After a harrowing climb up a narrow valley, they reached the top of Kenosha Pass. There the world seemed to open like a book as they looked with awe over hundreds of miles of flat plain ringed on all sides by snowcapped mountains. Even the sky seemed bigger than it did back east. Limitless. “Closer to heaven,” Lucy whispered.
Driving down the other side of the pass, Marlene experienced something akin to vertigo. The thought crossed her mind that if she wasn’t in her truck, she might have just dissipated into the immensity of her surroundings, like water sizzling off a hot skillet. The feeling continued for Marlene as they crossed the high-mountain plain called South Park. Only she began to imagine that the clean, crisp mountain air was stripping away the defenses she’d erected around her psyche, or soul, peeling each layer like sunburned skin. She wondered if there would be anything left by the time they reached New Mexico. At least anything worth saving.
• • •
Feeling vulnerable and shaken, she turned her thoughts to her husband, whom she considered the most stable force in the universe. When they met almost thirty years earlier, he was just recovering from the blow of his first wife leaving him for a woman. Most men she knew would have let that batter their egos into a simpering shell of manhood, or an angry misogynist. But he’d accepted his first wife’s departure as simply a sad ending to an important chapter in his life, one he blamed on his own preoccupation with his job and failure to be a good husband, rather than her betrayal.
Marlene believed that her husband’s lack of recrimination was connected to his mother’s death from cancer when he was in high school. She knew the loss had shaken him to his core, but it was one of the few areas in their relationship where he allowed no trespass. He explained that it wasn’t something he liked to talk about, and that he’d put it all behind him. “Part of life,” he’d say before immediately changing the subject.
As a result, Marlene knew only the easy-to-talk-about aspects of his younger years. He’d always described himself as fortunate to have come from a family situation in which he had the support and unconditional love of both parents. He’d thought of his home, he said, as a refuge where he always felt safe and secure. When Lucy was born, it was something he told her he wanted for their children. Lot of good it did him, she thought as she passed through the shadow of fourteen-thousand-foot Mount Princeton, having made the mistake of choosing Marlene Ciampi to plant his seed in.
Whatever their role, Butch was as good and decent a man as any Marlene had ever known. In fact, better than all but a very few, and most of those were priests or monks. He wasn’t religious in the sense that Lucy was religious. He didn’t go to the synagogue or celebrate the holy days. But he lived by a code of personal conduct that drew a line in the sand between right and wrong with very little no-man’s-land in between. While other men, even basically good men, would find ways to justify bending the rules or looking the other way for personal gain or to avoid problems, Butch stuck to his principles, even if it cost him professionally, financially, or personally.
However, such values weren’t always easy to live with, especially because she was no angel. There were times when she thought him impossibly rigid and wished that he could lighten up, be more human, or at least accept that not everyone, including his wife, saw the truth through the same prism.
When they talked about it, she’d pointed out that the world ran on compromises and that no one knew what was right for everyone else all the time. He’d shrugged and said, “I can only say what’s right for me. I do happen to believe that rules are the cornerstone of civilization and that compromises, while necessary in personal relationships, when used by the government to simply make things run smoother or for the greater good erodes the foundation. It’s like most of the people who keep the district attorney’s office in business. The first time they commit a crime, it’s usually out of desperation or stupidity; they may even feel remorse. But once the line is crossed, the next time becomes easier, the voice of their conscience quieter, until it is silenced altogether. The same for us when we start fudging on the rules, or look the other way. It becomes easier until the little voice that tells us something isn’t right becomes mute. The government wants access to private information, or maybe relaxed search-and-seizure laws, and because we’re afraid of the next terrorist attack or the criminals, we go along with it. We tell ourselves that when the threat is gone, we’ll go back to the way it was…but will we? Can we?”
It made her angry that she could think of no better argument than that she believed there were times when the ends did justify the means. Take the Iraq War, for instance. As far as she was concerned, Saddam Hussein was just another murdering piece of shit who needed to be cast from the circle of humanity. The world didn’t need an excuse to take him out, any more than most of those same bleeding hearts who protested the war wouldn’t have shed a tear if a homegrown mass murderer were gunned down in their neighborhood by the police. Except that then they would understand the threat because it was right outside their door. Yet she knew that her husband would have insisted that Satan himself be given his Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.
It was because Butch was who he was that she didn’t want him to go into politics. She thought that for all his real-world experience with the worst of human nature, her husband could be incredibly naive. He had this dream of returning the office to the days of old man Garrahy. But as much as she loved him and admired his principles—most of the time—she also felt that he was kidding himself to think that one man could make a difference. The district attorney’s office had changed, turned into a monster of a bureaucracy. Its mission was no longer the dispensation of justice, but giving the appearance that something was actually being done to rein in the criminals. She worried that his refusal to bend would leave him broken and dispirited when he finally had to accept the futility of his quest.
Marlene would have preferred, if he insisted on remaining with the DA, that he stay in the second spot—let someone else deal with the bureaucratic headaches, the press, and the politics. Better yet, she thought he should go into private practice. “You’ve done your share, more than your share,” she told him one night as she was lying in his arms resting between amorous bouts. “Let someone else pick up the gauntlet. You could choose among the biggest law firms, all of which would kill to have Butch Karp come on as a partner. Exercise that fine mind in front of the Supreme Court, become a justice yourself. Or, if you like, hang a shingle out of the Village and defend NYU students’ right to smoke pot.” He didn’t say anything, but she felt his body grow tense, and it had taken her very special attentions to get him to relax again. She’d stopped talking about it that night and instead fell asleep and dreamed of running away with him to some distant island where the population had no concept of legal briefs.
When he’d called a family meeting some weeks later and asked their opinion of his running for office, she’d declined to give hers. “I haven’t been around enough lately that I feel I have a right to say,” she insisted. But one of the reasons she’d left for New Mexico was she didn’t want to be a wet blanket on her husband’s aspirations.
• • •
However, it was not the main reason. That was far more personal, dark, and deep than whether Butch ran for office. After her son was shot, she had no qualms about asking her friend, Tran Do Vinh, the Vietnamese gangster, to seek retribution. She felt she had all the prima facie evidence necessary to live with her decision. A family she had befriended had been brutally murdered and her son blinded by the men she wanted Tran and his men to kill. The law had stumbled when it was supposed to protect the innocent, and then acted as though it was powerless to deal with the murderers. So she had taken it upon herself to set justice back on its feet.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t feel any guilt for arranging what was essentially the execution of other human beings, some of them “collateral damage,” otherwise known as women and children. They’d joined the other unquiet ghos
ts whose deaths she’d had a hand in; but their voices and faces, the nightmares and personal sacrifices, were a price she’d thought she could live with.
She wasn’t, however, as prepared for the look in the eyes of her husband, even if he loved her too much to say what he was thinking. Felon. Murderer? He mostly chose to ignore it, but she knew that it put him in conflict with his principles. She hated being the one—probably the only one besides his children, and they never would have done it—who could make Butch Karp look the other way. She wondered if she was any better in the final analysis than the people she’d killed or had killed. Yes, they had been vicious men who preyed on the innocent people who had no one else willing to step up, including the law. But that same law—the law Butch, and at one time she, had sworn to uphold—held that murder was murder, even when it was evil men who died.
Haunted by a guilty conscience, hurt by her husband’s unspoken censure, worried about her influence on her family, she’d moved to the dog farm in part to get away from the constant reminders and from there, perhaps, fade away until no one remembered Marlene Ciampi. But her family wouldn’t let her go quite so easily.
Butch had gone to great lengths to point out that her latest fatal outburst—the run-in with the terrorist bombers—had not only saved many innocents lives, “and mine,” it had not been motivated by revenge or vigilante justice. When she looked in his eyes, she saw that he was speaking the truth about how he felt and that made a difference. The mayor of New York had even given her a commendation for bravery that further reinforced the notion that maybe she wasn’t a completely lost cause. It was enough that for the first time in a year she’d felt comfortable sleeping in her own bed with her beloved husband snoring beside her. But the issues didn’t just go away.
As she’d told Lucy following their mud-wrestling exhibition, there was also the belief that she needed to protect her family from Marlene Ciampi. She considered herself a magnet for violence. She knew that a good percentage of the danger her family had experienced over the years had more to do with her husband’s career than her penchant for trouble. Even the letter bomb that took her eye and scarred her face was intended for him. But that was in the line of hazards associated with his job. She, on the other hand, she gravitated toward danger—not always consciously—like heroin addicts drifted toward Times Square looking for a fix. Nor did she always weigh the unintended consequences of her actions. Case in point, Giancarlo had been placed in harm’s way because she took on the role of avenging angel for the murdered family.
What was the old saying? Live by the sword, die by the sword. Marlene had been convinced for years that sooner or later, she would be the one who got careless or moved a split second too late, and wouldn’t survive. She didn’t want her family near when the sword fell, especially if it came down on their heads as well.
Again, her family had refused to let her wallow in that mire of self-indulgence. Giancarlo wouldn’t even let her apologize for what happened to him. Sometimes she wondered where he came from, as it was hard to believe that such an angel was actually a child of her womb. He was such an old soul that he often made her feel spiritually immature. For the most part, Giancarlo had accepted his affliction as just part of his growth as a human being, like puberty. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he’d focused on music and the inner person. It was as if he were exploring the phenomenon of being blind in a sighted world like a spelunker who drops his flashlight in a cave. A new challenge, but nothing to panic about. He said he did feel sorry for those who had been blind since birth. “At least I have home movies I can play up here,” he told her, tapping his head. Still, there’d been a number of times that she’d noticed a fleeting sad look on his face when his brother, Zak, left to play a sport or got involved in a project that required sight. Only then did she understand that some of his good cheer was just him being brave.
Lucy and Giancarlo were much alike, almost too good to be true. As she and her daughter drove south through the San Luis Valley of Colorado, Lucy had returned to the subject of Felix Tighe. But it was only to point out that what happened with Tighe wasn’t Marlene’s fault; he was out to destroy their entire family because Butch had destroyed his and put him in prison.
Of all her family, Marlene worried the most about her influence on Zak. There was no doubt that he was her son. He wasn’t a bad kid—he had a big, generous heart and was loyal and brave to a fault. But he’d shown early on that he was willing to cut corners to achieve his ends and lied like Pinocchio if it was easier than telling the truth. He was like her, too, in that he didn’t hesitate to resort to violence if he felt that he or someone he loved, particularly his brother, was threatened. It wasn’t only school bullies who had to worry, either. When the terrorists attempted to kidnap Giancarlo, one had ended up with Zak’s knife planted firmly in his thigh and their plans thwarted.
Zak actually admired her for the traits that troubled her husband and worried her other two children. If she’d been willing, he would have happily had her recount every bloody incident like a boy listening to his father’s war stories. She wasn’t willing but that didn’t stop her from worrying that the longer she was around him, the more her personality would rub off on him.
• • •
Marlene was not at all sure why she chose New Mexico for her escape. She’d been talking to Father Dugan one afternoon after meeting with the board of the charitable foundation she’d financed and he ran, when he asked how she was doing. He was aware of her self-exile, probably from Lucy, and had an inkling of what troubled her.
Maybe it was her Catholic upbringing, but Dugan was the one man she felt she could confess to without his judging her. So she’d talked about the demons of guilt that rode her back and her concern that she was a danger to her family. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just going insane, and soon I’ll end up pushing a shopping cart full of all my earthly possessions up and down the Avenue of the Americas,” she said. She said it with a half smile, but even that disappeared when she whispered, “And to tell you the truth, there have been times when I’ve doubted whether I want to live at all.”
Dugan had not brushed off the suicidal ideation, nor had he given her the standard Catholic priest spiel about it being a mortal sin. Instead, he’d reached inside his desk and pulled out the brochure for the Taos Institute of Art Healing. She’d looked at it briefly, then smiled and slid it back across the desk at him.
“Therapy?” she asked. “Been there, done that. Most of the psychologists I’ve met need as much help as I do, maybe more. I’ve had it with lying on a couch talking my ass off—excuse the French—while some guy who couldn’t make it in a real science sits there saying, ‘I see. I see,’ when really they don’t see any more than any street-corner philosopher. And I’m not the sort to sit in a circle with ten other loonies to compare war stories so that we’ll feel better because the others are even more messed up than you are. Or maybe practice falling backward into each other’s arms so we can learn to trust.”
Dugan slid the brochure back. “You need to talk to somebody, Marlene, who can speak to you objectively,” he said. “You know I’m always here for you. But I don’t think you need a priest as much as you need someone who can tell you where you’re full of merde—excuse the English—and where you’re not. I think you need to get away from New York City, and I don’t mean digging a hole out in Long Island and jumping in. But somewhere you might actually enjoy being. Forget the therapy crap if you want, and just look at that beautiful country. I know these people and have sent other troubled souls to them with great results. I have an old friend who is a priest in Taos working with the Indians, and he recommends them highly as well, based on some of the work they’ve done with victims of domestic violence on the reservation…. And who knows, maybe you’re the next Georgia O’Keeffe—she lived and worked in Taos, you know. Sell your paintings and make enough money so you can start another foundation to help the poor and assuage your feelings of guilt because you sent a few
miscreants back to hell where they belong. Pardon the blasphemy; we Catholic priests, of course, believe that every life is sacred. Some are just more sacred than others in my book.”
Dugan paused and reached across the desk to take her hands in his big rough ones. She thought his eyes looked tired and sad as he quietly added, “Or you can do nothing and wait until the demons win and you’re no longer around for the family who loves and needs you. We all need you, Marlene. There is more good in your soul than you know, and I have a feeling that before the end that will matter to many people.”
Marlene smiled and squeezed his hands. Then more to humor her friend than a real interest, she took the brochure with her and said she’d think about it.
When she got home she put the pamphlet on the nightstand and there it sat for a week before she went to bed one night and with nothing else to read, picked it up. She had to admit that there was something about the photograph on the front page of Taos Mountain, a pointed cone blanketed with snow and pine trees rising from what looked like a desert, that intrigued her. Maybe it was the nothing-to-hide honesty of landscape; it was just there. She opened the brochure to read what it had to say about its art programs and how they were tailored to help women who were “suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder associated with violence in their lives.” She thought that the writer of the brochure was probably talking more about women who were victims of violence, rather than perpetrators, but she called the center the next morning anyway.
The administrator who took the call assured her, after Marlene gave her a brief synopsis of her background, that the center’s clients did not fit a single mold. “We don’t use the word victim,” she said. “Not because it’s not accurate, but because the word is debilitating;it allows us to sit around felling sorry for ourselves, or engage in self-destructive behavior, instead of taking responsibility for our own recovery. We, of course, have women who have been raped or beaten or shot, often by people who are supposed to love them. But we also have women who have done the beating or shooting, though granted for some it was in self-defense. You may be unique in your circumstances, but you are not alone in being unique.”
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