One dream broken, so another could survive.
WALKING INTO THAYER Hall, yellow spots appeared before Avery’s eyes as she adjusted from the brightness outside to the academic building’s dim corridor. Normally, the hallway was abuzz with cadets rushing to class, hanging their hats on the hooks outside the doors, chatting before they shuffled through into the classrooms and into their seats. But today, the hallway was empty and silent.
Her freshly shined black shoes clicked against the linoleum floors for twenty paces, until she reached the door to the lecture hall. She’d expected her Physics professor to be standing at the front, handing out the midterm packets, while cadets frantically used the last minutes they had to finish studying. But instead, every person inside the classroom was statuesque, staring at a television screen that had been rolled to the front of the room.
Life could change so quickly. All it took was an instant.
Turning to look at what held their attention, Avery’s stomach lurched, like she’d just stepped off the edge of a cliff. On the screen, two silver buildings glittered against a blue sky. The same blue sky she’d just been admiring outside. But something wasn’t right. The buildings were on fire, gashes cut into their sides, flames spilling out. Black smoke pooled above the towers, reaching higher than the tallest buildings in the world. Smoke signals.
“Two planes. Back to back. Flew right into the buildings,” the cadet standing next to her said.
“On purpose?” Avery asked, incredulous.
He nodded.
“Did they . . .” Avery stuttered. “Did they get everyone out?”
The cadet didn’t answer, but simply turned to look back at the screen.
The news flickered between images of the World Trade Center and a confused anchor, frantically trying to assess what had happened in the world around him. When the room let out a gasp, Avery closed her eyes and tried to pretend that the slam she heard through the television speakers was something else. Anything else.
Only one thought went through her mind, circling and circling, like a plane waiting to land. Like the dress of the woman who’d just jumped.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.
This changes everything.
“THIS IS WAR,” Avery said, breaking the silence. “That’s what I keep thinking. It’s . . . just . . . I can’t believe it.”
The entire women’s basketball team had gathered in Wendy Bennett’s living room. Paper bowls of half-eaten chicken pot pie littered the floor, and were stacked on the coffee table. The team huddled under blankets, interlocking arms and passing around a tissue box. All twelve pairs of eyes were puffy and red. Women at West Point learned quickly to hold their emotion in check—never to shed a tear. But that unspoken rule had shattered to the ground, falling with the towers.
All day, people had speculated about what might happen next. Would they cancel school and send them all immediately to the Middle East? Avery heard more than one person say they wanted to go down to the city to help search for survivors. And though she didn’t say it out loud, she wanted to remind them that two 110-story buildings had collapsed. From what they were showing on television, it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off in the middle of the city. There weren’t going to be any survivors.
“I just don’t understand,” said Hannah, wiping tears from her cheeks. “Why would anyone do something like this?”
“They’re saying it’s al-Qaeda,” Dani explained. “Terrorists.”
“But what do they want?” said Lisa Johnson. “What does killing thousands of innocent people accomplish?”
Avery had chosen a spot on the couch between Dani and Hannah, while the rest of the girls spread out throughout the room—some seated by the fireplace, others on the floor. Five plebes—girls who’d graduated high school a mere four months ago—sat in the corner, white faced. Time to grow up, Avery thought to herself. They would no longer get the liberty of treating their training like a joke. And Avery wished, suddenly, that she hadn’t either.
At the beginning, she’d wanted to come to West Point to prove something: maybe to her father, maybe to herself. But the sound of that body hitting the ground had knocked her motivations completely off balance. Could it be possible that this was the reason she was here? That the universe had conspired to get her to this house, in this moment, with these people?
She shuddered, afraid of what that might mean. Dani was a natural leader. And Hannah was selfless, to a fault.
But what about me? Avery wondered. Am I really cut out for war?
Do I even have a choice?
Wendy sat on an ottoman with her hands resting in her lap. The television was still on, flashing scenes that made Avery cringe. People had walked out of lower Manhattan covered in white dust, their cheeks tear stained, their bodies hunched over in defeat. It was hard to watch. And yet, she couldn’t turn her eyes away from their faces.
Wendy sighed deeply and looked around the room, as if she was trying to imprint the moment into her memory. Then she grabbed the television remote and pressed a button. The screen snapped to black.
“What does Mark think?” Dani asked suddenly.
Wendy’s husband wasn’t home tonight. Tonight, he’d gone to meet with the men’s basketball team, who were likewise in shock. Avery felt oddly jealous of the familiar way Dani had called Colonel Bennett by his first name. She knew the Bennetts had a special bond with Dani after she’d lived here, recovering from surgery. But as Wendy stared across the room, eyes trained to the freckles on Dani’s face, Avery felt a deep pang of sadness that she didn’t have that kind of close-knit relationship anywhere, with anyone. Wendy, with her pearl stud earrings and tattered Bible, had probably heard the gossip. She probably thinks I’m a lost cause.
“He’s in shock. Just like the rest of us,” answered Wendy.
“Does he think we’ll declare war?” Lisa asked timidly.
“I don’t know.”
Wendy paused, her chin quivering. “You know, a lot of people may not understand how people of faith—people like Mark and me—could choose to be in the Army. But what those men did today is evil. It’s pure evil—killing innocent people. And I know that Mark feels honored to be part of a team that wants to rid the world of that kind of evil. It’s an honorable path you girls have chosen. But it won’t be easy.” She dabbed a tissue under her eyes, then cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking about you girls all day, and how scary this must feel. It’s scary for everyone—it’s scary for me too. But for you—this day will change the course of your lives forever. Maybe in ways we can’t even predict.”
Avery knew that was true. Already, she’d run through the memory of the morning countless times, and when she closed her eyes, the images wouldn’t stop assaulting her brain. She’d never forget the color of the sky—an aggressive blue. The smell of fresh-cut grass in the air. The eerie quiet in the hallways before she turned and saw both buildings collapse, right there on television. Maybe that’s what made a memory powerful. Not that it happened once, but that it happened over and over again on the screen of your mind.
They sat in silence for a long time before Wendy offered to pray. Around the room, all of her teammates had their eyes closed and they were nodding along, wiping their tears and noses.
What did they think all this prayer would change? Avery wondered. Did they actually think someone was listening?
“For some reason, I keep coming back to this story,” Wendy said, once she’d finished her prayer. The pages of her Bible flipped back and forth, thin and worn, like she’d done this a lot. Her finger landed in the middle of a page.
“I’ll paraphrase,” she said, slipping on round tortoiseshell reading glasses. “Jesus was with his disciples and he got word from Mary and Martha that one of his best friends, Lazarus, was sick. And this is what blows my mind. It says, ‘Now Jesus loved Mary and Martha. So, when he heard Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.’”
Wendy put her glasses down. “Doesn’t that seem
strange? He loved them, so he waited? When I think about love, I think of someone jumping on the first plane to come see me when I’m in trouble. But by the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has already been dead for four days. Four days! He’s already in a tomb; Jesus missed the funeral.” She paused, letting that information sink in.
“And when Jesus finally arrives, Martha doesn’t say, ‘I’m so sorry you missed the funeral.’ No. She says, ‘If only you had been here, none of this would have happened.’ She’s basically saying, ‘You could have prevented this, but you didn’t.’ It’s faith mixed with total confusion. ‘I believe, but I have no idea what you’re doing.’”
The silence was almost too much to bear. Avery wanted to jump out of her chair and scream: EXACTLY! If God had been there, all those people in those buildings and planes wouldn’t have died. But God wasn’t there, because there was no such thing as God. Tragedies happened every single day. To believe that God could prevent those tragedies but didn’t? That wasn’t confusing. It was offensive. That meant God wasn’t loving—it proved He was cruel.
“I’m sorry,” Avery snapped. “But I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
Wendy closed her Bible. “Martha’s prayer is one of the most honest, raw prayers I’ve ever read in the Bible. ‘Lord, if you had been here, none of this would have happened.’ It’s her cry from the trenches. And Jesus doesn’t get angry with her. He doesn’t walk away. He cries with her.”
And suddenly, much to Avery’s amazement, the girls were talking. Sharing. Dani said that she’d constantly felt that way about her injuries—that she wanted to believe there was a reason, but she couldn’t understand what God was doing in her life. Lisa Johnson brought up Coach Jankovich. The woman grew worse and more vindictive with every passing day, and Lisa wondered how much more she could stand. Avery pressed her fingers into her eyes and felt wetness. She hated to cry. But somehow, she couldn’t make the tears stop. She wanted to feel angry at God. But you can’t be angry at a God you don’t believe in.
“Let me get this straight. These assholes fly planes into buildings full of people,” Avery cried. “And what? We’re just supposed to trust that God has some bigger plan for all this? What’s the point?”
Wendy took her glasses off. “That’s a really important question, Avery. Keep going.”
“Keep going?” Avery cried. “What else is there to say? It’s bullshit.”
Dani squeezed Avery’s arm tight, and when Avery turned to look at Dani’s face, there were tears streaking down her freckled cheeks, in heavy lines.
Wendy didn’t respond immediately. Instead, she simply nodded her head, letting the sound of Avery’s harried breathing fill the room.
“Yeah. It is,” Wendy said finally. “It is bullshit. And I think that’s why I love this prayer from Martha so much. She’s saying, ‘Where the hell were you, Jesus?’
“It’s dirty. It’s ugly. But it’s faith, just the same.”
9
Spring 2002 // West Point, New York
I have nothing to wear.”
“That’s not true,” said Avery. “Here, try this.” She threw Hannah a black dress.
Pulling it over her body, Hannah stared at herself in the mirror hung on the back of one of the wardrobe doors. The dress hugged her in all the wrong places.
“Um, no.” She pulled it off her head. “That looks like I’m going to a funeral.”
Her small dorm room was littered with clothes. Sequined skirts, spaghetti-strap shirts, Daisy Dukes, and dresses fit for nights of dancing were scattered across the floor. Since they were only allowed to have a few select civilian clothes in the barracks, Avery kept her stash in a trunk in the basketball locker room, where she would not get caught. For this occasion, she’d carted the trunk back down to the barracks. A pile of rejects draped the back of Hannah’s desk chair.
They were allowed to wear civilian clothes only on the rarest of occasions: on infrequent Thursday night spirit dinners, B-weekends as they traveled home or to the city, and select events on campus. Thick with muscle, her thighs looked larger than she remembered, and her arms, though toned, looked strange against the pastel colors of Avery’s clothes. To Hannah, dressing like a girl felt pointless, and suddenly, she understood why no guys at West Point had dared to ask her out. Who needed a ninety-degree rule when you had a wardrobe full of high-waisted wool trousers?
Propelled by a surge of anxiety, Hannah fell face-first onto her bed, wishing that she’d never agreed to let Avery Adams play stylist. How did Avery fit into these clothes anyway?
In high school, Hannah always got asked to dances. The student body had voted her homecoming queen, and the quarterback of the football team was her boyfriend for two solid years—that is, until they’d disagreed about sex. He’d wanted it; she’d wanted to wait. The relationship had ended abruptly and without much fanfare. And though she’d never been afraid of being alone in the past, with Avery around, Hannah couldn’t escape the daily reminders that she was desperately, permanently single.
“You seen Avery?” a guy from the lacrosse team had asked last week, popping his head into her room.
“Nope, not here.”
“Adams around?” ventured a dark-haired Latino cadet Hannah had never seen before.
“Sorry.”
“Where’s Avery?” John Collins would demand, for what felt like the millionth time. He was the only one Hannah knew for certain Avery was trying to avoid. Apparently, she’d broken off their fling, and the green-eyed Collins had gone green all over.
“Beats me, Collins. You might try her room,” Hannah had said.
The last time he’d come around, Collins had thrown his fist into the cinder-block wall and Hannah thought she’d heard his knuckle crack.
“You should talk to him,” Hannah had suggested a few days later in the women’s locker room. She and Avery were both cleaning out their lockers after the season ended. “It seems like he might need some closure.”
“Closure?” Avery said. “How much more closure can you get? I told him it’s over.”
As one of her closest friends, Hannah had a front-row seat to Avery’s pattern of ups and downs, which started with Avery’s pronouncement that she’d found the one and ended with her sobbing in the fetal position, because the guy had decided to date a cheerleader—better known as a Rabble Rouser—instead. The drama had grown predictable, and Hannah worried constantly that Avery would get caught behind closed doors, putting her entire future at West Point in jeopardy.
“Don’t worry,” Avery had said that night as they’d walked back to the barracks. “I’ll take care of Collins. He won’t bother you anymore.”
IN THE SEMESTER that had passed since September 11, everything had changed at West Point.
As soon as the towers came down, West Point had increased security, outfitting every campus entrance with bomb-sniffing dogs and military police, fully armed with automatic rifles. Where once there had been open roads, spike strips now controlled the flow of traffic. Visitors used to be able to walk through the gates simply by showing their ID. Now they had to submit to background checks.
Conversation had changed too. Once a far-off land few could pinpoint on a map, Afghanistan had become the center of most discussions on campus. The name Osama bin Laden could be heard in the mess hall and between classes. At Grant Hall, cadets shared slices of pizza and opinions about military strategy. You couldn’t turn on the news without seeing grainy images of the world’s most wanted criminal: a thin, gray-bearded man seated in a cave. Whenever she saw Bin Laden’s face, Hannah shuddered. But her unease was always short-lived. Perhaps because she imagined men like her grandfather at the Pentagon planning the response, she felt confident that the U.S.-led retaliation would be over quickly. After all, America’s army was the strongest in the world. Its most recent military conflict, Desert Storm, had only lasted six months.
How long could it take to find and kill one lone terrorist?
But while headl
ines raged, the daily proceedings of college life had moved forward as usual. Professors went on teaching. Sports teams went right on practicing. Leaves fell into piles of gold on the ground, and soon, the sky turned the color of wool. With Dani still recovering from her surgery and the loss of last year’s class of seniors, Coach Jankovich promoted Hannah to the varsity team, along with Avery and Lisa Johnson. During a basketball game over the Thanksgiving holiday against Cornell University, Hannah scored twenty points, and Avery hit a half-court three-point shot in the last second to win the game. The entire arena had erupted in chaos. Hannah had never seen Avery’s face so lit up with joy. Even the Cornell fans celebrated, as if West Point’s ability to win a women’s basketball game somehow correlated with their future ability to take out terrorists.
When they weren’t on the road, they were in the gym, listening to the shrill sound of Coach Jankovich’s whistle reverberate across the court. Last year’s losing season meant this year, her antics had risen to a fever pitch. She was extremely hard on the plebes, Hannah thought, and had replaced her hatred for Avery with ceaseless criticism of Lisa Johnson.
“LISA!” she’d screamed a few weeks earlier, throwing her clipboard to the ground. “THOSE CORNROWS TOO TIGHT? Maybe if you’d loosen them, you could actually think!”
The more Jankovich yelled at Lisa, the more Dani crutched to the sidelines to give her teammate quiet pep talks. Hannah marveled at Dani’s ability to motivate her teammates, despite her injuries. She called out ideas for plays during time-outs, whispered tips to Hannah during games. And rather than see her as an asset, Coach Jankovich often sent Dani out of practice for speaking out of turn.
It didn’t make sense to Hannah. The fact that the players had respect for Dani didn’t mean they had less for their coach. Respect wasn’t pie. But Coach Jankovich’s unrelenting paranoia had turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Team morale had never been lower.
Even Hannah, who hated conflict, had ventured to ask for a change. Practices ran late every single day, leaving the girls little time to rush back to their dorm rooms before dinner. In January, when Hannah had asked Coach Jankovich to consider ending practice promptly at six o’clock, like other coaches, she’d offered only a thin-lipped smile in return.
Beyond the Point Page 11