My last counselor had been earnest and compassionate. But she’d never seen war. Never shot and killed anyone. Never watched a child die or handled a body blown apart by a bomb.
“I read in your file that you killed six men last February,” Hayes said. “I looked up the newspaper accounts. Everyone called you a hero. How did that make you feel?”
I looked away and shook my head, unable to speak.
“Uncomfortable, I’m guessing,” Hayes went on. “Sydney—can you look at me?”
Reluctantly, I meet his gaze.
“As a chaplain, I was prohibited from engaging in combat. I couldn’t even carry a weapon. So killing was out of the question for me. I didn’t have to deal with that moral quandary. But I had a lot of reason to think about it. Because everyone around me was fighting and killing. And after each skirmish, each battle, a lot of them came to me, to ask how they were supposed to feel about it.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I believe war and killing are sins. But I also believe that, sometimes, they are necessary. These men and women did what most people can’t or won’t, and we owe them our gratitude. Maybe our lives. So I listened to them, blessed them, then sent them on their way. But each time, I was left with the miserable feeling that most of what I offered didn’t make any difference.”
I looked up at the wall of masks. Row after row of mute pain.
“So given that,” Hayes said, “will you talk about those six men?”
“I appreciate what you’re saying. But—” I shook my head. “I’m not ready.”
“Okay. Fair enough. What about today? What happened after the bomb went off? I know you lost two friends to an IED in Iraq.”
I brought my palms together. “Don’t link today with what happened in Iraq. It’s not the same.”
“I heard that the detective who was with you is in critical condition.”
I threaded my fingers together. “Frank Wilson. He didn’t get to shelter in time.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“What do you think? I’m angry.”
“At what?”
“The situation. The person who set the bomb.” I sucked in air—it came as if through a straw. “At Wilson for being with me, even though I know that’s not fair.”
“Are you mad at yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because I failed to protect him.”
“Could you have protected him?”
I looked at my ragged fingernails, the faint sunburn on my arms. “I should have told him to stay back. He wanted to stay back. Said the situation didn’t feel right to him. Said he was getting too old for this sort of thing. I should have listened.”
“He made his own decision.”
“I might have encouraged him.”
“What about in Iraq?”
“What about what in Iraq? I told you. It’s not the same.”
“Did you also feel guilty about your friends?”
I wanted to crawl under Hayes’s desk and curl into a ball so small that no one could find me. “No.”
“Because a lot of Marines and soldiers in your situation do. Survivor’s guilt.”
I glared. “I’m not them.”
Hayes and I regarded each other like boxers in their respective corners. Clyde sat up and rested his chin on my thigh.
“What I want to know,” I said, “is since you were clever enough to learn about moral injury, are you smart enough to fix it?”
Hayes palmed his bald crown. He picked up his clipboard again, an inch-thick stack of papers weighted with my story. “That, unfortunately, is the bad news. This is all so new that we don’t really know yet how to treat it. But I will say that a couple of things look promising. Group therapy. And also doing some kind of service. Volunteering at a shelter, or helping disadvantaged kids. Any number of things.”
I thought of the breakfast I took to the homeless every Saturday morning. The hours I volunteered in the women’s shelter. The determination with which I cared for my partner and looked after my grandmother. The search I’d started for Malik.
But against the debts I owed, it was like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
“Atonement,” I said, dully. “That’s what you mean.”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s a part of a process that seems to help. And it’s a long process, Sydney. There’s no overnight cure.”
“You’re saying I really did do something wrong.”
“No, not at all. But it doesn’t matter what I think. As a chaplain, I could tell you that you’re absolved of all guilt. Or you could go to a priest and confess your supposed sins and be forgiven. But it doesn’t matter what others say. It only matters what you believe. The decision has to start inside of you. Your most important step is self-forgiveness.”
“You have no idea what I’ve done.”
“I know that nothing in war is clean. I know that we do things in the cauldron of battle that we would never do at home. And I know that most of us are too hard on ourselves.” Again, he touched the scar beneath his eye. “Even a marathon requires a first step. Forgiveness could be yours.”
I shrugged, as if what he had to say was of no great consequence. But I was remembering what my grams had said to me. That sometimes your best self was your worst self. That sometimes you couldn’t separate the two. My lieutenant had told me that Marines were often called upon to do the unconscionable, and that it was all right, because ultimately the ends justified the means.
But damn. The day to day of living within those means . . .
Hayes leaned in, his hands on his knees. “None of your fellow Marines would say you’ve done anything wrong.” He went on. “Neither would your family. But that’s part of the problem. Their understanding or forgiveness means nothing to you, because you’ve convinced yourself that if they knew the real story, if they knew everything you’ve done, they would agree with your own silent judgment. They’d say you aren’t worthy of forgiveness.”
I caressed Clyde’s ears and said nothing.
“In war,” Hayes said, “we do all these things we find terrible and then we come home and people tell us we’re heroes. So we wake up in the middle of the night and try to make those two things line up. But we can’t. We don’t know if we’re sinners or heroes. We try to reconcile who we thought we were with the things we did. And when we can’t, we think we’re unworthy of forgiveness. But forgiving ourselves doesn’t mean whitewashing our past. It just means we’ve decided to allow ourselves to move forward. To live without the guilt and the anger and the nightmares. To reengage with society. To let the past be nothing more than that—the past.”
An alarm on Hayes’s watch beeped.
“Ignore that,” he said.
But I stood, trying to stay solid when I felt as untethered as a balloon. Clyde rose and shook himself.
“No, it’s time,” I said. “And I need to go anyway.”
Hayes looked disappointed, like a man who’d almost managed to land a fish. But he stood and held out his hands, palms up in surrender. “Just think about what I’ve said. We’ll talk more next time. I’m starting group sessions next week. Why don’t you come?”
“Maybe.” I forced a smile. “And thank you for what you’ve said. I’ll think about it.”
“That’s a start.” He handed me his business card. “And if you want to talk between now and our next meeting, just person-to-person over a beer or something, give me a call. Anytime.”
Downstairs, in the hospital bathroom, I locked myself and Clyde in the handicap stall. I squeezed my hands together until my knuckles and fingernails turned white and I stared down into the toilet. With a gut-twisting wrench, I leaned over and vomited. I stayed bent over for a while, the stench of my own vomit sharp in my nostrils. Then I wiped my mouth with toilet paper and flushed everything away.
“Let me find Lucy,” I said, unsure if I was trying to strike a deal wit
h God or the devil. “Let me find her and then I’ll forgive myself.”
When I walked out of the stall, the Six stood lined up by the sinks. Six dead men with their pale, tattooed skin, their shaven heads, the knife-edge glint in their watching eyes. They moved aside as I crossed to one of the sinks, then crowded close behind while I washed my hands.
“You deserved to die,” I whispered. “All of you.”
They watched me, unblinking, in the mirror. Then, one by one, they grinned and nodded, their bloody faces lean and satisfied, their dark, eager looks those of wolves who’ve run their prey to ground.
I glared at them.
“Fuck guilt,” I said. “I’d do it again.”
CHAPTER 14
If I stop having nightmares, if I stop living in the past, how will I speak for those we left behind?
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Outside the VA building, the evening air was violet and balmy. The streetlamps cast warm puddles of light on the asphalt. There were only a few people around, and all of them were very much alive. I found a bench set in a small grove of trees and dropped onto it, needing a moment to sort through what Hayes had told me and to regain my equilibrium. Clyde pressed close against me and placed his head in my lap, his eyes locked on mine. I ruffled his ears. Dogs didn’t believe in human guilt, only in love. Being with him was better than confession and a dozen Hail Marys.
To hell with the wisdom of war. What about the wisdom of dogs?
I reached into the side pocket on my pants and pulled out a wedge of dog sausage. Clyde came to his feet, his rear wiggling with excitement.
“Who’s the Marine now?” I cooed in the high-pitched voice he loved. “Who’s mama’s big boy?”
Now his entire body quivered. I tossed the sausage high into the air. Clyde launched himself skyward, jaws wide. He snapped the sausage out of the air and landed nimbly, ready for more.
I tossed a few more treats for him, then dropped to my knees and gently pulled him with me to the relatively dry ground beneath the trees. I scratched his belly around his K9 vest until we both felt better.
“We’ve got one more thing we have to do before we go home,” I told him.
His ears perked.
“It’s a Marine thing.”
Ben Davenport’s room was in post-surgery ICU on the ninth floor, on the far side of the nurse’s station. The rooms on either side were empty, and a cop stood vigil just outside Ben’s door so that he could see everyone who came by. I checked in with the unit clerk, then approached the officer and showed my badge. He nodded for me to go ahead, but the clerk called after me.
“Not your dog,” she said. “The rooms are off-limits to animals. Risk of infection.”
I looked at the cop. “Okay if he stays with you?”
A grin broke across the officer’s face. “Of course.”
“Clyde,” I said, “bleib.”
Clyde looked betrayed. He was a Marine, too. I promised I’d be quick.
Ben’s room was standard ICU. The adjustable bed, the tray table, and the privacy curtain, now drawn back so that the nurse had a clear view of her patient. There was a TV bolted to the wall and a single chair. Because it was the ICU, there was also a vast array of monitors, bags, and tubing, accompanied by the steady, subdued beeps and clicks of the instruments. In the middle of it all, Davenport lay unconscious, his head bandaged, his face sunken and gray. A respirator had been forced through his open mouth, the tubes running along his chest.
Ben bore so little resemblance to the man whose picture I’d studied that morning, to the man he had been just twenty-four hours earlier, that something inside me cracked. How could it be right for him to have survived so much in war, only to come home and lose almost everything? How could one person be asked to carry so much?
I lifted my eyes to the window. Outside, the lights of Denver glowed. The clouds had cleared the mountains and now sat above the city, orange in the city lights. The sun burned in a sullen, western sky. I edged past the bed and leaned my head against the glass. Traffic streamed far below, but the sidewalks were empty of pedestrians. I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining the block where I stood replicated thousands of times across Denver. Thousands—millions—of garages and warehouses and condos; parks and fields and sewers; ditches and culverts and basements.
A hundred million places to hide a child.
A hundred million places to bury her.
A draft blew through the vent, chilling the room, and suddenly Samantha Davenport was there beside me. Her long hair whispered against her back, and the draft fluttered the hem of her dress. She pressed her ghostly fingers to the glass and traced the outline of her husband, his form reflected in the window. I stumbled back until I got caught up against the chair, trapped between pity and fear, wondering if it would always be my lot to carry the dead, certain I didn’t have the strength.
How much, I wondered, had Ben told his wife about what had happened in Iraq? Most vets said nothing to their families, for all the reasons the chaplain had offered. But others found someone not only willing to listen, but also able to understand and accept what they heard. Samantha’s photographs—the bleak ones—made me think she was strong enough to take whatever Ben had offered. And to give comfort in return.
The fan shut down, and the room went silent save for the machines keeping Ben alive. With a last glance at her husband, Samantha stepped through the window. She shimmered along the glass like sunlight rippling on water, then vanished.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure if I was speaking to her or to Ben or to myself.
Outside Ben’s room, a phone rang, and somewhere beyond the nurse’s station a gurney rattled. I turned my back to the window and all the impossibilities beyond the glass and looked at Ben Davenport.
He hadn’t stirred. I’d heard the newscast on the drive here—the surgery had successfully removed the pressure on his brain. But there had been damage to the brain itself, and the doctors didn’t know how much of Ben would remain when he woke up.
My attention was caught by the only nonmedical thing in the room—a framed photograph of Ben and Samantha and their children. Maybe Ben’s father had brought it. The five Davenports lay on their backs, the children smiling up at the camera. The boys looked goofy. Lucy—lying between her brothers—beamed. Their parents lay shoulder to shoulder. Samantha’s hair spilled over Ben’s chest and his hand clasped hers. Their gazes had locked just before the camera went off, their expressions both knowing and jubilant. Whatever complaint Samantha might have expressed about her husband to Stern, there was no hint of it here.
I looked from the photograph on the tray table to the man on the bed. Did Ben know what had happened to his family? He would have been down and presumably unconscious before the boys died, before Samantha and Lucy were taken away. In his artificially induced sleep, did he dream about them? And in his dreams, were they all still alive?
I reached out a hand, ready to turn the picture facedown so that it wouldn’t be the first thing Ben saw when he opened his eyes. In case he knew. In case it broke his heart all over again. But then I stopped, my fingertips on the frame, unable to take away this last thing.
“We’ll find her,” I told him. “She’s alive and we’ll find her. When you wake up, she’ll be here for you.”
I left the picture where it was and walked out of the room to where Clyde waited.
CHAPTER 15
Hope is that thin gold line at the horizon on the far side of a blasted landscape.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
By the time we reached Cohen’s house, the day had settled into my bones like wet sand.
I parked and retrieved my duffel bag while Clyde went about his business. When he went sniffing for squirrels, I whistled for him to follow, then headed toward the stairs of the carriage house.
The nearby main house had belonged to Cohen’s grandmother, and he had inherited it from her. The place was over ten thousand square f
eet, maintained by an invisible army of maids, gardeners, and handymen. But Cohen said living there would have made him feel like the last man on earth, which was why he had decamped to the carriage house. The only time he went back was when he wanted something from his grandmother’s library. Or to raid the wine cellar.
As soon as Clyde and I reached the bottom step, a motion-detector light came on. I was so tired that for a moment the staircase looked like the Swiss Alps. I saw the glittering soil where I’d scraped my boots clean earlier that day and aimed for that. Once there, I kept going.
At the front door, I fumbled for my key. And noticed another scrape of dirt.
I hesitated.
The alarm was still armed. Clyde’s casual demeanor said there was no one around. He sniffed the dirt, then paid it no more attention. But unease pressed a heavy hand against my neck. In the light from the porch, the dirt glittered faintly, just like the soil I’d scraped off my boots. Someone who’d been at the cement factory had also been here.
Cohen, I remembered. He’d come home to change.
Still, just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. I punched in the code for the alarm, then rearmed it once Clyde and I were inside. I dropped my bag in the living room, dialed Mauer, then started a walk through of the house, pulling blinds and checking to see if someone had stashed a corpse anywhere.
“I’m working my way back from the most recent accident files,” Mauer said. “Nothing yet. A couple of the Death and Dismemberment forms are either missing or misfiled, so it’s possible we’ll never find anything.”
I paused in my survey of the master bedroom. “The crossing form for 025615P was missing from the Federal Railroad Administration files.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences. But the good news is, someone put in a placeholder. Our crossing is the one at Potters Road, near where Samantha died. It’s an overpass now. Margaret Ackerman at the FRA hasn’t been able to find a record of any accidents there. But an article written in 1982 says there were several. Locals called it Deadman’s Crossing.”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 19