“Oh, Gil wanted to see him,” she said offhandedly.
“Gil did? Why’s that?”
“He wanted to tell him about some movie.” Hat wasn’t familiar with the film, but, from the loose and secondhand description Hat gave her, Janice was: Gil was talking about Saving Private Ryan, a World War Two drama from the late 1990s. “I didn’t really understand,” Hat told her. “There was something someone says in that movie that Gil wanted to say to Cameron.” Janice leaned forward in her chair, dropping her head between her shoulders, knowing exactly the line Gil wanted to quote to Cameron. The army captain played by Tom Hanks said it, as he lay blood-soaked and dying, to Matt Damon’s character, for whom he’d given his own life and those of four of his men to rescue. Janice saw the scene playing in her head. He’d grabbed him by the collar, pulled him weakly to him: Earn this, is what he’d said. Earn it.
* * *
The twilit Gulf lay like a vast and luminous purple bruise to her right as Janice drove home along the beach on U.S. 90, until she passed her exit for the Back Bay Bridge and was no longer headed home. The landscapes of her life, it occurred to her, had always been flat—first as a child in the Mississippi Delta, with level fields of cotton stretching in every direction, and then as a woman and physician and now a freshly minted mother-to-be on the Coast, with that blue plane of salt water her southward vista. Nothing had ever impeded her horizons or, for that matter, drawn her toward them; they’d never been anything other than crisp lines. This realization struck her as both meaningful and meaningless at the same time, if anything proof that she wasn’t thinking clearly.
She turned left on Caillavet Street and dialed Nap. “Wait,” he said, “you’re doing what?” She needed to see Cameron, she told him, stringing on a second apology. His voice went blank, he didn’t understand at all; in his mind, the two of them had already indicted Cameron as a fraud, the morning’s Sun Herald article having validated not their suspicions but rather their inklings about an unsavory aspect to Cameron’s story, its more-than-meets-the-eye quality. And what about dinner with his parents? The five of them needed to celebrate. Janice did some quick math to realize he was counting her as two, setting a sweet but very premature place setting for the tiny packet of Cuevas cells occupying her belly. She turned onto Division Street. “Cameron might not want to talk to me,” she told Nap, who, bewilderment and disappointment aside, was still too buoyed by the pregnancy news to catch what she knew was in her voice: the tautness of a steel bridge cable. Nap could be dippy at times, a quality she mostly adored; he was going to make a terrific father. “He might not even be home,” she said. “And in that case I won’t hardly be late at all. Just tell your parents I had an emergency call, leave it open. I’ll text you.”
She hadn’t identified the emotion tugging her toward Reconfort Avenue as anger until she was parked in front of the Harris house and turned off her car, realizing the vibrations she still felt weren’t from the engine but from her own body. She gripped the steering wheel for calm, as if to absorb some of its mechanical logic. For one thing, she reminded herself, the hospital’s information technology administrator had the week before detonated a large hole in her theory: The VA’s VistA system, he told her, was essentially hack-proof. It logged every access and recorded every change to a patient’s file, and while maybe some teenage savant in Ukraine could figure out how to subvert that logging, it was way beyond the capacity, he said, with a light sneer, of “any federal employee.” Cameron’s file, then, was Cameron’s file; what it showed was what was there.
Yet her theory remained standing, emotion and intuition and maybe a smidgen of denial propping it up in the places where its foundation blocks were missing, with a surge of indignation currently jacking it up even higher in Janice’s mind. If her suspicions were right, and Cameron’s recovery was indeed a hoax, his list of victims now extended beyond her and the United States government; Gil Poleman was on that list, and also Hat, whose tears had probably yet to dry on Janice’s lab coat back at the hospital. Whether he’d intended to or not didn’t matter: Cameron had supplied them with false hopes about their own existences, he’d stolen reality from them. He’d let Gil Poleman go to his death feeling excluded from painfully proximal glory, feeling forsaken upon his own inflatable cross. This wasn’t abstract anymore, a crime against bureaucracy; this was sowing hurt.
The lights were on in the house, Cameron and Tanya’s twin pair of showroom-glinting new cars out front. Janice steamed up the walkway and rang the bell.
Tanya answered. The squint she gave Janice was bedraggled and confused, as if she didn’t recognize her at all—and maybe she didn’t, Janice allowed, outside of her lab-coated medical context. Janice identified herself. The pallid shade of Tanya’s skin and the nauseated look on her face gave her the appearance of someone who’d been binging on bleach-and-soda highballs. She was partly blocking the doorway. “Can I see your brother?” Janice asked, adding, when Tanya failed to respond, “It’s about his medications,” not quite a fib.
Tanya’s eyes popped a bit, as though Janice had just slipped her a crucial clue to something, and she eased backward to let her in.
Janice’s anger went draining out of her the moment she saw Cameron. He was propped shirtless on the couch, sitting upright but curled into something close to the fetal position against the armrest, his wrapped right hand over his head as though to hold his skull together or shield it from invisible blows. When he lowered the hand and revealed his face to Janice, she felt a long shudder run through her. Here was the same broken-looking boy she’d first encountered on an exam table three years ago, his eyes hazed now as then with incomprehension and dread, that giant tattoo of the angel-winged infantryman beside the prayer to the archangel Michael still somehow out of place on his lissome torso, a mistaken branding.
“Let me see that hand,” was the first thing she said to him. The hand was wrapped too tightly; she could see puffed flesh where the wrapping ended at his wrist. Unspooling it she found the outside of his hand swollen and the same shade of purple as the Gulf had appeared on her drive over. “Move your fingers for me,” she commanded, Cameron gingerly forming a claw. “Have you been icing it?” she asked, Cameron nodding.
“Tanya, will you get us some more ice?” she said. “And do you know if you have any cortisone cream or some other anti-inflammatory cream?”
Tanya asked, “Did I wrap it too tight?”
“No, honey, just a little too snugly. You don’t want to cut off the circulation.”
Tanya returned with a bag of frozen butter beans, which Janice applied to Cameron’s hand. “We don’t got any creams,” Tanya said. “Reckon they sell it at the Biz-E-Bee? I can run over.”
Janice locked eyes with Cameron. “I’m thinking you’re probably going to need to make a pharmacy run.” To Cameron she said, “You ready to think about restarting your meds?”
Tanya emitted a low hiccup of shock. “Restarting?”
Cameron sat blinking at Janice, lifting an unlit cigarette to his lips.
“You can tell her,” she said to him.
He lit the cigarette, twin funnels of gray smoke exiting his nose. “I went off my meds.”
“When?”
“Couple months ago.”
“The hell for?”
Cameron threw up his hand as if to shoo a horsefly. “Because I didn’t think I needed them no more,” he said. “Because, I mean, look at me.” It was an abysmally wrong time to solicit an assessment, which Cameron seemed to grasp even as the words left his mouth. He’d just disproven his own point. The shoo-fly defensiveness disappeared from his tone as he said, quietly, “It just seemed like if my legs was working then my brain was working too. I dunno. I just didn’t think I needed them no more.”
“Well you’re a stone dumbass,” came Tanya’s judgment. “And you didn’t think to tell me that? The way you been acting, now this thing wi
th Landry…” Her voice trailed off as pieces went clicking together in her head.
“I think he knows it was a mistake,” Janice said, looking to Cameron for confirmation. He dipped his head yes, squinting as he exhaled a stream of smoke. “Look,” she said to him, “I don’t know what happened with this fight and whether you staying on the medications would’ve helped it not happen. What I do know is that they help keep you together up there, that they help prevent stress and anxiety from letting you come unglued. Is that what happened?”
“Yeah.” He combined a nod with a shrug. “I just lost my shit.”
Janice excused herself to get a prescription pad from her car. When she returned the air in the room felt sheared, as though sharp words had just been hurled. She started scribbling out prescriptions, Cameron helping to remind her of his old jilted regimen. She added some Valium, too, to help him over this hump. “You tired of talking about it yet?” she said about the fight.
“A little,” he said, his expression suggesting a lot. He stabbed out his cigarette then picked at the bag of butter beans chilling his hand. “I had to turn myself in to the police this morning. Got fingerprinted and all that. Tanya was so messed up about it, had to get Father Ace to come post bond.”
Tanya muttered, cryptically, “I ain’t messed up about that.”
“Is he put out with you?” Janice asked, passing the sheaf of prescriptions to Tanya.
“Not really, no. He told me this story about having to knock the sand out of some dude in his village back in Africa, this big guy who’d drink cooking fuel and go crazy picking on folks. Them priests over there, I guess they gotta act like cops sometimes.”
“Is that what you did, knock the sand out of someone trying to pick a fight with you?”
“Something like that,” Cameron said distantly.
“It was just some jackass from high school,” Tanya interjected, “saying Cameron didn’t earn his medals or something…”
Cameron flinched, and Janice watched his face and body go tense; she could actually see it in his bared abdominal muscles, the way they contracted into a rutted grid. He shook his head, and without looking at his sister said to her, “We ain’t gonna do that, Tan. I told you that.”
Janice felt the energy in the room gathering or curdling into something thick, an unseeable partition jelling between Tanya and Cameron. He fished a cigarette from his pack. Tanya was standing by the front door with an ashen, seasick look on her face. “But…,” she said, without finishing.
“What I’m supposed to do?” he asked her. “Just hole up? Until what, huh? Hide? From who? From me?”
“I just don’t want people hurting you, baby,” Tanya said, stepping forward then back.
“Am I really gonna get hurt worse,” he said, “than I’ve already hurt?”
Janice’s head was swiveling blankly between them.
“It’s different,” Tanya begged. “It ain’t the same, Cam.”
Cameron closed his eyes, summoning or evicting something from what looked to be deep within. He lit the cigarette, letting the smoke curl from between his lips. “This ain’t your story either, Tan,” he said, Janice unable to follow. “It’s mine. It’s mine now.”
Tanya looked steamrolled, the color of her face alternating from red to green, like dying Christmas bulbs, and her body swaying or rather heaving side to side. Janice instinctively searched the room for a pot or a planter she could grab if Tanya began to vomit. Having arrived here directly from a deathbed, Janice’s gut was telling her she was witnessing another kind of death, though she couldn’t say precisely who or what was dying. Some kind of cord, maybe, that’d connected brother and sister for nearly a quarter century, severing right before her eyes.
“I been protecting you since the day you’s born,” Tanya told Cameron, brandishing the stack of prescriptions in her hand as convenient proof, shaking them at him. Her eyes were spearing him. “Everything I ever done been to protect you. To take care of you. Who you think changed your diapers when Mama couldn’t lift her ass off the floor? Who you think put food on the table after Mama died? Who’s the one stayed up till two in the morning writing your term papers? Who’s the one stayed in San Antonio when you come back nothing but bandages, the one carried you in and outta bed when you couldn’t do it yourself, cleaned the pressure wounds on your ass, cried when you was crying, who’s the one gave up every fucking thing but you for four years? Four fucking years, Cam. You wanna look at something? You wanna look at something? Look at me.” She punched herself in the chest three times, each punch expelling a sob. “Look at me,” she repeated weakly.
Tanya dropped her gaze and let out a high-pitched moan, as though horrified by the emotions she’d spilled onto the floor. Cameron’s mouth remained fixed in a tight straight line—yet another flat horizon—while his derelict cigarette was burning itself out in the ashtray. Janice’s thoughts swirled as an incoming text message pinged her cellphone—Nap, almost certainly.
The sound jolted her, a psychic alarm clock reminding her why she was here.
“Is there something I should know?” she asked Cameron, registering the absurdity of the question as she asked it. The last three minutes, to her, might as well have been conducted in Latin.
Cameron stared flatly at Janice, barely breathing.
“About your recovery?” she pressed.
A rubbery scowl flashed onto Cameron’s face, his bottom lip flopping down. “My recovery?”
Firmly, trying to look wise to him, she nodded.
“My recovery?” he echoed once more, trying to hammer the phrase into something coherent. His confusion looked thorough. “Nothing I ain’t told you about that.”
“You’re telling me,” Janice said, the pitching and rising and faltering of her voice reflecting the unruly muddle of her thinking, “that the way it happened, it was just like you said?”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, and when he leaned toward her the whole room seemed to shift with him, exerting all its weight upon Janice. “Where you coming from?”
“Where I’m coming from,” she said, her words feeling disconnected, like she was reading from a script that her brain’s higher powers had already discarded, “is a medical opinion that says the only explanation for your recovery is that you couldn’t have been paralyzed the morning of August twenty-third, before you stood out of your chair.”
“What?” Tanya squealed, taking a menacing step forward. Janice was suddenly seized by a very real and physical fear, apprehending, in that instant, that her indignation over Hat’s grief had completely warped her judgment. She should never have come here to confront Cameron (she’d neglected to even consider Tanya)—not alone, and not when Cameron was already tottering in the aftermath of violence, after he’d just proved his potential for coming unhinged. She should’ve left this to the Vatican investigator, or, as Nap suggested, taken her suspicions to the U.S. attorney’s office. She was pregnant, she remembered, not as a fact but as a vulnerability spiking her fear. She was pregnant.
And she was also—if what everything Cameron’s wet eyes were telling her was true—wrong. “You’re—you’re my doctor,” he said feebly, his voice reeled back twenty years to that of a small boy facing broken trust for the very first time, not knowing how to withstand it. Janice looked away; she couldn’t bear the way he was searching her face.
“I am your doctor, Cameron, I am,” she said, struggling to engineer some way out of this place she’d cornered herself in, feeling Tanya moving heavily behind her, then deciding without really deciding just to lay it all out there, to confess, as Cameron had asked, where she was coming from. “And that’s why I’ve spent these last four months ramming my head into every brick wall I’ve been able to find, trying to help you and—and me, yes, me too—understand why you’re walking, and the only thing that’s made any sense to me at all, the only thing I found I could actu
ally explain, was something happening up there”—pointing up to his head, then dragging her finger down to his legs—“and not there.”
A long silence gripped the room as a weird reversal set in. Janice seemed the wounded one—voice fraying, eyes imploring—while Cameron regarded her with the tender sturdiness of a country doctor. “I can’t tell if you’re saying I’m a liar or I’m crazy.” His face twitched with something approaching a smile. “But I know I ain’t one. And I don’t think I’m the other.”
“It was real,” Janice said, as barely a question.
Cameron bobbed his head, staring her square in the eyes. “I don’t know what it was. But it was real.”
“Then—then what was all that?” she pleaded. “You and Tanya—what was that?”
“That…” He glanced at Tanya. “That ain’t about here or here,” he said to Janice, touching his head then his legs. He tapped his chest. “That’s about here.”
“I gotta get out,” Tanya suddenly groaned. “I’m going…” Her gaze swung around the room until she noticed the prescriptions in her hand: “I’m—I’m going to the drugstore.”
The solidity Janice had seen in Cameron was only growing denser and harder. Something had happened to him since she’d arrived, whether because of her or in spite of her Janice didn’t know. She watched him pin his sister with a stare.
“No, Tan,” he said. “Stay. You ain’t heard but a little of it. You only heard the part about Landry. There’s something more.”
Tanya stood fastened to the doorway. “I can’t,” came out of her—not even a whisper, just a breath. Her hand found the doorknob, cranked it sideways.
“You can,” her brother said softly. “Please.”
She left.
To the drugstore, first, then to anywhere else but home.
* * *
Cameron sank his head into his hands. And then, after fetching himself a Bud Light, he told his doctor a story—a long story, his, beginning in Biloxi, Mississippi, in the 1990s and ending with a white flash then soundless blackness on a ridge in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, its latter part the flip side of the same story that, two weeks earlier, Damarkus Lockwood had told Euclide Abbascia inside that mobile home in the backwoods of White County, Georgia.
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 30
