"I can take it."
"I know that, Ron. You can take anything. But maybe sometimes a person doesn't need to say everything. You've just got to get through stuff."
He sipped his drink. "Sometimes you think you would want to go see him, or talk to him, if it wasn't for us. Is that it? Because if it is, I won't stand in your way. I really won't, T." He came forward. "But let me ask you this: Were you thinking a lot about him before you ran into his mother and found out he'd been hurt?"
"Not a lot, no. Sometimes."
"So maybe-just a thought here-maybe it's guilt. Maybe on some level you feel like you need his permission."
"To do what?"
"Move on. Have a life of your own."
She sat on the edge of her big chair, biting her lip, holding her forgotten wineglass in both hands between her knees. Eventually, slowly, she began to shake her head. "No," she said. "I don't think that's it."
"Okay," Nolan said. "I've been wrong before. Twice, I think." A quick smile, trying to break the tension. It didn't work. "What's your theory?"
"It's not a theory so much as it's a change in the facts I was living with. I thought he stopped writing to me because he'd stopped…loving me."
"Maybe he stopped writing to you because you didn't write back."
"Okay, maybe some of that too. But that wasn't really him, I don't think. He's a stubborn guy. I mean, he wrote me ten letters and I didn't answer any of them, so why would he stop at number ten? I think he would have kept on until I told him to stop. Except he got shot and he couldn't."
"So he's still carrying a torch for you?"
"He might be."
"And that would make a difference?"
She blew out the breath she was holding. "I'd gotten comfortable thinking it was over, that's all. Mutually over. Thinking he was okay with it. It made it easier for me."
"With me, you mean?"
She nodded. "Which is really why I didn't write back to him. You know that."
"Yes, I do." He sat back, let out his own long breath, and took a drink. "Do you regret that? Us?"
Tara 's head kept moving slowly from side to side. "I don't know, Ron. I just don't know. You're a good guy and we've had a lot of good times…"
"But?"
She raised her eyes and looked at him, her lovely face drawn with indecision and regret. "But I think I might need some time to sort this out a little." Her eyes widened. "God, I don't even know where those words came from. I'm not saying I want to stop seeing you. I don't know what I'm saying."
Nolan pushed the ice around in his glass with his index finger. Sitting back now, an ankle on its opposite knee, he let the silence hang for a few beats. "Here's the deal," he said at last. "You take all the time you need, do everything you think you need to do. The downside is I might not be around anymore if the deciding goes on too long. That's just reality. I don't want to lose you, but I don't want half of you either. Just so it's clear where I stand."
"It's always clear where you stand. That's one of the great things about you."
He leveled his gaze at her. "You're going to call him?"
"I don't know. I shouldn't, at least not right now. His mother made it sound like he still wasn't all the way back to normal. I don't want to hear him or see him and start to feel sorry for him. That wouldn't be good."
"No, it wouldn't. It's easy to confuse pity and love, but it's bad luck."
"But I've still got to figure out where to put him. For my own peace of mind. And to be fair to us."
"I get it," Nolan said. "Truly." He drained his drink and got to his feet. "But as I say, T, don't be too long. I want for you what makes you happy, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope that that was me."
"It might be, Ron, but I'm just all confused by this right now. Please don't hate me."
"I couldn't hate you, T. You get this settled, maybe we can start over."
"That'd be good."
"I hope it would." He offered her a cold smile. "Well, listen. You've got all my numbers. I'll wait for you to call." Nodding, he placed his empty glass carefully on the coffee table, crossed over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the night.
10
Evan Scholler was the enemy. Sometimes it was a split-second evaluation, and sometimes a long-considered one, but once you made the decision that an enemy had to be eliminated, it came down to tactics-how to do it. And in this case, there was no more time to be lost. Tara remained undecided about getting in touch with Evan, but that could change in the blink of an eye. For all of Tara 's apparent reluctance, at some point she'd need to see or talk to him. And any contact between the two of them would be a disaster.
Nolan had lied to Evan about what Tara had done with his letter; he'd lied to her about the incident in Masbah and many other things. Those lies and all the other ones would come out and he'd lose her.
He couldn't let that happen.
So Evan was the enemy.
Nolan left Tara's, went home and packed a bag with a heavy jacket in it, and made it to the Oakland Airport by ten o'clock. In the mobbed waiting room at the JetBlue terminal, he found a likely looking college kid, chatted him up, and ended up giving him three thousand dollars in cash to cancel his own ticket so that Nolan could get his own last-minute ticket on the otherwise sold-out red-eye flight to Washington. He caught four hours of solid sleep on the five-hour flight.
The sky was deeply overcast, a light snow was falling, and the temperature hovered at twenty-six degrees at ten twenty-five when he arrived by cab from National Airport at the main entrance to the enormous complex that was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The place brought him up a little short. Though he had some general understanding of the numbers of injured service personnel being treated at the center, he had more or less assumed that the place was in essence just a big hospital-a building with a bunch of patients and doctors.
It was more like its own city. The main reception area throbbed with humanity. It reminded him in some ways of the main hall of Baghdad's Republican Palace. By the information board, he checked out a rendering of the facility and saw that there were nearly six thousand rooms-he figured probably fifteen to twenty thousand beds-spread out on twenty-eight acres of floor space.
Turning back to the mob, he scanned the cavernous lobby, hoping to get his bearings somehow. A large information booth commanded a good portion of the reception area's counter space, but Nolan was here to neutralize one of the hospital's patients. It wouldn't be a good idea to call any attention to himself. Returning to the rendering, he found a building labeled Neurology and decided to start there. Grabbing the map from its slot, he started out across the huge campus.
The snow had begun to dump more heavily by the time he reached his destination, and he stopped inside the door to shake out his jacket and stamp his feet. The lobby here wasn't nearly as crowded as the main reception lobby, but it still was far from deserted.
He was surprised to see four gurneys lined up against one of the walls, each of them featuring hanging drips and holding a draped body. The line for surgery? For a room? He didn't know and wasn't going to ask, but it struck him as out of place and terribly wrong. These guys had no doubt been wounded in the line of duty-the least the Army could do, he thought, was get them some rooms.
But he wasn't here to critique conditions at Walter Reed. The Army he knew was so fucked up in so many ways that he'd given up thinking about it. Besides that, he had been running on a mixture of adrenaline and low-level rage ever since he'd left Tara 's apartment last night, and now, suddenly, the logistics of carrying out this particular mission demanded his complete attention.
As the tide of humanity continued to flow past him in both directions, Nolan experienced a rare moment of indecision: Why did he assume that Evan Scholler would be here anyway? The front door of the building identified it as the Neurology Surgery Center, but Evan's surgery had possibly been months before, and he was now probably somewhere among these fifteen thousand be
ds, recovering or in rehab.
How did Nolan propose to find Evan without asking directions, and without calling attention to himself? And then, once found, how did he propose to kill him, especially if-as seemed likely if overflow gurneys here in Neurology were any indication-he was in a room with other patients?
Of course, he could eliminate them all. Collateral damage was inevitably part of the equation in any military strike. But this wasn't Iraq, where he could simply disappear without a trace. Here, potential witnesses would have to inform him of Evan's location. Staff members or nurses might be mandated to accompany him if he visited any of the patients.
Beyond that, and perhaps most significantly, Nolan had to consider that Lieutenant Evan Scholler wasn't some raghead nobody shop owner in Baghdad. If he were the victim of a murder here at Walter Reed, every aspect of Evan's life would come under the microscope, including the incident in Masbah, the scrutiny for which Nolan had thus far managed to evade. The authorities would find a reason to talk to Tara, and that would eventually, inevitably, lead back to him.
Bottom line: it was mission impossible.
Fuck that, Nolan thought. The guy is going down.
"Excuse me." A young woman in a pressed khaki uniform smiled up at him. "You look a little lost. Can I help direct you somewhere?"
Nolan's face relaxed into a smile. "I'm afraid I'm having some trouble finding a friend of mine, one of your patients."
"You're not the first person that's happened to," she said. "I've got a directory over at the reception desk that is marginally up to date, if you'd like to come follow me."
He started walking next to her. "Only marginally up to date?"
Rueful, she nodded. "I know, but we're so slammed lately, sometimes it takes the computer a while to catch up."
"That darned computer," Nolan said.
"I know. But we're trying. The good news is if he's not where the computer says he is, at least there they'll probably know where he went."
"That would be good news."
"You're being sarcastic," she said, "and I don't really blame you. But believe me, good news around here is scarce enough. You take it where you can get it." They arrived at the reception desk. "Now, your friend," she said. "What's his name?"
"Smith," Nolan said. "First initial J. We called him 'J' but he might have been Jim or John. I know," he added, with a what-can-you-do look, "it's a guy thing."
Evan Scholler stared out at the falling snow.
He had either been asleep or didn't remember when it happened, but somebody had tacked up some Christmas decorations on the wall. There was a tree and those animals that flew and pulled Santa's sled-he couldn't remember what they were called, but he was sure the name would come to him someday. Then there was Frosty the Snowman-he remembered Frosty and even the song about him, sung by that guy with the big nose. They'd also hung up by the door one of those round things made out of evergreen branches and ornaments.
It was making him crazy. He knew what objects were. He just often couldn't remember what they were called.
What he did recognize as a real memory was that he was in his third room since he'd arrived at Walter Reed. His first stop for about ten days had been the Intensive Care Unit, where he'd mostly been unconscious, and about which he had little recollection except that while he was there, he was unwilling to believe that he wasn't still in Baghdad. It didn't seem possible that he could have gone from squatting next to his Humvee in Masbah directly to the ICU here.
Of course, that wasn't what had happened. His speech and language therapist, Stephan Ray, had made his physical and mental journey a kind of a recognition game that he'd memorized as part of his therapy. His first stop after Masbah had been to a combat support hospital in Balad, which was where they took out a piece of his skull. The operation, which gave his brain room to swell, was called a craniectomy-remembering that word had been one of Evan's first major successes in therapy. When he'd gotten it right, repeating it back to Stephan the day after he'd learned it, Stephan had punched his fist in the air and predicted that he was going to recover.
What the doctors did next, still in Balad, was pretty cool. They'd taken the piece of his skull that they'd cut out and put it into a kind of a pouch they cut into his abdomen. He could still feel it in there, a little bigger than the size of a silver dollar-they were going to put it back where it belonged in his head in the next month or so, when his brain had healed sufficiently.
From Balad, they'd evidently flown him to Landstuhl in Germany, where after a quick evaluation they decided to get him here to Walter Reed.
His second room here was in Ward 58, the Neuroscience Unit. His mom and dad told him that for his first days there, the doctors more or less left him alone while the Army decided if he was eligible for benefits. He didn't understand that-eventually they had worked it out-but nevertheless he had nothing but good memories of the ward because this is where he had met Stephan. Though Evan hadn't had a clear sense of where he was or what had happened to him, in fact his therapist was there to explain things and pull him through some of the tougher, disorienting times.
Basically, what they did in those first days was play games, do flash cards and puzzles and simple math exercises. Neither Stephan nor his doctors seemed to understand exactly why, but Evan's progress was surprisingly rapid, far better than that of most of the other soldiers who were in here for head wounds. After only about a week in the ward, they moved him again to the room he currently occupied, on the fourth floor above the Pediatric ICU.
There were nineteen J. Smiths at Walter Reed, but only one with traumatic brain injury similar to Evan's. The nice nurse/receptionist at Neurological Surgery checked her monitor at the desk and told Nolan that his friend was listed as being in Ward 58, the post-op Neuroscience Unit, but that if he was still under observation there-it was only one step removed from the ICU-she didn't think he would be allowed to see visitors.
"That can't be right," Nolan said. "I know his mom and dad have already been in to see him." He gave her a warm smile. "Why do I sense computer issues again?"
"I'm sorry," she said. "I told you it might take a little patience."
He kept smiling, relaxed. "Patience is my middle name. Is there someplace they send brain injury patients when they're starting to get a little better, after this Ward Fifty-eight?"
She screwed her lips in frustration. "I don't really know. But wait." Picking up the telephone, she leaned down to read something from the computer monitor, then punched in some numbers. "Hi. This is Iris Simms at Neurosurgery reception. I've got a guest here to visit one of your patients, Jarrod Smith, and the computer's still got him in your unit, and the guest doesn't think he could still be there. In which case, where would he be?"
She covered the phone and conveyed the message to Nolan. "There's a lot of overflow, but they're saying maybe you could check the upper floors of the Pediatric ICU building, but wait…"
She raised a finger, went back to listening. "He is? Oh, I see. But I understand his parents were able to see him." She waited for the reply. "Okay, thank you. I'll let him know."
Hanging up, shaking her head in continued frustration, she came back to Nolan. "I'm afraid Jarrod is still in Ward Fifty-eight, but they say he's still pretty incoherent. And they don't allow nonfamily guests in that unit. I'm sorry."
"Nothing to be sorry about," Nolan said. "You gave it a good try. I'll call first before I come next time. Thanks for all your help."
"No problem," she said, "anytime."
Evan might be recovering faster than most, but to him it was still agonizingly slow going. This morning, he'd tried to get once through all of his flash cards-he had six hundred of them now in a shoe box next to his bed-but by about number two hundred his head felt as though it was going to explode, so he'd closed his eyes just for a minute.
And opened them more than two hours later. All of his three roommates were gone, out with their rehab or other therapies. Outside, the snow was falling in
heavy clumps, which he found depressing-so depressing, in fact, along with his failure to succeed earlier with his flash cards, that for a moment he succumbed to the blind hopelessness of his situation here. He was never going to recover, in spite of what they said. He'd never really be normal again. People would notice the dent in his head, even after they put his skull back together. He'd never again talk like a regular person. He'd never have another relationship like the one he had had with Tara. He wished the shrapnel had just cut a little deeper and had killed him, the way it had his troops.
So many of them gone now. So many gone. Regular guys. And he'd been leading them. To their deaths.
Sitting up in his bed, he closed his eyes against the unexpected sting of unwelcome tears. Bringing both hands to his face, he pressed hard against his eyelids, willing himself to stop. In an instant, before he was even aware of it, the self-flagellation and depression had turned, as it often did, to fury. He was goddamned if he was going to cry. But why had this happened to him? Why wouldn't they let him out of here? Why were we having this fucking stupid war anyway? Who cared if he ever learned his fucking flash cards? He turned his head, ready to slap the damn box of the things to the ground, when his eyes grazed the wall again, stopped for a second at the new decorations. Santa and…
Reindeer!
Those flying animals pulling the sled were reindeer. That was the word.
He started to laugh. At first it was just a small chuckle emanating from his throat, but it soon swelled to something completely out of his control, paroxysms that violently shook him until he could no longer catch his breath. His shoulders heaved and heaved some more as he tried to grab air into his lungs and now suddenly he was crying again, crying for real. Exhausted, his body shaking with the release of so much that he'd kept pent up, he collapsed back into his pillows, tears flowing unabated in a steady stream down his face.
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