“Right.”
“I explained to her our policy on cremation, which allows cremated remains of a service member who dies in active duty to be placed in the columbarium, a crypt, where the remains will be given an engraved niche cover. Sharice Stanton wasn’t happy with that; she wants a regular plot with a headstone.”
Abby restrains herself from gnashing her teeth. Of course, an unmarked grave wouldn’t suit Sharice at all. “Sharice has…certain expectations,” Abby says.
The sergeant nods. “Yes, yes. Unfortunately, we can’t assign an entire plot to an urn.”
“I understand,” Abby tells him.
“I knew you would.” He pats her hand. “Now, I’d be happy to show you the columbarium where we will place the ashes. He’ll get a niche cover with his name engraved, just like a tombstone, but smaller.”
“That sounds fine,” Abby says.
“But we have one more,” Flint says. “John’s brother Noah just flew in from Iraq. If you two want to wait here, I’ll run and grab him.”
Flint makes it sound way too easy, Abby thinks, though she doesn’t want to let on to the chatty sergeant that Noah is out of his mind with grief and trauma. But two minutes later Flint returns with a broken Noah by his side. They climb into Flint’s rental car and, guided by the sergeant, drive slowly uphill along one of the paved roads that meander casually over the green landscape.
“Now if you’ll turn right here, young man, onto Roosevelt Drive, we’ll go right past one of the most famous stops in the cemetery,” Sgt. Tremaine says.
Flint maneuvers around a line of cars waiting by the side of the road—a funeral procession, Abby realizes. Although the cemetery bristles with the activity of visitors and the occasional tour bus, an aura of peace and dignity resides here.
They follow the curving road to a hillock. People crowd the path leading up the rise.
“Just follow that path and you’re at JFK’s grave,” Sgt. Tremaine explains. “The memorial design is very distinctive—the Eternal Flame.”
Abby nods, trying to take it all in and keep an eye on Noah at the same time. He has been moving along with the group, but he remains silent and withdrawn.
“Next time you visit, take a look at the quote etched in the stone there. ‘And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.’ Do you know what that’s from?”
“Kennedy’s Inaugural Address,” Flint answers.
“So you’ve been there?” Sgt. Tremaine asks.
“I’ve just got a sick mind for detail. Don’t ever challenge me to Trivial Pursuit.”
“JFK’s grave site is our most visited memorial,” he says, confiding, “Everyone wants to be near the Kennedys.”
“Except Republicans,” Flint mutters.
Abby smiles, but Noah, in the backseat beside her, doesn’t even acknowledge the joke. Sinking against the door, Abby wonders how Noah will cope. Although one of the first rules of psychological counseling is that you don’t diagnose your family, her education and training in psychology is ringing an alarm. Noah needs help. Does he have to go back to Iraq? How long will the army give him for bereavement? Are there psychological services available to him in Fallujah? Counseling, therapy? How will he function in such a stressful environment in this overwrought state?
Flint parks along the roadside, and the group ventures along a path toward a low marble vault.
“The nice thing about the columbarium is that it’s set back, away from the road and the more popular monuments,” says Sgt. Tremaine. “I like the quiet.”
Just then an explosion cracks the air.
Fear knifes through Abby’s chest before she realizes that it’s the report of a rifle.
Flint pivots on one foot, turning back toward her as Noah dives to the ground and rolls behind a white gravestone.
At the lead of the group, Sgt. Tremaine doesn’t even break stride. “Not to worry,” he says. “It’s just the three-rifle volley, part of our ceremonial honors. There must be a funeral service going on nearby.”
But Noah is beyond worried. Hunched behind the tombstone, he has fallen into another world.
Of course, he is flashing back. The explosion must take him right back to Iraq, to the scene of John’s death or some other horrific event he’s experienced.
“Noah?” Abby steps toward him, then crouches down so that her face is level with his. “That startled me,” she admits, pressing a hand to her chest. “My heart is still racing.”
Unmoving, he presses against the stone, one side of his jaw to the cool stone.
“Do you want to go back to the car?” she asks.
Without answering, he springs to his feet and takes off running, staying low, ready to dive for cover.
“Noah…” Abby calls after him as Flint and Sgt. Tremaine join her. But Noah doesn’t slow or turn back. He keeps running, a single khaki figure disappearing in a mouth of white granite teeth.
Chapter 26
Arlington National Cemetery
Noah
In every pristine tombstone emerging from the rolling green fields, Noah sees a different incarnation of death.
The torso of a soldier whose legs were removed in the field to extract him from debris.
Flesh blackened from mortar fire and smoke.
A baby with shrapnel peppered through its body.
A soldier, his body looking deceptively whole but for the blood draining from a mortal bullet hole.
Death…it’s everywhere.
And he’s running, not because he thinks he can escape, but because he simply cannot rest.
During his first deployment to Iraq, Noah was assigned to Baghdad General, where army doctors treated wounded members of the armed services, as well as injured Iraqi soldiers and civilians. A registered nurse, Noah had just taken his state licensing exam when John talked him into enlisting.
“We can’t sit back and let this happen to America,” John had said. “It’s our job to stop terrorism at its source, and I’m going to go over there and do it. Our country needs us now, Noah. Good people, the people on those planes, innocent victims. Children. Americans should have an expectation of safety, and it falls on the shoulders of the military to make that happen.” As John lifted his beer, Noah glanced beyond him to Elliot Bay. Noah remembered that moment so vividly these days, he could almost taste the beer—a porter. He could feel the smooth glossed table under his fingertips. And the heated passion burning through his brother singed like a broiler.
It had started with John’s free Sonics tickets. Noah was bucking for a celebration after finishing his nursing boards, and John suggested he drive into Seattle to catch some basketball. Noah had expected beer and bonding, but then John had hit him with this…this crevice in the road.
They sat at a table by a window in the Pyramid Alehouse, and Noah recalled looking out at the water, realizing how dark and bleak it became at night. An abyss. A few steps off the dock under their window would be like falling off the edge of the earth.
Just as his brother was proposing.
Noah didn’t want to go. He had no intention of fighting in a war. “Why would I sign up to shoot people?” he asked his brother.
“Is that what you think Dad does?” John asked.
“Not anymore, but yeah, he did. And it’s not for me. I made the choice to try to help people. I’m into healing, man.”
“And here’s the irony,” John said quietly. “Because we want the same thing, but the only way to heal this nation, the only way to help, in the wake of worldwide terrorism, is to stop the killing.” He sat back and sipped his beer. John always had perfect timing, knowing when to shut up and let those silent spaces eat away at you. “And you are not really doing your part to heal this nation by staying in your cushy bubble, tapping the air out of some old codger’s IV line.”
Noah braced himself against the table, his fingernails digging into the laminate of the wood. The challenge was well-precedented. He’d spent his life proving himself, answering the
call, prompted by: “I can throw stones farther than you.” Or, “I’ll bet you can’t run to the mailbox and back in less than thirty seconds.” Or, “You can’t jump from the roof of the shed—you’re too little.”
This time, Noah wasn’t going to jump. “You need to do what you have to do,” he told his brother. “I just invested two years in nursing school, and I’m going to put it to use.” And nurses do more than tap air out of an IV line, he wanted to add.
“What if you can use your nursing skills to serve your country?” John lifted two fingers to the waiter, ordering another round. “You can enlist and serve in a medical unit.”
And that was the point where Noah started to lose the argument. Two beers later, they were brothers-in-arms.
Noah had been so green and earnest, fresh out of nursing school and wanting to help, thinking he could make a difference…until he was assigned to the hospital in Baghdad.
It was so different from nursing school, where patients were somewhat sanitized and other nurses and aides were readily available to consult about a patient’s needs or bitch about pulling a double shift. Here, gruesome victims were airlifted in every day, and “Stat” was called so often, Noah dreamed he was stuck doing triage on an endless line of soldiers.
When Noah had read about tourniquets and amputations in nursing school, he’d assumed that sort of medicine had ended with the Civil War. And yet in his first shift in the Baghdad ER, he’d watched in horror as a surgeon used a saw to remove a patient’s arm—a sickening procedure that converted him to vegetarianism and made him vow never to enter a butcher shop again. He soon learned that amputation was not uncommon. When a knee had been shattered into jelly, the leg bone draping, there was no talk of knee replacement or orthopedic surgeons. The term “cutting losses” began to have new meaning.
“This war is unusual in that we’re able to save ninety percent of the wounded who come through our doors,” one of the doctors explained in a morning conference one day. “But in order to do that, we have to amputate limbs. There’s just no other way around it.”
How many times had he woken up shrieking in the middle of the night, reaching for his leg or his arm or his foot, sure that he’d walked into an IED and lost a limb while he was unconscious?
Yes, his stint at Baghdad General had cured him of all confidence in the medical profession, all hope in humanity. To think that people created these bombs, that they sat by the roadside for weeks waiting for the right time to detonate, disturbed him deeply. Or the suicide bombers with backpacks or vests loaded with enough explosives to turn their own bodies to a bloody mist. What had happened in their lives to bring them to such a depraved, brutal place?
The worst part was seeing kids in pain, and there was plenty of that in the hospital where they treated American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, and civilians. It tears at you to see a baby with shrapnel in her tiny body, a small bundle so still you know it’s over.
Little girls with fat tears rolling down their cheeks because some of their fingers have been blown off.
He still hears the screams, gut-wrenching screams, and hopeless moans of pain.
He sees himself walking down the hospital corridor at the end of his shift, his body limp from physical and mental exhaustion. And there, on the floor of the waiting room, which is blessedly quiet and empty, sits a child’s pair of sandals, tiny shoes with a cartoon character printed on the straps, caked in blood. They’ve been abandoned, their owner obviously having been rushed inside to a curtained bay for treatment.
Noah left those shoes on top of the reception desk that night, but they were still there when he returned for work the next day, and the next day, until he tossed them into the Lost and Found and tried not to think about what happened to the child they belonged to.
It occurred to him then that, while a soldier chose to go to battle, a child had no choice. The war came to these children, driving bullets into their homes, pounding through familiar streets and marketplaces.
But he and John, they chose to go to Iraq. They enlisted in the Rangers with that very intention—to go where the terrorists were, to stop the siege.
In the beginning, Noah had enjoyed working side by side with his brother. Basic training was like extended Boy Scout camp, pushing to the limit, sparring, sleeping in tents. He remembers sparring with his brother, defending himself against John’s mean right hook. John had a skill for boxing, but Noah was the superior swordsman. God help him, he’d actually enjoyed bayonet training, stabbing the dummies.
It’s all fun and games until the dummies become real bodies.
And now he’s stuck in the middle. He’d rather die than return to the bloodbath and terror in the Middle East. He can’t turn back time and return to the scarred old oak dining table, sitting across from John, who’d instigate a secret kick fight under the table. John would find a way to crack everyone up, and Noah had, on more than one occasion, spewed milk from his nose.
This got him in a heap of trouble. Of course, Noah was the one who got in trouble. Always Noah.
Like in basic training when Noah stabbed the dummy and a swarm of angry bees emerged. Apparently they’d been nesting inside the dummy, building their fortress in the stuffing, and they did not appreciate the interruption of the bayonet slicing through.
Noah got stung, causing an anaphylactic reaction. He’d always been allergic, but somehow the adrenaline rush of basic training, getting pumped and feeling mightier than a gladiator, gave him false confidence that he could overcome a little bee sting.
He ignored the swelling. At least, he tried to until his throat began to close up and he went down. John grabbed an Epi-Pen from the unit’s first aid kit and stabbed him in the thigh with it. Later, over beers, they’d had a good laugh about it, how Noah had almost been eliminated by a yellow jacket. “Taken down by a mighty bee,” John teased.
Now, Noah thinks of the bee allergy and wonders if maybe it’s a way out.
Bees. Bees might be his salvation.
Chapter 27
Al Fallujah, Iraq
Where is the media now?
He hands the Ping-Pong paddle over to another guy and slams out into the deserted compound, a scattering of bungalows not much bigger than those plastic houses on a Monopoly board. This place is a ghost town without his posse—the paparazzi.
Stanton’s death brought them out in droves: big-name reporters, aloof photographers, cameramen from all the major networks. They came with a million questions, and he played host, ready and willing to answer. A role model. A rising star.
And man, the spotlight is sweet. The taste of power makes his blood surge, liquid steel in his veins. Energy radiates when the camera is on him, the eye of the world watching in awe. The camera loves him, and he’s happy to deliver a good show.
But in just a few days’ time, the media attention to the platoon has dried up. The journalists and photographers and cameramen packed their gear and headed off to hotels with showers in Kuwait.
And he’s left boomeranging back to the life of a drone in Camp Despair.
Withdrawal from the limelight is tough when you’ve got to go cold turkey. Although some of the other guys in the platoon seem relieved to have the cameras gone, he feels let down. None of this is worth the fucking effort if all those people back home can’t see the sacrifices he’s making. There’s nothing worse than working without getting credit. When he was a kid, his older brother used to bamboozle him into back-breaking work, trick him into doing all his chores, and then that bastard would take all the credit when the old man got home.
And he promised himself he won’t be taken advantage of anymore. Never again.
He wants the media back. Now.
And the quickest way to get the media sniffing around is action.
It’ll be hard to match the media buzz of Stanton’s death, but you got to work with what you got.
He pulls the door to the platoon’s bungalow open and finds it empty but for Gunnar McGee snoring away on his co
t. That man can drop off in seconds—a true gift, the ability to nap on cue and block out the world so completely.
The soles of his boots tread lightly on the floor as he walks the length of the small room, pondering how to make it happen. Nothing too obvious. Nothing that could be traced back to him.
So far, no one has drawn the line to him as a suspect in Stanton’s murder, and he doesn’t think anyone is the wiser, except maybe Emjay Brown, who’s been nuttier than a fruitcake since the shooting. He would be worried that Brown saw him, if he hadn’t disabled Brown’s NOD himself.
In the end, the whole warehouse scenario had worked out perfectly, especially since that pussy Spinelli had cut his knee outside and needed the medic to bandage his boo-boo. That made two fewer people in the warehouse to see him, and two fewer soldiers to help John.
He paces past the rack of bunks, climbing up to see what Spinelli is reading. MAD magazine. The goddamned nose picker. He doesn’t belong in this man’s army.
Checking the door to make sure no one is coming, he reaches for the NOD beside Spinelli’s bunk and dislodges a part of the device. Not that he wishes anyone harm, but if something happens to Spinelli, he won’t be shedding any tears. The platoon can go on without Spinelli.
He is the weakest link.
Chapter 28
Fort Lewis
Sharice
When Sgt. Palumbo tears a blueberry muffin apart over the paperwork, Sharice has to look away. It probably doesn’t matter if the papers get stained with crumbs, but she doesn’t want to see it. She wants the funeral to go off without a hitch, and messy means mistakes.
Of course, it would have helped a great deal if Abby had handled some of these arrangements when she visited Arlington National Cemetery, but…oh, well. This is no time to push the girl beyond her stress limit.
“Does the family have any religious affiliations?” the sergeant asks.
Sharice wants to laugh, thinking of the answer her father used to give. “We believe in army,” he used to say.
One September Morning Page 16