Physicists knew dark energy existed—for numerous reasons, it had to—but beyond that? We knew nothing about it at all. In the same way, Sean’s notations had to mean something, but it was easier at that point to say what they weren’t—a grocery list, a car, a ball—than what they were. I didn’t know how to start thinking about them; there was nothing to put my hands around.
29
I let Sam stay at school until the end of extended day. I’d already paid for it and, considering the things that had been happening, he was safer at school than he was at home.
My parents arrived soon after I picked up Sam. I saw them pull into the driveway and alerted Sam. He already had his new train ready and waiting to show my father.
My mother came bearing gifts. “Just a little something.” She dipped toward me so I could look inside the leather tote she was carrying. The little something turned out to be some cheese straws, a gallon of sweet tea, and container of pimiento cheese.
She winked. “I know you never have any.”
I didn’t. Hadn’t. Not for a number of years. I kissed the cheek she offered as I took them from her.
“So I thought I might as well bring my own.” She smoothed her hair as she glanced around the room, raising a brow when she noticed the galaxy of stars on the ceiling.
I didn’t want to hear her thoughts on those. “I’ll run these into the kitchen.”
Sam was already well into telling his grandfather about his new train.
Out in the kitchen, I set the tote on the floor and put the cheese and sweet tea in the fridge. When I lifted out the package of cheese straws, I saw— “Mom? Mom!”
“Georgia Ann?” Her reply came floating from the living room.
“Mom? Come here!” Right now!
She appeared a moment later. “Sugar pie?”
I gestured toward the tote at my feet.
She came over to peer down inside it.
“Did you know that was in there?”
“The gun? Well . . . you can take the soldier out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the soldier.”
“Mom!”
“Your father has a permit to carry.”
“And I have Sam. What were you planning to do with it?”
She lifted a slender shoulder. “Take it with us when we leave.”
“But why did you bring it here?”
“With the world the way it is? You just never know.”
“Do you always take—” Parents! “You know what? I’m going to put it here.” I stretched up toward the refrigerator and placed her bag on top of it. “And when you go, you’ll take it, and you won’t bring it back.”
She smiled. “All right.”
“I mean it.”
She went back to Sam while I took a few moments to get myself together. Deep breaths; some ice cold water patted on my face. Once I had myself under control, I rejoined them. My father had already shed his sports coat and was playing with Sam’s new train.
But my mother wasn’t having it. She’d taken out her phone. “Come on, everyone. I need a picture for Instagram. And the blog. And Facebook.”
She gathered us together. Then she stood back from us, hand on hip. “Tsk. Georgia Ann, does your child not have any socks to wear? Samuel, go find something to put on your feet!” She shooed him off to his room. “And comb your hair while you’re there!”
Once Sam came back, dressed to her standards, she took a selfie. And then another. And then—
“Mom! Seriously.” She was annoyingly techie. But she ran a military-spouse support website and spent a good part of every morning clicking through the apps on her phone, visiting the sites and pages of all her acolytes in the military community and leaving comments.
My father was fiddling with the wheels of Sam’s new train. “When did Sam get this?”
“Saturday. Mr. Hoffman brought it for him.”
My father’s brow rose. “To the house? Because it seems like the wheels are already a little loose.” My dad cupped a hand to Sam’s shoulder. “But it’s no problem, buddy. Nothing a screwdriver can’t fix.” He glanced over Sam’s head at me.
“Downstairs. In the toolbox beneath the workbench. But—” I stepped toward them, offering to take it.
My father pushed to his feet with a groan. “Don’t worry about it. We can do it, can’t we, Sam?”
Sam had taken the train from my father and was clutching it to his chest.
My mother intervened. “Georgia Ann, you never answered my question from before.”
I dutifully turned toward her as my father and Sam went to fix the train. “Which question was that?” There were lots of questions she’d asked that I’d never answered.
“The confirmation hearing. What are you planning to wear?”
That question. I caught myself mid–eye roll.
“Because you just know, sitting right behind him, that we’ll be on television the whole time. I’ve already made an appointment for us at a spa downtown. I’m going to have them give you just a little trim. I was thinking a couple inches off the bottom and some more layers. With hair like yours, layers are the only thing that help. And I really need you not to frown while we’re sitting there.” She pointed at me. “Like that. It makes you look like you’re scowling. And everyone will see you and they’ll wonder why. Just—” She paused, remolded her features into a look I could only label angelic. “You can do that, can’t you? I know you can.”
“I, um . . . Alice! She needs to go for a walk.”
At the sound of her name, Alice lifted her head from her paws.
I nodded toward the door. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Her ears flicked forward. She stared at me as if questioning my sanity. She’d already been for a walk earlier. A really long one.
I had to grab the leash and walk over to her in order to clip it to her collar. And then I had to plead with her to get up.
“You sure she wants to go?” My mother asked the question with a frown as she stared at me over the top of her reading glasses.
“She’s going. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Then we can all go out to dinner. My treat. How’s that sound?”
Before she could say anything else, I slipped out the door.
The wind had picked up. And with the sun’s decline, it had turned frosty. In my haste to get away, I hadn’t thought to grab a hat or gloves. In retrospect, it might have been better to stay and deal with my mother. We turned left, away from the school, at the end of the block. It took us past Mrs. T’s house.
I hadn’t thought about Mrs. T in forever. She’d lived in a bungalow that was the same era as ours. She was big on walking, and her route took her past our house in both the morning and the evening. Soon after we first moved in, she’d decided that Sean was her personal project. She baked him cakes and knitted him sweaters and recorded television shows for him about the Dalai Lama on her VCR. She flirted with him outrageously. It wasn’t difficult to understand why. When Sean smiled, it was like Christmas and the Fourth of July combined.
After she let it slip that her ninetieth birthday was fast approaching, Sean had started checking in on her in person every Friday, to see how she was doing, to make sure she was okay. We discovered she made a mean martini. And played a competitive game of Nertz. And just like that, Friday-evening cocktail hour at Mrs. T’s had begun.
She’d passed away several years before Sean died. Her son had rented the house out for a while, then decided he could make more money by selling it. Her old house with its tattered garlands of Tibetan prayer flags and its collection of stone Japanese lanterns had been torn down during the summer and a new mini mansion was being built in its place.
As we reached her lot, the last of the contractors’ mud-splattered pickups was pulling away.
Mrs. T wouldn’t have liked the McMansion. I stood there for a moment, trying to take it all in. It was too big. It was too much. Alice must have sensed my inattention, because she bolted toward t
he front yard, pulling her leash from my grasp.
“Alice!”
She ran up the front steps and disappeared into the house.
“Alice!” I picked my way through the debris that was strewn around the front and climbed up onto the porch.
I pushed the door open wider and put a foot to the threshold. Took a listen.
Heard nothing.
Slipping inside, I closed the door behind me, then stood in what would eventually be the front hall. “Alice!”
A whimper came from a room off to my right.
“Alice?” I walked into it.
A yelp came from the room beyond.
“Alice, what have you—”
At the back of the house was a great room with soaring ceilings and a full wall of windows that provided a view into the backyard.
Alice was there, lunging at a construction worker who was trying to calm her.
I jogged toward him, trying to explain myself. “Alice! I just— Sorry. Alice—stop! I know we’re not supposed to be here, but my dog got away and— Alice, sit!”
Alice sat, but her tail kept thumping.
The construction worker took off his hat and tucked it under an arm.
I reached for the handle of the leash. “I’m sorry she jumped—”
He put a hand to his sunglasses and pulled them off.
“—all over—” All the air left my lungs. I gasped. Felt my knees buckle. “Oh my—”
30
He was beside me in a minute, grasping my arm, keeping me upright.
“Sean?”
“Georgie, I—”
It was him. It was him. Underneath the beard and the too-long hair, it was truly and unmistakably him. But still, as he put a hand on my forearm, I moved away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t!” I recoiled, retreating in the direction of the wall. “Don’t touch me! I can’t—” I turned away from him, folded my arms around my waist, and closed my eyes. I wasn’t okay. I wasn’t going to be all right. I leaned my forehead against the wall for a moment. It was solid. Cool. I turned to face him and slid down the wall, sobbing.
He reached out.
I held up a forearm to fend him off. “Don’t!” My chin began to tremble. “You’re not alive.” I whispered the words.
“I am alive.”
My mouth was drawn down like a bow, my voice dissolving into hysteria. My whole body was trembling. I was deathly cold. “Don’t you—” I could hardly speak. Sobs, deep and guttural, were pulsing upward from deep down inside. “Don’t you just come here—” I grimaced as I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold everything together. “Don’t just come here and—” A sob broke through. “And tell me that you’re alive and show up as if—as if—I should be glad? Glad that I had to bury you? Glad that I had to listen to my son try to explain to me why he thinks you’re alive when you’re dead?”
“I’m not—”
“But you’re not! You’re not dead.”
He squatted and tried to put his arm around me.
“Don’t try to apologize. Don’t—” My resolve crumbled. “You were dead.”
“Georgie?”
“Don’t.”
“Georgie.” His voice was closer.
“Just—”
His arm came around my shoulders.
“You can’t—”
He went to one knee and pulled me to his chest.
I clung to him, weeping. I wept for him and for me. I wept for our son.
When he tried to pull away, I clutched at him. “Don’t go!”
“You listened to my message.”
“It was you. I tried everything I could to make it not you, but it was you.”
“I’ve been trailing you for two weeks, but there’s always been someone around. We need to talk.”
I sat up, putting distance between us, and swiped at my tears with my forearm. Then, drawing a shuddering breath, I nodded.
He sat down next to me, back against the wall.
Alice came over and curled up beside him, placing her head on his thigh with a sigh.
He gave her one of those rubs behind her ears that she loved so much. “Remember that Gulf War project?”
I nodded.
“I was helping write the army’s history of Desert Sabre. Pulling together documents. Collecting oral histories.”
Where had Sean been all this time? What had he been doing?
“Georgie?”
I blinked. Nodded. “Desert Sabre. My father was there.”
“And I was writing about his battalion, down to the company level, looking back through everything I could get ahold of—oral histories, field reports, orders of the day.”
If I hadn’t interred Sean, who had I interred? Who had I— I heard myself gasp. I’d had someone else cremated!
“Georgie, are you okay?” Brow furrowed, he touched my arm. “Are you—”
“Fine. I’m fine. Haven’t been sleeping. There was someone in the crawl space on—”
“That was me.”
“That was—that was you?”
“I was trying to—”
“Wait. Stop.” Everything was starting to make sense now. It was as if I’d been looking at everything backward and upside down. “Alice chases the garbage truck. She started doing that after you died.”
“Because it’s me.”
“You’re the one who hauled out the garbage cans this week.”
He nodded.
That was him? “Those were all you? All those times she chased the truck? You’d been there? Right there? The whole time?”
“I needed to make sure you were okay. So I pay one of the guys off every Monday morning so I can make sure that no one is—”
“So you’ve been, what? Working construction here? In my own backyard, all this—”
“No, I’ve just been wearing this the past few days so I could blend in. Lots of construction in the neighborhood.”
“—time and moonlighting as a garbage man once a week? Did you never stop to think, Gee, Georgie looks a little sad. I know! Maybe I should let her know I’m alive!”
“I couldn’t because—”
Maybe that’s what Dr. Correy had meant. Maybe he assumed that I already knew Sean hadn’t died. Why would he have assumed that? Because I was Sean’s wife. “I cremated someone and put your name on him. I don’t even know who he is.”
“Just— I need you to listen.” He shifted to face me and gripped my hand. “I can’t keep you here much longer. I noticed there were—”
“The Leatherman. It was on the inventory from the medical examiner’s office, but it never made it to the house. At least, I didn’t think it had, but then I found it under the house. It’s because you—”
“—because I took it with me when I left the medical examiner’s office. When I didn’t die.”
“Then how did— The autopsy?”
“I only have a few minutes and I need to explain.” He squeezed my hand. “Are you with me?”
The questions could wait until later. “Yes. Okay. Yes. I heard you: Desert Sabre.”
“Right. I was working on your father’s part in the war. It seemed like a no-brainer, assigning that to me. I had an inside connection.”
I nodded.
“So I started contacting soldiers in his old unit, scheduling oral interviews, asking questions about the night they made that breach in the Iraqi lines.”
My father’s company had stumbled on the Iraqi Republican Guard during a scouting mission the first night of that war. The Iraqis outnumbered them, but the company fought them off and blew up their base, destroying their weapons. That’s how he breached their lines and that’s what put him on the road to the four stars he eventually earned. It was the one story from that war almost everyone knew. “Okay.” It all sounded like standard historian work to me.
“That’s when things started getting weird.”
“Things? What things?”
“Just . . . little things. All of a sudden I had to
turn in a daily report on who I’d talked to, what questions I’d asked. My files were being accessed without my knowledge. Some of my source material disappeared.”
“Did you tick someone off? Was someone jealous of your assignment?” That seemed remarkably petty. Even for the army. “Maybe someone just wanted to keep tabs on how the project was going.”
“Maybe. But no one else’s materials vanished. And no one else had to file a daily report.”
“What kind of questions were you asking?”
“Nothing unusual. State your name. What was your rank and duty? What are your memories of that first night of the war?”
“You were given this assignment, though, right? Someone asked you to do it. It’s not like you were freelancing.”
“I was given the assignment.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. I don’t understand any of it. But when things start disappearing and people start following you—”
“People followed you? You were just doing what everyone else was doing.”
Sean nodded. “But the company I was researching was your father’s. And I think something happened out there in the desert. Something that shouldn’t have.”
31
Outside, footsteps scuffed up the front stairs to the porch. Paused. A voice called out, “Georgie?”
Alice pushed to her feet. Barked.
Was that . . .
Sean rose to a squat and lunged toward the shadow along the far wall.
From my location I caught a glimpse of Chris’s face through the front door.
Sean sprang toward me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me to a sliding glass door at the back of the house that should have led to a porch but at that moment led to—nothing but empty space. The ground was a half-story down. Inside my shoes my toes tried to grab on to the door’s track. My free hand clawed at the cutout, trying to leverage me back from the hole.
But Sean’s hand clamped around mine. “Jump!” The word was low but vehement, and his momentum was already carrying me with him over the threshold. As he hit the ground, he let go of my hand and reached upward. Pulling me to his chest, he broke my fall and then rolled us away from the house. And even then, he kept moving, heading toward a pile of discarded lumber and scraps of trim that had been stacked at the back of the lot.
State of Lies Page 11