“Such as?”
“That Joe was ‘leadership material,’ for whom ‘no sacrifice of others’ was too great. Stated with less sarcasm, that encapsulates one of the classic problems of command. Great generals can’t be impeded by sentiment.”
Meg’s clear blue eyes were fixed on Carson. “Joe,” she said, “would have killed to be like my father.”
Carson nodded. “Precisely my point. I may be out on a limb here. But if Brian resented your father, I think he saw D’Abruzzo as an ersatz General McCarran, a man with the general’s willingness to sacrifice his soldiers but without the general’s character or talent. That reduces D’Abruzzo to a mindless butcher, doubling down on Brian’s resentment.”
Terry stared at the psychiatrist. “That’s not a suggestion I’d care to hear in public, Blake. Butchers deserve to die; one could even see it as a mercy to others. I’d prefer that Brian took D’Abruzzo’s gun out of deep concern for Kate. That squares with his concern for the defenseless.”
Carson smiled. “You can relax, Paul. I’m free-associating here—I wouldn’t stake my professional reputation on very much of what I’ve told you. Brian hasn’t given me near enough to go on.
“The one thing I’m certain of is that Brian—like his father, I’d imagine—is exceptionally intelligent. But I don’t see him as naturally aggressive, or even assertive, unless life presents him with a reason. Without the McCarran tradition, I doubt that he’d have considered entering the military.”
Meg looked down. Quietly, she said, “I used to wonder if I could have stopped him. Now I wish that all the time.”
“You’re not responsible,” Carson told her firmly. “Maybe a strong mother could have redirected him. But you weren’t much older than Brian when she died. From then on, Brian had only one parent to define what kind of man he should be.” He softened his voice. “I think Brian has struggled with the question of identity for most of his life. And PTSD is a profound blow to a soldier’s sense of self—to his value system, and to his belief that he can control his life.
“I see these guys all the time. I keep encountering the same two questions: ‘After what I did in war, do I deserve to be happy?’ And ‘After what I saw in war, can I believe in a world that makes moral sense?’ It all comes down to ‘Who am I now, and how can I live?’ Brian has no answer.”
Meg briefly shook her head, a twitch that suggested her distress. “What about D’Abruzzo?” she managed to ask. “Everything we know suggests that Brian should have been afraid that night.”
Carson frowned. “As Paul points out, ‘everything we know’ comes from Kate or Brian. There weren’t any witnesses to their fights, and no one but Kate to say that D’Abruzzo hit her at all. In his case, I’m not diagnosing a living man, but someone else’s version of a dead one.”
Meg gave Terry a quick glance, as if to learn whether he had told Carson about the apparent fact of Kate’s affair. Then she asked, “Aren’t there other sources?”
“Who?” the psychologist inquired gently. “Joe’s kids? His parents? Maybe you can find someone. But on the surface, his service record was problem-free.”
“Still,” Terry interjected, “combat stress from Iraq could explain the changes in behavior Kate describes: volatility, self-medication, withdrawal from his kids, and outbursts of anger that end in spousal abuse. As well as his withdrawal from sex.”
Carson hunched forward, coffee cradled between his hands. “In the abstract, all of those could be symptoms, as could a profound emotional numbness. Time and again, I encounter feelings of hopelessness and an inability to express difficult thoughts or feelings—which could become our biggest problem when it comes to helping Brian.”
“Brian doesn’t fly into rages,” Meg put in.
“Not that you’ve seen.” Carson sat back, addressing both Terry and Meg. “But in combat veterans, exposure to unceasing violence can cause the circuitry of the brain to change. The result is a lack of inhibition of anger and blindness to the behavior that results. Take Joe as Kate describes him. Maybe he couldn’t communicate with her because he had no gift for it or because what he felt was too wrenching to express. So Kate’s demands for intimacy—physical or emotional—could have triggered explosions of anger aimed at making her stop. Assuming, again, that Kate’s account is truthful.”
Terry feigned a pensive look, as though something had just occurred to him. “Suppose that D’Abruzzo felt threatened by his wife’s relationship to Brian. How might he have reacted once Brian had, in the literal sense, ‘disarmed him’?”
Carson’s smile came with a raised eyebrow. “How phallic are we getting here? Are you positing an affair?”
Ignoring Meg, Terry responded blandly, “I’m wondering about anything that could have made D’Abruzzo resent the relationship. In Joe’s headspace, a lifetime of closeness between his wife and another man could have felt threatening in itself.”
Carson’s amiable WASP features, concentrated in thought, gave him the earnest look of an altar boy confronting the possibility of sin. “If he literally thought his wife was betraying him, the impact could have been combustible. Again, if you believe Kate, consider the ingredients: anger; shame; rage; betrayal. And, quite possibly, sexual impotence. Now another man has taken his gun. If that’s all mixed up with adultery—” The shrug with which Carson cut himself off suggested that the rest was obvious.
“Adultery aside,” Terry answered, “the rest squares with Brian’s story of events leading up to the shooting. D’Abruzzo was bigger, trained in martial arts, outraged to begin with, and disinhibited by alcohol. Brian says that Joe started a karate move that could have been instinctive. Brian had no time to think and only one means of protection: D’Abruzzo’s gun. Which supports a claim of self-defense.”
“Sure,” Carson concurred. “But it is based on Brian’s version of events—or his perception of events. My opinion is only as good as Brian’s credibility. For example, I keep wondering why he let D’Abruzzo in, which perplexes me almost as much as Brian’s lack of memory. I keep hitting the wall between supposition and everything I don’t know, beginning with what happened to Brian in Iraq and how—in terms of specific parallels—it might relate to D’Abruzzo’s death. If at all.” Elbows resting on the table, Carson opened his palms. “And then,” he said more slowly, “there is the whole question of anger. Brian’s, that is.”
“Meaning?” Meg asked.
“Self-defense is based on an objectively reasonable fear. An insanity defense, as Paul imagines it, rests on an unreasonable but genuine fear. Either way, fear is the basis. But you don’t get to shoot somebody just because you’re angry at him. A belief that D’Abruzzo was beating Kate didn’t license your brother to kill him.”
“Not even if he was afraid for her?” Meg protested. “Joe held a gun to her head.”
Terry shook his head. “Flynn would say, ‘That’s why you call the MPs.’ Or report D’Abruzzo for domestic violence, and ask the army to counsel him. Brian can’t shoot him as a substitute. And, as Blake keeps pointing out, there’s no evidence but Kate’s word that D’Abruzzo ever hit her.”
“What if Brian believed her, whether or not it was true?”
What struck Terry about the question was its tacit supposition that Brian could have been Kate’s dupe, perhaps acting as a stand-in—or even a scapegoat—for an unknown lover. Then Terry remembered that José Calvo had overheard the dead man saying, I saw him, you cunt. “Same difference,” Terry said at length. “Starting with the physical evidence, we’re mired in ambiguity. Okay, there’s a good chance D’Abruzzo was a tinderbox. We also think Brian suffers from PTSD, and you tell us he was strung out from lack of sleep. So both of them could have had trouble controlling anger, an oversensitivity to threat, and reflexes conditioned by combat under extreme conditions. Brian had a weapon; D’Abruzzo was one. It’s hard to sort out fear from anger, or whose fear or anger it was.”
Abruptly, Meg turned from him to Carson. “I hope we never
see a court-martial,” she said bluntly. “But if we do, and you’re a witness, somebody’s going to ask you whether Joe’s death stems from something far more culpable than spontaneous combustion. Specifically whether—despite how damaged Brian is—he could be using PTSD to cover up his role as triggerman in a premeditated murder.”
Carson threw up his hands, an exaggerated gesture meant to express his own frustration. “You might as well ask me how D’Abruzzo ended up facing the wall with a bullet in his back. Only Brian can answer that, and he says he can’t remember. Which, by the way, I’m by no means ruling out.” He softened his voice again. “Brian is literally a trained killer. But I don’t easily leap to the conclusion that he’s a cold-blooded one. Still, one huge X-factor here is his relationship with Kate, whatever it was, and whether that changed in the last six months.
“Was he afraid for her? Did he feel gratitude to her from childhood and protective of her now? Or had he come to feel something more passionate and possessive?”
“D’Abruzzo had lost interest in sex,” Meg responded. “So now, despite whatever anyone says, you’re wondering if my brother and Kate became lovers. Even though Brian told me he wouldn’t date for fear of freaking out at night.”
Carson was unfazed. “Ask a question, and I’ll give you my best answer. I don’t know shit about your brother’s relationship to women, or even about his sexuality before or after Iraq. But it’s Psych 101 to imagine that, in adolescence, he had sexualized feelings about Kate. Or even about you and Mrs. Gallagher—subconscious incest is the game the whole family gets to play. Of those feelings, the one most likely to survive would focus on the woman who isn’t his sister, and is reasonably age-appropriate.
“On multiple occasions I’ve seen protectiveness ripen into sex, sometimes unleashing repressed desires strong enough to shatter the strongest barriers. That Brian and Kate are part of a quasi-family might not be enough to stop them, or that adultery is a sin in the army and your church. Your brother is a textbook case of repression: as a soldier, as a man, and as a member of the McCarran family, he’s treated his own feelings as the enemy. But sometimes the defenses shatter, too.”
Meg stared at him. “Brian’s also a study in depression,” Terry pointed out.
“True,” Carson allowed. “And depressives usually don’t make terrific lovers. I’m just looking at all the psychic angles.” He turned to Meg. “I’m flying blind here. If what I’m up against with Brian is a matter of trust, not calculation, maybe we can make some headway in figuring out what happened—not only in Iraq, but that night in his apartment. Then we can go after why it happened. I’d like that, if for no other reason than that Brian’s still alive. I don’t want him to live in a prison, literally or emotionally.”
To Terry’s surprise, tears sprung to Meg’s eyes. “All I want,” she said, “is for Brian to be free.” The weight she placed on “free” suggested more than a fear of prison.
AT TEN O’CLOCK THAT night, Terry put two cold bottles of Sam Adams in a bag, left his apartment, walked to the shadowy park across the street, and sat against the trunk of the thickest tree. Sipping from the first cold bottle, he felt the humid air on his skin and listened to the chirp of the crickets in darkness.
No one knew he did this. It was not the conduct of a military officer, but of a man conditioned by the feeling of loneliness and confinement that pervaded the tiny bungalow he and his mother had tried to keep after his father’s death. It was the escape of a sixteen-year-old who would return from a date with girls who could never truly know him and, aware that his mother was sleeping, take a beer into their fenced backyard and numb himself in a reverie of cricket sounds and leaf-shrouded moonlight.
So much comes from family, he knew. His family had numbered only three; the two who remained were scarred in different ways. His mother relived the past; Paul burned with the fierce ambition to control his future beyond anyone’s ability to take it from him. Law became his grail. Now, at last, he was skilled enough to go to New York and obliterate his past, paycheck by paycheck and trial by trial, using his firm’s signing bonus to buy his mother a modest home and pay the last of his student loans. Three weeks left, all bound up with someone else’s family.
He took a deep swallow of beer.
Neither Paul Terry nor his mother were hard to understand. Their trauma had been simple—the rest of their story was written by it. The McCarrans were different. Especially since meeting Rose, Terry saw them as locked in a complex web that, as one family member acted on another, enveloped them further. Meg, their protector, was at its center. In many ways, she was the most elusive of them all—by turns tough and vulnerable, bound to Brian by love and responsibility, yet deeply alone. Sometimes Terry sensed her wanting to reach out to him, then pulling back. He wondered if he imagined this.
Three more weeks. He would work this to the end; his creed was never to let up. That meant learning about the McCarrans, not just from what one or the other might say but from interpreting what he heard and sensed. He had learned from his father’s death, and his mother’s lies, how mutable truth could be.
He would find a way to use what Meg knew, and not just as a lawyer.
three
FOR THE FIRST FEW HOURS OF THE FOLLOWING DAY, TERRY reviewed the history of Brian’s battalion in Iraq. Around noon, he reflected for a moment, then telephoned Meg McCarran. “Can I take you to dinner?” he asked. “I keep thinking I should have asked you yesterday.”
The allusion to her tears was unmistakable. In a tone that mingled embarrassment and reserve, she answered, “I’m okay. Really.”
“Even better then. I’ve got a place picked out, and I’m sick of my own cooking.”
A moment of silence followed. “All right,” she answered more lightly. “Maybe Brian could use a break from me.”
Imagining her dislocation from her home and career, Terry wondered how it felt to be entangled with her family, once again, after making her own life. “Pick you up at six,” he said, and got off before she could change her mind.
VIDALIA WAS A BRIGHT restaurant with crisp white tablecloths and enough space between tables to encourage private conversation. Across the table Meg, though still lovely, looked like someone who’d had too little sleep and too much time with painful thoughts. That she found her emotions so difficult to acknowledge deepened Terry’s sense of her aloneness. Who takes care of you? he wondered. But the answer seemed clear enough: no one.
Watching Terry observe her, she asked, “Why did you invite me to dinner?”
The mildness of her voice did not diminish the directness of the question or the caution behind it. “I owed myself,” Terry said easily. “I canceled a reservation here when Colonel Dawes called me about Brian. You’re the incidental beneficiary.”
“What about your date?”
“She’s back in Chicago. She was just here for the weekend.”
Given all that Brian faced, Terry doubted that an aborted dinner would strike Meg as a tragedy. In a voice so dry it contained a trace of humor, she said, “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t worry too much,” Terry answered philanthropically. “She and I are evolving into friends.”
With a twitch at the corner of her mouth, she said, “Define ‘evolving.’ ”
“It’s complicated.”
Her smile lingered. “Somehow I could have guessed that about you.”
Their waiter arrived, soliciting drink orders. To Terry’s surprise, Meg ordered a vodka martini, a trial lawyer’s drink. When each had taken a first sip, Terry said, “The truth, okay? This has been awkward for both of us. You’re scared for Brian; I’m used to being in charge. But I understand your feelings, at least as well as I can.”
The guarded look in her eyes receded. “It has been hard,” she allowed. “Most of it’s fear for Brian. Some of it’s just how I am, I’m afraid.”
Terry nodded in recognition. “Most cases like this are hard for me to turn off—I’m too afraid that someone els
e will pay for what I missed. My mind keeps working until I wish I could escape myself.”
Meg shook her head, as though answering the question Terry had not asked. “I’ve got no choice, Paul.”
For a moment Terry imagined the twelve-year-old girl Rose Gallagher had described, made too serious too soon. “I know that.”
The quiet that followed suggested a certain peace. After a time, Terry asked, “Mind if we talk about your family a little?”
Meg’s eyes became hooded. “I thought you’d covered that with Rose.”
In Meg’s eyes, Terry knew, Rose had crossed an unspoken boundary, becoming his collaborator in something akin to betrayal. “Your family is distinctive,” he answered. “As is its role in making Brian who he is. I can’t worry about anyone else’s sensitivities.” He softened his tone. “Your domestic violence cases are family stories, Meg. To help the battered women you’re protecting, you need to understand how they got there. No doubt the reasons are painful for them to share. But that can’t stop you from asking.”
Meg stared at the table, then briefly nodded, a silent concession. “We’re a military family,” she said at length. “No disparagement intended, but the army is like a cult—you’re separated from the rest of the world. And the McCarrans are a kind of cult, as well.” She looked up, meeting Terry’s eyes. “Our cult has its own values—familial, martial, and religious. And our head’s a living legend descended from dead heroes.
“In our own small way, we’re like the Kennedys or the Bushes. I don’t know what your dad was like, Paul. Somehow I don’t imagine him saying at the dinner table, ‘Terrys do this’ or ‘Terrys never do this.’ But that’s part of how Dad raised us.”
“My dad never tried that,” Terry responded simply. “It would have had no meaning.”
Meg smiled a little. “After Brian was born, when Dad and I picked up Mom and the baby at the hospital, he took us home on McCarran Drive. I always knew the McCarrans were special, and that Dad had to live up to that—or die trying. Brian was right: by dying as heroes, Dad’s father and grandfather hit the jackpot.” Her voice became musing. “No one ever knew those men. They had no personalities, or frailties—just a legacy of courage and sacrifice, like the words of my great-grandfather’s Medal of Honor citation. My father said that God had granted them the honor of dying for their country. It sounded strange until I realized that was all he had.”
In the Name of Honor Page 12
