The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

“Why?”

  Rex set his drink on an end table, put an arm around his wife. They were the same height. When they whispered it sounded like the same whisper. Questions and answers. I had the feeling that they were saying things they had said many times. Had the feeling that Patricia was winning this negotiation. They turned to me together.

  “Clay was born with a bad heart,” she said. “And they said he might not live. There were complications over the years, but he wanted to be strong, like his sisters. So he compensated. He compensated so hard you wouldn’t believe it. There was never a boy who worked harder to be strong and smart. He read and read, and studied and studied, got tutors, always took the hardest classes. He ran for miles and lifted weights and played sports and went to summer school, and there was never one day of his life that Clay wasn’t striving and straining and sweating to be stronger and smarter and better. He—”

  “Overcompensated, is what Pat’s trying to say.” Rex cleared his throat. “I did some of that myself. When I was young. Winning became everything to him—beating Kayla and Daphne. But the war changed him. He felt he had lost. He thought he’d let us down somehow. Then came all this crazy behavior. Seeing us now reminds him of his failure, of how far he has fallen. So he doesn’t want to see us.”

  “He was set for Stanford but he joined the Air Force instead,” said Patricia.

  “Nine-eleven,” said Rex. “He was only thirteen, but the attacks fit right into his mental picture of becoming Superman. For his country.”

  “He was one of the best aircraft mechanics in Iraq, wasn’t he, Rex?”

  Rex held my stare. “Ali Air Base. He worked on the Spookies.”

  “So,” said Patricia. “That’s why we can’t see him as much as we’d like. It’s a sacrifice we make for him. If he was more comfortable around us, I’d move him into this house, get the security better and plenty of nurses, and maybe—”

  “Enough, Pat. This is ground we have agreed not to walk upon.”

  She nodded, resigned.

  “Believe me,” said Rex. “We’d be at Arcadia once a week.”

  At the bar Rex freshened his drink, then refilled his wife’s wineglass and brought it to her. “I’d offer you a drink, but it’s late.”

  I checked my watch to confirm it was only four in the afternoon, but let that slide. “Less than an hour ago there was gunfire here, directed at your son and an innocent girl. Now I show up, trying to get Clay back to his hospital, and you want to kick me down the road. Why?”

  Hickman gave me a cold stare but no information. I rolled with his silence and turned to his wife. “Mrs. Hickman, were you looking forward to your annual visit with Clay next week?”

  “Get out,” said Rex.

  Patricia Hickman smiled. “Very much, Mr. Ford. I’ve purchased a new Max Azria for the occasion.”

  He gave her a tough glance. “Dear? Please shut up. Beat it, Ford. The Ventura sheriffs can get here in a hurry.” Rex jammed a hand into his shorts pocket and drew his phone.

  “Just a couple of things, Mr. Hickman, then I’ll leave you to your busy evening. Did you have any contact with Clay in 2008 or 2009?”

  “Why, of course,” said Patricia. “We talked three or four times a week when he was overseas.”

  “Did he ever send you anything physical, a letter or a postcard or a package? A gift, maybe? Not electronic, but something with an origin?”

  Patricia seemed guileless and Rex overheated and I didn’t think they were lying to me about Clay being at Ali Air Base. They’d fallen for the same invented war story that Paige Hulet had given me. “Clay only got us one gift from the war,” said Patricia. “But he didn’t mail it. He brought it home in his duffel.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Pat? Stop.”

  “It’s okay, Rexie. Dolls, Mr. Ford. Two dolls, fighting with swords. Villagers of some kind. Soft, with ceramic faces. Less than half a foot tall. Clay thought we would like them. We kept them upstairs in his room.”

  “Christ, Pat.”

  She looked at him, then down at the floor. “The dolls were genuine folk art, and they showed us he cared. Honey, Mr. Ford really should know that the longer Clay was at war, the less we heard from him. And how, by the last year of his deployment, we were down to maybe an email or text every other week. Or once a month.”

  “It’s none of his business how much our son did or did not write us,” said Rex.

  A heavy silence settled over the room. I felt very grateful that I was not either one of these human beings. “When Clay first saw Arcadia, what did he think of the place?”

  “Clay liked it,” Rex said. “He wanted to live there. But we didn’t discover it—it discovered us. People like Briggs Spencer look out for people like me. Now, excuse me while I call 911 to report your invasion of my home.”

  “What did Clay want today? Why did he come here?”

  Hickman looked up from his phone with all the menace he could find. It might have been terrifying from across a boardroom table. I did not laugh in his face. It always surprises me how successful in life angry, small-minded people can be. I must underestimate these virtues.

  “He wanted the fighting dolls I just told you about, Mr. Ford,” said Patricia. “And he took them.”

  I paused and considered. “After three years in a private hospital, he dug out and came all the way up here to retrieve two folk dolls that he’d brought home from the war. Can you make some sense of that for me?”

  “He also needed money,” said Patricia. “So he took five thousand from our what-if jar.”

  “Damn it, Pat!”

  “We’re as puzzled as you must be,” she said. “But Clay gave us something back. He gave each of us a big strong hug. For the first time in years. My heart felt so full and light. But then he took the gun from Rexie’s nightstand. It’s loaded. He seemed so eager to have the gun. Which frightened both of us half to death.”

  I felt a jagged surge of adrenaline. Now the violent schizoaffective Clay Hickman was armed, financed, and shielding himself with a nineteen-year-old girl who thought she’d found a friend in him. He had risked her life just an hour ago. He was off his meds and in the wind again and his stolen firearm was loaded.

  “Clay needs to be stopped,” I said. I set a business card on an end table. “He’s crazy, off his meds, and dangerous. Neither of you see how wrong that could have gone.”

  Rex tried to stare me down again but his fighting spirit had flown. He slipped the phone back into his pocket. “I want to get one thing straight before you get off my property.”

  “Straighten away.”

  “I love my son.”

  Once in a while, I get an inspired idea. “Would you like Clay back here? Under this roof again?”

  “Yes!” cried out Patricia.

  I don’t know what I was expecting from Rex. Spontaneous combustion, or a backhand to his wife’s cheek, or at least another ugly stare-down. Instead, he looked at her with thirty-plus years of hard-won understanding. “We would consider that. Yes.”

  “Please give us that chance, Mr. Ford,” said Patricia.

  —

  I had just climbed into Hall Pass 2 when the message came through from Sequoia.

  6:25 PM

  R ok. Dents in truck from gun. Driving north to find old war friend. Won’t say name or why. U saved us. Clay thanks and me 2.

  6:26 PM

  Game over. Clay, we need to meet. You are going to hurt someone. Don’t want it to be S. You owe her! Help me help you.

  I leaned my head back against the rest and closed my eyes and waited.

  No reply.

  No surprise.

  —

  Justine was all I could think about on the flight home. I cruised just offshore, with the lights of the coast and the great black Pacific beneath me. I let the growling powe
r of the Cessna engine vibrate through my body, the same power that had hummed through me the first time Justine had taken me up. I’ll never forget the charge of it back then, and the charge of what I was already feeling for this beautiful, bright, unpredictable woman. Back then, those two charges had combined to form an irresistible current. Now, flying over the Palos Verdes Peninsula, I remembered it very clearly. But I couldn’t feel it. Justine was gone and even Hall Pass 2 couldn’t make up what was missing.

  14

  Paige Hulet stepped inside Clay’s room at Arcadia and held open the door. “Clay texted me one hour ago,” she said with a small smile. “He’s fine. I’m so relieved. So very happy.”

  I stepped in. It was Saturday but Arcadia seemed no different than during the week. Through the window I saw the morning sunlight on the green flanks of the mountains. The room was warm and I caught the doctor’s light scent in the still air. She wore the usual black pantsuit and a white blouse and her hair was up and snug. Predictable, like the morning paper—black and white and neatly bundled—day after day after day. She had a small black satchel over one shoulder. She turned on the lights and set the air conditioner, then leaned over the front of Clay’s computer. I stood and watched as she started it up, entered a password, waited for it to boot.

  “Clay said he was fine and would be in touch,” said the doctor. “You don’t seem nearly as pleased as I thought you would.”

  I nodded to the reading chair by the window. “Would you sit down for a minute?”

  Dr. Hulet sat, swung the satchel across her lap, and regarded me. “I have to be in therapy in twenty minutes. What’s on your mind, Mr. Ford?”

  “Are we on mic or camera?”

  “No. We turn off the room feeds when a partner is absent.”

  “Clay and his lady friend surprised his mother and father yesterday. Have you talked to them?”

  She had not, so I told her about Clay’s visit to Ojai, the security blitz, the gunfire near the guardhouse, Clay’s acquisition of a gun, cash, and souvenir fighting dolls.

  “But Clay is okay?” asked the doctor. “He said he was okay.”

  “He’s fine. So is the girl, in case you’re concerned. Her name is Sequoia. I’m not clear on why Clay really went there. But it made me realize how little contact the Hickmans had with him here.”

  “I told you it was only once a year.”

  “I assumed it was their preference—trying to forget about him, too painful. Something like that.”

  She shook her head. “No. The infrequent visits were at Clay’s insistence. He thought his parents wanted to turn him over to the state. I don’t know where he got that idea.”

  I thought back to the Hickman couple standing in the study—Rex livid with helplessness, and Patricia trying to find her courage. I thought of Rex’s parting words. I love my son. One thing I didn’t get from them was any hint that they wanted to wash their well-moneyed hands of Clay. “They said Clay’s fear of them began when he was deployed. Over his last two years, especially.”

  “Clay and I have talked about it in therapy. He feels that in the war he let his country down, and his airmen buddies, and his family. During his last two years of deployment, his feelings of failure grew and grew. Once he was back home he was better—as you know from the medical charts. Then the first psychotic break. Along with the drinking. And it all seemed to focus on what he’d done—and failed to do—during his time overseas in Iraq.”

  “Clay was never at Ali Air Base in Iraq, Dr. Hulet, as you and your alleged service record claim. He wasn’t a flight mechanic, either.”

  Silence hung between us like a heavy black curtain. Then it vaporized with her voice. “Really. It says so, right—”

  “The record is invented.” I told her about Clay’s attendance and later his teaching at the SERE program at Fairchild AFB from 2006 through 2007. Then his abrupt “disappearance” from 2008 until his discharge in late 2009.

  Paige Hulet colored, like she had before when talking to me about Clay. “Well, Alec gathered up all of the military information. I can ask him where he got it.”

  “You two can point fingers at each other all day. What good would that do anybody?”

  “I resent your implication, Mr. Ford. I certainly did not falsify Clay’s service record in any way, and I doubt that Alec did, either. It was probably the DoD itself. Isn’t that what they do when it’s convenient? Redact documents? Rewrite history?”

  “Clay never mentioned SERE or Fairchild?”

  “No, never. He talked about fixing those big gunships, the Spookies, at Ali Air Base. However . . .” She stood, looked uncertain what to do with herself, then sat back down and set her satchel on her lap again. “However, Clay didn’t offer many details of Ali. His memories seemed neither vivid nor emotionally grounded. There was something rote about them. Which made me suspect that his experience there was too painful for him to recount. Or perhaps untrue. It would not have been his first elaborate fabrication.”

  I felt something snap inside me. Like what snaps when you get a runaround at the DMV, but worse. DMV cubed. Enough is enough, and one more word lights your fuse. “What about Clay’s last two years overseas? Did he ever talk about 2008 and ’09? I need something true from you, Dr. Hulet. Not more of your live-streaming nonsense about him being a flight mechanic in Iraq.”

  She gave me a power scowl. “I’ve told you what I know.”

  “No, you haven’t. And Spencer hasn’t, either. Doctor-patient confidentiality? Maybe. But why did he dig out of this place? Because he couldn’t stand visits from his parents? I doubt it. You’ve been in therapy with him for two years and you couldn’t tell he was ready to run? And what about those paintings of Clay’s? What goes through your mind when you look at those things? You care about Clay Hickman. You blush when you talk about him. You probably know him better than anyone in the world. Speak true words.”

  She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket, checked something, gave me another stony look.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Our time is up.”

  “Yes, it is. You’re a blunt man, Mr. Ford, but not a stupid one. Two years ago when I came here as the new medical director I assumed oversight of sixty mentally disturbed patients. Clay was by far the most heartbreaking because he had struggled so hard to make something of himself. Struggled for life and health, accomplishment and recognition. For his country. He had soared, then fallen. To me, he’s the definition of a hero. I saw the damage done to him, but I didn’t understand it all. I still don’t. I know I’m blushing now and I just don’t care.”

  She wiped the corner of her eye with a finger, then took a deep breath and let it out in one loud huff. “Speak true words? Okay. I have to be careful what I say here. I will do no harm. In therapy with me, Clay has claimed that, during 2008 and 2009, he was assigned to a secret prison in Romania named White Fire. He has also denied ever setting foot in Romania. I don’t know what is true and what is only in his mind. Yet.”

  I took a hop of faith. “Romania. Where he met Briggs Spencer.”

  “Clay says he did, then denies it.” Paige Hulet sat looking at me with an oddly hopeful expression.

  I remembered what Evan Southern had said of Deimos. A nickname for someone Clay knew in the war. Made another hop: “Deimos is Spencer.”

  “Deimos and Phobos,” she said, “are nicknames Clay uses for Briggs Spencer and his partner, Timothy Tritt. They ran this alleged prison. They were identified in the Senate report on torture, as you know. But again, at other times Clay says he has never been in a secret prison in Romania or anywhere else.”

  Suffocating, this tangle of contradictions. “Is Clay in therapy with Spencer here?” I asked.

  “Irregularly,” she said. “Neither man has acknowledged those sessions to me.”

  I tried to collect this disorderly information into an orderly whole. It was lik
e trying to herd lizards. “What is the white fire Clay wants to bring to Spencer?”

  “He has not spoken to me of bringing anything to Spencer,” she said.

  “He told Evan. And Sequoia.”

  “Maybe he trusts them more than me.”

  “Is that what his paintings are about? White fire?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “He gives up so little at a time.”

  “Did he ever mention dolls to you? Folk dolls—swordfighters he’d brought home and given to his parents?”

  Her brow bent with confusion. “Never.”

  I went to the window and looked down at the glittering swimming pool and the partners wading around in it, and the white-clad staff maintaining order. I looked at her and she must have seen the cynical amusement on my face. “Anything else in his file that might be just a little bit made up?”

  Dark eyes, dark flash. She stood, flipping open the satchel. “I’ve told you what I know. And I hope you find what you need on his computer.”

  She told me how to get printouts from Clay’s laptop through the security office, if needed. Floor six. Then pulled a visitors’ clip badge from her satchel and dropped it to the computer desk.

  “You asked about medications,” she said. “The next meds break is in half an hour, in the Lyceum. You’ll need this to be anywhere on the grounds unescorted. Clay was always good about taking his medications. But you should ask the dispensary nurses about that, since I’m so difficult to believe.”

  “I will.”

  She reached into the satchel again and set a thick envelope next to the badge. “Yours, complete with Dr. Spencer’s raise. Cash. Maybe you should put it in a bank. Or are bankers as difficult to trust as doctors?”

  “Far easier, Doctor.”

  “You’re being an ass just to anger me.”

  “I’ve been downgraded from hominid to ass.”

  She shook her head and held my gaze, and I could feel her hostility waning. Instead of hostile she looked undecided, as if she’d caught herself in the act of something and wasn’t sure how she would be judged. She struck me as a person long on trial with herself. She latched the satchel, smoothed her pants somehow primly, though they were without a wrinkle. “I’m afraid for Clay,” she said.