Unquiet Ghosts

by Glenn Meade

  Kyle saw him and stood, zipped up his grubby fleece hoodie, and stabbed me with a look before he headed for the lakeshore alone. “Leave it,” he said.

  I watched him go.

  My father came to stand in the doorway, twirling his reading glasses in his hands, his craggy Celtic face tense with unease. “He worries me.”

  His warrior demeanor had mellowed with the years, and he’d found it easier to show affection. Without a word, he came over and put an arm around my shoulder. I leaned into him. He hugged me so tightly I could hardly breathe. It made me feel so secure, despite everything.

  I loved to feel the strength of my father. He was always my hero. His mere presence was often the only reassurance I sought when trouble loomed or danger threatened. Dad was the man I always looked up to. And as a child, I felt there was nothing my father couldn’t protect me from. But as we watched Kyle down by the lake, head hunched down, hands in his pockets while he kicked stones into the water, I knew that my father was helpless.

  “Kyle’s like his mom, honey. Not one for showing his feelings. We love him so much, and it’s killing us all.”

  “How can we help him?”

  My father’s face tightened. “Pray for him. Stay close to him. Let him know we love and care for him. Nothing else we can do.” He hugged me again and turned to go, looking forlorn.

  “Dad?”

  His bushy eyebrows rose in a question mark.

  “What happened to Kyle in Iraq?”

  “God only knows. We saw action in so many places.”

  “But what do you think happened to him?”

  He stared back at me as if I’d peeled off a scab. “I’ll tell you a true story about Kyle. A bunch of us are in a burnt-out apartment building in Fallujah, a lookout post, and we’re watching our guys a mile away taking machine gun fire. The guy next to Kyle, a sniper, hands him his rifle with a powerful scope, points toward the streets below, and says, ‘Take a look at the kid.’ ”

  My father paused. “It’s a seven-year-old girl who hangs around outside our base. Pretty, dark eyes, always friendly. She often wears a purple gown. We call her the flower girl. She gives us flowers, and we give her hugs and candy.

  “But we also know that in a street fight, she carries weapons and ammo for the insurgents. The rules of engagement say we can shoot her. But nobody does. Kyle likes her. She likes him. They’re always high-fiving and smiling at each other, and he always gives her extra candy. You know Kyle and kids. He’s a natural with them. But that day, the sniper says bitterly to Kyle, ‘She’s been back and forth across the street at least a dozen times. She’s been getting a whole load of ammo to her people, and our guys are getting killed.’ ”

  My father sighed, shook his head. “Nobody shoots her. We can’t do it. But a few days later, Kyle’s in the same lookout and peers out through his binoculars. He sees the little flower girl’s body in the street. Next to her bloodied corpse are a bunch of loaded AK magazines lying in the dirt. A kid of seven. Shot dead.”

  “Our . . . our troops shot her?”

  “Or she got caught in a crossfire. Or was shot deliberately by her own side to make it look like we were war criminals. Anything is possible. I’ve no idea. But Kyle was convinced one of our snipers killed her. He went crazy after that. Wasn’t right for weeks.”

  My father’s mouth was tight as he looked at me. “People just want to hear the Band of Brothers stories. The rousing, heroic stuff. The average American doesn’t want to hear about our soldiers seeing and doing evil things and coming home with it weighing on them. They don’t want to know about killing kids and old people. They really don’t want to know about the stuff that destroys your soul.”

  “You think that was what sent Kyle over the edge? The little flower girl?”

  “Maybe. But in the end, it’s always the same thing that happens to everyone who goes into battle, honey.”

  “What?”

  “The soldier who goes to war is not the same soldier who comes back.”

  * * *

  Courtney visited Kyle at Serenity Ridge every day for the first two months.

  Then her visits tapered off. After a year training as a beautician while she tried to figure out what to do with her life—“I don’t want to jump into some pool I’ll want to climb out of after a few months, honey”—Courtney decided to join the military, and she received a CID posting in her father’s unit. CID was the Department of Defense’s prime investigation organization, responsible for conducting criminal investigations into crimes for which the Army was, or might be, a party of interest.

  “Here’s the thing, honey. I love it. You get a good case, and it’s like a mystery, a puzzle to solve. If they could just give us some decent heels to go with the uniform, they could really sex up this outfit.”

  Courtney was smart, good at her job, the rumors said. During her training at Quantico, Virginia, she would often drive all the way to Tennessee—eight or more hours through the night sometimes—just to visit Kyle. But after her military career took off, her visits dropped to three times a month and then two.

  “Kyle never talks, never reacts, Kath. When he wants to, he’ll let me hold his hand, but mostly he just seems to want to be left in whatever world he’s in. I can’t get through to him, honey.”

  That’s how it was most times when I visited Kyle, too. Tiny, muted sparks of reaction once in a while, but mostly his head lolled to one side, his eyes locked in a thousand-yard stare. Or he’d focus blindly on the TV as if attracted just by the light and not the action on-screen. He’d sit there, often in total silence, as I wiped dribble from his lips.

  I used to ask myself, was it the brutal sight of the little flower girl’s body that sent him over the edge? I had no way of knowing. I could try talking to him about Iraq, show him videos or photos of the dead and the street battles, but to me that was risking far too much. I knew from past experience that kind of thing disturbed him so much he might try to kill himself again.

  The doctors said his mental perception was about twenty percent of normal. He had physical therapy, but it was as if Kyle was going through it all in a trance. I felt saturated with pain every single time I drove up the oak-lined driveway to Serenity Ridge. With every yard, it felt as if a six-inch nail were being hammered into my heart.

  “I still love him, Kath, and always will,” Courtney confessed. “But I’d be fooling myself to believe it could work out. I mean, I want a husband, I want kids someday . . . I . . . I want a life.”

  She broke down, crying into her sleeve. I was angry at her. I had expected Courtney to be loyal to Kyle, to devote herself to his care. But when my anger washed away, I knew that was just wishful thinking. I couldn’t have kept a relationship like that going, either.

  Besides, I felt mixed up about my own impending marriage. Jack and I had been due to get hitched in June. Because of what happened to Kyle, we’d postponed our wedding until August. It might as well have been two years, not two months, because it made not a shred of difference to my mother’s grief or her state of mind. Kyle’s affliction hit both her and my father hard.

  But when my mother’s grief turned to anger, she began to blame my father—for being a soldier, for Kyle’s joining the military, for allowing him to be posted to Iraq. She even blamed my father for the warrior genes in our family DNA, which she claimed “crippled Kyle’s mind with the lure of war.”

  But in the end, the terrible crime she committed on my wedding day told me that she really just blamed herself.

  9

  * * *

  The next twenty minutes in the helicopter went past in a blur.

  A blur and a welter of emotions wrenched my heart in every direction. My mind went into a tailspin so severe I wanted to throw up. Fear and helplessness overwhelmed me. Chad’s words ricocheted around inside my head.

  “They’ve found it, Kath. They�
��ve found Jack’s aircraft.”

  My insides felt hollowed out, yet I still managed to ask a barrage of questions. How? Where? When? How had the aircraft crashed? Was it intact or scattered in pieces? Did they find . . . did they find bodies?

  I hated even saying that word. It was so brutally final. Sometimes I used to almost convince myself that maybe Jack and my children didn’t die that night. That maybe they somehow survived and lived on without me in some alternate universe. My mind never figured out the exact details. But it’s weird the things a troubled mind will convince you of.

  The very thought of bodies turned my stomach. My husband’s and children’s remains scattered among wreckage. Bleached bones at this stage. I couldn’t get my head around that. Even after eight years of not knowing exactly what happened to my family, I guess I still could not grasp the finality of their deaths.

  Until now. Now it began to seep into me like rot. I felt tormented, gripped by a kind of madness. I saw that I was wringing my hands, yet I could not stop. I was locked into a loop of desperation, wanting to know everything at once.

  “They found the wreckage in a remote part of the Smoky Mountains.” Chad spoke softly. “An area called Thunder Mountain. Apparently, the crash site was covered by years of debris, and the aircraft is reasonably intact.”

  I remember reading somewhere—maybe in the Knoxville News Sentinel or some local tabloid—that there are still aircraft wrecks they have never found in the Smokies. It is a vast area, many hundreds of square miles of sometimes dense foliage and forest, some of it subtropical.

  “But . . . but Jack wasn’t supposed to be flying in that area, was he?”

  Chad looked down at his black shoes, polished like glass, then back up at me. He gave a tiny shake of his head. “Not that I’m aware of, Kath.”

  “Then . . . then why there?”

  “I don’t know. The company wasn’t aware that the aircraft would be in that area at that time. I’m hoping the investigation may solve the mystery.”

  “Oh, my God.” I put my head in my hands, feeling overwhelmed again. “What about remains?”

  Chad touched my arm, squeezed it. His other hand went around my shoulder to comfort me. “I don’t know about any remains, Kath. The site’s still being investigated.”

  “How? How did they find the wreckage?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess they’ll explain.”

  I looked out at the landscape drifting by. We were beyond Knoxville’s sprawl and the wide Tennessee River, maybe a couple of thousand feet up, the vast mountain range that made up the Smokies not far ahead. The helicopter banked, rose higher, and my stomach sank in response.

  “If you need me to stay with you for a while when we land, I’ll stay,” Chad offered.

  I didn’t respond.

  “But the police are probably going to want your full attention, Kath. They’ll likely want to talk with you alone. But just know I’m there if you need me. You still have my number.”

  Of course I still had his number. I still saw Julie Ann fairly regularly. I think Chad knew that being in her company was good for me, even though seeing her made me think about Amy and what she might look like now. Getting braces on her teeth, going to middle school, hanging out with friends, cruising the mall at weekends, having crushes on boys.

  I don’t know why I said it, but I did. “I think I want to be alone.”

  “Are you sure, Kath?”

  “Yes . . . yes, I’m sure.”

  But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything, but I had a sickening sensation in my stomach that had nothing to do with the helicopter ride and a lot to do with the truckload of fear and dread that was rioting inside my head.

  I felt Chad squeeze my hand again. I wanted it to feel reassuring, but it didn’t. Right that minute, nothing would reassure me.

  The Smoky Mountains were all around us now, their vast, rugged majesty drenched in misty sunshine, snow on top of some of the highest peaks.

  Jack and I used to bring the children up here in winter and summer, to ride down the river in rubber tubes, picnic, visit Dollywood or Gatlinburg or sometimes Cades Cove to see bears in the wild.

  One memory stuck out above all others.

  When I was pregnant with Amy, I’d had preeclampsia, and she came almost three months early. A preterm birth can sometimes signal problems for a child’s physical and mental development. Lung problems, brain development, and eyesight problems are all risks, but we were lucky; aside from a left-ear abnormality, Amy was perfect. A final operation at age three to correct the problem with her cochlea, and she was as good as new. A month after she left the hospital, all the medical reports were clear, and Jack and I decided to celebrate.

  We drove up into the Smokies with Sean and Amy early one evening, brought a homemade picnic, and joined thousands of other visitors on the field outside Gatlinburg who came to watch the annual fireflies dance, a symphony of light like no other, which happened in only two places in the world, Southeast Asia and the Smoky Mountains.

  When darkness fell and the stars appeared, we were treated to the sight of hundreds of millions of fireflies dancing in weird synchronous displays that took our breath away. We watched, astonished.

  A wide-eyed Sean said, “Wow, Mommy, Daddy, look at all those twinkling lights!”

  Amy was in a trance. “It’s . . . it’s like a lot of Christmas trees, Mommy.”

  At first, she and Sean tried to catch the errant fireflies that strayed our way, giggling and chasing them this way and that, before they gave up, exhausted. Sean attempted to count the winking lights and got stuck at “twenty and one hundred.”

  It was such a special moment, sitting on that hillside. One of those times when you look at your children and you know they are your whole life, and it moves you so much it frightens you, because you realize you are a hostage to fortune. Your existence would be meaningless if anything happened to your kids. It makes you wish that time could stand still.

  It was the kind of glorious memory everyone should experience once in his or her lifetime. My mother used to say that there should always be one bright, shining, happy incident in our lives that we remember above all else. That evening was surely ours.

  I looked down now at those same mountains, in sunlight now, not darkness. It was such a cruel irony that the bodies of my husband and children should lie here, in a place that was always so special to us.

  I felt besieged by my memories, my eyes wet.

  Chad held on to my hand. I felt its strength as he clasped it to his chest.

  Our eyes met. I got the feeling there was a lot more he wanted to say to me. But this was not the time.

  And then below, I saw a splash of activity appear in the forest. Police cars, TV vans, and figures scouring the forest in all directions.

  My heart swelled, feeling as if it were going to explode.

  The helicopter started to descend.

  10

  * * *

  The rotors tossed branches and sent rippling air across the brackish, swampy waters in the forest below.

  As the helicopter came in to land, my stomach clenched with pain. Below, I could make out a crush of TV crews and reporters, held back by uniformed sheriff’s deputies. All around there was nothing but patches of swamp and thick forest, speckled with what looked like bits of aircraft wreckage. I spotted a big central mass of it off to my left, but as the helicopter banked, I lost sight of it. Next to me, Chad squeezed my hand again, even tighter. “You hanging in there?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure.”

  “Kath, are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”

  “I’m sure.”

  It was true. This was about my family. This was about me and Jack and Sean and Amy. No one else. I felt my eyes become wet.

  The helicopter landed with a solid bump. The swish of the blades die
d, and then a man slid open the door. Big, handsome, light-skinned African-American carrying too much weight.

  He slipped off his Ray-Bans, and I saw green eyes flecked with gray. He flashed an ID. “Ms. Kelly, thanks for coming. I’m Brewster Tanner. I’m with the FBI.”

  I barely nodded, still in a daze.

  Tanner gestured to a tall, muscular dark-haired man who was chewing gum. The man didn’t speak; he looked remote but made eye contact with me as his jaws moved. “And this is Agent Breedon,” Tanner added.

  Breedon barely nodded.

  A hundred yards away, I saw a bunch of SUVs parked near a pair of canvas walk-in tents, a half dozen sheriff’s deputies standing around. Men and women in blue nylon zip-up jackets with large yellow NTSB lettering on the back were gathering up the bits of debris, tagging them before removing them to the tents. Some areas were marked off with yellow tape or red tape.

  The next thing I knew, I was out of the chopper, and Chad was lost somewhere behind me. The FBI man seemed to be studying me, as if trying to size me up.

  “Are you familiar with this area, ma’am?”

  “No.”

  Tanner jerked his chin toward a mountain nearby. “We’re at a place called Thunder Mountain, southeast of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This particular area is actually pretty dense, kinda looks like rain forest. An elderly couple from Louis­ville, Kentucky, died last night when their private aircraft came down in a bad storm.”

  When I looked closer at the central mass of wreckage, I realized what it was: the remains of a cabin, scattered in a zillion pieces all around the forest. Bits of a white refrigerator and a chunk of an aircraft wing were stuck in some branches. Little yellow flag markers were planted next to debris, people in white hazard suits poking around whatever interested them.

  I understood none of this, none of it at all. I felt a strange fluttering in my chest. A muddied green Polaris Ranger drove up, the buggy’s engine sounding like an angry garden mower. A small, ruddy-faced man with wiry gray hair and glasses climbed out of the seat, leaving a clipboard on the dash.