Cold Harbor

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Gibson didn’t know about all that, but took a deep breath and stood up.

  “Excuse me,” he began. All heads swiveled to see who was disturbing their morning. He forged ahead. “I’m looking for a ride to Morgantown to catch a bus home. I’ve got a little money, not a lot, but I can put some toward gas. I’m a former Marine, a little down on his luck. If you could help, I’d be grateful. Thank you and merry Christmas.” He sat back down and stared at the newspaper, flushed with embarrassment. So that was what begging felt like; he didn’t think he’d ever look at a homeless person the same way again.

  Bear smiled at him supportively, but no one leapt at the opportunity to offer him a ride. After a moment’s hesitation, the room returned to its meals and conversations, agreeing to erase the interruption from its collective memory and get on with its morning. Gibson finished his second burger and ordered coffee, thinking of alternate ways to Morgantown. In the end, he opted for the individual approach. He’d greet each new truck as it arrived and appeal to the driver. Make it personal. So much human interaction sounded painful, but he would do it if it got him home to Ellie.

  Resolved, Gibson paid the check and headed out. A man stopped him on his way to the door and said he’d drop him in Morgantown. “That’s my rig,” he said, pointing to a semi at the far side of the lot. “Leaving in twenty.”

  “See?” said Bear. “It’s Christmas.”

  Seventy miles an hour saw them pull into Morgantown in a little over sixty minutes. The trucker, who never offered his name, dropped Gibson off in front of Mountaineer Station. Gibson offered him forty dollars, the trucker took twenty, and the two men shook hands without ever having spoken more than necessary. Gibson had been grateful for the silence. His brief taste of freedom had exhausted him—every interaction, every decision. Some part of him longed for the inviolate routine of his cell. The irony could not be any more plain—he’d dreamed of escaping constantly, but now, a few hours after his release, all he wished was to be back where he felt safe. Is this what institutionalization did to the mind?

  He looked up at the bus station. Only eighteen months behind schedule. He’d been on his way to Morgantown when Lea’s desperate text had brought him back to Niobe. How different his life might be if only he’d ignored her. He would never have met Damon Washburn. Never crossed paths with Charles Merrick.

  It had been some detour.

  His good luck held—the next bus departed in ten minutes. That gave him only enough time to buy a ticket, use the restroom, and find a seat toward the back of the bus. For a time, he watched the traffic on the highway, but soon enough the bus rocked him to sleep. He woke with a cry, certain he’d find himself back in the confines of his cell, disoriented when he didn’t. A passenger across the aisle stared suspiciously his way. Gibson sat up and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He judged they must be in Maryland by the way the snow had thinned as they moved out of the mountains. So close now. Bear wandered back and sat beside him. They played the alphabet game out the window until he caught the passenger staring at him again.

  It was past seven when Gibson got into the serpentine cab line outside Union Station. A mix of holiday travelers and business commuters returning from Philadelphia and New York on this crisp December night—Gibson didn’t belong among them. Above his head, great wreaths hung between the arches of the station. He kept his head down and shuffled forward in line. The attendants who orchestrated the cab line hustled to keep things moving, but it was still twenty minutes before he reached the front. Duke waited in line with him.

  “What are you going back there for?” Duke asked. “You really think they want to see you?”

  “It’s my family.”

  “It’s an ex-wife and a girl who barely knows her deadbeat father who’s been in a CIA black-site prison for eighteen months. Son, that’s not a family, that’s a guest appearance on Maury Povich.” Duke paused to let that sink in. “So . . . what? What do you think is going to happen? You’ll roll up to their door looking like Chewbacca’s prom date, and they’ll welcome you in with open arms? Are you even thinking this through?”

  Gibson looked at his father imploringly. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  “That’s not a good enough reason to go someplace.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “What you promised me.” Duke’s face was inches from Gibson’s. “You want Nicole to respect you again? Then prove to her you’re a man who deserves respect. Damon Washburn has to pay. If you go to her now, looking like this? Nothing good will come of it. I promise you.”

  An attendant pointed Gibson toward a waiting cab. The driver protested that he’d been saddled with a bum and wouldn’t unlock the door until Gibson showed him his money. Mollified, the driver punched Gibson’s destination into his GPS and drove up Massachusetts.

  The idea of reuniting with his daughter thrilled him, but his father had given voice to all his rawest fears. What if he had been gone too long? What if Ellie didn’t remember him? Maybe he should wait, get himself cleaned up so he didn’t frighten her. Twice he leaned forward to ask the cabbie to take him to a motel and stopped himself. He didn’t have money for such a luxury; more than that, he needed to see Ellie to remind him why he still wanted to be alive.

  “It’ll be all right,” Bear said. “Nicole will understand. She knows how much you love Ellie.”

  “What if I frighten her?”

  “You won’t. You’re her daddy.”

  “But what if I do?”

  “She’ll get over it,” Bear reassured him.

  The thought of Ellie shrinking away from him was too horrible to imagine. Gibson caught the cabbie’s narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “What are you doing?” the cabbie demanded.

  “Sorry,” Gibson said. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Don’t.”

  “He’s mean,” Bear said.

  Gibson gave her a pleading look to keep quiet. He didn’t want to get thrown out of the cab. He was almost home.

  “Well, he is,” Bear said, getting in the last word. But after that, she held her peace.

  They left the beltway and wound their way up into the residential neighborhood where Nicole and Ellie lived. Where he had lived once. Gibson sat forward, resting his forearms on his thighs, and tried to slow his racing heart. The cab pulled over to the curb. Gibson took a deep breath and looked out the window.

  It was the wrong house.

  The cabbie had brought him to the wrong house.

  The cabbie repeated the address he’d been given—53 Mulberry Court—and showed Gibson on his GPS. Gibson didn’t understand. Could he have forgotten the address of the house that Nicole and he had bought together? The house where Ellie had been born and grown up. The house he’d fought to keep when he couldn’t find a job. Was he that crazy? He tried to think of the right address, but his head was so murky. Gibson tried the handles, but his doors were locked. The driver repeated the fare, and Gibson thrust all the money he had left at the cabbie, who counted it carefully before consenting to unlock the door.

  Gibson stumbled out of the cab and spun slowly in a circle. He recognized everything. The houses across the street. The neighbors. The tree with the gashed trunk where a teen driver had jumped the curb and plowed into it. Everything was the same. Except the house. Where was the house?

  He really had lost his mind. Or worse, maybe he hadn’t ever left his cell. This was nothing but another of his excursions through the secret passage. He couldn’t countenance how real it all felt, but there was no other explanation for this cruel trick of his mind. All he wanted now was for Bear to lead him back to his cell. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she was playing hide-and-seek the way she sometimes did. He ran down the street calling her name and looking behind parked cars.

  At the corner, he gave up and slapped himself hard across the face. Trying to wake himself up. Unwilling to remain trapped in this fun-house mirror of his memory, he pinched th
e skin on the back of his wrist until it bruised. Please take me away from this hell, he begged the evening sky.

  “Bear. Please come back. Help me,” he whimpered, hoping she wasn’t too far away to hear him. “Please.”

  Nothing. He looked up at the street signs that named this the intersection of Macomb Lane and Mulberry Court. He went back up the street, reading the numbers off the houses: 47, 49, 51 . . . He recognized all these houses. Everything was as he remembered it, but when he stopped outside 53 Mulberry Court, it was still the wrong house. Twice the size of the house he remembered. The wrong color. The wrong style. His head throbbed. Maybe this was the right house. Maybe they were inside waiting for him, and he’d only remembered the house wrong. That had to be it.

  A silver car pulled into the driveway. A man in a suit got out. He looked Gibson up and down, not appearing overly impressed. He started toward the front door but reconsidered and crossed the yard and met Gibson at the gate.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  “Do you live here?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Is this 53 Mulberry Court?”

  “Yes, it is. Can I help you?” the man asked a second time.

  The front door opened. A woman looked out with a baby cradled against her hip. Two small boys pressed forward to see what the fuss was about.

  “Tom, what’s going on?”

  “It’s okay, honey, just keep the kids in the house.”

  “How is this your house?” Gibson said. “What happened to the old house?”

  The man stiffened. “Who are you?”

  “I used to live here. What happened to the old house?”

  The man turned back to his wife. “Shut the door. Call the police.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked, voice rising.

  “Get the gun from upstairs. Don’t open the door.”

  The wife paled but didn’t move, frozen between doing what she’d been asked and going to her husband’s defense.

  “What happened to the house that was here?” Gibson asked again.

  “It burned down,” the man said.

  Gibson fumbled with the gate’s latch, trying to get in. This was some kind of a trick. “What are you talking about?”

  “The house burned down,” the man said again and put both hands on the gate to hold it shut.

  Gibson felt an emergency-room dread, the kind that comes from trying to guess what kind of news a doctor brings based upon her body language. “What do you mean, it burned down?”

  “Stop. Please just stop. You’re scaring my kids.”

  Gibson looked up at the boys’ faces, saw their fear. He let go of the fence and stepped back, hands up. “I’m sorry. Can you just tell me what happened? Was anyone hurt?”

  “I don’t know. We only moved in a few months ago.”

  “Who did you buy from?”

  “Through a broker. Look, there’s obviously nothing here for you. My wife is on the phone with the police. You should just leave.”

  Gibson took one last look at the imposter that stood where his dream home had once been. He backed away from the gate and lurched away down the street. At a storm drain, he knelt and vomited. He squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself back into his cell, but when he opened them, he was still on Mulberry Court. He prayed for it not to be real. But what if it was? And what if they’d been home? Oh God, what if they’d been home? Numb and lost and with nowhere to go, Gibson walked in an aimless, straight line, hoping to find the passage back into his cell.

  “I warned you not to go back there,” Duke said.

  “You knew?”

  “I didn’t think you could handle it. I’m trying to protect you from yourself.”

  “Take me back. Please,” Gibson said. “I can’t be here anymore.”

  A police cruiser passed him and stopped at the curb twenty feet up the block. A uniformed officer, barrel-chested in his body armor, stepped out. The owners of 53 Mulberry Court hadn’t been bluffing.

  “Evening, sir. Can I have a word with you?” The officer’s voice was light and friendly.

  Gibson didn’t break stride. He was all talked out for one day. The cop could shoot him for all Gibson cared, but he wasn’t stopping for anyone. He had to get back to his cell. The passage had to be nearby.

  “Sir. I just need a few minutes. Can you stop for me, please?”

  When Gibson still didn’t, the officer stepped onto the sidewalk blocking his way. A second cruiser turned the corner and approached from the other direction. An old, atrophied part of Gibson’s brain warned him that this could only go badly for him. He didn’t listen and changed directions to evade the officer, who moved sideways to stay in front of him. The cop raised a hand, palm out.

  “Sir. Stop walking, okay. Right there.” The man had asked nicely twice, but now his voice hardened.

  Ahead, Gibson saw a break in the fence beside the sidewalk. The secret passage to the place where his old house hadn’t burned down and Nicole and Ellie were safe and happy. Gibson dropped his duffel bag, took a quick step to his left, and tried to stiff-arm his way past the officer. A little head start so he could make a break for it. If he reached the passage, they wouldn’t be able to follow. But putting a hand on the officer took the situation from tense to downright unfriendly.

  The officer took hold of Gibson’s wrist and, turning, drove his forearm into Gibson’s triceps just above the elbow. The leverage on the joint forced Gibson to the ground. Gibson kicked out at the man, desperate to get free. His foot connected with the officer’s knee. The cop grunted and let go for a moment. The second cruiser screeched to a halt and bounced up onto the curb, blocking the way. Another officer leapt out. Gibson scrabbled down the sidewalk on all fours until the first officer Tased him. A knee drove into his back, and the officers wrestled handcuffs onto him, then flopped him on his back.

  Duke winked down at his son. “You pick the damnedest times to stand on principle.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Gibson spent the night at the police station. He’d managed twelve uninterrupted hours of freedom before finding his way back into a cell. Apparently, he had struck an officer, but Gibson remembered little of the encounter. He recalled something about a police cruiser and a struggle but only flashes after that. He attributed the gaps in his memory to the Taser burn on his back. The wound was bruised and raw, and he passed a fitful night, dreams of fire and pain chasing him from sleep anytime he closed his eyes. Ellie screamed for him from her bedroom window.

  “Is this real?” he asked his father, who loomed over him each time he woke.

  “Does it matter?”

  “What kind of an answer is that? Just tell me that Ellie is all right.”

  “Why would I bother? It’s not like you listen to anything else I say.”

  In the morning, a taciturn officer moved Gibson to an interview room and left him handcuffed to a table. Gibson asked the officer about Ellie and Nicole, but, as with the night before, he received no answer. For his family’s sake, he had desperately wanted this all to be another of his elaborate delusions, but deep down he knew it was real.

  Hours passed before anyone came to talk to him. He stewed at the injustice of it, layer upon layer of anger stacking up like dry cordwood waiting for a spark. He felt on the verge of a child’s tantrum until Bear asked him to read to her. She, too, felt devastated about the fire, and he could see that he was being selfish. They read quietly until she calmed down. Eventually, the door opened. Gibson paused midsentence and handed the book back to Bear. A plainclothes detective carrying a file sat across from him. The man had smug, confident eyes and combed his short blond hair forward in a Caesar that he smoothed compulsively with the flat of one hand. He introduced himself as Jim Bachmann.

  “How are you this morning?” the detective asked as though meeting Gibson for a round of golf.

  “Don’t lose your cool,” Bear said, getting up to leave the room.

  It was good advice that Gibson w
asn’t sure he could follow. He wanted to pummel Detective Jim Bachmann, smear blood in the man’s eyes, and ruin his perfect little haircut.

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Duke said. “He’s probably CIA like Washburn.”

  Gibson thought Duke was being paranoid.

  “No one will tell me about the fire,” Gibson said.

  Duke let out an exasperated sigh.

  “We’ll get to that,” the detective said.

  For the next thirty minutes, the detective advised him of his rights while implying that it would be a mistake to invoke any of them. “You want a lawyer, we’ll stop right here, but after that I can’t do anything for you.” It was a hell of a performance—lawyers and the courts were the enemy, and only good old Jim Bachmann could straighten this mess out. Gibson marveled at what kind of fool would fall for it until he realized that he hadn’t asked for a lawyer yet.

  “Can you please just tell me if anyone was hurt?”

  Detective Bachmann sidestepped the question, unmoved by Gibson’s plea. “You answer my questions, then we’ll see about yours.”

  “My daughter . . . is she okay?” Gibson said.

  “We can discuss all that after you answer my questions.”

  Gibson studied Jim Bachmann. He’d always had a talent for reading people and tried to pick up the detective’s intent from his body language. His mind couldn’t bring the man into focus, and the detective’s face remained a cubist jumble of angular planes. Gibson slumped back in frustration. “Why was I stopped?”

  “Officers responded to reports of someone matching your description causing a disturbance at 53 Mulberry Court.”

  “There was no disturbance. We just talked.”

  Bachmann made a note. Gibson realized he’d admitted to being there.

  “We only talked. I swear.”

  Bachmann smiled agreeably. “The homeowner told a different story.”

  “So they Tased me in the back?”

  The detective looked sideways at Gibson. “You failed to comply with the officer’s verbal instructions. Then you assaulted that officer. That’s why you were Tased.”