by Bob Mayer
Once a teacher had been kind and told Moms that when her mother was a senior in the same high school, she was the prettiest girl in her class. Always dancing and always smiling.
Moms kept digging until she turned the corner, out of the gaze of the empty socket of the window into the kitchen. She felt a bit better. But then she remembered she’d felt bad hearing her teacher’s words, such a contrast to what she knew of her mother. Now it made her almost happy to know there had once been a girl inside the faded housedress and cuffed loafers.
Her mother had always worn the loafers. They’d made a clicking sound when she did move, and Moms had liked that—the fact that she never snuck up on anyone.
Moms kept digging until it was too dark to see. Nada would have told her to bring night vision goggles, but then Nada had had his own issues with memories and how to deal with them.
Moms didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she threw a poncho liner on the ground and lay on it. She stared up at the moon, feeling the pain radiating from her hands, up her arms, and numbly into her brain. She remembered the creaking bags of onions, the sound etched into her brain so deep, she doubted Frasier and his machine could extricate it.
Because one day it wasn’t the onions.
Her brothers never checked back. They left and never looked back; Moms supposed men could do that. But even on the other side of the world, Moms would check in once in a while. And then one day at Area 51, she’d called and there was no answer and she knew, she just knew it was bad.
She’d come back. That day the stale butt pile hadn’t grown. The teacup rested on the table, but the chair was gone. The root cellar door was open, amplifying the sound of the creaking rope, but even then, Moms had immediately known it was too loud, the house too still.
She knew everything before she took the first step down into the cellar. And she stopped when she saw the loafers turning idly in the air, one half off, the other determinedly in place. She saw the piece of paper on the dirt floor and forced herself to walk back out without seeing too much or taking the note.
She’d violated a Nada Yada before she even knew what they were.
She didn’t look up.
She didn’t want to see.
Moms had called the police, because this had to be done right. Let them take the note, cut the body down.
She didn’t want to know, because the note could be about her.
Who knew?
Some of the others might have wanted to change some one thing in their lives, something in their past. This she understood, especially Nada’s choice. But Moms had finally understood that nothing needed changing for her.
Nothing changed in her past would make her now better.
But now she was fixing something for the future.
She was the result of this and there was a reason for it; she’d suspected it, but now she was certain of it.
She began digging before the sun came up and didn’t finish the circle until nearly dark. She didn’t stop to admire her handiwork. She went to the car and dragged out the heavy body of Mr. Calloway. He’d gone to school with her mother, and he used to be a deputy. He’d been the one who’d responded first, and she hadn’t picked up a clue in her grief. She’d remembered him, too old for a deputy to ever make sheriff.
How Sin Fen knew what was on the note, Moms had no idea. When she’d finally asked about it, she’d been told it had been lost in the sheriff’s files, destroyed in a flood.
But now she knew the real story.
Moms only had to break two of Calloway’s fingers before he told her what he’d done to her mother when she was the prettiest, happiest girl in her senior class. Moms didn’t believe in torture, not really, but she had to know. And she found out there were more, one as recent as six months ago. So she’d simply broken his neck.
Now she dragged him down the stairs and into the root cellar and rolled him into the hole she’d dug under that one rope. She buried him quickly, finally feeling anxious to be done with all this. She went back outside and examined her work in progress: the cleared trench around the house, the man under the house, and finally something under that hill of significance. And the house itself.
It was her house now and she could do with it as she chose.
She took the wedding album with the cut-out pictures and postcards and placed it in the half-assembled dollhouse.
Then she spread the accelerant Mac had taught her how to make in one of his arcane classes about destruction.
Mac had done a good job because the house was consumed quickly. The cleared trench kept the fire from spreading to the dry grass. Moms was killing the house, but she had no intention of hurting anything but the man who’d crushed her mother and the house that was never a home because of that.
Moms was three miles down the highway before she heard the first siren.
She didn’t look back. She steered with one hand. In the other she held a teacup covered in tiny painted roses.
It was enough.
When it changed back, Roland was driving a pickup truck while Neeley was in the passenger seat. Roland was totally focused on the here and now, negotiating the dirt trail in the Green Mountains, because Roland was a man who could live and flourish in the here and now.
That’s a rare, and valuable, trait.
One Neeley was beginning to truly understand. She wasn’t focused on the road or Roland’s driving. She was focused on him at the moment. She’d decided a little while ago that the biggest difference between Roland and Gant was that Roland talked when Gant would have known to be quiet. Roland was rambling on right now about having done some Winter Warfare training years ago in the Green Mountains, and whether she responded or not didn’t seem to matter to him.
The drive to the closest town, South Lincoln, had started bringing back huge swaths of memory, and she wanted to be still with them and the emotions that came from remembering each tree and rock and turn. They’d left the paved road behind and the memories had grown stronger along the overgrown dirt trail up the west side of Mount Ellen, as she recalled all the times she and Gant had made this drive down to town for supplies, or to go further, on a mission, and then returned.
She’d been short one return, which she was now making.
As they got closer to where the cabin was, or should be—she reminded herself, she felt a deep pain from the last time on this road, when she’d driven away after she buried Gant, promising herself never to return. Either in fact or in memory. But now she was doing both, and Roland wouldn’t shut the hell up! Not only was he talking, he was asking her questions.
“I learned to ski in the Army,” Roland was reminiscing. “I still don’t like it. It’s cold. Can you ski? Maybe we can go skiing sometime.”
And then she suddenly realized he was talking because he was nervous. Roland had barely said three words before the Sanction on Whidbey Island. He hadn’t been nervous lying in wait to kill someone, but traveling back into her past with Gant, he was nervous and that made her smile, to think her own past could make this big man nervous and chatty.
Roland was the first man since Gant she could close both eyes with. She felt safe with him. Not just physically safe, although Roland was as fierce a protection as one could get in human form.
Neeley had been alert for years, and she was exhausted. The closer they got to the cabin, the more she feared it would be gone, and then there would be no way to orient herself or know where Gant’s body lay, all alone, in these acres of meadows and wild flowers gently blowing in the mid-morning breeze.
She’d often thought of him over the years, lying in the cold, cold earth, all alone, with no one coming to visit. It would strike at the oddest times, spurred by the strangest things.
As they went higher up the mountain, Neeley thought what a sacrilege it would be to forget where the grave was that Gant had dug himself, once he knew his time was coming to an end. At the time, she’d felt nothing but his courage and remarkable loving strength that he’d saved her the t
ask. Not because it would have been too much physically—she was stronger than him by then—but he’d sensed how much pain each shovelful of dirt would have caused her.
It had been hard enough to put him in the hole, fill it in, and then leave—leaving him behind forever because she could have never managed coming back to this place where joy and love had twisted into loss and grief. So much so that so many years later, she could feel as though no time had passed at all.
And to come back with someone else, another man, that had never occurred to her as a possibility. Neeley had kept herself very busy for so long, working for Hannah and the Cellar, and shoving all that pain into a deep pit where healing couldn’t reach, trying to keep it forgotten but occasionally remembering, with the pain so fresh and raw and savage that she feared it would rip her apart.
She’d forgotten Gant because she had to. She’d forgotten all of this place and all of the memories and just started living a different life. She must have done a good job, she knew, because someone like Frasier had never shown up to wipe away her memories of Gant, like they had wiped poor Nada’s wife and child away into the darkness.
That didn’t mean she was psychologically healthy, Neeley knew. Doctor Golden was like a puppy on a leash these last years, begging Hannah to get a crack at Neeley’s damaged psyche. What Golden didn’t understand, though, was that Neeley had been damaged goods long before Gant.
Without thinking, Neeley reached for Roland’s hand and he let go of the steering wheel, wrapping hers in his big paw.
“We should be here,” he said, with a glance at the GPS. “I don’t see anything.”
“Stop,” Neeley said. She looked all around. “It’s gone,” she whispered and began to cry. She looked around the huge meadow with a franticness that she had never felt before. There were native wildflowers blooming everywhere and she couldn’t spot anything to give her a bearing on where the cabin had been.
“Nero,” she finally said with a deep bitterness. “He sent his man Bailey here. I knew he would. He burned it down.” She fumbled with the door and stumbled out of the truck. Roland hopped out in a hurry, scurrying, as best a man that big could scurry, around the front of the truck to join her.
Neeley walked forward, trying to remember, looking up at the top of the mountain, remembering the mornings watching the sun come over it, lying in Gant’s arms. “It was near here.”
Roland was at her side, pointing. “There. Rocks. Probably the chimney.”
Neeley walked over, Roland hovering at her side.
He was right. The crumbling remains of the stone chimney marked the cabin’s site. Pieces of charred wood were buried underneath the plant life that had grown over the site.
Roland tried to hug her, but she shoved him away. “You don’t understand! No one is truly dead until no one remembers their name.”
Roland reached out and gently took her face between his two calloused hands, tilting her head so she looked into his eyes. “You remember his name. And now I remember his name. Gant.”
“But what does it mean if I can’t even remember his grave?” She pulled away and kicked through the grass. “Here somewhere. But where exactly?”
Roland turned to look over the site. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“Over there.” He pointed and then Neeley saw it too.
A large swatch of blue, solid blue, in the midst of an ocean of white and green and yellow and pink. A rectangle of pure blue.
Neeley began to run, and she stumbled over rocks and chunks of wood, but she didn’t care, going faster and faster until she got to the blue. A perfect rectangle of low-growing beautiful blue blooms. Within that rectangle she knew she’d found him.
She fell onto her knees, and Roland caught up to her and stood right next to her.
“Wow,” he whispered. “Those are really pretty.”
And his words were so true.
Neeley wrapped an arm around his firm and safe thigh, resting her head against the hard muscle. He was like a rock. Her rock. And Gant was here because not only had he dug the hole, he’d planted his seeds in the dirt that would go above him to bloom with the warm sun every year. To make the cold, cold earth just a little bit warmer above him.
He’d known she’d come back, even though he had warned her never to.
Perhaps he had hoped she would come back. A hope he’d never been able to say.
There was something to be said for talking.
Neeley could feel the rough fabric of Roland’s trousers grow damp against her face, soaked by her tears.
And he spoke, at a time Gant would have remained silent, but she realized who she was now, that she needed the words.
“This was a righteous dude,” Roland said. “You were lucky to have him while you did. These flowers are nice. Do you know what they are?”
“They’re forget-me-nots,” she whispered. She realized he hadn’t heard and said it again, pulling her face away from his pants leg. “They’re called forget-me-nots.”
And Roland only said, “I have to go to the truck.”
And he left her there, right when she did need to be left alone. Neeley edged forward on her knees, into the center of the blue. She lay down on her back, exactly in the middle of the grave and stared up at the blue sky and remembered the good times.
When it changed back for Scout, she was dreaming, with no sound of her mother singing downstairs intruding, nor the smell of bacon. A dream so real, she could smell the grass in the cemetery. It had been freshly mown, but the stone markers would always stand in their solemn rows. In perfect, final formation.
She knew Nada would have approved.
She was aware she was asleep, but she knew she needed to stay asleep. Not to fight it like a nightmare, but to let it glide over her like the gentle breeze that caressed the shoulders of the stone markers. They were stones for departed soldiers, the dates affirming that any decade seems to require the blood and life of young men and women, as if that greased the progress of time and history, but this part of Arlington, Section 60, had its own time, the Global War on Terror.
Gathered around some of the markers were families and friends and comrades in arms.
She paused and saw a woman standing, staring at a stone. The inscription summed up a life:
CARL COYNE
OPERATION RED WINGS
28 JUNE 2005
PURPLE HEART
BRONZE STAR
US NAVY SEAL
The woman was crying and Scout wanted to tell her not to. That fate had intervened, in more ways than the woman could imagine, for the better.
But that wasn’t allowed.
Scout glided past them. Near the end of one row was a girl. A pretty young girl, her hair long and twisted into a braid so thick that Scout both admired her and envied her at the same time. Scout glided toward her and halted. She didn’t have to read the marker, because she finally knew the name engraved there: Edward Moreno. And now she knew the date, one most Americans had forgotten; but it was all clear to Scout what had changed for some and then changed back and not changed for everyone.
She looked at the girl and saw her father in those eyes and the way her smile tilted.
Isabella, I knew your father. He was a great soldier and man.
The girl was startled and looked about, as if the wind had disturbed her without ruffling the flowers on the grave.
Scout moved on, not wanting to intrude anymore, but she knew Nada had made a choice. He had chosen that the stone bear his name over the alternative of standing in front of a different marker bearing his daughter’s name and her mother’s name. And as much as Scout would miss him, she also felt a smidge of happiness that Nada had been allowed to make this choice. That he’d been allowed to remember, both the wonderful and the terrible and then choose.
She would always miss him, as would all the other Nightstalkers, but the man they missed, they did so because he was the man who would make this choice.
And then
the dream faded and Scout knew it was time to face reality. It passed like the early morning fog over the river outside her house. She was in bed and her mother wasn’t singing and there was no smell of bacon permeating the air.
No mother cooking for a beloved daughter. Just the thud, thud of Mother’s feet meeting the rolling trail of the treadmill. Scout lay there and listened to the rhythmic stride of her mother’s surprisingly loud tread for such skinny legs and pulled the covers over her head.
And maybe she drifted off to sleep, but maybe it was the sight, because in the noise she could hear some words.
Thud, thud.
Hey, Scout.
Thud, thud.
Nada!
Thud, thud.
I’ll miss you, kid.
Thud, thud.
Everything is just right.
Thud, thud.
Keep me in your heart.
And then the treadmill stopped.
Scout got up. She grabbed her deployment bag from under her bed.
She had places to be and things to do.
The four Nightstalkers from Area 51 were gathered in the treeline watching as Winthrop Carter, the man who would now never be known as Kirk, chopped firewood, his lean body leaning into every swing of the axe.
Eagle had Googled the Department of Defense database and they knew the scant details. Carter had some pockmarks on his side, shrapnel wounds from his tour in Afghanistan with the Infantry. After getting booted out of Ranger School for cheating, he’d gotten out of the army and come back to Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666.
Carter—it was hard for the Nightstalkers to think of him as that, as he would always be Kirk to them—slammed the axe home into a log and turned as a young girl called out from the door of the old house.
“That’s Pads,” Eagle said. “His younger sister.”
“She must be important,” Doc said.
“Or not,” Ivar argued, “if Sin Fen allowed him to come back here to take care of her.”
Carter-Kirk walked with the girl hand in hand down the rutted dirt road to a pitted single-lane asphalt road. They stood at the intersection, chatting, while the Nightstalkers watched, not quite sure why they had been drawn here.