“Hey, cool it, woman! I’m ticklish there!”
She grinned. “And here?”
“Cut it out, Fiore.”
The grin widened. “Why?”
“Because you’ll be sorry if you don’t.”
“Hah! You talk so big, MacKenzie. Put your money where your mouth is.”
He grabbed her wrist and yanked her, giggling and protesting, to the ground beside him. They rolled in the grass like a pair of five-year-olds as he tickled her without mercy, until she was laughing and crying and begging him to stop. “Who’s in charge now?” he said.
“Stop,” she said weakly, letting out a burst of laughter that ended on a groan. “Oh, stop, please, it hurts.” Still laughing, she struggled in a halfhearted attempt to fight him off. “MacKenzie,” she sputtered, “if you don’t stop—right this minute—”
“Yeah?”
“—I’ll pee my pants.”
He grinned. “That wouldn’t be a pretty sight, would it, Fiore?”
“You win,” she cried. “You win!”
“That’s more like it,” he said. “I like to see a little humility in a woman.”
They lay on their sides, his hand resting on her ribcage as it rose and fell with her labored breathing. In the melee, her tee shirt had ridden up, exposing a vast amount of skin. Their eyes met, green probing deeply into green, and the playfulness melted away. He could see her pulse beating steady and strong at the base of her throat. Beneath his fingers, her skin was hot and sticky, and of their own volition, his knuckles brushed against her satin smoothness, raising goose bumps on her flesh and sending a searing pain through his chest.
Then a car passed, and the spell was broken. Casey blinked her eyes, yanked her shirt back into place, and rolled to a sitting position beside him. While he struggled to get his breathing back under control, he busied himself brushing grass and debris from his clothes and retying sneaker laces that didn’t need tying. When he thought he could speak again, he cleared his throat. “If we don’t get back pretty soon,” he said, his voice sounding odd to his own ears, “they’ll send out the bloodhounds.”
“Insufferable ass,” she said, but without conviction.
“That’s me, kiddo,” he said. “Let’s roll.”
They finished their run in a heavy silence. He had planned to stay for another day, but directly after breakfast, he packed his bags and headed out. All the way to Camden, Chris kept sending him speculative glances, but she didn’t ask, and he wasn’t about to volunteer any information.
He just got the hell out and didn’t look back.
***
That fall, the air turned crisp, the leaves wore their best and brightest colors, and with the bulk of the work on the house completed, for the first time in years she and Danny had time to spend together, away from the prying eyes of the world. When they’d reconciled, he had promised to take a year off, and so far he’d held to his promise. She had expected that idleness would be difficult for him, but he found other avenues of expression. They attended weekly counseling together, and they were slowly working through the problems in their marriage, working through their grief and their anger and a myriad of other emotional booby-traps.
Although they still weren’t able to talk about Katie openly without the anger and the pain resurfacing, other topics were safer ground, and they explored their emotions with a depth that was sometimes unsettling. Even after thirteen years, she was still captivated by Danny, still drawn to his dry wit, to the vulnerability he tried so hard to hide. Their love had matured, had mellowed into something more tranquil than the obsession they’d experienced in previous years. At times she felt so close to him it brought tears to her eyes. At other times, she felt something very near to indifference.
“It’s normal,” her sister-in-law Trish said when she confided her misgivings. “Every marriage goes through dry spells. You’ve been together for thirteen years. Be grateful you’re still speaking to each other.”
“Is it like this for you and Bill?”
“Honey, I love the man more than life itself, but there are times when I wish he’d go away for about a year. Trust me, there’s nothing wrong with your marriage. It’ll pass.”
But she wasn’t convinced. Trish didn’t know about the incident with Rob. Casey still wasn’t sure precisely what had happened on the grassy roadside that August morning. She wasn’t even certain that anything actually had happened. Perhaps it had been all in her mind. Perhaps she’d imagined being caught with Rob MacKenzie in a moment of sexual awareness so crystalline that she had only to close her eyes to recall every detail: the warmth of his breath on her face, the laugh lines around those green eyes, the damp patterns of perspiration on his sweatshirt, and her own inability to draw breath.
No, she hadn’t imagined the incident. It had been real. But its meaning was obscured in a morass of jumbled emotions too risky to explore. They’d been on the verge of—what? She would probably never know, for their relationship could survive only if she tamped down these offensive emotions and locked them away in a safe place. All Casey knew with any certainty was that she had come very near the jagged edge of a dangerous precipice, and had somehow managed to escape without tumbling into the abyss.
She didn’t understand it, for she still loved Danny. The sight of him still made her go warm all over. She still slept in his arms at night, still thrilled to his lovemaking. If their marriage was in a slump, it was for the reasons Trish had said, and was perfectly normal for a couple who’d been together as long as they had. The problem, if there was one, sprang from internal conflict, not from any outside influences. She and Danny were learning to handle these emotions, and with time, the situation was bound to improve.
It was in counseling that they first started talking about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “You’re both seeking some kind of healing,” Kevin Johanson, their counselor, said. “I’ve been there, and I have to say that even though I never served in Vietnam, visiting the Wall was a tremendously cleansing experience.”
Danny had mentioned the idea to her once or twice over the years, but until now, he hadn’t been ready. He’d been too afraid it would stir up the turmoil he’d left behind in Vietnam. But Casey knew there was still a piece of his life missing, the piece of himself that he’d left behind in Southeast Asia. And Southeast Asia was clearly still inside him, shifting and swirling like the colored patterns of a kaleidoscope, distorting his every emotion, his every action. She was afraid that he would live in emotional tumult for the rest of his life if he didn’t purge himself of some of that violent emotion and try to put his experience into some kind of meaningful perspective. So it was with immense relief that she agreed, that first weekend in December, to drive down to DC with him.
chapter twenty-six
Early morning shadows lay long and heavy on pale winter grass whose tips were touched with frost. The sky had that whitish look that precedes full blueness, and when she exhaled, she could see the faint cloudiness of her breath. Beside her, Danny was silent, tense, and in the distance, the bare branches of the trees along Constitution Avenue reached skyward. The Wall stretched out to their right, long and low and glossy black, deserted except for a lone man who knelt near the apex, his fingers following the words etched into the stone. Together they paused to absorb the power, the magnitude of it. Danny turned to her, blue eyes guarded, and she realized that she had no business going any farther. She took his face between her hands and kissed him. “Go,” she whispered.
His eyes questioned hers. “Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m sure, sweetheart. Go.”
He looked relieved. Kissed her gently, squared his shoulders and turned away. Hands in his pockets, he walked slowly along the Wall’s length, his form a faint reflection in its glassy surface. The kneeling man looked up at his approach and they exchanged nods as he passed. Danny turned the corner and disappeared, and Casey tucked her hands into the pockets of her jacket. Time passed. He reappeared, cro
ssed the grassy verge and began reading the names inscribed in the stone. After a time he paused, shoulders tensed, then he lay both palms flat against the smooth stone. With one finger, he followed a line of print, knelt and continued reading, stopping every now and then when he reached a familiar name. He bowed his head at one point, resting his forehead against the stone, and Casey felt like a voyeur, driven to watch, yet repelled by the pain of watching.
The sun was high in the sky when at last he stood up and dusted off his knees and came back for her. She was still waiting where he’d left her hours before. He took her in his arms and held her shuddering form until they both warmed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” she said, and brushed the hair back from his face. “Don’t ever be sorry.”
“You’re freezing.”
“So are you.” She took his icy hand in hers and rubbed it until the warmth returned. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
“I’ll wait. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”
He stroked her face with his thumb, gazed tenderly into her eyes. “After all these years,” he said, “after everything I’ve put you through, you still love me. Why?”
She warmed her freezing hands in the layer of air between his coat and his body. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”
That evening, they returned, and together they walked down the path and crossed the grass to the place where the names of fifty-eight thousand men were inscribed. Together, they read the names of his fallen comrades: Kenny Bailey and Chuck Silverstein, Tico Ramirez and John Duquesne, Bill Taylor and Jack Cooke and Ramsay Brown. Beneath her fingers, the stone was hard and cold; at her back, Danny was warm and gloriously alive. Casey shivered and leaned back into his reassuring warmth, and he wrapped an arm around her. “There’s nobody here I even know,” she said. “Why do I feel so much like crying?”
Danny rested his cheek against hers. “They say it has that effect on everybody.” He reached into his pocket and removed something and held it up to the light, and she recognized the dog tags he kept tucked away in his underwear drawer. He studied the tarnished military I.D., then kissed it lightly. “This one’s for you, buddy,” he said softly, and placed it on the ground beneath Kenny Bailey’s name.
That night, in his arms, she rediscovered the commitment she’d doubted for so long. For better or for worse, she had bound herself to this man, had chosen him out of all the men in the world. Together, they had weathered pain and tragedy, and had not only survived, but had become stronger. Nothing could hurt them now.
In the sweet aftermath of passion, he pulled her close. He smoothed back her hair and said, “For a while there, I wasn’t sure we were going to make it.”
She wrapped her arms around him. He was big and solid, sticky and warm. “Neither was I,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said, “I should feel honored.”
It was an odd choice of words. “Honored,” she said. “Why?”
“Because he’s a good man.”
It took her a moment to understand, and then she went stiff in his arms. “It’s not like that,” she said.
“Christ, Casey, give me credit for having a few brains. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. What I’m trying to tell you is that it doesn’t matter. Whatever went on between the two of you, it doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that you’re here, with me, and we’re okay.” He paused, then said, “We are okay, aren’t we?”
She let out the breath she’d been holding. “Yes,” she said. “We’re okay.”
***
“You grow up with rules,” he said. “Some of them are drummed into your head. Others are implicit. Either way, you know what they are. Your boundaries are clearly defined. You understand what is and isn’t acceptable. But over there, the rules didn’t apply. There was only one rule, and that was survival.”
He stared blindly into the darkened room. “After the first couple of times I caught the clap,” he said, “I learned to stay away from the brothels and the Saigon street whores. The teenage peasant girls were usually clean, at least if you got there ahead of everybody else. There we were, a hundred thousand horny twenty-year-olds, raping and pillaging our way across the country, all in the name of democracy. We took whatever we wanted. We thought we were entitled. We took turns gang-banging thirteen-year-old girls. We set old men on fire, just to watch them dance. We’d march into a village, and they’d be hiding from us, because they knew why we were there. To steal their food, to kill their animals, to burn their crops.” His face hardened. “To rape their daughters.”
“Oh, Danny.”
“None of it bothered us, because we dehumanized them. They weren’t people, they were gooks, and everybody knew that the only good gook was a dead one. You couldn’t trust any of them, because even in the South, the Cong had infiltrated everywhere, and if you turned your back you’d end up with your throat slit. All the fear, all the frustration, all the anger, we had to convert into something, so we turned it into rage. Do you know that Dylan Thomas poem, the one about not going gentle into that good night?”
She took his hand. “Yes,” she said.
“That’s what we were doing. We were raging against the dying of the light. On the outside, we were killing machines, doing what we’d been trained to do. On the inside, we were a bunch of scared kids who didn’t want to die, and we needed a way to handle the fear. There weren’t many options. You could stay stoned all the time. Some guys did that. Everything from grass to smack. It was their way of escaping, and who the hell could blame them? Some of us dealt with it by screwing anything that moved, because we were so desperate to feel something, anything, that would prove to us we were still human.”
He got up from the bed and began moving restlessly around the room. “If you managed to survive long enough,” he said, “sooner or later they’d send you to Singapore for a few days of R&R. You’d get a hotel room and a whore, and you’d stay drunk the whole time. Then, when you got back, you’d go straight to the medic for a penicillin shot.”
He leaned against the dresser and lit a cigarette. “You learned to sleep flat on your back in the mud with your gun in your hands. You learned to watch for the tiniest deviation from the norm: a broken blade of grass, the snapping of a twig. A flock of birds squawking. Or silence.” He took a deep drag on the cigarette and slowly exhaled the smoke. “Silence was the worst, because you never knew what it meant. The Cong were born knowing the tactics of guerrilla warfare. They knew how to make themselves invisible, how to hang like monkeys from the trees. We were just a bunch of kids from Boston and Boise who grew up on Lucy and Ricky and Good Humor bars. These guys were out of our league.”
He looked around for an ashtray, found one, flicked the ash from his cigarette and tossed the hair back from his face. “So you spent thirteen months in a state of hyper-vigilance, because the piddliest little thing could mean instant death. And then they shipped you stateside and expected you to fit right back into society and play by the rules again. Except that the rules no longer made sense.” He drew on the cigarette, exhaled, stared into and through the cloud of smoke. “After consorting with death, twenty-four hours a day for a year, it was impossible to live with the pettiness and the hypocrisy, the canonization of the trivial that was the basis of everyday life back home.” He paused, lost in thought. “Sometimes,” he said, “it would get so unbearable that you’d want to go back, because at least in Nam things made sense. Life, death, the good guys, the bad guys. Simple, gut-level survival. Some guys kept going back, kept signing up for one tour of duty after another, because they found they couldn’t function any longer in the outside world. The rest of us,” he said, “learned to pretend.”
Cigarette in hand, he began pacing like a caged tiger. “Kenny Bailey and I met in basic. He was a farm kid from Omaha. Red hair, freckles, braces. After basic, we were given the dubious honor of spending the longest year of our lives together in hel
l. We were part of a ground unit, and we’d broken up into patrols. Usually there were five or six men in each patrol, but on this particular occasion, half the unit was laid low with dysentery, so there were just three of us. Kenny, me, and Chuck Silverstein. We’d walked—Christ, it must have been fifteen or twenty miles that day. It was raining. Not a heavy monsoon rain, the kind that sounded like thunder hitting the ground.” He paused in front of the window and looked out, but she knew it wasn’t the city of Washington he was seeing. “No,” he said, “this was more the type of noxious drizzle that grew fungus between your toes and slowly drove you crazy.”
It was a moment before he continued. “Chuck had only been in country for a month or so,” he said, “but Kenny and I were two weeks away from shipping out, both of us scared shitless that we’d die before we could escape from that soggy hell. We were razzing each other that night, bragging, seeing who could outdo the other with the biggest line of bull. It was a way of passing the time, a way of laughing in the face of death, a way of trying to fill the silence, because it was too damn quiet. The jungle’s usually alive with sound, but that night, the silence was spooky.”
Casey got up from the bed, stood beside him at the window, and lay a hand on his back. Beneath her fingertips, his muscles were rigid and unresponsive. “We’d found what I thought was a relatively safe place to spend the night,” he said. “The guy must have been watching us for a while, waiting for the precise moment to strike. The first shot picked Chuck right off his feet. It went in the front and left a hole the size of a watermelon when it came out the back. Kenny and I hit the ground. We knew it was a sniper, but we couldn’t figure out where the guy was shooting from. He knew where we were, though, and he was having one hell of a fine time trying to pick us off. I pulled rank on Kenny, ordered him to fall in behind me, and the two of us started crawling through the mud, trying to reach cover. There was no moon because of the cloud cover, and it was dark as the pit of hell out there. One minute, Kenny was right behind me. The next minute, he wasn’t. As patrol leader, it was my duty to go back and find him.” He paused. “Christ, I’d have gone back anyway. He was my best friend.”
Coming Home (Jackson Falls Series) Page 32
