The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  I turned and saw Vanessa’s boat, still upended, bobbing in the shallows on the far side of the eddy. Arch was already ashore and running back upriver.

  A lone paddler in a narrow kayak floated up the crest of the great wave crashing against the canyon wall and hurtled into the chute with practiced grace. He was a bearded man, maybe about forty, wearing a fiberglass helmet. He came up alongside the bank beneath me.

  “Our friend swam,” Arch shouted. “Did you see her?”

  The man shook his head.

  Arch took off running. The bearded man and I got out of our boats. He gathered a throw rope and a first-aid kit. We came up over the rocks and spotted Vanessa, floating against the far wall of the canyon, in the eddy. The cliff around her was vertical, featureless, far too slick for her to climb out. Her face was frighteningly pale.

  Arch mounted a large boulder jutting out over the current. I thought he meant to hurl a rope to her; instead, he leapt into the air and disappeared into the river. A moment later, he surfaced and swam toward Vanessa. He wrapped his arms around her and spoke close to her ear. Vanessa nodded, her own face mirroring Arch’s fixed determination.

  Arch pushed off the wall, holding Vanessa from behind. They hit the chute and disappeared. Their heads popped up just as they descended into the current, hurtling toward the hole below. Just before he went under, Arch pushed Vanessa forward, flinging her past the danger and out toward the gentle water as he vanished beneath the roiling foam.

  The bearded man tossed his throw rope to Vanessa. I stood at the edge of the bank, searching for Arch below the surface of all of that noisy, bubbling water. The seconds stretched on. Counting aloud, I realized with mounting dread that he’d been down for close to a minute. For an instant, I tried to fathom the unthinkable. And then he popped up, gasping for air, some sixty feet beyond where he’d gone under.

  “Hot damn. He swam right down into it, below the current,” the man said. “Down’s the only way out. Smart kid. That hole’s a killer.”

  As soon as the water was shallow and gentle enough for him to stand, Arch went straight for Vanessa. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, holding herself. Her whole body shook, her face a blank mask of fatigue—what soldiers call the thousand-yard stare. Arch sat down behind her, covering her with an emergency blanket, enclosing her in his arms.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, the stranger was pointing up into the air over my head. There it was—the Royal Gorge Bridge, a thousand feet above us. From that distance, the center of it looked like a black thread stretched taut across the sky.

  The sun glinted off the windows of a train as it passed over. In the distance, we heard a long, lone whistle. I looked back at Arch clinging to Vanessa, her eyes cold and emotionless, her body warmed by his imperfect devotion, Arch chastened but also exultant.

  Recalling that moment years after, I might as well have been standing there again, only now able to describe what I felt then but could not express, even to myself. I knew that no matter how I loved them, however close I might wish to be, I would always remain on the outside of that circle. I knew that theirs was a charmed existence, in ways that went far beyond their privilege. And I was quite certain that Arch would never die.

  I called Vanessa before I left to go into the office. I wasn’t confident she’d answer the phone. She picked up on the first ring.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “At the farm,” I said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “I turned it off.”

  “Why? What were you doing?”

  I told her what I had found waiting for me in the cellar at Jamie’s place, what I had heard.

  “That’s unfortunate,” she said.

  “Unfortunate?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I listened to the silence on the other end of the call, trying to imagine what Vanessa was doing, what she was thinking.

  “I’m going to tell him,” I said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because you love him.”

  I drew in a breath and let it out slowly.

  “Let’s just go,” I said. “You and me. We can go anywhere you want.”

  I hadn’t given the words a single thought. They just spilled out.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Neither are you.”

  “Vanessa,” I said.

  “Don’t say it, Charlie,” she said.

  “Don’t say what?” I said.

  “That you love me.”

  “I do,” I said. “You know I do.”

  “I know,” she said. “And you know too.”

  “What do I know?”

  “That it isn’t enough.”

  I wished with all my heart that I could prove her wrong.

  “I have to go,” Vanessa said. “Goodbye, Charlie.”

  I put the phone down. There was nothing else to do but go find Arch.

  When I reached the office, he was in a meeting. I sat in front of his desk until he came in.

  “What the hell, bud,” he said. “We’ve been worried about you.”

  I shut the door behind me. Arch sat down behind the desk. I told him everything Nick Averett had told me, what he had shown me on his computer, what he wanted. Arch crossed his arms behind his head. I thought I detected a hint of worry in his expression. It might just as likely have been a projection of my wish to see him squirm for once.

  “I need to tell you what I did while you were in Chattanooga. Do you want to know what I was doing?” I asked. “Who I was with?”

  He shifted in his chair. A look of mild contempt came over his face. I took out a cigarette.

  “Don’t smoke in here,” Arch said.

  “You’d better call Averett,” I said. “The clock is ticking.” I took a long drag and let the smoke trickle out through my nostrils.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  “Do tell.”

  “I went out to the farm last night.”

  “You told Jim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to begin to answer that,” I said. “But that’s not why I mention it. Jim gave me something. Something of my mother’s.” I took the lighter out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  “That belonged to my father,” I said.

  I told Arch about the widows and Norman Hatcher and the pictures and the letters.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  He eased back into his chair and fondled the Zippo just as I had, flipping the lid open and closed, and then placed it on the desk. He slumped back into his chair. I slipped the lighter back into my pocket.

  “Arch,” I said. “I think I’m done.”

  “You’re just hungover.”

  “No,” I said. “Really. Consider this my resignation.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “We can get past this. We love each other, right? All of us. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Not this time,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?” he said. “Go back to painting portraits?”

  “There’s a war going on, you know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll follow in my father’s footsteps and be all that I can be.”

  Arch laughed. “What, you’re going to join the Army? You? You’re not your father, Charlie. You’re an artist. Besides, you’re too old.”

  “I hear they’ll take anyone these days.”

  “Now I think you’re still drunk.”

  I doused my cigarette in a half-filled Styrofoam coffee cup.

  “Come on, Charlie,” he said. “I need you. Now more than ever. We’re going to win, you know. It’ll be over soon, and we’ll go to Washington, and
it will be better, for all of us.”

  Arch stood and rounded the desk. “Come on, brother,” he said.

  He almost had me. Then I remembered something Vanessa had told me long ago. “Arch doesn’t love anyone as much as he loves being loved,” she’d said. Was that true for Vanessa too? I wondered. For me?

  “I do love you, you know,” I said. “And I will miss you.”

  “You just need a good night’s sleep,” he said. “You’ll feel better after. We’re going to win, and then we’ll all go to DC, and we’ll start over. All of us. It’s going to be fine. You’ll see.”

  I dropped the cup into the wastebasket and walked out the door.

  A year later, Arch and Vanessa were in Washington, and I was on the other side of the world, consumed by heat and long hours of fear and dread and suffocating silence between eruptions of violence and the calls to prayer pealing out across the rooftops.

  In time, Arch and Vanessa left my dreams, replaced by the faces of dead soldiers, and, sometimes, of my mother, young again, with Sunny and the other women by the pool at Montague Village, and the father I never knew.

  Epilogue

  The Spirit and the Flesh

  The place had been dead when we arrived. It was the sort of joint Mike and I both liked: old and dark, a bit grungy, a single television behind the bar, a string of colored Christmas tree lights strung above the shelves of bottles.

  “You never spoke to him again?” Mike asked.

  “Not once,” I said. “He kept calling me for a while, but I never answered. I never even listened to the messages. Eventually, I threw the phone away. Everything I knew about him came from what I saw in the news.”

  “And her?”

  “The same. Or almost. She never called.”

  “And you never tried to reach her?”

  “I didn’t think I could bear it,” I said. “I wrote her a letter once, in Iraq. I was feeling the way I think my father must have felt when he wrote those letters to my mother. I never sent it. I read it over and over. Then I burned it.”

  Mike emptied his drink.

  “Another round?” he asked.

  “I’d better not.”

  A waitress appeared beside the booth. She pointed at the plate between us.

  “You want a box for that?” she asked.

  We’d ordered food so as not to look like we were just getting loaded: stale tortilla chips smothered by cheese, pickled jalapenos, and watery salsa. The menu called the dish Freedom Nachos.

  “No, thank you,” Mike said. “Just the check.”

  I emptied my drink.

  “Do you still paint?” he asked.

  “I haven’t touched a brush in years,” I said.

  Mike pointed at my father’s lighter, next to my cigarettes and the overflowing ashtray.

  “Can I see that?” he said.

  I slid the lighter over to him. He flipped open the lid before setting it back on the table and pushing it back toward me.

  “Last week, when I came into the chapel in the morning, there was a boy there,” he said. “A private, about the same age as the kid whose parents we just left. He was standing in the pulpit holding a revolver in his mouth.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve seen things like that? And it’s not all combat trauma. A lot of these men had never been deployed. Why do they do want to take their own lives? Why would anyone?”

  At the bar, an old man sat on a stool at the corner, his face lit up by the blue screen of a video poker machine.

  “What did you do?”

  “I talked to him. I told him how when Christ hung in agony on the cross, he cried out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ I think hell happened in those five words. Why have you forsaken me? In that moment, Jesus was in hell. Not the physical agony, but the death of the spirit. But he overcame death. Body and soul. He showed us the way out of hell.”

  “Did that work?”

  “Enough to calm him down and get him into treatment.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know. I was planning to check in on him this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You have more important things to do.”

  Mike reached across the table and grasped my hand.

  “You’re not going to pray for me, are you?” I asked.

  He smiled.

  “The thought never crossed my mind,” he said.

  In the next six months, I delivered two more casualty notifications, one in Goodlettsville, the other in Murfreesboro. Mike Bailey was not with me; both boys were Baptists. After the second, I put in for my discharge.

  For a while, I lived with Sunny and her husband—they’d been married for eight years—while I looked for a new place of my own. I’d kept my house in East Nashville when I enlisted; Sunny suggested that I sell it. Gentrification had made it worth more than triple what I’d paid. But I liked the tenants—a high school biology teacher and a midwife with two straw-haired children, one a kindergartner in the neighborhood school.

  Dolly was living in New York, working at an auction house. I wrote her long letters narrating the history of our mother’s life as I remembered it. I flew up one weekend on the pretext of visiting the museums and galleries and took her out to lunch at a bistro on the Upper West Side, near her apartment building. She had grown lean and leggy, like Vanessa, but with my mother’s chestnut hair and eyes. She spent most of our time together looking at her phone. But she met me, and she didn’t tell me to fuck off and get out of her life. I left feeling more hope than regret.

  Another year passed. I never tried to reach Vanessa and had stopped wishing she would try to reach me. So the day she called, the sound of her voice hit me with the same force I’d have felt if it had been my mother’s.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Home,” she said.

  The last time I’d seen her, she was on television, next to Dan Baird when he announced his intention to run for Arch’s vacated Senate seat. She stood there looking as stoic and serene as Baird, who had every reason to spit on Arch’s grave, talked about the tragic loss of such a promising public servant and vowed to continue the good work Arch had begun for the country and for the people of Tennessee.

  The next morning, I drove across Nashville and into Belle Meade. A fog had settled overnight across Middle Tennessee, thinning with the rising sun into a misty vapor. I turned off West End, onto the Boulevard, and steered up the long pebbled driveway. She met me at the front door.

  For years, I had seen Vanessa only on screens and in photographs, where she looked more or less unchanged by time. Face-to-face, I could see the lines around her eyes, worn deeper, no doubt, by sadness as much as by the years. This is not to say that she was not as lovely as ever, or that I did not feel seized by the old yearning. I mention it only to observe that those little signs, visible only at close range, reminded me how far removed we were from that first sun-drenched afternoon by the pool, and that heartbroken drive on the Natchez Trace, and that last night when she arrived at my house unannounced and I followed her back to my bedroom.

  “You’re out of uniform,” she said.

  “That’s over now,” I said. “Trying to get used to being a civilian again.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll have one less thing to worry about.”

  “You worry about me?”

  “I never stopped worrying about you.”

  Behind her, the walls of the great room were bare, much of the furniture gone, the rest draped with white covers.

  A tray of fruit and scones sat at the center of the kitchen table, along with a set of fine china dishes and cups on saucers, one cup half full, a faint lipstick stain on the rim.

  “Will you eat?” she asked.

  “Just coffee, please.”

  We carried our coffee out to the table on the slate patio behind the kitchen. The mist had burned off. The grass was still long and green in the sunshine, but scattered
with fallen leaves as the trees turned red and gold and yellow with the coming of fall. We sat down at the patio table and sipped our coffee, neither of us wishing to waste time with small talk but unsure what to say.

  “I thought I might see you at the memorial service,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to be a distraction.”

  “I could have used one.”

  “I’m sorry. To be honest, I didn’t think I could bear it.”

  What couldn’t I bear? Listening to a naïve priest try to pin a happy ending on the tail end of a tragedy? Seeing all of those people I’d run away from once again? Being just another face in the crowd, somewhere in the back of the room, inauspicious, anonymous, unrecognizable?

  “The news said something about a note,” I said. “What did it say?”

  “He said he was sorry. He told me where to find him and that I should send someone else. That’s pretty much it.”

  “There must have been something.”

  “There is always something.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Vanessa took in a long breath and let it out slowly. She pushed her hair behind her ears. I noticed her pearl earrings—the same, I assumed, as the ones she wore on the day of Arch’s first election. They had belonged to Arch’s grandmother. Heirloom jewelry. Who would wear them next? Dolly, no doubt. Things go on, as they must.

  “Do you remember Sandy Hook?” she said.

  “How could I forget?” When it happened, I was still in Iraq, where over the course of the war I had seen so much of man’s inhumanity to man that I had nearly lost the capacity for pity. There had been times when I’d heard or read of some fresh atrocity back home and observed the horror and indignation flowing forth on television. Only in the United States of America, I thought, does anyone still feel that such things are not as predictable as the sunrise. But none of the horrors I had witnessed could harden my heart against what had happened in that school.