by Ninie Hammon
Whitworth was older than Jack, and Jack had no memory of him—not surprising, given that he had no memories of anybody else, either. Whitworth’s heroism during the nightmare fire had cost him much of the right side of his face, though the scar gave the man a singularly commanding presence. It had also secured for him an appointment to West Point where he graduated at the top of his class. That was something else Jack had against him. Jack had been an Army Ranger, one of the youngest ever, and rangers held West Point desk soldiers in particular contempt.
Whitworth had been deployed during the Gulf War. Later press releases about him said that he had “served with distinction” there, whatever that meant.
Still, Whitworth would likely have slid quietly into obscurity afterward had he not been seated in the front row of First Class on US Air Flight 734 from Cincinnati to Los Angeles on March 4, 2003.
It was never determined what exactly the knife-wielding lunatic on the flight actually wanted—much less how he’d gotten the knife through security, which was, admittedly, sketchy at the time. But it was clear he intended to use the weapon on the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit, and would have done so had it not been for Chapman Whitworth.
Not a particularly big man, he had seemed larger than life that day. Leaping from his seat to block the door leading to the cockpit, Whitworth had stood, arms crossed and glared at the lunatic.
“Get out of the way,” the crazy man had shouted, “I’m going in there.”
“You’ll have to go through me,” Whitworth had said calmly.
The man had attempted to do just that. And Whitworth had killed him.
That part stuck in Jack’s craw as well. A trained soldier, Whitworth could have—and in Jack’s view should have—merely disarmed the man. Instead, he’d wrestled the weapon away and it had subsequently ended up in the lunatic’s chest.
That part hadn’t been captured by the passenger who’d been filming her grandson’s reaction to his first airplane ride when the crazy man leapt into the aisle. She’d turned her camcorder on the drama and filmed it in glowing detail. Once the media got hold of the video, it was shown—Jack believed ad nauseam—around the world.
So soon after 9/11, with every airplane passenger hinky about terrorists on board, the mood of the country was such that nobody seemed inclined to question whether or not Whitworth had used excessive force.
Instant hero—add water and stir. Whitworth was nominated and elected by a landslide to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky less than a year later. His cheesy campaign slogan became as iconic as “Let’s Roll.”
You want to mess with America, you’ll have to go through me.
Jack had seen a picture in the Louisville Courier-Journal on a newsstand in Cincinnati when a garish monstrosity of a sign had been erected in his hometown. It featured a picture of Chapman Whitworth’s head, thirty feet tall sticking out of the top, his mouth open as if the shot had been taken as he’d spoken the words printed in the little speech bubble next to it: “You’ll have to go through me.” Beneath the head was the inscription: “Bradford’s Ridge, Kentucky, home of U.S. Senator Chapman Whitworth.” He’d only served one term as senator before securing an appointment as a federal judge in Cincinnati, but Jack would bet his running shorts the sign in Bradford’s Ridge remained.
Crocker was either not paying attention to the Whitworth conversation, or didn’t hear it. The major had weird hearing issues. Sometimes, he missed a whole conversation and sometimes he could pick up a whisper across a crowded room. There was a crease of concentration across his brow that was the only mark of any kind on his head from his eyebrows to the tag on his shirt collar. Jack recognized it as his “I’m going to get to the bottom of this” look.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Crocker said. “Until the board of inquiry puts your batteries back in, you’re as useless around here as bumps on a pickle. Why don’t you do some more digging, see if you can come up with a bone that ties all this together. Unofficially, of course.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
No prob, Crock. I’ll just ask the eye-witnesses in Savannah and Saint Louis, “Say, any of you good folks see a swarm of bugs with fangs perched on the perps’ shoulders?”
* * * * * * *
Opthalmologist, Dr. Paul Fredricks, at Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was scrubbing for the emergency surgery that had called him off the golf course this morning before he’d even had time to tee off. He’d played every Monday with the same foursome for going on ten years now and they had razzing-rights about his abandoning them.
“I have an agreement wiz my patients,” said Sergei Afanaseyez, the obstetrician, in his melodious Russian accent. “If I ‘em not dere when the bebe showszup, they go ahead and hiv it widout me.”
In truth, Dr. Fredricks didn’t often miss a game for an emergency, but a seaman with a horrendous injury had been airlifted from a commercial fishing vessel seventy-five miles off shore last night and flown in on a Coast Guard chopper.
As an intern more years ago than he liked to admit, Dr. Fredricks had always hated the emergency room rotation. Oh sure, if you asked him, he’d maintain there was no such thing as a squeamish doctor. Nobody got through four years of medical school, two years of internship and another four of residency without developing a profound tolerance for all things bloody, oozy, wet and squishy. But he was honest enough to admit to himself that one of the reasons he had selected opthalmology was that it afforded him minimum exposure to the maimed and mauled. And the older he got, the more grateful he was that while others were called to bind up the wounds of the world, he got paid to help the humanity in his little part of it see the world better.
He’d flinched inwardly when he’d been briefed on the patient coming in on the chopper. Occupations all had their hazards, but he had never heard of a fishing injury like this seaman had sustained. He wasn’t looking forward to this surgery.
Rachel Zaremba, the nurse he’d worked with for so long she handed him instruments before he asked for them, stepped into the room. He turned so she could help him glove up, but her mask was pulled down off her face.
“He’s gone,” she said. Her voice had a peculiar quality he’d never heard in it before.
“Who’s gone?” Dr. Fredricks asked.
“The patient.”
Dr. Fredericks stopped scrubbing.
“Gone where?”
“Just…gone. He’s not in there. The floor nurse went to get him, found the lines unhooked and the bed empty. His gown was on the floor and his clothes weren’t in the closet.”
What she said was confusing, but far more disturbing was the look on her face. Rachel Zaremba was a rock, calm and unflappable. You wanted her in the trench beside you when it hit the fan. Now, she seemed about to cry, breathing in short little gasps like she was in shock.
“A man with that kind of injury…” Dr. Fredricks couldn’t process it. “You’re telling me he got up and walked out of the hospital with a fish hook in his eye?”
“No, that’s not what I’m telling you,” she said, with a little squeak that sounded like incipient hysteria. “He didn’t walk out with a fish hook in his eye.”
Dr. Fredricks noticed the instrument tray in her hand for the first time when she held it out to him.
“He left his eye behind.”
Lying in a small puddle of blood and fluid was a human eye, trailing broken blood vessels and ligaments where it had been ripped from its socket. The orb looked like a ball of white bait. A three-inch hook had been stabbed into one side of the eyeball and the gory prong end protruded out the other. Centered perfectly.
The eye stared sightlessly up at Dr. Fredricks. It was a startling pale blue.
* * * * * * *
Growing in Daniel’s chest like a festering boil, it got bigger and uglier every day. He’d been waiting for the right time to talk to Emily about it, had planned out what to say. But he had underestimated the force of the building press
ure. One day it burst and the stinking, vile infection squirted out all over him, and all over Emily, too.
Andi was asleep. He had brought the book downstairs with him to ensure she didn’t pull out a flashlight and read it under the covers after he left.
He’d sat on the edge of her bed earlier, reading it to her and having with her the same discussion they’d had so many times before.
“The movie,” Andi had pronounced firmly. “I love the book, Daddy, but the movie’s waaay better.”
“Maybe you have a fever,” Daniel had said, and reached to put his hand on her forehead, but she’d batted it away. “All the good lines in the movie came right out of the book, Sweetheart.”
“But Billy Crystal as Miracle Max,” she crinkled up her nose and did a pretty fair imitation, “‘Have fun stormin’ the castle, boys.’ That was epic, Daddy. And how beautiful Princess Buttercup looked when she floated down out of the window onto that horse.”
“That’s exactly how you float down when we play Catch Me,” he teased. That was a game Andi’d started when she was maybe three years old—just hopped up onto the back of the couch one day, put her arms out to her sides, closed her eyes, called out, “Catch me!” then dropped straight backward. Daniel had had to leap halfway across the room that first time to keep her from landing splat on the floor.
Andi rolled her eyes, “Riiiight.”
Back and forth they went. Eventually, they’d declared the perpetual Princess Bride argument a draw, as they always did.
He’d been smiling to himself about the book, hadn’t even been thinking about the dark, rotting hole in his heart. Then Emily had breezed into the room, looking radiant, and had casually brushed a kiss off the top of his head when she passed where he was sitting in his recliner. Something about the offhandedness of the gesture, the superficial, perfunctory nature of it stabbed into his chest, an ice pick that punctured the swollen boil within.
“I know,” he said quietly.
She had been crossing the room toward the kitchen, but the tone of his voice stopped her and she turned to face him. Several looks washed over her face at once. Uncertainty. Surprise. He saw apprehension there, too—no, fear.
“Know what?” she said, and was almost able to carry it off as an innocent question. But not quite.
He hadn’t meant to say it, but once the words were out there in the room, he not only couldn’t call them back, but couldn’t stem the tsunami of tangled emotions that had propelled them out of his chest.
He took a slow, deep breath, and rage/love/hurt/indignation and all the other feelings solidified and settled around him in a blanket of icy calm.
“No games,” he said. “At least show enough respect for me not to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Emily had the most amazing ability to charge a room with electricity, with a kind of “game-day” excitement just by her presence and her dazzling smile. As she stood expressionless, studying him, he could feel the “charge” go out of her. She diminished before him, some of her power taken from her.
“How did you find out?”
“What difference does it make how? I know. I know that…”
He paused for only a moment in real time, but in soul time, the earth stopped, ceased spinning and revolving around the sun. On the other side of what he was about to say was a world he did not know, a reality he’d never even considered. And a door would slam shut behind him as soon as he spoke the new world into existence and he would never be able to return to the old one, the world of innocent trust and security and commitment. How did two people, two married people, relate in the world he was entering, where all the rules had been broken, the trust shattered, the vows abandoned? How did they make a place there, and make a place they must, because the world of innocence would be forever lost to them as soon as he spoke.
“…you were shacked up somewhere rolling around in the sheets with Jeff Kendrick when Andi was shot, when your little girl was bleeding—dying.”
The sudden rage that catapulted him into the new world was all-consuming and almost overwhelming. He hadn’t expected it at that moment or wanted it, but was grateful for the strength it gave him. Righteous indignation did, indeed, bestow great power and authority.
Emily looked like he’d slapped her. She sank down onto the arm of the chair she stood beside, her face white. She didn’t look at him, merely stared at a spot on the floor in the middle of the room. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely audible, clotted with unshed tears.
“I love my baby. When I thought we might lose her, I…” She stopped, took a deep breath, then another. Slowly she raised her eyes to meet his and there was such unexpected steel in her gaze that if he’d been standing, he would have taken a step back. “I will be forever sorry I wasn’t available to my daughter every second that she needed me…but I am not sorry for where I was and what I was doing, so don’t expect me to fall at your feet and beg your forgiveness.”
“Emily, how could you?” He realized how trite and pathetic that sounded but it just popped out. “Why?”
“Why? Oh, let’s see…maybe it’s that there hasn’t been any passion in our marriage since…I don’t know…since Bill Clinton ‘did not sleep with that woman.’ Or maybe that you look at me and talk at me, but you haven’t really seen or spoken to me in years. Or that—”
“So it’s my fault? You commit adultery and it’s my fault?”
“Adultery? Oh, please. Adultery is one of those church words you love to throw around that don’t mean a thing to you.”
This was wrong, all wrong. How had he gotten on the defensive?
“So you’re not committing adultery?”
“If it makes you feel morally superior to paint me with a scarlet letter, be my guest. Certainly, that word’s your get-out-of-jail-free card. Plop that baby out there and ‘poor pastor Daniel’ will instantly become a hyphenated word. Poor-Pastor-Daniel’s wife committed adultery and that gives Poor-Pastor-Daniel Biblical grounds to get a divorce.”
They both were shocked into silence by the noxious sound of the word. It hung there between them, stinking like a dead fish on a stick. Emily recovered first.
“Is that what you want—out? A divorce?”
Daniel’s head was spinning. In all the times he’d pictured this scene, all the times he’d imagined what would be said, he had never pictured Emily unrepentant. No, not just unrepentant—defiant. How did he…what was he supposed to do with that? He’d prepared himself for contrition, tears, pleading for forgiveness. He’d searched his heart for compassion to give to her. He had prayed for…
No, he hadn’t.
The words of the old black woman, Theresa Washington, rang in his ears.
“When was the last time you prayed? You ain’t been praying for me. Or for yourself or your wife or your little girl.”
He hadn’t prayed for anything.
“You didn’t answer my question, Dan. Is that what you want? A divorce?”
“Is that what you want?”
Emily wavered, didn’t seem prepared for the question. He got the sense that the conversation had gotten out of hand for her, too, that perhaps it had gone places she didn’t expect or intend for it to go. She looked down, not meeting his eyes for a time, but none of what she might be thinking showed on her face. Finally, she sighed and looked up at him.
“This is the truth, Dan. As much of the truth as I know. It will probably surprise you, but I like my life. It works. I like this house. I like being…” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers, “‘Pastor Burke’s wife.’ Maybe my life’s dull, uninspiring, but it’s safe. I don’t know how I would survive alone.”
“Alone? You mean you wouldn’t dash into Jeff Kendrick’s waiting arms?”
“Leave Jeff out of this.”
“Leave him out of this? He’s the reason for this.”
“No, he’s not. He’s not the cause, he’s the effect. You’re the cause.” She paused, then added g
rudgingly, “we’re the cause.”
She got to her feet.
“If you’re asking me if I’m willing to pick up the phone right now and call Jeff and tell him I never want to see him again, the answer is no. Whatever you have to do about that, you’ll just have to do. But if you’re asking if I want a divorce, the answer to that is no, too.”
She looked at him, vulnerable for a moment, and he could see that the strength and resolve were not as sturdy as she would have him believe, as she herself wanted to believe. He saw confusion, uncertainty and—no, he wasn’t deluding himself—he saw affection there, too. Love? That he couldn’t say. But she cared about him, that was certain. She still cared.
“I’m not ready to give up, not yet…” she finished softly, “on…us.”
She seemed to catch herself, then, to realize she’d let her guard down and the door to her soul slammed shut in his face.
“Besides…there’s Andi.”
By mutual unspoken agreement, they had not talked about that strange afternoon when Theresa Washington had said their little girl could see demons. And the longer they didn’t talk about it, the more comfortable they became with the illusion that it’d never happened, that the strange old woman was addled by her grief and Andi… They couldn’t go there, explain how Andi had come back from…how she had seen…so they simply didn’t talk about it.
“Andi is fragile right now. I don’t know what’s going on with her…”
Emily’s voice trailed off. Daniel had nothing to say, to add.
A creature made of wasps?
The heart monitor’s sudden beep, beep, beep.
But right now was absolutely not the time to go there.
“I don’t know what it means that she…what any of it means about her, or about…God.” Emily’s voice had the same wonder in it Daniel was sure he’d hear in his own if he tried to talk about it. “But I do know that there’s enough turmoil in that child’s life and we can’t add to it. Right now is not the time for her parents to decide to go their separate ways. She needs us, Daniel. She needs both of us.”