, she said, “If you don’t believe in anything — then what is it that you expect Rose to tell you? You say that what she tells them ‘lifts them up.’ Don’t you imagine it’s got to be something of a spiritual nature?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What else would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
Repeating Joe’s own words heavily colored with exasperation, she said, “‘Something amazing but logical.’”
He looked away from her, toward the trees along the northern edge of the field, and he realized that in the fire-blasted aspen cluster was a sole survivor, reclothed in foliage. Instead of the characteristic smooth pale trunk, it had scaly black bark, which would provide a dazzling contrast when its leaves turned brilliant yellow in the autumn.
“Something amazing but logical,” he agreed.
Closer than ever, lightning laddered down the sky, and the boom of thunder descended rung to rung.
“We better go,” Barbara said. “There’s nothing more here anyway.”
Joe followed her down through the meadow, but he paused again at the rim of the impact crater.
The few times that he had gone to meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had heard other grieving parents speak of the Zero Point. The Zero Point was the instant of the child’s death, from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes and wants — which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams — was turned on end and emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations. In a clock tick, the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation — and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.