by Steven James
But her shrink was a one-trick pony telling her over and over that getting her feelings out into the open was good for her, when in reality all it had done was churn up the pain and harsh memories and then leave them choppy and gray on the surface of her life when the fifty-minute sessions were over.
She’d stopped seeing him after three weeks.
She hung up the keys, shed the coat and boots, and then took her bag to her room.
Yes, that man she’d killed had a gun pressed against her head, yes, it was self-defense-she knew all of that intellectually and had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t guilty according to any law.
But reassuring her conscience was a different story.
“Tell me how you feel,” the psychiatrist had said to her in their last session.
“Like I’m sinking.”
“Into what?”
“Myself.”
“And what does that mean? Sinking into yourself?”
It means I’m losing. It means it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again. It means I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own.
She stared at him. “Is that what they teach you in graduate school? To just ask follow-up questions? Just active listening, reflecting back to me what I’m saying?”
Where were you on career day when they brought that little gem up?
He rolled his pen between his fingers. “It’s okay to be angry,” he said. “And it’s okay to be disappointed.” He paused and she waited. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. At last he said, “But you have to learn to forgive yourself.”
“That again.”
“Yes.”
“Really. Forgive myself.”
“That’s right.”
“What does that even mean?”
“To forgive yourself?”
“Yeah.” She’d had enough of this. “And if you ask me what I think it means, this session is over.”
He took a breath and then hesitated, and she could tell he really didn’t know what to say.
Nice. He tells you to forgive yourself and then he can’t even explain what he means.
“Obviously,” she told him, “it’s not just marginalizing the event or simply acknowledging the pain and then doing your best to ignore it, it’s gotta be more than that or ‘self-forgiveness,’ if there even is such a thing, would just be a casuistic form of denial.”
He looked at her oddly, finally said, “You mentioned that your mother used to take you to church. Are you a religious person, Tessa?”
“My mom was.”
“Don’t you think God wants you to forgive yourself?”
“Well, I looked that up last week after you started in on all this. The Bible never says to forgive yourself. Not once. So apparently, it’s not exactly on God’s top ten list.”
The guy seemed to be at a loss.
“Look”-she stood, put a foot on the glass coffee table beside him-“if I break this thing, you can forgive the debt I owe you if you want, or you can make me pay for it, but how can I forgive myself for the debt that I owe you?”
He rose abruptly. “Tessa, put your foot down. I mean, you need to put it-”
Enough. This guy’s more clueless than you are.
“I am so done with this.” She bypassed shattering the glass coffee table and lowered her foot to the floor.
“Tessa-”
Without a word she’d left the office and never gone back.
Tessa entered her bedroom, closed the door behind her, and emptied her bag.
She checked through her stuff three times and finally had to acknowledge the truth-the pills weren’t here.
She replayed the morning in her mind. Packing, stressing, hurrying out the door…
Oh.
Leaving her pill bottle on the countertop beside the sink of that dorm room at the University of Minnesota.
She slumped into the chair by the desk.
Now what?
Amber’s a pharmacist. You’d think she’d have…
Feeling slightly guilty, she eased into the hall and slipped into the bathroom. Then, as quietly as she could, she searched through Sean and Amber’s medicine cabinet but couldn’t find anything she could use to help her sleep. But to her surprise she did find some Abilify, Wellbutrin, and Lamictal. She wasn’t an expert on medications, but she’d seen enough drug commercials about the first two to know they were antidepressants. All three drugs were prescribed to Amber.
Patrick had never told her that Amber was dealing with depression. If he even knew about it.
This is way uncool. You should so not be doing this, Tessa. Looking through their stuff.
Feeling worse than before, she silently returned to the bedroom and pulled out her notebook. She stared at the blank page for a long time, but nothing came to her.
When she went to draw the curtains across the window to keep out the darkness, she noticed the dusty corpses of two wasps on the windowsill.
Too many dead things in this house.
She imagined what it would have been like to see those wasps flying over and over again into the glass, thinking that they were heading toward freedom, when they were destined only for death.
Now they slept and would never wake up.
Words came to her: Time is a strange beast that cannot be tamed. It devours all things, but it lets you play with its mane in the meantime.
The distance and the days collapsed in her mind, and she went back to her notebook, wrote, dead wasps lie on the windowsill. yesterday they tried to fly through the glass. to freedom. to life. today they lie still in death; all their hopes sheathed in their dry, quiet bodies. all their busy buzzings are over now that they’re dead and forgotten on this side of the glass.
She thought for a long time and then added two more words: with me.
46
Saturday, January 10
US Naval Forces Central Command
Bahrain, Persian Gulf
12:21 p.m. GMT
Allighiero Avellino took a step forward in line and showed his ID to the Master-at-Arms, the United States Navy’s version of military police, standing sentry at the end of the gangplank to the USS Louisiana, then waited while the man used a handheld scanner to run his name through DBIDS, the Defense Biometric Identification Data System, to verify his identity.
It was the fourth and final security checkpoint that he and the fellow members of his cleaning party had to pass through before they would be allowed onto the sub to clean the urine-stained floors of the heads before setting things up to pump the solid waste receptacles into the tanker truck that was still being inspected at the entrance to the base.
Although today he had another small task to complete in addition to his official duties.
For years Allighiero had believed that the environmental activist groups that sprang up in the twentieth century-Greenpeace, Earth First! and the rest-hadn’t taken things far enough: small demonstrations, people chaining themselves to trees or railroad tracks, cutting down a few telephone poles, spiking old forest growth, unfurling banners on bridges or boats. Yes, all of it was good for a few minutes of publicity, but in the end it almost never swayed public opinion or changed the minds of policy makers. It mostly just made the activists feel good, as if they were doing something.
The MA studied Allighiero’s identification card one last time, then handed it back to him and waved him through.
He pushed his cart of cleaning supplies forward onto the gangplank leading to the sub’s conning tower.
Media flash points.
That was about it.
You get a little coverage, maybe you get arrested to make a statement, but then the next soccer game or celebrity publicity stunt or political scandal takes over the news cycle, and nothing important ever changes.
A few days later you’re out of jail and no one hears your name again.
But with the present worldwide irreversible environmental devastation, th
e time for procrastination was over. The time for protests was over. The time for real action was here. For the sake of the planet, for the sake of the future.
The world needed a wake-up call that could not be ignored.
And that was why he’d joined Eco-Tech in the first place last year. But, of course, because of his job cleaning nuclear submarines, he’d always been careful to keep his involvement with the organization quiet.
One at a time his co-workers disappeared with their military chaperones into the sub. Descending into the ship with the carts wasn’t as tricky as it might look since the carts had retractable wheels and specially designed handles to slide down the ladder’s handrails. At last, Allighiero met his escort at the conning tower, and the man assisted him in getting his supplies down the ladder.
“Glad I don’t have your job,” the petty officer told him.
“Grazie,” Allighiero said, thanking him generically in Italian rather than letting on that he knew English.
“Right.” The seaman sounded slightly judgmental. “Follow me.”
Allighiero trekked behind the petty officer across the steel mesh floor of the walkway. Surrounding them in the cramped corridor: caged-in lightbulbs and valves and gauges, rivets and swarms of cables and wires. And deep beneath them, twenty-four Trident ballistic missiles. A great steel beast carrying oblivion in its belly.
A beast that not only did not belong in the ocean but did not belong on the planet.
American weapons of mass destruction were forcing the world to bow to the whims of capitalism, industrial commercialism, and the free market exploitation of the poor and marginalized around the globe.
Put simply, the neoliberal economic ideology of the US and the UK subjugated developing nations and devastated the rest of the world’s natural resources.
Humans are destined for so much more than consumption, materialism, and self-absorption. How could a world in which products that poison the environment and take centuries to deteriorate are endlessly produced, consumed, and discarded with no aim toward sustainability of the world’s ecosystems, how could that kind of civilization, by any stretch of the imagination, be called advanced? How could it even be called sane?
Nearly 28 percent of the world’s energy is consumed by Americans, who subsequently refuse to pay a fair climate debt to the rest of the world, while 30 percent of the people on the planet have no access to clean water, let alone electricity, medical care, or adequate housing. More than 79 percent of the world’s population lives on less than $10 a day; 1.4 billion people are forced to survive on less than $1.25 a day. All this, while Americans complain that there isn’t enough whipped cream on their mochas or enough leg room in their SUVs.
As philosopher Peter Kreeft wrote, and Allighiero had long ago memorized in the original English, “Anyone whose common sense has not been dulled by familiarity should be able to see the blindingly obvious truth that there is something radically wrong with a civilization in which millions devote their lives to pointless luxuries that do not even make them happy, while millions of others are starving; a civilization where no hand, voluntary or involuntary, moves money from luxury yachts to starving babies fast enough to save the babies.”
A world of people pursuing yachts and ignoring the babies.
The fruit of corporate greed and imperialism run wild.
And perhaps most disturbing of all: the proliferation of nuclear weapons that would eventually and inevitably fall into the wrong hands and create an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that would exacerbate the effects of global climate change and potentially wipe out billions of earth’s creatures-humans and other precious species alike.
Allighiero followed his escort toward the galley. Maneuvering the cart of cleaning supplies through the narrow corridors was not easy, but he had been doing this for two years and managed with little trouble.
He palmed the USB memory stick.
Today he would help clean each of the eight heads on the submarine. But now on the way to the first one he would pass through the galley.
Which was where he was going to place the device.
Allighiero’s task was simple-just insert a USB 3.0 jump drive into the back of the computer in the galley, a place no one would ever notice, would never even think to check for foreign devices. He had not been told exactly what the software he was uploading would do, but he knew that the drive contained some type of code that would spread through the sub to help accomplish Eco-Tech’s goal of disabling the submarine’s capability of firing its nuclear warheads.
He was a small cog in a much bigger plan. He knew that as well, but he had a part to play and he was going to play it.
When the world saw what a small group of environmentalists could do-the annihilation they could have caused if they’d had another agenda-the governments of the world would see the dangers of nuclear weapons for what they truly were, with eyes unclouded by political agendas and posturing.
Turning the tide of history would begin by first turning the tide of public sentiment.
A move toward peace.
A move toward a nuke-free world.
While his escort was distracted for a moment unlocking a door in front of them, Allighiero slid the device into the back of the computer console on the galley counter.
And just that quickly, his job was done.
In a little over fourteen hours and thirty minutes the world would wake up once and for all to the dangers of inadequately secured ballistic missiles.
47
The Moonbeam Motel
Woodborough, Wisconsin
8:38 a.m. Central Standard Time
I slept through my alarm, and even though I knew I probably needed the rest, I was still annoyed at myself for not rising earlier.
When I finally did climb out of bed, I found that, despite the alternating hot and cold baths last night, my ankle was still swollen. Still stiff. Still sore. Maybe even more so than when I’d gone to bed. And I was exhausted, my experience at the river still taking a huge toll on me.
I didn’t like the idea of using crutches, so after downing some Advil I showered and got dressed, choosing boots rather than shoes to add needed support to my ankle. I decided I would tape the ankle as soon as I could get my hands on some athletic tape, or even a roll of duct tape.
Before heading to the 9:00 briefing in the lobby, I wrote a note of condolence for Mia Ellory, the deceased deputy’s wife. Finding the right words wasn’t easy, and email wasn’t ideal, but it was something. It was a start. After a few online searches I had her email address. I typed it in and, though praying doesn’t come easily to me, I offered one up for her recovery from grief.
Pressed send.
My thoughts cycled back to last night. To Lien-hua. To Amber.
What a mess.
But there were more important matters at hand than my relational issues.
(1) Trying to establish whether Donnie Pickron and the driver of the semitrailer, Bobby Clarke, were alive or dead.
(2) Finding Alexei Chekov.
(3) Visiting the site of the old ELF station.
I grabbed my laptop and was about to head to the meeting when I noticed a folded sheet of paper lying near the base of the door. My name was written on the top in Amber’s handwriting.
I picked it up, considered whether or not to unfold it, then a little reluctantly, I did.
And read: Pat, I’m so sorry about last night. I hope it doesn’t hurt things between you and Lynn-wua. (I hope I spelled that right.) The last thing I would ever want to do is hurt you. I won’t bring any of this up again, but I needed you to know that I’m leaving Sean. That’s what I came to tell you last night, to see if you could help me find the best way to tell him. Now I see what a bad idea it was. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused. -A
I stood there stunned.
She’s leaving Sean?
Though my brother and I had never talked about it, I was pretty sure he loved Amber and was committed to her, just
like he’d been to his first wife. I could only imagine how devastated he’d be when he learned that Amber was leaving him. Sean was far from perfect, but he was faithful and You don’t know that, Pat. You barely know him. It might be all his fault.
Or it might be yours.
I stared at the note, overcome with a desire to call Sean and tell him what Amber had written, to get everything out in the open, but undoubtably he would wonder why she’d shared the news with me first rather than with him. And I would have to tell him about my history with his wife.
On the other hand, if he found out later that she’d come to me, he’d almost certainly feel betrayed and wonder what was going on between us, especially if Amber told him that we’d been in love while they were engaged-and that her feelings for me had never gone away.
And of course Amber’s decision was only going to make things worse between me and Lien-hua, who would now see the encounter last night here in the motel room in a whole different light. Considering the rocky spots we’d had in the past, I wondered what it would take to salvage things with her this time around-but I wanted to do so much more than just salvage things. I wanted us to take the next step in our relationship. And how was that going to happen if she didn’t trust me?
Sean. Amber. Lien-hua.
It was a lose-lose-lose situation any way you cut it.
I crumpled up the note and threw it toward the trash can beside the desk; it bounced against the wall instead and fell to the carpet as if it were mocking me.
For a moment I had the urge to knock on Amber’s door and square things away with her, but honestly, what good could come from talking to her right now?
9:02.
Already late for the meeting.
Focus.
Be here, Pat.
It’s all about the case. You have to put this personal stuff aside and think about the case.
I opted for my black North Face jacket instead of the camo one. Ditching the crutches but carrying my computer-and trying unsuccessfully not to limp-I headed out the door to meet with Sheriff Tait, Jake, Natasha, and Lien-hua, the woman I couldn’t imagine living without.
