Sole Survivor

After leaving K-Mart, he found a modest, clean motel in Malibu, on the ocean, where later he might be able to sleep to the rumble of the surf. He shaved, showered, and changed into clean clothes.

By seven-thirty, with an hour of sunlight left, he drove east to Culver City, where Thomas Lee Vadance’s widow lived. Thomas had been listed on the passenger manifest for Flight 353, and his wife, Nora, had been quoted by the Post.

At a McDonald’s, Joe bought two cheeseburgers and a cola. In the steel-tethered book at the restaurant’s public phone, he found a number and an address for Nora Vadance.

From his previous life as a reporter, he had a Thomas Brothers Guide, the indispensable book of Los Angeles County street maps, but he thought he knew Mrs. Vadance’s neighbourhood.

While he drove, he ate both of the burgers and washed them down with the cola. He was surprised by his own sudden hun­ger.

The single-story house had a cedar-shingle roof, shingled walls, white trim, and white shutters. It was an odd mix of California ranch house and New England coastal cottage, but with its flagstone walkway and neatly tended beds of impatiens and agapantha, it was charming.

The day was still warm. Heat shimmered off the flagstones.

With an orange-pink glow growing in the western sky and purple twilight just sliding into view in the east, Joe climbed two steps onto the porch and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was about thirty years old and pretty in a fresh-faced way. Although she was a brunette, she had the fair complexion of a redhead, with freckles and green eyes. She was in khaki shorts and a man’s threadbare white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair was in disarray and damp with sweat, and on her left cheek was a smudge of dirt.

She looked as if she had been doing housework. And crying.

‘Mrs. Vadance?’ Joe asked.

‘Yes.’

Although he had always been smooth about ingratiating himself with an interviewee when he had been a reporter, he was awkward now. He felt too casually dressed for the serious questions that he had come to ask. His jeans were loose, the waistband gathered and cinched with a belt, and because the air was hot, he’d left the

Sports coat in the Honda. He wished he’d bought a shirt instead of just T-shirts.

‘Mrs. Vadance, I was wondering if I could speak with you—’

‘I’m very busy right now—’

‘My name’s Joe Carpenter. My wife died on the plane. And my two little girls.’

Her breath caught in her throat. Then: ‘One year ago.’

‘Yes. Tonight.’

She stepped back from the door. ‘Come in.’

He followed her into a cheery, predominantly white and yellow living room with chintz drapes and pillows. A dozen Liadro porcelains stood in a lighted corner display case.

She asked Joe to have a seat. As he settled in an armchair, she went to a doorway and called, ‘Bob? Bob, we have a visitor.’

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday night,’ Joe said. Returning from the doorway and perching on the sofa, the woman said, ‘Not at all. But I’m afraid I’m not the Mrs. Vadance you came to see. I’m not Nora. My name’s Clarise. It was my mother-in-law who lost her husband in the… in the accident.’

From the back of the house, a man entered the living room, and Clarise introduced him as her husband. He was perhaps two years older than his wife, tall, lanky, crew-cut, with a pleasant and self-confident manner. His handshake was firm and his smile easy, but under his tan was a paleness, in his blue eyes a sorrow.

As Bob Vadance sat on the sofa beside his wife, Clarise explained that Joe’s family had perished in the crash. To Joe, she said, ‘It was Bob’s dad we lost, coming back from a business trip.’

Of all the things that they might have said to one another, they established their bond by talking about how they had first heard the dreadful news out of Colorado.

Clarise and Bob, a fighter pilot assigned to Miramar Naval Air Station north of San Diego, had been out to dinner with two other pilots and their wives. They were at a cosy Italian restaurant and, after dinner, moved into the bar, where there was a television set. The baseball game was interrupted for a bulletin about Nationwide Flight 353. Bob had known his dad was flying that night from New York to L.A. and that he often travelled Nationwide, but he hadn’t known the flight number. Using a bar phone to call Nationwide at LAX, he was quickly connected with a public-relations officer who confirmed that Thomas Lee Vadance was on the passenger manifest. Bob and Clarise had driven from Miramar to Culver City in record time, arriving shortly after eleven o’clock. They

didn’t call Nora, Bob’s mother, because they didn’t know if she had heard. If she was still unaware of the news, they wanted to tell her in person rather than over the phone. When they arrived just after midnight, the house was brightly lighted, the front door unlocked. Nora was in the kitchen, making corn chowder, a big pot of corn chowder, because Tom loved her corn chowder, and she was baking chocolate-chip cookies with pecans because Bob loved those cookies too. She knew about the crash, knew that he was dead out there just east of the Rockies, but she needed to be doing something for him. They had been married when Nora was eighteen and Tom was twenty, had been married for thirty-five years, and she had needed to be doing something for him.

‘In my case, I didn’t know until I got to the airport to pick them up,’ Joe said. ‘They’d been to Virginia to visit Michelle’s folks, and then three days in New York so the girls could meet their Aunt Delia for the first time. I arrived early, of course, and first thing when I went into the terminal, I checked the monitors to see if their flight was on time. It was still shown as on time, but when I went up to the gate where it was supposed to arrive, airline personnel were greeting people as they approached the area, talking to them in low voices, leading some of them away to a private lounge. This young man came up to me, and before he opened his mouth, I knew what he was going to say. I wouldn’t let him talk. I said, “No, don’t say it, don’t you dare say it.” When he tried to speak anyway, I turned away from him, and when he put a hand on my arm, I knocked it off. I might have punched him to keep him from talking, except by then there were three of them, him and two women, around me, close around me. It was as if I didn’t want to be told because being told was what made it real, that it wouldn’t be real, you know, wouldn’t actually have happened, if they didn’t say it.’

They were all silent, listening to the remembered voices of last year, the voices of strangers with terrible news.

‘Mom took it so hard for a long time,’ Clarise said at last, speaking of her mother-in-law as fondly as if Nora had been her own mother. ‘She was only fifty-three, but she really didn’t want to go on without Tom. They were—’

‘—so close,’ Bob finished. ‘But then last week when we came to visit, she was way up, so much better. She’d been so bitter, depressed and bitter, but now she was full of life again. She’d always been cheerful before the crash, a real—’

‘-—people person, so outgoing,’ Clarise continued for him, as if their thoughts ran always on precisely the same track. ‘And

suddenly here again last week was the woman we’d always known and missed for the past year.’

Dread washed through Joe when he realized they were speak­ing of Nora Vadance as one speaks of the dead. ‘What’s hap­pened?’

From a pocket of her khaki shorts, Clarise had taken a Kleenex. She was blotting her eyes. ‘Last week she said she knew now that Tom wasn’t gone forever, that no one was ever gone forever. She seemed so happy. She was-’

‘—radiant,’ Bob said, taking his wife’s hand in his. ‘Joe, we don’t know why really, with the depression gone and her being so full of plans for the first time in a year. . . but four days ago, my mom

she committed suicide.’

The funeral had been held the previous day. Bob and Clarise didn’t live here. They were staying only through Tuesday, packing Nora’s clothes and personal effects for distribution to relatives and the Salvation Army Thrift Shop.

‘It’s so hard,’ Clarise said, unrolling and then rerolling the right sleeve on her white shirt as she talked. ‘She was such a sweet person.’

‘I shouldn’t be here right now,’ Joe said, getting up from the armchair. ‘This isn’t a good time.’

Rising quickly, extending one hand almost pleadingly, Bob Vadance said, ‘No, please, sit down. Please. We need a break from the sorting . . . the packing. Talking to you . . . well . .

He shrugged. He was all long arms and legs, graceful before but not now. ‘We all know what it’s like. It’s easier because—’

‘—because we all know what it’s like,’ Clarise finished.

After a hesitation, Joe sat in the armchair again. ‘I only have a few questions. . . and maybe only your mother could’ve answered them.’

Having readjusted her right sleeve, Clarise unrolled and then rerolled the left. She needed to be doing something while she talked. Maybe she was afraid that her unoccupied hands would encourage her to express the grief that she was striving to control — perhaps by covering her face, by twisting and pulling her hair, or by curling into fists and striking something. ‘Joe . . . this heat

would you like something cold to drink?’

‘No thanks. Quick is better, and I’ll go. What I wanted to ask

your mother was if she’d been visited by anyone recently. By a woman who calls herself Rose.’

Bob and Clarise exchanged a glance, and Bob said, ‘Would this be a black woman?’

A quiver passed through Joe. ‘Yes. Small, about five two, but with. . . real presence.’

‘Mom wouldn’t say much about her,’ Clarise said, ‘but this Rose came once, and they talked, and it seemed as if something she told Mom was what made all the difference. We got the idea she was some sort of—’

‘—spiritual advisor or something,’ Bob finished. ‘At first, we didn’t like the sound of it, thought it might be someone taking advantage of Mom, her being so down and vulnerable. We thought maybe this was some New-Age crazy or—’

‘—a con artist,’ Clarise continued, now leaning forward from the sofa to straighten the silk flowers in an arrangement on the coffee table. ‘Someone trying to rip her off or just mess with her mind.’

‘But when she talked about Rose, she was so—’

‘—full of peace. It didn’t seem this could be bad, not when it made Mom feel so much better. Anyway—’

‘—she said this woman wasn’t coming back,’ Bob finished. ‘Mom said, thanks to Rose, she knew Dad was somewhere safe. He hadn’t just died and that was the end. He was somewhere safe and fine.’

‘She wouldn’t tell us how she’d come around to this faith, when she’d never even been a churchgoer before,’ Clarise added. ‘Wouldn’t say who Rose was or what Rose had told her.’

‘Wouldn’t tell us much at all about the woman,’ Bob confirmed. ‘Just that it had to be a secret now, for a little while, but that eventually—’

‘—everyone would know.’

‘Eventually everyone would know what?’ Joe asked.

‘That Dad was somewhere safe, I guess, somewhere safe and fine.’

‘No,’ Clarise said, finishing with the silk flowers, sitting back on the sofa, clasping her hands in her lap, ‘I think she meant more than that. I think she meant eventually everyone would know that none of us ever just dies, that we. . . go on somewhere safe.’

Bob sighed. ‘I’ll be frank with you, Joe. It made us a little nervous, hearing this superstitious stuff coming from my mother, who was always so down-to-earth. But it made her happy, and after the

awfulness of the past year—’

‘—we didn’t see what harm it could do.’

Spiritualism was not what Joe had expected. He was uneasy if not downright disappointed. He had thought that Dr. Rose Tucker knew what had really happened to Flight 353 and was prepared to finger those responsible. He had never imagined that what she had to offer was merely mysticism, spiritual counselling.

‘Do you think she had an address for this Rose, a telephone number?’

Clarise said, ‘No. I don’t think so. Mom was. . . mysterious about it.’ To her husband, she said: ‘Show him the picture.’

‘It’s still in her bedroom,’ Bob said, rising from the sofa. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘What picture?’ Joe asked Clarise as Bob left the living room.

‘Strange. It’s one this Rose brought to Nora. It’s kind of creepy, but Mom took comfort from it. It’s a photo of Tom’s grave.’

The photograph was a standard colour print taken with a Polaroid camera. The shot showed the headstone at Thomas Lee Vadance’s grave: his name, the dates of his birth and death, the words ‘cherished husband and beloved father.’

In memory, Joe could see Rose Marie Tucker in the cemetery:

I’m not ready to talk to you yet.

Clarise said, ‘Mom went out and bought the frame. She wanted to keep the picture behind glass. It was important to her that it not get damaged.’

‘While we were staying here last week, three full days, she carried it with her everywhere,’ Bob said. ‘Cooking in the kitchen, sitting in the family room watching TV, outside on the patio when we were barbecuing, always with her.’

‘Even when we went out to dinner,’ Clarise said. ‘She put it in her purse.’

‘It’s just a photograph,’ Joe said, puzzled.

‘Just a photograph,’ Bob Vadance agreed. ‘She could’ve taken it herself — but for some reason it meant more to her because this Rose woman had taken it.’

Joe slid a finger down the smooth silver-plated frame and across the glass, as if he were clairvoyant and able to read the meaning of the photograph by absorbing a lingering psychic energy from it.

‘When she first showed it to us,’ said Clarise, ‘she watched us with such . . . expectation. As if she thought—’

‘—we would have a bigger reaction to it,’ Bob concluded.

Putting the photograph on the coffee table, Joe frowned. ‘Bigger reaction? Like how?’

‘We couldn’t understand,’ Clarise said. She picked up the photo and began to polish the frame and glass on her shirttail. ‘When we didn’t respond to it the way she hoped, then she asked us what we saw when we looked at it.’