Sole Survivor

they themselves should be dead instead of their offspring, that outliving their children was sinful or selfish-or even monstrously wicked. It wasn't much different for those who, like the Delmanns, had lost an eighteen-year-old. In fact, it was no different for a sixty-year-old parent who lost a thirty-year-old child. Age had nothing to do with it. The loss of a child at any stage of life is unnatural, so wrong that purpose is difficult to rediscover. Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance.
        Yet here was Georgine Delmann, flushed and sparkling, girlishly excited, as she pulled Joe to the end of the hallway and through a swinging door. She seemed not merely to have recovered from the loss of her daughter in one short year but to have transcended it.
        Joe's brief hope faded, because it seemed to him that Georgine Delmann must be out of her mind or incomprehensibly shallow. Her apparent joy shocked him.
        The lights were dimmed in the kitchen, but he could see the space was cosy in spite of being large, with a maple floor, maple cabinetry, and sugar-brown granite counters. From overhead racks, in the low amber light, gleaming copper pots and pans and utensils dangled like festoons of temple bells waiting for the vespers hour.
        Leading Joe across the kitchen to a breakfast table in a bay-window alcove, Georgine Delmann said, “Charlie, Lisa, look who's here! It's almost a miracle, isn't it?”
        Beyond the bevelled-glass windows was a backyard and pool, which outdoor lighting had transformed into a storybook scene full of sparkle and glister. On the oval table this side of the window were three decorative, glass oil lamps with flames a-dance on floating wicks.
        Beside the table stood a tall good-looking man with thick, silver hair: Dr. Charles Delmann.
        As Georgine approached with Joe in tow, she said, “Charlie, it's Joe Carpenter. The Joe Carpenter.”
        Staring at Joe with something like wonder, Charlie Delmann came forward and vigorously shook his hand. “What's happening here, son?”
        “I wish I knew,” Joe said.
        “Something strange and wonderful is happening,” Delmann said, as transported by emotion as was his wife.
        Rising from a chair at the table, blond hair further gilded by the lambent light of the oil lamps, was the Lisa to whom Georgine had referred. She was in her forties, with the smooth face of a college girl and faded-denim eyes that had seen more than one level of Hell.
        Joe knew her well. Lisa Peccatone. She worked for the Post . A former colleague. She was an investigative reporter specializing in stories about particularly heinous criminals-serial killers, child abusers, rapists who mutilated their victims-driven by an obsession that Joe had never fully understood, prowling the bleakest chambers of the human heart, compelled to immerse herself in stories of blood and madness, seeking meaning in the most meaningless acts of human savagery. He sensed that a long time ago she had endured unspeakable offences, had come out of childhood with a beast on her back, and could not shrive herself of the demon memory other than by struggling to understand what could never be understood. She was one of the kindest people he had ever known and one of the angriest, brilliant and deeply troubled, fearless but haunted, able to write prose so fine that it could lift the hearts of angels or strike terror into the hollow chests of devils. Joe admired the hell out of her. She was one of his best friends, yet he had abandoned her with all of his other friends when he had followed his lost family into a graveyard of the heart.
        “Joey,” she said, “you worthless sonofabitch, are you back on the job or are you here just because you're part of the story?”
        “I'm on the job because I'm part of the story. But I'm not writing again. Don't have much faith in the power of words any more.”
        “I don't have much faith in anything else.”
        “What're you doing here?” he asked.
        “We called her just a few hours ago,” said Georgine. “We asked her to come.”
        “No offence,” Charlie said, clapping a hand on Joe's shoulder, “but Lisa's the only reporter we ever knew that we have a lot of respect