“Thank you, Barbara. You’ve taken such risks—”
“I don’t want you to worry about that. You hear me? It was my decision.”
“If not for your kindness and your courage, I’d never have had a hope of getting to the bottom of this. Today you’ve opened a door for me.”
“But a door to what?” she worried.
“Maybe to Nina.”
Barbara looked weary and frightened and sad. She wiped one hand across her face, and then she looked only frightened and sad.
“Joe, you keep my voice in your head. Wherever you go from here, you remember to listen for me at the back of your mind. I’ll be an old nag, telling you that even if two people somehow came out of that crash alive, it’s damn unlikely that one of them is your Nina. Don’t swing the sword on yourself, don’t you be the one to cut yourself off at the knees.”
He nodded.
“Promise me,” she said.
“Promise.”
“She’s gone, Joe.”
“Maybe.”
“Armor your heart.”
“We’ll see.”
“Better go,” she said.
He opened the door and got out into the rain.
“Good luck,” Barbara said.
“Thanks.”
He slammed the door, and she drove away.
As he unlocked his rental car, Joe heard the Explorer’s brakes bark less than half a block away. When he looked up, the Ford was reversing toward him, its red taillights shimmering on the slick blacktop.
She got out of the Explorer, came to him, put her arms around him, and held him tight. “You’re a dear man, Joe Carpenter.”
He embraced her too, but no words came to him. He remembered how badly he had wanted to strike her when she had pressed him to forsake the idea that Nina might be alive. He was ashamed by the hatred that he had felt for her then, ashamed and confused — but he was also touched by her friendship, which meant more to him now than he could have imagined when he first rang her doorbell.
“How can I have known you only a few short hours,” she wondered, “and feel as if you’re my son?”
She left him for the second time.
He got into his car as she drove away.
He watched the dwindling Explorer in the rearview mirror until it turned left into Barbara’s driveway, two blocks behind him, and disappeared into her garage.
Across the street, the white trunks of the paper birches glowed like painted doorjambs, the deep moody shadows between like open doors to futures best left unvisited.
Soaked, he drove back to Denver with no regard for the speed limit, alternately using the heater and the air conditioner, trying to dry out his clothes.
He was electrified by the prospect of finding Nina.
In spite of what he had said to Barbara, in spite of what he had promised her, he knew that Nina was alive. One thing in this eerily altered world seemed absolutely right again at last: Nina alive, Nina out there somewhere. She was a warm light upon his skin, a spectrum of light beyond the ability of his eyes to detect, as were infrared and ultraviolet, but though he could not see her, he could feel her shining in the world.
This wasn’t at all similar to the portentous feeling that had so often sent him spiraling into searching behavior, chasing after ghosts. This hope was rock under his hand, not mist.
He was as close to happiness as he had been in more than a year, but each time that his heart swelled too full with excitement, his mood was dampened by a pang of guilt. Even if he found Nina—when he found Nina — he would not also regain Michelle and Chrissie. They were gone forever, and it seemed callous of him to be too happy about reclaiming only one of three.
Nevertheless, the desire to learn the truth, which had motivated him to come to Colorado, was the tiniest fraction as powerful as the wrenching need to find his younger daughter, which now raged in him to a degree beyond the measurements used to define mere compulsion or obsession.
At Denver International Airport, he returned the car to the agency, paid the bill in cash, and retrieved his signed credit-card form. He was in the terminal again fifty minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart.
He was starving. But for two cookies in Mercy’s kitchen, he had eaten nothing since the two cheeseburgers the previous evening on his way to the Vadance house and later a chocolate bar.
He found the nearest restaurant in the terminal. He ordered a club sandwich with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.
Bacon had never tasted half as good as it did now. He licked mayonnaise from his fingertips. The fries had a satisfying crunch, and the crisp dill pickle snapped with a spray of sour juice. For the first time since another August, he not only consumed his food but relished it.
On his way to the boarding gate, with twenty minutes to spare, he suddenly took a detour to the men’s room. He thought he was going to be sick.
By the time he got into a stall and latched the door, his nausea passed. Instead of throwing up, he leaned his back against the door and wept.
He hadn’t cried in many months, and he didn’t know why he was crying now. Maybe because he was on the trembling edge of happiness with the thought of seeing Nina again. Or maybe because he was scared of never finding her or of losing her a second time. Maybe he was grieving anew for Michelle and Chrissie. Maybe he had learned too many dreadful details about what had happened to Flight 353 and to the people on it.
Maybe it was all those things.
He was on a runaway rocket of emotion, and he needed to regain control of himself. He wasn’t going to be effective in his search for Rose and Nina if he swung wildly between euphoria and despair.
Red-eyed but recovered, he boarded the plane for Los Angeles as they issued the final call.
As the 737 took off, to Joe’s surprise his heart made a hollow racket in his ears, like running footsteps descending stairs. He clutched the arms of his seat as though he might tumble forward and fall headlong.
He hadn’t been afraid on the flight to Denver, but now he was in the lap of terror. Coming eastward, he would have welcomed death, for the wrongness of outliving his family had been heavy on his mind — but now, westward bound, he had a reason to live.
Even when they had reached cruising altitude and leveled off, he remained edgy. He could too easily imagine one of the pilots turning to the other and saying, Are we recording?
Since Joe could not get Captain Delroy Blane out of his mind anyway, he withdrew the three folded pages of the transcript from an inner jacket pocket. Reviewing it, he might see something that he had missed before — and he needed to keep his mind occupied, even if with this.
The flight wasn’t heavily booked, a third of the seats empty. He had a window seat with no immediate neighbor, so he was afforded the privacy he needed.
In response to his request, a flight attendant brought a pen and note pad.
As he read through the transcript, he extracted Blane’s dialogue and printed it on the note pad. Standing apart from First Officer Victor Santorelli’s increasingly frantic statements and shorn of Barbara’s descriptions of sounds and pauses, the captain’s words might allow for the discovery of nuances otherwise not easy to spot.
When he was done, Joe folded the transcript and returned it to his coat pocket. Then he read from the note pad:
One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.
One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.
They’re doing bad things to me.
They’re mean to me.
Make them stop.
Are we recording?
Make them stop hurting me.
Are we recording?
Are we recording?
Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.