by Steven James
The wind rattled my windows, but it didn’t stop me from hearing, in the room next to me, Amber moving around, getting ready for bed.
And all I could manage to do was sit there trying not to think about what had just happened, waiting for the night to become quiet enough for me to be able to rest.
44
As Tessa was washing up, she realized she’d forgotten one of her bags, the one containing her pajamas and the pills she was using to help her sleep, in Sean’s pickup.
Great.
For months she’d bugged Patrick to teach her how to pick locks until around Thanksgiving he finally gave in. Since then she’d gotten pretty good with residential doors and even handcuffs, but cars were not her specialty, and she definitely remembered Sean locking the truck before they came inside.
So now, as quietly as she could, she eased downstairs, donned her jacket and boots, grabbed Sean’s truck keys from the keyboard beside the door, and went outside.
The snow slashed at her, and she had to use one arm to shield her face as she trudged along the path to the driveway. Although the walkway had been shoveled earlier and was bordered by piles of snow nearly six feet deep, in the light from the porch she could see that the storm had formed deep drifts crisscrossing the pathway in front of her.
She picked her way through them.
Despite the ferocity of the storm, everything around her looked so white, so pure, and in a sense, remarkably innocent.
A stark contrast to how she felt inside.
Seven months ago, on the night it happened, she’d watched a man outside the back window of the home where she and Patrick were staying get shot and drop in the moonlight. Detective Cheyenne Warren, the woman who’d just fired the three shots at him, eased out the door, gun in hand, to see if he was alive or dead.
Tessa remembered how terribly her heart was beating.
Beating.
Deep and chilled.
Moments later, she’d heard another shot outside, then the wisp of a door opening and a swish of soft movement behind her. She turned, saw a man’s outline silhouetted against the moonlight seeping through the window behind him; his hand was raised high, something long and narrow in it.
Before she could call out, he brought the object down, hard, against her forehead, sending her spinning to the floor. The world went filtering, black on black.
A buzz inside her head.
Then she was on the carpet and everything was fuzzy and spinning and alive with colors that weren’t colors at all.
And then the man was pressing a knee against her chest and stuffing a gag into her mouth.
Terror rising.
The world became blurry as the ache in her forehead pounded through her, but she was aware of this much: the man dragging her down the hallway toward her room. And then, only a few moments later, she heard the porch door pound open and Patrick calling her name. She struggled to get free but couldn’t. The intruder yanked her to her feet and pressed a gun against her head. With his other hand he clung to a fistful of her hair.
Patrick called again and she tried to shout to him, but beneath her gag she barely managed to make a sound.
Then he was in the hallway, coming toward her, to help her, to save her.
The man jerked her backward into a room, closed the thick oak door, and took off the gag.
He demanded that Patrick tell her who was lying dead outside, threatening to kill her if he refused.
Patrick had tried to buy time, but in the end he’d told her.
Her father.
It was her father who’d been shot.
And when she heard the words, she screamed and Patrick used the moment to shoot at the lock and kick open the door, but the man was behind her, the gun against her temple once again. This time he held his finger over hers, which was pressed against the trigger.
She knew she was going to die. She knew it, knew it, knew it, and reached across her chest, grabbed her elbow, and swung the gun backward.
And squeezed the trigger just as Patrick fired at the man’s forehead. She felt the wet blowback of blood against the back of her neck as the bullets both found their mark and the man behind her died.
Crumpled to the carpet.
Then her ear was ringing and she was trembling, terrified, and Patrick was helping her outside and away from that house filled with so much darkness and death.
The hearing in her ear that was only inches from the gun never came back, and since that night Patrick had tried to reassure her that he was the one who’d killed the man; that it wasn’t her fault, that the gun in her hand had fired accidentally.
He had tried to convince her of that.
And had failed.
Because she knew she’d pulled that trigger, had willed it, had planned it, had done it.
And in the end she was glad she did.
She’d lost her father that day, and somewhere between tilting the gun and shooting a man in the face, she’d lost herself.
The snow whirlwinded around her, forcing her to turn up her collar all the way even before she reached the truck. As she tried to unlock the door she fumbled with the keys and ended up dropping them into the slope of snow at her feet.
The wind bit at her.
With her bare hands she began digging through the powder, looking for the keys.
Remembering.
Of course she’d mourned the loss of her father, but since she’d hardly known him, it was almost like mourning a stranger—someone you hear about on the news: a body was found in the park and you feel a wash of loss and concern, and then end up with only a vague sense of guilt that you don’t feel worse than you do.
In the seven months since that night, she’d learned to forgive the woman who’d accidentally killed her dad.
And over time, life had gone on.
In a way.
Because even as the sting of her father’s death had healed, the reality of what she’d done, the fact that she’d pulled the trigger and killed a person, weighed on her now more heavily than ever.
She finally found the keys, unlocked the door, and went for her bag. As soon as she had it, she left the truck and started for the house again.
She had them.
The pills that would help her sleep.
45
Tessa reentered the house. Stomped the snow from her boots.
Patrick didn’t know about the secret wound she carried.
Almost immediately after the shooting she’d decided it was something she needed to work through on her own, but that hadn’t gone so well. She’d even tried seeing a psychiatrist a few times on Thursday afternoons, skipping her seventh-hour study period, bugging out of school and cruising over to the guy’s office before heading home, using the money she’d inherited from her dad to pay for it.
But her shrink was a one-trick pony telling her over and over that getting her feelings out into the open was good for her, when in reality all it had done was churn up the pain and harsh memories and then leave them choppy and gray on the surface of her life when the fifty-minute sessions were over.
She’d stopped seeing him after three weeks.
She hung up the keys, shed the coat and boots, and then took her bag to her room.
Yes, that man she’d killed had a gun pressed against her head, yes, it was self-defense—she knew all of that intellectually and had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t guilty according to any law.
But reassuring her conscience was a different story.
“Tell me how you feel,” the psychiatrist had said to her in their last session.
“Like I’m sinking.”
“Into what?”
“Myself.”
“And what does that mean? Sinking into yourself?”
It means I’m losing. It means it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again. It means I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own.
She stared at him. “Is that what they teac
h you in graduate school? To just ask follow-up questions? Just active listening, reflecting back to me what I’m saying?”
Where were you on career day when they brought that little gem up?
He rolled his pen between his fingers. “It’s okay to be angry,” he said. “And it’s okay to be disappointed.” He paused and she waited. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. At last he said, “But you have to learn to forgive yourself.”
“That again.”
“Yes.”
“Really. Forgive myself.”
“That’s right.”
“What does that even mean?”
“To forgive yourself?”
“Yeah.” She’d had enough of this. “And if you ask me what I think it means, this session is over.”
He took a breath and then hesitated, and she could tell he really didn’t know what to say.
Nice. He tells you to forgive yourself and then he can’t even explain what he means.
“Obviously,” she told him, “it’s not just marginalizing the event or simply acknowledging the pain and then doing your best to ignore it, it’s gotta be more than that or ‘self-forgiveness,’ if there even is such a thing, would just be a casuistic form of denial.”
He looked at her oddly, finally said, “You mentioned that your mother used to take you to church. Are you a religious person, Tessa?”
“My mom was.”
“Don’t you think God wants you to forgive yourself?”
“Well, I looked that up last week after you started in on all this. The Bible never says to forgive yourself. Not once. So apparently, it’s not exactly on God’s top ten list.”
The guy seemed to be at a loss.
“Look”—she stood, put a foot on the glass coffee table beside him—“if I break this thing, you can forgive the debt I owe you if you want, or you can make me pay for it, but how can I forgive myself for the debt that I owe you?”
He rose abruptly. “Tessa, put your foot down. I mean, you need to put it—”
Enough. This guy’s more clueless than you are.
“I am so done with this.” She bypassed shattering the glass coffee table and lowered her foot to the floor.
“Tessa—”
Without a word she’d left the office and never gone back.
Tessa entered her bedroom, closed the door behind her, and emptied her bag.
She checked through her stuff three times and finally had to acknowledge the truth—the pills weren’t here.
She replayed the morning in her mind. Packing, stressing, hurrying out the door . . .
Oh.
Leaving her pill bottle on the countertop beside the sink of that dorm room at the University of Minnesota.
She slumped into the chair by the desk.
Now what?
Amber’s a pharmacist. You’d think she’d have . . .
Feeling slightly guilty, she eased into the hall and slipped into the bathroom. Then, as quietly as she could, she searched through Sean and Amber’s medicine cabinet but couldn’t find anything she could use to help her sleep. But to her surprise she did find some Abilify, Wellbutrin, and Lamictal. She wasn’t an expert on medications, but she’d seen enough drug commercials about the first two to know they were antidepressants. All three drugs were prescribed to Amber.
Patrick had never told her that Amber was dealing with depression. If he even knew about it.
This is way uncool. You should so not be doing this, Tessa. Looking through their stuff.
Feeling worse than before, she silently returned to the bedroom and pulled out her notebook. She stared at the blank page for a long time, but nothing came to her.
When she went to draw the curtains across the window to keep out the darkness, she noticed the dusty corpses of two wasps on the windowsill.
Too many dead things in this house.
She imagined what it would have been like to see those wasps flying over and over again into the glass, thinking that they were heading toward freedom, when they were destined only for death.
Now they slept and would never wake up.
Words came to her: Time is a strange beast that cannot be tamed. It devours all things, but it lets you play with its mane in the meantime.
The distance and the days collapsed in her mind, and she went back to her notebook, wrote,
dead wasps lie on the windowsill.
yesterday they tried
to fly through the glass.
to freedom. to life.
today they lie still in death; all their
hopes sheathed in their dry, quiet bodies.
all their busy buzzings are over
now that they’re dead
and forgotten on this side
of the glass.
She thought for a long time and then added two more words:
with me.
46
Saturday, January 10
US Naval Forces Central Command
Bahrain, Persian Gulf
12:21 p.m. GMT
Allighiero Avellino took a step forward in line and showed his ID to the Master-at-Arms, the United States Navy’s version of military police, standing sentry at the end of the gangplank to the USS Louisiana, then waited while the man used a handheld scanner to run his name through DBIDS, the Defense Biometric Identification Data System, to verify his identity.
It was the fourth and final security checkpoint that he and the fellow members of his cleaning party had to pass through before they would be allowed onto the sub to clean the urine-stained floors of the heads before setting things up to pump the solid waste receptacles into the tanker truck that was still being inspected at the entrance to the base.
Although today he had another small task to complete in addition to his official duties.
For years Allighiero had believed that the environmental activist groups that sprang up in the twentieth century—Greenpeace, Earth First!, and the rest—hadn’t taken things far enough: small demonstrations, people chaining themselves to trees or railroad tracks, cutting down a few telephone poles, spiking old forest growth, unfurling banners on bridges or boats. Yes, all of it was good for a few minutes of publicity, but in the end it almost never swayed public opinion or changed the minds of policy makers. It mostly just made the activists feel good, as if they were doing something.
The MA studied Allighiero’s identification card one last time, then handed it back to him and waved him through.
He pushed his cart of cleaning supplies forward onto the gangplank leading to the sub’s conning tower.
Media flash points.
That was about it.
You get a little coverage, maybe you get arrested to make a statement, but then the next soccer game or celebrity publicity stunt or political scandal takes over the news cycle, and nothing important ever changes.
A few days later you’re out of jail and no one hears your name again.
But with the present worldwide irreversible environmental devastation, the time for procrastination was over. The time for protests was over. The time for real action was here. For the sake of the planet, for the sake of the future.
The world needed a wake-up call that could not be ignored.
And that was why he’d joined Eco-Tech in the first place last year. But, of course, because of his job cleaning nuclear submarines, he’d always been careful to keep his involvement with the organization quiet.
One at a time his co-workers disappeared with their military chaperones into the sub. Descending into the ship with the carts wasn’t as tricky as it might look since the carts had retractable wheels and specially designed handles to slide down the ladder’s handrails. At last, Allighiero met his escort at the conning tower, and the man assisted him in getting his supplies down the ladder.
“Glad I don’t have your job,” the petty officer told him.
“Grazie,” Allighiero said, thanking him generically in Italian rather than letting on that he knew English.
; “Right.” The seaman sounded slightly judgmental. “Follow me.”
Allighiero trekked behind the petty officer across the steel mesh floor of the walkway. Surrounding them in the cramped corridor: caged-in lightbulbs and valves and gauges, rivets and swarms of cables and wires. And deep beneath them, twenty-four Trident ballistic missiles. A great steel beast carrying oblivion in its belly.
A beast that not only did not belong in the ocean but did not belong on the planet.
American weapons of mass destruction were forcing the world to bow to the whims of capitalism, industrial commercialism, and the free market exploitation of the poor and marginalized around the globe.
Put simply, the neoliberal economic ideology of the US and the UK subjugated developing nations and devastated the rest of the world’s natural resources.
Humans are destined for so much more than consumption, materialism, and self-absorption. How could a world in which products that poison the environment and take centuries to deteriorate are endlessly produced, consumed, and discarded with no aim toward sustainability of the world’s ecosystems, how could that kind of civilization, by any stretch of the imagination, be called advanced? How could it even be called sane?
Nearly 28 percent of the world’s energy is consumed by Americans, who subsequently refuse to pay a fair climate debt to the rest of the world, while 30 percent of the people on the planet have no access to clean water, let alone electricity, medical care, or adequate housing. More than 79 percent of the world’s population lives on less than $10 a day; 1.4 billion people are forced to survive on less than $1.25 a day. All this, while Americans complain that there isn’t enough whipped cream on their mochas or enough leg room in their SUVs.
As philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote, and Allighiero had long ago memorized in the original English, “Anyone whose common sense has not been dulled by familiarity should be able to see the blindingly obvious truth that there is something radically wrong with a civilization in which millions devote their lives to pointless luxuries that do not even make them happy, while millions of others are starving; a civilization where no hand, voluntary or involuntary, moves money from luxury yachts to starving babies fast enough to save the babies.”