“A sniper?”
“That’s the thing. Those poor people didn’t have guns. Not in that remote region.”
“What then?”
“It was reported as a truck accident. But, as I said, I was riding shotgun. We weren’t in no accident of any sort. I knew he had men going off AWOL, mad and wanting to be back home. I think it was one of his own men.” He picked at his food. “So he was shot in the head.”
“Clean and perfect shot. If a local had gotten a gun … they couldn’t shoot worth crap. It had to be a trained GI. But no one would talk about it.”
“What happened to you?”
“His second in command, a first lieutenant, called a halt. I was yelling for us to keep going, but he made me stand down. Like his captain, he had not seen that kind of duty. He didn’t know you don’t stop a convoy on the side of the road. That’s when I heard the sound. It was like a scream coming at us. The scud hit the side of our truck square. I was knocked onto the road. The truck was on fire and on its side. I could hear my buddies inside the truck. Mack, my friend out of Southern Pines, he was yelling. But I couldn’t get to him. My knee bone was shattered. Felt like fire coming up my leg. Then I fell asleep.”
“Meredith can’t wait to see you.”
“She’s my life.”
“What are we fighting for anyway?”
“Not sand.”
“Too painted-over to know?”
“It’s a jacked-up war.”
The flight to Colorado was an hour late due to maintenance repairs. We were placed on another plane. It was crowded, leaving the passengers in a surly mood. But because of Tim’s condition and the unavailability of seats, we were upgraded to first class. He fell asleep fairly quickly, from the heavy medication, I suspected.
He awoke two hours later during the beverage service. I offered to buy the in-flight movie earphones, but he wanted to talk again. “Tell me about you and Braden,” he said.
“It’s been a state of limbo of late.”
“He loves you, Gaylen.”
“Not that he’s said that, but it’s something to ponder.”
“What did you think, that you would go around feeling in love all of the time?”
“You do.”
“I know that I’m in love. I don’t feel it every minute of the day. I do today because I miss her. But love is not a feeling. It’s an act of will.”
“Then you should be able to fall in love with anyone.”
“Don’t reduce it to formula, Gaylen. You start out with the romantic notion of love. That’s the lure. Then once you’ve bought into it, said the I-do’s, it’s a daily service to a person. Meredith can drive me crazy with her lists and plans. She’s always revising our future. Not that it does any good. Tomorrow never turns out like you plan. She’s annoying like that, so when she’s in revision mode, she’s not as endearing as, say, when she’s out squatting over her flower bed, rump in the air. But I’ll negotiate with her. Then she’s buying into me because I’m investing in her. Then I feel that, and that’s when I just know that I’ve made a deeper impression on her.”
“How did you turn out so good? Sylers never turn out good.”
“No one’s good.”
But Tim was a good man. I admired him. He was like the one good seed that drops from a plant in a dump and is blown into a field to become the true essence of its purpose. “If I can’t be like Jesus, I want to be like you.”
“Aim for Jesus. If you miss, it’s still good.”
His knee was hurting after that. He pushed his seat back down. “They patched me up in Germany, but I got more surgery when I get back home.” The flight attendant kept checking on him. She felt his forehead. “He’s got fever,” she said.
“Look through my bag, Gaylen,” he moaned. “There’s stuff for fever.”
There was a pharmacy inside his duffel bag. I pulled out one medication after another until he said, “That one. Give me two of those.”
The flight attendant brought him water and a compress. She put a pillow under his head. Tim fell asleep again, and I sat watching him until the pilot announced our descent into Denver.
An airport escort met us at the gate. Tim asked her to stop in at a gift shop. He bought a bouquet for Meredith. The escort led us to an elevator and then assisted us by picking up Tim’s luggage from the turnstile.
I placed the tin of pralines on his lap. “These are from New Orleans. For you and Meredith to share.”
“New Orleans. That’s one place I’ve not been.”
“Meredith would like it.”
“Would I?”
“Not so many pine trees or lookout stations.”
“I won’t be climbing into a lookout tower anytime soon.” He sounded melancholy. His face sagged dejectedly.
Meredith waited parked exactly where she said, under the Delta sign. “Gaylen! Over here!” She walked toward us, a slight bump reshaping her knit top. “Oh, Tim! Tim!”
Tim laughed. They embraced awkwardly, Meredith holding her face next to Tim’s as she cried. He consoled her as if he would always be strong. If I had not witnessed him crying in Maine, I would have bought into his chivalrous ruse.
He pulled himself up by the car door and squeezed into the front car seat. The airport escort wheeled the chair away. I untied the cord from his crutches and slipped them into the car trunk next to our luggage.
There was snow covering most everything. I had been to Denver once with Braden. It was in the season between winter and spring when the grass was yellow but the temperatures still struggled to climb into a comfortable climate. On this day the weather was the type the city father’s wanted depicted on postcards. The mountains west of us looked white and hard. I slipped into my coat and pulled out gloves as well. “Good grief, Meredith! How do you live in so cold a place?” I asked.
Meredith and Tim lived in a town north of Denver, northeast of Boulder, called Longmont. It was a growing town where people had only recently started locking their doors at night, according to Meredith.
She and Tim talked about things back home more than on the war front. I stretched across the backseat and napped on and off between Denver and Longmont. When I woke up, Meredith was telling Tim about the surgery scheduled for him at the veterans’ hospital.
I spent the next few days in and out of their house, borrowing the car, running errands for Meredith back and forth from the pharmacy. It was a pretty little house that had climbed in value after a magazine report listed the town as one of the best places in the country to live.
Meredith checked Tim into the VA hospital on Tuesday. While she ran down to the cafeteria to buy snacks for us for the long surgery ahead, I waited beside Tim. The anesthesiologist would be in at 4:00 a.m. so the doctor had encouraged him to sleep until he was awakened. I made a bed in a chair while Meredith took the cot.
Tim sipped water, the only thing he was allowed in the hours leading up to his surgery. “Talk to me, Gaylen. Im going nuts here.”
“Everything turns out good for you, Tim.” I believed that about all good people. “You’ll wake up tomorrow night with a new kneecap and a new mountain to climb.”
“There’ll be no more climbing.”
“I meant it in the metaphorical sense. But you’ll still be a ranger.”
“They’ve offered me a desk job down in the park.” The residue of spiritual death was in his eyes. He was flagging, too, from so much pain medication. “I took the ranger job to be outdoors. This is a promotion, though, they tell me. More money, actually.”
“Meredith says you’ll be training staff. You’ll be the boss.”
“Giving tours, demonstrating to tourists how to watch for bear droppings.” He was not expressing much enthusiasm.
“What do you tell them?” I asked.
“To carry a whistle or little bells to shake
at the bear. Grizzlies aren’t afraid of anything, but they hate noise.”
“Is there really a difference in bear droppings?”
“The black bear, he’s an omnivore. So you’ll find little leaves and berries in his droppings.”
“What about the grizzly?”
“In his droppings are little bells and whistles.” He started to laugh and then grimaced.
“I stepped right into that,” I said.
“Ha-ha!” he poked fun at me. “Grizzlies haven’t been spotted in Colorado since the late 70s.” He could not keep the jokes coming, though. He leaned back into the hospital pillow.
“Braden called to check on you,” I said. “I told him you were grumpier than he was after his appendicitis attack. Why do men turn twelve again when they’re wounded?”
“We’re scared. We’re no different than women.”
“The next time you see Braden, give him the truth serum you seem to live on.”
“Meredith gave me lessons early on. She says that if you start out telling the truth as young lovers, you’ll not die when you get old but just walk straight into heaven together.”
“Want to know the truth about me?”
“I know you.”
I doubted him. “I cheated.”
“I told you. I know.”
“Braden’s got some nerve. He told you, didn’t he?”
“He told on himself first. He said that what you did was partly his fault. You wanted revenge, he said.”
“He said it was revenge?” That surprised me. The details were so inhabited now by complications that I could hardly say what had really caused it.
It was the third trip to the cottage, and I had already decided to break it off with Max. He did not overdress this time or play a part. Instead I found him making pancakes. He made breakfast for dinner. He fed me strawberries and told funny stories. It was getting late, and I had planned to leave. But I was going home to an empty bed. Braden had flown a corporate executive to Kentucky.
Braden would never fully confess about what had happened between him and the college girl. It was boiling over inside me. I even told Max that. He avoided talking about Braden at all. Instead he seated me in a chair and massaged my neck and shoulders. He talked quietly. “I slept with Max that night because of some weird debt I owed him for listening to me.”
“Makes sense.”
“Why don’t you hate me, Tim?”
“Too much of that floating around.”
“What makes it so easy for you to love unreservedly?”
“Haven’t you heard? God is love.”
Until that moment, I had not applied that principle so liberally to my own flaws. I imagined an angrier God, one who disagreed with most of my decisions, who was never satisfied with any of my choices. “I think of God as a giant critic.”
“You’re mixing him up with your father.”
The sky was growing dark. I turned on a lamp next to Tim. Meredith peeked into the room. She carried the sack of crackers and giant cookies to a table, laid them down, and then picked up a book. She sat next to Tim and stroked his hair. She read poetry aloud. Tim fell asleep, and she lay beside him in the hospital bed. They looked like they could fall asleep just like that and wake up in heaven.
21
IT WAS SNOWING OUT, and Tim was back home recuperating. I didn’t know the temperature, but cold is cold in Colorado. Tim was going to get back most of his life. But it had returned to him in an entirely different shape. The physical therapist told Meredith and Tim that he would walk again without the aid of a crutch in six months.
I gave Tim a novel for a welcome home gift. “It’s about a man who almost dies,” I said. I thought it would inspire him to carry on.
He was propped up in his bed. The TV blared, and he stared out the window. Meredith crossed the backyard in a sprint, taking out the garbage. She talked over the fence to a neighbor, a man most likely inquiring about Tim’s recovery.
Tim said to me, “Gaylen, you are slow to come out of hiding. But once you do, you’ll be surprised.”
“I’ll find myself, you mean?”
“No. That’s not it.”
“Tim, like you, I’m resilient. I’ll be fine.”
“What does ‘fine’ mean anyway? It’s being stuck and telling everyone you don’t mind being stuck.”
There was a new layer of cynicism snowing down on Tim’s jolly disposition.
“Do you need your meds?” I asked.
“Tell me, were you surprised when you cheated?”
“Never more surprised.”
Tim was chipping away at me again, but in his current state of misery, I let him go. It would be therapeutic for him to think that he was helping me. “It was like watching someone else going through the motions. But I felt dead until the moment that I succumbed. Suddenly my feelings were alive. It was exciting in the early stages. Better than being numb.”
“But now?”
“Sheer misery, old chap.”
“The human heart is deceitful.”
“I understand what you mean.”
“Do you?”
“Give me a little credit, Tim. I have been exposed to all things religious. My mother took me to every church in town.” I said it as gently as I knew how. “I’m not a Sunday school greenhorn.”
“Sunday school was a place to tell kids sunshine stories.”
“You need a pill,” I said.
“But Gods a valley sitter. I don’t hear him too good when the suns shining. But in the valley, he comes through loud and clear.”
I was hoping this was helping Tim. It seemed to place him in a better mood so I humored him.
“He allowed his creation to kill his boy. He sat and watched. That had to be hard,” he said.
“It never made sense.”
“It does now.”
I wanted it to. “I haven’t heard a word from God, Tim. What do you do when there’s nothing from heaven but silence?”
“Get out of the noise, Gaylen.”
I shook out his next dose and put it on the tray in front of him.
“Can you get me one of those cookies that Meredith brought home?”
“I can. Then I have to go. My sister is calling me every night. Delia is lost without me.”
“I hope you help her find her way home.”
The last painted dress leaned against the small bedroom wall, casting no shadow, for the night had enveloped the room. I had not noticed the smallness of the apartment when I agreed to the sublease. The young Wilmington woman named Alice Poe who was my new roommate was a career woman who, like me, had decided to rent temporarily until deciding where to buy a home. She had left me a note on the corkboard in the kitchen telling me how to set the alarm and where to park my car. She was off on a summer vacation to France, and I would have the place to myself for two weeks.
I napped on Alice’s small tweed sofa, too tired to get ready for bed. My suitcases sat out in the middle of the floor. I lay contemplating where and when I would continue my education. I made a mental list that included visiting Delia in jail that afternoon and then soliciting schools for brochures. But I could not feel anything but anxious and for the life of me could not shake the nerves.
My guiding belief had been that once I had made my fortune, I would be at ease. It had not occurred to me that my father, driven by manic compulsions, was storing up a small fortune that would be my lot to manage. But the worry of how to care for the inheritance troubled me. Then there was the burden of how best to help Delia, whose money was being eaten up in legal costs. I fell asleep finally and woke at three in the morning to hear a faint shuffling noise.
Since I was unfamiliar with Alice’s neighborhood, I imagined it to be an overhead sound at first. A child getting up in the middle of the night and padding across the f
loor might make that sound from the overhead unit. I was drifting back to sleep when a sharp sound caused me to sit up.
I stood up, and just about the time I pulled on my robe, there was a dull knock against the apartment door.
Through the window, the streetlights flooded the landing enough to expose a figure standing in the common area. A hood covered his head. He knocked again. Finally, he said, “Gaylen, it’s me, Braden.”
Behind him, the flow of interstate traffic whispered faintly through the copse of trees. I let him in, and he was wet from a rain mist that followed him from his apartment in Wilmington to mine.
He pulled off the damp hooded sweatshirt and left it on the linoleum entry.
“It’s early,” I said.
He explained the intrusion. “I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
“Because Im here, Braden. I got my own place now.”
“You liking it here?”
“Until I buy a house.”
“Mind if I make coffee?”
“I guess not.”
“Some for you too?”
“Are you staying that long?”
“A bit, if you’ll let me.”
I stepped aside to let him pass. “Are you okay?”
He looked around the place as he turned on the lights in the kitchen. Alice had the cute kind of tastes found in home-crafter’s bazaars, every small decorative piece hot glued with a bow. “Tim, how was he? I mean, I called, but he was sleeping. They got him doped up, Meredith says.”
“He’s got to depend on Meredith to get around. He gets sore lying in bed. She helps him move and roll over. You could go see him.”
“Yes, yes. I should do that.”
“The coffees in the fridge, just like home.”
He found the bag and made a half pot, very black and caffeinated like he liked it.
“You can sit if you want,” I said.
Braden took a seat at the small glass-top kitchen table. “Your sister getting any better?”
“Depends on what you mean by better.” I imagined Delia in jail and I felt sorrier for her at that moment than I had ever felt. “The attorney can get her off, he thinks, on an insanity plea.”
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