Chapter 32
“You can’t be serious,” Robert said, his voice stripped of its earlier calm.
“I am,” Charlotte said.
Ellen stepped forward. “Charlotte, listen to me. The house is gone. The entire eastern end of that cul-de-sac is a crater. We pulled twelve bodies from the wreckage on your street alone, and that was before the fire reached the north side. If your family had been inside when that plane hit…”
“They might not have been. The basement was intact. I checked. The supplies were still on the shelves. If they had made it downstairs before the impact…”
“They didn’t,” Robert said. “You found your mother’s glasses twenty feet from the foundation. You found your father’s watch. If they’d made it to the basement, those things would have been with them.”
“Her phone was outside,” Charlotte said. “I found Sophia’s phone near the maple tree. Not in the house. Outside. That means she might have been outside when it happened.”
“Or it means the impact threw it there along with everything else,” Melissa said.
“We’ve been doing this for twenty-four hours.
We’ve pulled survivors from three different crash sites.
Do you know how many of them were standing directly in the path of the impact?
Zero. The force alone would have killed anyone within fifty yards. The fire took care of the rest.”
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Ellen said. “The gas damaged your lungs. You’re in shock. You’re running on adrenaline and grief, and both run out. When they do, you’ll collapse on some roadside five miles from here, and there won’t be anyone to find you.”
“I appreciate what you’ve done, but I need to go back,” Charlotte replied.
Robert threw up his hands. “This is what I’m talking about.
We risked our lives going into that neighborhood.
The fire was spreading. The gas was still active in pockets.
We pulled you out because you were the only one still breathing, and now you want to walk back into it because you found a phone case? ”
“It’s not just the phone.”
“Then what is it?” Melissa asked. “From where I’m standing, it looks like survivor’s guilt mixed with trauma and a complete disregard for the fact that you are alive when a lot of people aren’t.
Your family is gone. I’m sorry, but going back won’t change that.
It will just make you one more body we have to account for. ”
The words landed like a blow. Your family is gone. Charlotte had refused to hear them until now. Charlotte looked at Melissa and understood she was speaking from what she had seen in the last twenty-four hours.
“I need to know for certain,” Charlotte said.
“There is no certainty in this,” Ellen said. “Not the kind you’re looking for. There’s only what we saw, and what we saw was a street that took a direct hit from a passenger jet moving at four hundred miles an hour. Nobody survived that impact. Nobody.”
Charlotte swung her legs over the side of the wagon. She nearly fell and caught herself on the rail, pain flashing behind her eyes.
“At least take supplies,” Ellen said. “Water. Food. Something for the pain.”
Robert turned away while Ellen searched a backpack at the front of the wagon and returned with water, a cloth bundle of crackers, and a small brown bottle of pills.
“Antibiotics,” Ellen said. “From the pharmacy on Main. They won’t fix your lungs, but they might prevent infection. Take two now, two every twelve hours if you can remember.”
Charlotte accepted the supplies with her less-damaged hand. The antibiotics went into the pocket of the borrowed T-shirt. The water bottle she tucked against her side, and the crackers she held in the same hand as her father’s watch.
“Thank you,” she said.
The phrase felt even more inadequate than before, but Ellen didn’t respond. She helped Charlotte to her feet, her arm around her waist, and for a moment, the two women stood together on the empty road with the wagon between them and the trees throwing long shadows across the pavement.
“The community center is that way,” Ellen said, pointing west. “About a mile. If you change your mind.”
“I won’t,” Charlotte said.
She took her first step east. Her legs trembled, and the cough rose again, a deep, wrenching spasm that bent her double and left her spitting onto the roadside.
When she straightened, the three rescuers were watching.
Charlotte turned away from them and started walking.
The road stretched ahead, empty and quiet, heading back the way the wagon had come.
Back toward whatever remained of the life she had built and lost in the space of a single morning.
She didn’t look back. The wagon creaked into motion behind her, its wheels finding the pavement again, carrying Ellen, Robert, and Melissa toward the community center.
Charlotte listened to the sound grow fainter until the trees swallowed it completely, and then there was nothing but the sound of her own uneven footsteps and the occasional, distant call of a bird that hadn’t yet learned to be afraid.