For the next two days, Margaret watched Brenna circle her.
Brenna interacted respectfully, pitching in with meal preparation, companionably picking peas and lettuces in the garden, accompanying her for walks—even allowing Margaret to keep guiding her in meditations. But no question, Brenna was eyeing her.
On the second evening, standing beside Margaret at the sink, peeling carrots, Brenna resurfaced. “What, exactly, are you proposing?”
“First,” she replied, not bothering to pretend she didn’t know that Brenna was referring to therapy, “you decide what your goals are, what you want to achieve. For example, what symptoms are interfering with your daily life. Nightmares, hyperalertness, flashbacks. Whatever you want to address. You set the direction.”
“Then?” she asked, sliding the peeler down the carrot.
“We process. An hour and a half a day, we address your traumas.”
“We just talk?”
“Talk, yes. But also, EMDR, I think.”
“EMDR?”
“Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. The simplified explanation is that during a traumatic event, the connection between the amygdala and the hippocampus—the emotional versus analytical regions of the brain—doesn’t operate normally. Because of the intensity of the event the brain doesn’t have the time to integrate the experience.”
Brenna picked up the knife and started chopping the carrots into discs.
“With EMDR,” Margaret continued, “the brain is bilaterally stimulated—you just hold a couple small paddles that alternately vibrate, and listen through headphones to sounds that alternate sides while you recall the experience. This activates the neural connections between the right and left sides of the brain, so the experience can be reprocessed and correctly stored.”
“Brain voodoo.”
“Shall we discuss post-synaptic receptor channels, depotentiation, and the central foci of activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus, or would you rather just trust me on this?”
Brenna scooped the pile of carrots on the cutting board into a small pile. “Do these go in the pot yet?”
“Let’s wait a bit ’til the roast is closer to being done,” she replied. Letting go of the topic of therapy, she explained the concept of back-timing food preparation. “Everything takes its own time. The trick is to get it all to coalesce at the right moment.”
They ate dinner companionably, washed up, played a round of gin rummy, and retired for the night.
The next morning, heading out for their daily walk to the shore, Margaret saw Brenna’s step falter, as it did each time she stepped off the concrete pad at the front door. “What is that?”
Brenna startled, immediately shifted her shoulders as if to shrug off her reaction. “What’s what?”
“You hesitate before you step onto bare ground. You did it our first night when you were getting out of the car onto the lawn. You do it every time you start on the path.”
Brenna quivered, a shiver running up her spine. “The click,” she said. “I hear the click.”
“Click? Of what?”
“The land mine.”
A point of entry, Margaret thought, watching Brenna unconsciously run her hand over her injured thigh. A click sounded like a small thing, not a pathway to the deep psyche. Seemingly just a nibble, it was enough to give Brenna a taste of the process. Therapeutically, it didn’t matter which memory was used as a starting point. Everything was connected.
“It could be a starting point,” Margaret said, “to sever that emotion from a simple, safe act.”
Brenna walked silently beside her across the meadow. She stopped at the edge of the cliff and stared at the horizon. “I’m scared. All the time. Waiting for the next thing to go wrong. Thinking that if I only concentrate hard enough, I can forestall it. I don’t feel as if I can cope with even one more awful thing. You got a cure for that?”
“I can’t keep the world from being what it is, Brenna. Life still lies ahead. But there’s a lot of burden you can set down. A lot of energy you can free up for the rest of the journey.”
“You can do something about the click?”
“We can, together, yes.”
Brenna walked down to the shore with her. Stepping carefully over the water-worn stones, she picked up a smooth black rock and smoothed it between her palms. “We could talk about the click, I suppose. But just the click.”
Marga Velazquez ticked the monitor with a manicured red fingernail. “This,” she told Daniel, who was sitting beside her at the console in the muted gray edit suite with its ranks of screens and electronics. “Look at this.”
Daniel lifted his eyes from the script he was marking, to the monitor. Marga had cued up the footage of Brenna cradling Squeak, her eyes poring over the baby, murmuring softly.
“Gold. There’s no way we aren’t using this. Tanto amor. So much love. We need the contrast. Like, this and Kavsak, side by side. The viewer can’t miss the message.”
Daniel rolled his chair back and laced his hands behind his head.
“Have you forgotten this footage?”
“Nope.”
“This whole nursery section?” She tapped the monitor again “One. Big. Hole. We’ve got all the way through the city, last day, find the children—then…what? It just ends abruptly?”
He peeled his eyeglasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Brenna’s words came back to him from their last night together. You probably don’t want to use that footage. Makes me look like someone I’m not.
He hooked his glasses back on and refocused. Marga was right. The story had a gap you could lay train tracks through. How the hell was he going to wrap up the documentary without exposing Brenna? He’d lost sleep over that issue and still had no answer. It was one thing to bare his own story but he wasn’t willing to sacrifice Brenna. With her history, she’d be pilloried.
Still, he couldn’t lie.
“What became of these children?” Marga persisted. “Because by this point in the story, everyone wants to know.”
He stood up. He had to get out of this stifling room and see some sunshine. “I don’t know what to say about it yet,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “You’ll be the first to see the script when I do.”
She rolled back in her chair and lay her hand on his elbow. Her brown eyes pierced his. “Daniel.” She pronounced his name in Spanish, slipping into the natural warmth of her culture that shifted him into the category of family, not boss. “Between us, what happened to those children?”
He looked over her shoulder at the freeze-frame of Brenna with Squeak. There had been no more pictures after they’d abandoned the camera at Roza’s nursery. Brenna’s forced choice didn’t have to be revealed. “It was war, Marga. Sometimes things just end abruptly. Loose ends. Lives cut short. Maybe we have to finish with that footage of Kristjan.”
Marga frowned. She didn’t like the ending any better than he did.
“¡Ay, bendito! You’re telling me those pobrecitos all died?” The more emotional she got, the more Spanish flowed out of her. In a moment, he’d need a translator.
She looked stricken, as if the children had been her own. Or his.
“I didn’t see the bodies, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“¿Bueno, y como sabes que están muertos?”
“English, Marga.”
“Then how do you know they’re dead?”
The question stunned him. Of course they were dead. How could they not be?
“I was unconscious,” he said, gesturing at his broken nose. “Brenna got me to the airport then went back for the children. That’s when she stepped on the land mine. She woke up in the hospital in Weisbaden.”
He had no idea what Maric did after she left the apartment. Brenna had revealed the bare bones of the story and then bolted without further discussion. But—what if? Everything hinged on what Maric would do. Shoot the babies? Waste the ammo, as Brenna might say, or turn his back and walk away? A man who h
ad inflicted the mental cruelty he had on Brenna would surely not encumber himself with the care of four infants in the middle of an all-out assault. Imagine taking that to the General: Sorry I didn’t secure the neighborhood—I couldn’t arrange child care.
He shook his head. Christ. He was drifting away from the dock. A single, improbable spark of hope, and he was grasping at straws. “She didn’t get back to the children, Marga.” At best they would have starved or frozen to death. No. At best they would have been shot. Spared the slow death. Same outcome, though.
“Well, what if somebody found them? Babies cry. Maybe someone heard them. Someone might have come by—”
“In the middle of house-to-house combat? With shells falling and gunfights everywhere, somebody just happened by?” Streams of refugees had fled the neighborhood. The streets were deserted. The only people who stayed were holed up inside the apartment buildings.
“You did. You and Brenna came by Roza’s, didn’t you?”
He hesitated. He’d been there. He knew how crazy it was to hold out hope. But—would Brenna have gone back if she didn’t think there was a chance they were alive? Or had she just lost it by then and was running wild? “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get some digital stills off the nursery footage and e-mail them to refugee agencies,” he said. “See if anything comes of it.”
Marga’s eyes watered. She daubed gingerly at her brimming lids with the pads of her fingers, careful of her mascara. “¡Ay, bendito! ¡Pobrecitos!”
“Marga. Don’t expect miracles from Kavsak.”
Special Envoy Brendan Rease was rankled by the way the Vienna talks were going. Although General Cavic had not reappeared, his head of delegation made a point of inquiring after Brenna at each meeting.
Blast it!
Brenna had gone underground, and the FBI wasn’t having any luck finding her despite his daily calls to Special Agent Tait Starke. Each day that passed was one that Cavic’s people had to find her first.
Now, sitting at his antique desk, rummaging through stacks of folders, he came across the paperwork for Dr. Jelena Subasic’s immigration, on which he had previously signed off. “Martindale!”
His aide, working in the adjacent room appeared in the doorway, notepad in hand. “Ambassador.”
He held up the folder. “Why is this file still open?”
Martindale took the folder in his slender hand and looked at it. “We had the rendezvous lined up and she didn’t show.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
Martindale blinked. “The city’s under heavy fire, sir. The hotel is a distance from the airport. Dr. Subasic is sixty-odd years old. We set a fallback date if she didn’t make the first one.”
“Where was the rendezvous?”
“Far side of the airport tunnel.”
“The Nationalist side.”
“Yes, sir. Payment for passage has already been arranged.”
“Well, dammit, Martindale. Tell our guys to go get her. What the hell are special forces for?”
Martindale hesitated. “Into Kavsak to her son’s old hotel room?”
These were not standard operating procedures. Special Envoy or not, he was mobilizing military forces onto foreign soil for what could be construed as personal interests. But if Brenna could be held hostage to influence his actions—and Cavic was daily playing that card—then whatever Brenna held dear could be used as a lure to get her to walk into a trap. Mother of God, she’d already bought an airline ticket. Who doubted she’d go if big enough bait were dangled?
“Wherever she is, extract her.”
If push came to shove and his actions came to light, he would argue that Dr. Subasic was a political asset, even if in his heart he knew he was just being a father, as he had been when Brenna herself was rescued. A career for a daughter, if need be. If Anne were still alive, she’d stand right beside him all the way to the Supreme Court. And then she’d visit him in jail.
“What are you standing there for, Martindale?”
Martindale’s old training as a United States Marine kicked in. This was an order. “Nothing, sir,” he said, damned near saluting. He turned away.
“One other thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Get me Special Agent Tait Starke on the line.” Might as well light a fire under her derriere, too, while he was at it. She was wavering. The search for Brenna had hit a dead end. When he last spoke to her she’d suggested that perhaps Brenna had gone off willingly with that old woman like they were friends and his daughter just needed a confidante. “That’s what I would do if I broke off with my lover,” she had said. “Cry it out with someone I trusted.”
He humphed aloud. Nipped that in the bud. “You’re not a Special Agent so you can think like a woman,” he’d told her. “Use your training. Be an investigator.”
Chapter 28
Just the click, Brenna had said. But one thing led to another and for days now she’d been sitting in that armchair across from Margaret, sometimes spilling her guts, sometimes holding those vibrating paddles in her palms and listening to the tones shifting left-right-left through the headset.
Brain voodoo, indeed.
Sorting through her own history, she decided, was a lot like combing through the ruins of an airplane crash site. There were bodies everywhere.
Margaret allowed her to pick her own topics, and step through the scene at her own pace. There was debris flung everywhere. Layers upon layers of it, the newer stuff flattening the older. The process stirred up memories, brought things to the fore that she thought she’d buried but had only stuck out of sight.
Margaret, reconstructing the disaster from the twisted wreckage, was a consummate engineer, identifying unrecognizable pieces, aligning sections that seemed at first not to fit together but that did. She used gentle pressure when Brenna got stuck, eased her back when she threatened to spiral.
It was exhausting.
And Brenna felt angry with herself, embarrassed for having fallen out of the sky in the first place. The cause of the crash was clear enough, she thought ruefully. Pilot error.
At the end of each day, after she had helped Brenna find a safe stopping point, Margaret went off alone to make telephone calls. “Doctor Banerjee,” Brenna heard her say once. “Thanks for doing this over the phone.” Other times, Margaret received calls from Alden (“Hello, darling.”), and Daniel (“Hello, dear.”).
Brenna’s heart irrationally spun out when she knew it was Daniel. It made her feel like he was in the same room with her but pretending he didn’t know her.
Living in Maine gave her an insight into who he was. This open landscape, the sea and the fresh air, the human scale of a smaller city had all shaped him. Picturing him as a boy growing up here made her long for him all the more. She missed his kindness, his caresses, his presence in a room. Without his long, warm limbs tangled up with hers, her bed felt like a wasteland.
She wished that life hadn’t yanked her off the path that led to his side. It was hard to construct a vision of herself in the future when the man she loved would not be in the picture. She had to console herself with the fact that he was alive, making the world a better place just by being in it.
Daniel treated himself to a rare short work day. Leaving the office at five-thirty, he stopped at the grocery store, picked up lamb chops, small red potatoes, a cuke and a tomato. At home, he picked greens out of his garden, made a salad, and grilled the meat and potatoes.
Sitting on his back deck after eating, reveling in the early summer evening, he called his dad. “So, Mom’s still not around?”
“Still holed up at the cottage. I’m batching it.”
“It’s been…what? Weeks?”
“Long enough for me to get undomesticated and leave a few dirty dishes in the sink.”
“Must be a hard case.” Like his dad, Daniel had no idea who his mother’s patient was. Neither of them conjectured, or asked. The whole point was privacy.
“She sneaks out now and th
en for lunch with me at the hospital. I tell you, I wasn’t envisioning cafeteria food for our anniversary. Thanks for the fly-fishing lures, by the way, and I’m sure your mother will enjoy her day at the spa.” His dad paused. “I miss you, son. I’d like a chance for some man-to-man time.”
“Anything you need to discuss, Dad? How to talk to girls? How to pitch a baseball?”
His dad chuckled, became silent.
“What?”
“This thing you told me—about trying to find the children?”
Daniel picked up his dad’s worried tone. “Yeah?”
“Well, you’re sure you’re not getting your hopes up too high? The last thing you need is another hard fall.”
It was true. Each new refugee agency e-mail he received, confirming they’d be on the lookout for Squeak, Heckle and Jeckle, and Grub had pumped up his hopes. There were people, looking. But, true. The chances were slim. “It makes me feel like I’m doing something, Dad. It’s pretty small, I know. But—”
“I understand. Just—”
“Yeah.” He paused, thinking about how radically his life had changed since he went to Kavsak.
“What’s on your mind, son?”
“Just that…I want to be the man I was before, you know?”
“You’re still in there.”
“I’m not that sure. I mean, after everything I went through—don’t you think I’d be more forgiving, less judgmental?”
“How’s that?”
Daniel lifted an elbow onto the edge of the table and rested his cheek against his palm. The thought running through his mind was awful.
“Talk to me, son.”
“Well. Brenna, Dad. I know Maric forced her, but…” He trailed off. It felt like a betrayal to even think what he was thinking, much less say it.
“How could she?” his dad supplied.
He nodded. “Children. A woman, giving up children.”
“It seems to go against nature, doesn’t it? We picture women as givers of life.” He paused. “Maybe you’re too tired to see this right now, too close to see the angles.”
“What am I missing?”
Day Three Page 54
