Part One: Lost Forever 


         Chapter 1


At two-thirty Saturday morning, in Los Angeles, Joe Carpenter woke, clutching a
pillow to his chest, calling his lost wife’s name in the darkness. The anguished and
haunted quality of his own voice had shaken him from sleep. Dreams fell from him
not all at once but in trembling veils, as attic dust falls off rafters when a house
rolls with an earthquake. 

When he realized that he did not have Michelle in his arms, he held fast to the
pillow anyway. He had come out of the dream with the scent of her hair. Now he
was afraid that any movement he made would cause that memory to fade and
leave him with only the sour smell of his night sweat. 

Inevitably, no weight of stillness could hold the memory in all its vividness. The
scent of her hair receded like a balloon rising, and soon it was beyond his grasp. 

Bereft, he got up and went to the nearest of two windows. His bed, which
consisted of nothing but a mattress on the floor, was the only furniture, so he did
not have to be concerned about stumbling over obstructions in the gloom. 

The studio apartment consisted of one large room with a kitchenette, a closet, and
a cramped bathroom, all over a two-car detached garage in upper Laurel Canyon.
After selling the house in Studio City, he had brought no furniture with him,
because dead men needed no such comforts. He had come here to die. 

For ten months he had been paying the rent, waiting for the morning when he
would fail to wake. 

The window faced the rising canyon wall, the ragged black shapes of evergreens
and eucalyptuses. To the west was a fat moon glimpsed through the trees, a silvery
promise beyond the bleak urban woods. 

He was surprised that he was still not dead after all this time. He was not alive,
either. Somewhere between. Halfway in the journey. He had to find an ending,
because for him there could never be any going back. 

After fetching an icy bottle of beer from the refrigerator in the kitchenette, Joe
returned to the mattress. He sat with his back against the wall. 

Beer at two-thirty in the morning. A sliding-down life. 

He wished that he were capable of drinking himself to death. If he could drift out
of this world in a numbing alcoholic haze, he might not care how long his departure
required. Too much booze would irrevocably blur his memories, however, and his
memories were sacred to him. He allowed himself only a few beers or glasses of
wine at a time. 

Other than the faint tree-filtered glimmer of moonlight on the window glass, the
only light in the room came from the backlit buttons on the telephone keypad
beside the mattress. 

He knew only one person to whom he could talk frankly about his despair in the
middle of the night-—or in broad daylight. Though he was only thirty-seven, his
mom and dad were long gone. He had no brothers or sisters. Friends had tried to
comfort him after the catastrophe, but he had been too pained to talk about what
had happened, and he had kept them at a distance so aggressively that he had
offended most of them. 

Now he picked up the phone, put it in his lap, and called Michelle’s mother, Beth
McKay. 

In Virginia, nearly three thousand miles away, she picked up the phone on the first
ring. "Joe?" 

"Did I wake you?" 

"You know me, dear--early to bed and up before dawn," 

"Henry?" he asked, referring to Michelle’s father. 

"Oh, the old beast could sleep through Armageddon," she said affectionately. 

She was a kind and gentle woman, full of compassion for Joe even as she coped
with her own loss. She possessed an uncommon strength. 

At the funeral, both Joe and Henry had needed to lean on Beth, and she had been
a rock for them. Hours later, however, well after midnight, Joe had discovered her
on the patio behind the Studio City house, sitting in a glider in her pajamas,
hunched like an ancient crone, tortured by grief, muffling her sobs in a pillow that
she had carried with her from the spare room, trying not to burden her husband or
her son-in-law with her own pain. Joe sat beside her, but she didn’t want her hand
held or an arm around her shoulders. She flinched at his touch. Her anguish was so
intense that it scraped her nerves raw, until a murmur of commiseration was like a
scream to her, until a loving hand scorched like a branding iron. Reluctant to leave
her alone, he had picked up the long-handled net and skimmed the swimming pool:
circling the water, scooping gnats and leaves off the black surface at two o’clock in
the morning, not even able to see what he was doing, just grimly circling, circling,
skimming, skimming, while Beth wept into the pillow, circling and circling until
there was nothing to strain from the clear water except the reflections of cold
uncaring stars. Eventually, having wrung all the tears from herself, Beth rose from
the glider, came to him, and pried the net out his hands. She had led him upstairs
and tucked him in bed as though he were a child, and he had slept, deeply for the
first time in days. 

Now, on the phone with her at a lamentable distance, Joe set aside his half-finished
beer. "Is it dawn there yet, Beth?" 

"Just a breath ago." 

"Are you sitting at the kitchen table, watching it through the big window? Is the sky
pretty?" 

"Still black in the west, indigo overhead, and out to the east, a fan of pink and coral
and sapphire like Japanese silk." 

As strong as Beth was, Joe called her regularly not just for the strength she could
offer but because he liked to listen to her talk. The particular timbre of her voice
and her soft Virginia accent were the same as Michelle’s had been. 

He said, "You answered the phone with my name." 

"Who else would it have been, dear?" 

"Am I the only one who ever calls this early?" 

"Rarely others. But this morning . . . it could only be you." 

The worst had happened one year ago to the day, changing their lives forever. This
was the first anniversary of their loss. 

She said, "I hope you’re eating better, Joe. Are you still losing weight?" 

"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 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 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." 

"There 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 any more. 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.