Sole Survivor

attached-”
        “No, it's ridiculous to think-”
        “Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.
        Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn't in those seats.”
        “I know that,” he assured her. “I know.”
        But how he wished .
        She met his eyes again.
        He said, “They're dead. They're gone. I'm not in denial here, Barbara.”
        “So you're back to this Rose Tucker.”
        “If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy-that's at least some small corroboration.”
        “Of what?”
        “Her story.”
        “Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.
        “That she survived.”
        Barbara shook her head.
        “You didn't meet Rose,” he said. “She's not a flake. I don't think she's a liar. She has such… power, presence.”
        On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theatre-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.
        In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive force-”
        “I understand that.”
        “God knows, I really don't mean to be cruel, Joe-but do you understand? After all you've heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew… in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like breadsticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel-a spray as fine as an aerosol mist-explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn't float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”
        Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.
        He said, “You've seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander-and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”
        “That's a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn't play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”
        “Some of the families of survivors… Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.”
        “What?”
        “I don't know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is… they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It's more than mere belief.” He remembered Georgine Delmann's shining eyes. “It's a profound conviction.”
        “Then she's a con artist without equal.”
        Joe only shrugged.
        A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of grey rain fell to the east.
        “For some reason,” Barbara said, “you don't strike me as a devoutly religious man.”
        “I'm not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday School and church every week, but I didn't go. It was the one thing I didn't share with them.”
        “Hostile to religion?”
        “No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash… I took the one step left in my ‘spiritual journey’ from disinterest to disbelief. There's no way to reconcile the idea of a benign god with what happened to everyone on that plane… and to those of us who're going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.”
        “Then if you're such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?”
        “I'm not saying Rose Tucker's survival was a miracle.”
        “Damned if I can see what else it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,” Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.
        “No divine intervention. There's