Sole Survivor

hands on Mercy's shoulders. “Close your eyes and try to see her again.”
        She closed her eyes.
        “On her left cheek,” Joe said. “Beside her earlobe. Only an inch in from her earlobe. A small mole.”
        Mercy's eyes twitched behind her smooth lids as she struggled to burnish her memory.
        “It's more of a beauty mark than a mole,” Joe said. “Not raised but flat. Roughly the shape of a crescent moon.”
        After a long hesitation, she said, “She might have had a mark like that, but I can't remember.”
        “Her smile. A little lopsided, a little crooked, turned up at the left corner of her mouth.”
        “She didn't smile that I remember. She was so sleepy… and a little dazed. Sweet but withdrawn.”
        Joe could not think of another distinguishing feature that might jar Mercy Ealing's memory. He could have regaled her for hours with stories about his daughter's grace, about her charm, about her humour and the musical quality of her laughter. He could have spoken at length of her beauty: the smooth sweep of her forehead, the coppery gold of her eyebrows and lashes, the pertness of her nose, her shell-like ears, the combination of fragility and stubborn strength in her face that sometimes made his heart ache when he watched her sleeping, the inquisitiveness and unmistakable intelligence that informed her every expression. Those were subjective impressions, however, and no matter how detailed such descriptions were, they could not lead Mercy to the answers that he had hoped to get from her.
        He took his hands from her shoulders.
        She opened her eyes.
        Joe picked up the spatula he had taken from her. He put it down again. He didn't know what he was doing.
        She said, “I'm sorry.”
        “It's okay. I was hoping… I thought… I don't know. I'm not sure what I was thinking.”
        Self-deceit was a suit that didn't fit him well, and even as he lied to Mercy Ealing, he stood naked to himself, excruciatingly aware of what he had been hoping, thinking. He'd been in a fit of searching behaviour again, not chasing anyone into a convenience store this time, not stalking an imagined Michelle through a mall or department store, not rushing to a schoolyard fence for a closer glimpse of a Chrissie who was not Chrissie after all, but heart-deep in searching behaviour nonetheless. The coincidence of this mystery child sharing his lost daughter's age and hair colour had been all that he needed to send him racing pell-mell once more in pursuit of false hope.
        “I'm sorry,” Mercy said, clearly sensing the precipitous downward spiral of his mood. “Her eyes, the mole, the smile… just don't ring a bell. But I remember her name. Rachel called her Nina.”
        Behind Joe, at the table, Barbara got up so fast that she knocked over her chair.

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    12
        
        At the corner of the back porch, the water falling through the downspout produced a gargle of phantom voices, eager and quarrelsome, guttural and whispery, spitting out questions in unknown tongues.
        Joe's legs felt rubbery. He leaned with both hands on the wet railing. Rain blew under the porch eaves, spattering his face.
        In answer to his question, Barbara pointed toward the low hills and the woods to the southwest. “The crash site was that way.”
        “How far?”
        Mercy stood in the open kitchen door. “Maybe half a mile as the crow flies. Maybe a little farther.”
        Out of the torn meadow, into the forest where the fire died quickly because it had been a wet summer that year, farther into the darkness of the trees, thrashing through the thin underbrush, eyes adjusting grudgingly to the gloom, perhaps onto a deer trail that allowed easy passage, perhaps across another meadow, to the hilltop from which the ranch lights could be seen, Rose might have led-or mostly carried-the child. Half a mile as the crow flies, but twice or three times as far when one followed the contours of the land and the way of the deer.
        “One and a half miles on foot,” Joe said.
        “Impossible,” Barbara said.
        “Very possible. She could have done it.”
        “I'm not talking about the hike.” She turned to Mercy and said, “Mrs. Ealing, you have been an enormous help to us already, a really enormous help, but we've got a confidential matter to discuss here for a minute or two.”
        “Oh, of course, I understand. You just