Sole Survivor (40 page)

He hurried with the girl in his arms, away from the cabin, along the narrow deer trail, remembering stories of people caught in California brushfires and unable to outrun them, sometimes not even able to
outdrive
them when the wind was particularly fierce. Maybe the flames couldn’t accelerate through this density of trees as quickly as through dry brush. Or maybe the pines were even more accommodating fuel than mesquite and manzanita and grass.

Just as they escaped the tunnel of fire, more rippling flags of flames unfurled across the sky overhead, and again the treetops in front of them ignited. Burning needles swarmed down like bright bees, and Joe was afraid his hair would catch fire, Nina’s hair, their clothes. The tunnel was growing in length as fast as they could run through it.

Smoke plagued him now. As the blaze rapidly intensified, it generated winds of its own, adding to the force of the Santa Anas, building toward a firestorm, and the blistering gales first blew tatters of smoke along the deer trail and then choking masses.

The cloistered path led upward, and though the degree of slope was not great, Joe became more quickly winded than he had expected. Incredible withering heat wrung oceans of sweat from him. Gasping for breath, sucking in the astringent fumes and greasy soot, choking, gagging, spitting out saliva thickened and soured by the flavor of the fire, desperately holding on to Nina, he reached a ridgeline.

The pistol under his waistband pressed painfully against his stomach as he ran. If he could have let go of Nina with one hand, he would have drawn the weapon and thrown it away. He was afraid that he was too weak to hold on to her with one arm, that he would drop her, so he endured the gouging steel.

As he crossed the narrow crest and followed the descending trail, he discovered that the wind was less furious on this side of the ridge. Even though the flames surged across the brow, the speed at which the fire line advanced now dropped enough to allow him to get out of the incendiary zone and ahead of the smoke, where the clean air was so sweet that he groaned at the cool, clear taste of it.

Joe was running on an adrenaline high, far beyond his normal level of endurance, and if not for the bolstering effect of panic, he might have collapsed before he topped the ridge. His leg muscles ached. His arms were turning to lead under the weight of the girl. They were not safe, however, so he kept going, stumbling and weaving, blinking tears of weariness out of his smoke-stung eyes, nevertheless pressing steadily forward—until the snarling coyote slammed into him from behind, biting savagely at the hollow of his back but capturing only folds of his corduroy jacket in its jaws.

The impact staggered him, eighty or ninety pounds of lupine fury. He almost fell facedown onto the trail, with Nina under him, except that the weight of the coyote, hanging on him, acted as a counterbalance, and he stayed erect.

The jacket ripped, and the coyote let go, fell away.

Joe skidded to a halt, put Nina down, spun toward the predator, drawing the pistol from his waistband, thankful that he had not pitched it away earlier.

Backlighted by the ridgeline fire, the coyote confronted Joe. It was so like a wolf but leaner, rangier, with bigger ears and a narrower muzzle, black lips skinned back from bared fangs, scarier than a wolf might have been, especially because of the spirit of the vicious boy curled like a serpent in its skull. Its glowering eyes were luminous and yellow.

Joe pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t fire. He remembered the safety.

The coyote skittered toward him, staying low, quick but wary, snapping at his ankles, and Joe danced frantically backward to avoid being bitten, thumbing off the safety as he went.

The animal snaked around him, snarling, snapping, foam flying from its jaws. Its teeth sank into his right calf.

He cried out in pain, and twisted around, trying to get a shot at the damn thing, but it turned as he did, ferociously worrying the flesh of his calf until he thought he was going to pass out from the crackling pain that flashed like a series of electrical shocks all the way up his leg into his hip.

Abruptly the coyote let go and shrank away from Joe as if in fear and confusion.

Joe swung toward the animal, cursing it and tracking it with the pistol.

The beast was no longer in an attack mode. It whined and surveyed the surrounding night in evident perplexity.

With his finger on the trigger, Joe hesitated.

Tilting its head back, regarding the lambent moon, the coyote whined again. Then it looked toward the top of the ridge.

The fire was no more than a hundred yards away. The scorching wind suddenly accelerated, and the flames climbed gusts higher into the night.

The coyote stiffened and pricked its ears. When the fire surged once more, the coyote bolted past Joe and Nina, oblivious of them, and disappeared at a lope into the canyon below.

At last defeated by the draining vastness of these open spaces, the boy had lost his grip on the animal, and Joe sensed that nothing spectral hovered any longer in the woods.

The firestorm rolled at them again, blinding waves of flames, a cataclysmic tide breaking through the forest.

With his bitten leg, limping badly, Joe wasn’t able to carry Nina any longer, but she took his hand, and they hurried as best they could toward the primeval darkness that seemed to well out of the ground and drown the ranks of conifers in the lower depths of the canyon.

He hoped they could find a road. Paved or graveled or dirt—it didn’t matter. Just a way out, any sort of road at all, as long as it led away from the fire and would take them into a future where Nina would be safe.

They had gone no more than two hundred yards when a thunder rose behind them, and when he turned, fearful of another attack, Joe saw only a herd of deer galloping toward them, fleeing the flames. Ten, twenty, thirty deer, graceful and swift, parted around him and Nina with a thudding of hooves, ears pricked and alert, oil-black eyes as shiny as mirrors, spotted flanks quivering, kicking up clouds of pale dust, whickering and snorting, and then they were gone.

Heart pounding, caught up in a riot of emotions that he could not easily sort out, still holding the girl’s hand, Joe started down the trail in the hoofprints of the deer. He took half a dozen steps before he realized there was no pain in his bitten calf. No pain, either, in his hawk-pecked hand or in his beak-torn face. He was no longer bleeding.

Along the way and in the tumult of the deers’ passing, Nina had healed him.

18

On the second anniversary of the crash of Nationwide Flight 353, Joe Carpenter sat on a quiet beach in Florida, in the shade of a palm tree, watching the sea. Here, the tides came to shore more gently than in California, licking the sand with a tropical languor, and the ocean seemed not at all like a machine.

He was a different man from the one who had fled the fire in the San Bernardino Mountains. His hair was longer now, bleached both by chemicals and by the sun. He had grown a mustache as a simple disguise. His physical awareness of himself was far greater than it had been one year ago, so he was conscious of how differently he moved these days: with a new ease, with a relaxed grace, without the tension and the coiled anger of the past.

He possessed ID in a new name: birth certificate, social security card, three major credit cards, a driver’s license. The forgers at Infiniface didn’t actually forge documents as much as use their computer savvy to manipulate the system into spitting out
real
papers for people who didn’t actually exist.

He had undergone inner changes too, and he credited those to Nina—though he continued to refuse the ultimate gift that she could give him. She had changed him not by her touch but by her example, by her sweetness and kindness, by her trust in him, by her love of life and her love of him and her calm faith in the rightness of all things. She was only six years old but in some ways ancient, because if she was what everyone believed she was, then she was tied to the infinite by an umbilical of light.

They were staying with a commune of Infiniface members, those who wore no robes and left their heads unshaven. The big house stood back from the beach and was filled at almost any hour of the day with the soft clatter of computer keyboards. In a week or two, Joe and Nina would move on to another group, bringing them the gift that only this child could reveal, for they traveled continuously in the quiet spreading of the word. In a few years, when her maturing power made her less vulnerable, the time would arrive to tell the world.

Now, on this anniversary of loss, she came to him on the beach, under the gently swaying palm, as he had known she would, and she sat at his side. Currently her hair was brown. She was wearing pink shorts and a white top with Donald Duck winking on her chest—as ordinary in appearance as any six-year-old on the planet. She drew her knees up and encircled her legs with her arms, and for a while she said nothing.

They watched a big, long-legged sand crab move across the beach, select a nesting place, and burrow out of sight.

Finally she said, “Why won’t you open your heart?”

“I will. When the time’s right.”

“When will the time be right?”

“When I learn not to hate.”

“Who do you hate?”

“For a long time—you.”

“Because I’m not your Nina.”

“I don’t hate you anymore.”

“I know.”

“I hate myself.”

“Why?”

“For being so afraid.”

“You’re not afraid of anything,” she said.

He smiled. “Scared to death of what you can show me.”

“Why?”

“The world’s so cruel. It’s so hard. If there’s a God, He tortured my father with disease and then took him young. He took Michelle, my Chrissie, my Nina. He allowed Rose to die.”

“This is a passage.”

“A damn vicious one.”

She was silent for a while.

The sea whispered against the strand. The crab stirred, poked an eye stalk out to examine the world, and decided to move.

Nina got up and crossed to the sand crab. Ordinarily, these creatures were shy and scurried away when approached. This one did not run for cover but watched Nina as she dropped to her knees and studied it. She stroked its shell. She touched one of its claws, and the crab didn’t pinch her.

Joe watched—and wondered.

Finally the girl returned and sat beside Joe, and the big crab disappeared into the sand.

She said, “If the world is cruel…you can help me fix it. And if that’s what God wants us to do, then He’s not cruel, after all.”

Joe did not respond to her pitch.

The sea was an iridescent blue. The sky curved down to meet it at an invisible seam.

“Please,” she said. “Please take my hand, Daddy.”

She had never called him
daddy
before, and his chest tightened when he heard the word.

He met her amethyst eyes. And wished they were gray like his own. But they were not. She had come with him out of wind and fire, out of darkness and terror, and he supposed that he was as much her father as Rose Tucker had been her mother.

He took her hand.

And knew.

For a time he was not on a beach in Florida but in a bright blueness with Michelle and Chrissie and Nina. He did not see what worlds waited beyond this one, but he knew beyond all doubt that they existed, and the strangeness of them frightened him but also lifted his heart.

He understood that eternal life was not an article of faith but a law of the universe as true as any law of physics. The universe is an efficient creation: matter becomes energy; energy becomes matter; one form of energy is converted into another form; the balance is forever changing, but the universe is a closed system from which no particle of matter or wave of energy is ever lost. Nature not only loathes waste but forbids it. The human mind and spirit, at their noblest, can transform the material world for the better; we can even transform the human condition, lifting ourselves from a state of primal fear, when we dwelled in caves and shuddered at the sight of the moon, to a position from which we can contemplate eternity and hope to understand the works of God. Light cannot change itself into stone by an act of
will,
and stone cannot build itself into temples. Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself, and it is, therefore, the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe. For a time, the spirit may become flesh, but when that phase of its existence is at an end, it will be transformed into a disembodied spirit once more.

When he returned from that brightness, from the blue elsewhere, he sat for a while, trembling, eyes closed, burrowed down into this revealed truth as the crab had buried itself in the sand.

In time he opened his eyes.

His daughter smiled at him. Her eyes were amethyst, not gray. Her features were not those of the other Nina whom he had loved so deeply. She was not, however, a pale fire, as she had seemed before, and he wondered how he could have allowed his anger to prevent him from seeing her as she truly was. She was a shining light, all but blinding in her brightness, as his own Nina had been—as are we all.

To contact The Compassionate Friends, a self-help organization offering friendship and understanding to bereaved parents and siblings, write or call:

The Compassionate Friends

National Office

P.O. Box 3696

Oak Brook, Illinois 60522-3696

(630) 990-0010

T
O THE MEMORY OF
R
AY
M
OCK
,

my uncle, who long ago moved on to a better world.
In my childhood, when I was troubled and despairing,
your decency and kindness and good humor
taught me everything I ever needed to know
about what a man should be.