The Face of Death (4 page)

“Thank you,” I say.

She knows what I mean.
Thank you for that memory, that forgotten bit of bittersweet, that punch in the gut that hurts and feels wonderful all at once.

This is Callie, spinning in close to hug my soul, spinning back out to regain her haughty distance.

She gets up from the bed and heads for the door. She looks back at me and smiles, a mischievous smile.

“Oh, and so you know? You don’t need a mousetrap. Just drug the donuts. I’ll
always
eat the donuts.”

5

“
HOW ARE YOU DOING, SMOKY?”

Elaina is asking me this. She showed up about twenty minutes ago, and after going through the requisite hugs with Bonnie, she’d maneuvered me off so that we were sitting alone in my living room. Her gaze is frankness and kindness and klieg lights. She faces me head-on, piercing me with those brown eyes. “No bullshit allowed,” that look says.

“Mostly good, some bad,” I say without hesitation. Being less than honest with Elaina never occurs to me. She is one of those rare people, the ones who are kind and strong at the same time.

She softens her gaze. “Tell me about the bad.”

I stare back at her, trying to find words for my new demon, the devil that romps through my mind while I sleep. I used to dream about Joseph Sands, he chuckled and chortled and raped me again and again, killed my family with a wink and a smile. Sands has faded; the nightmares now center around Bonnie. I see her sitting on a madman’s lap, a knife at her throat. I see her lying on a white rug, a bullet hole through her forehead, a crimson-angel spreading beneath her.

“Fear. It’s the fear.”

“What about?”

“Bonnie.”

Her forehead clears. “Ah. You’re afraid something’s going to happen to her.”

“More like terrified. That she’s never going to talk and end up nuts. That I’m not going to be there when she needs me.”

“And?” Elaina asks, nudging me. Pushing me to put the real terror, the guy at the bottom of that dark barrel, into words.

“That she’s going to die, okay?” It comes out sounding snappish. I regret it. “Sorry.”

She smiles to show me it’s fine. “All things considered, I think your fear makes sense, Smoky. You lost a child. You know it
can
happen. For goodness’ sake, Bonnie almost died in front of you.” A gentle touch, her hand on mine. “Your fear makes sense.”

“But it makes me feel weak,” I reply, miserable. “Fear is weakness. Bonnie needs me to be strong.”

I sleep with a loaded gun in my nightstand. The house is alarmed up the wazoo. The dead bolt on the front door would take an intruder an hour to drill through. All of it helps, but none of it dispels.

Elaina gives me a sharp look and shakes her head once. “No. Bonnie needs you to be
present.
She needs you to love her. She needs a mother, not a superhero. Real people are messy and complicated and generally inconvenient, but at least they are there, Smoky.”

Elaina is the wife of one of my team members, Alan. She’s a beautiful Latin woman, all gentle curves and poet’s eyes. Her true beauty comes from her heart; she has a fierce gentleness to her that says “Mom” and “Safe” and “Love.” Not in some silly, Pollyanna way—Elaina’s goodness is not sappy-sweet. It’s inexorable and undeniable and full of certainty.

Last year she was diagnosed with stage-two colon cancer. She’d had surgery to remove the tumor, followed by radiation and chemo-therapy. She’s doing well, but she’s lost the hair that had always been so thick and unstoppable. She wears this indignity the way I’ve learned to wear my scars: uncovered and on display. Her head is shaved bald and isn’t hidden by a hat or bandanna. I wonder if the pain of this loss hits her out of the blue sometimes, the way the absence of Matt and Alexa used to hit me.

Probably not. For Elaina, hair-loss would take a backseat to the joy of being alive; that kind of straightforwardness of purpose is a part of her power.

Elaina came to see me after Sands took away my family. She barreled into my hospital room, shoved the nurse aside, and swooped down on me with her arms wide. Those arms captured and enfolded me like an angel’s wings. I shattered inside them, weeping rivers against her chest for what seemed like forever. She was my mother in that moment; I will always love her for it.

She squeezes my hand. “The way you feel makes sense, Smoky. The only way you could be free of fear altogether would be to not love Bonnie the way you do, and I think it’s too late for that.”

My throat tightens up. My eyes burn. Elaina has a way of getting to simple truths, the kind that are helpful and provide freedom, but carry a price: You can’t unlearn them.
This Truth
is ugly and beautiful and inescapable: I’m stuck with my fear because I love Bonnie. All I have to do to be stress-free is un-love her.

Not gonna happen.

“But will it stop being so bad?” I ask. I heave a frustrated sigh. “I don’t want to screw her up.”

She takes both my hands, gives me that unswerving look. “Did you know I was an orphan, Smoky?”

I stare, surprised.

“No, I didn’t.”

She nods. “Well, I was. Me and my brother, Manuel. After Mom and Dad died in a car accident, we ended up being raised by my
abuela
—my grandmother. A great woman. I mean that as in ‘greatness.’ She never complained. Not once.” Her smile is wistful. “And Manuel—oh, he was such a wonderful boy, Smoky. Bighearted. Kind. But he was frail. Nothing specific to point to, but he was always the first to catch anything going around and the last to get over it. One summer day my
abuela
took us to Santa Monica beach. Manuel got caught by the undertow. He died.”

The words are simple, and spoken plainly, but I can feel the pain behind them. Quiet sorrow. She continues.

“I lost my parents for no reason at all. I lost my brother on a beautiful day, and his only sin was that he couldn’t kick hard enough to get back to shore.” She gives me a shrug. “My point, Smoky, is that I know that fear. The terror of losing someone you love.” She pulls her hand away, smiles. “So what do I do? I go and fall in love with a wonderful man who does a dangerous job, and yes, I’ve lain awake at night, afraid, afraid, afraid. There have been some times that I took it out on Alan. Unjustly.”

“Really?” I am having trouble reconciling this with the pedestal I have Elaina perched on; I can’t imagine her as less than a perfect person.

“Really. Sometimes years pass without a ripple. I don’t even think about losing him, and I sleep fine. But it always comes back. To answer your question:
No,
for me, it never goes away for good, but
yes,
I’d still rather love Alan, fear and all.”

“Elaina, why didn’t you ever tell me any of this? About you being an orphan, about your brother?”

The shrug is perfect, almost profound.

“I don’t know. I suppose I spent so much time not letting it define me that I forgot to tell the story when I should have. I did think of it once, when you were in the hospital, but I decided against telling you then.”

“Why?”

“You love me, Smoky. It would have added to your pain more than it would have helped.”

She’s right, I realize.

Elaina smiles, a smile of many colors. The smile of a wife who knows she’s lucky to have a husband she actually loves, of a mother who never had a child of her own, of a bald Rapunzel who’s happy to be alive.

Callie appears with Bonnie at her side. They’re both appraising me. Looking for the cracks, I imagine.

“Are we ready to get this show on the road?” Callie asks.

I force a smile. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Explain what it is we’re doing,” Elaina says.

I gather myself up into an imaginary fist and will it to hold on to the slippery, quivery parts of me. “It’s been a year since Matt and Alexa died. A lot has happened since then.” I look at Bonnie, smile. “Not just for me. I still miss them, and I know I always will. But…” I use the same phrase I gave to Bonnie earlier today. “They don’t live here anymore. I’m not talking about erasing their memories. I’m keeping every picture, every home movie. I’m talking about the practical things that don’t have use anymore. Clothes. Aftershave. Golf clubs. The things that would only get used if they were here.”

Bonnie gazes at me without hesitation or reserve. I smile at her, and put my hand over hers.

“We’re here to help,” Elaina says. “Just tell us what to do. Do you want to split up the rooms? Or do you want everyone to go from room to room together?”

“Together, I think.”

“Good.” She pauses. “Which room should we start in?”

I feel glued to the couch. I think Elaina senses this. So she’s prodding. She’s making me move, telling me to
stand up,
to get into motion. I find it irritating and then feel guilty for
being
irritated, because I’ve never been irritated with Elaina before and she doesn’t deserve it now.

I stand in a single motion. Like jumping off the high board without thinking about it first. “Let’s start in my bedroom.”

We put a bunch of boxes together, a startling cacophony of ripping tape and scraping cardboard. Now it’s silent again. Matt and I each had our own closet in the master bedroom. I’m looking at the door to his closet and the air is getting heavy.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Callie says. “It is just
too
damn serious in here.”

She stalks over to the windows and yanks open the plantation shutters on one, then another, then the last. Sunlight comes rushing into the room, a flood of gold. She opens the windows in decisive, almost savage, motions. It takes a moment before a cool breeze begins to eddy, followed by the sounds of the
out there
.

“Wait here,” she growls, heading toward the door of the bedroom.

Elaina raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug. We hear Callie tromp down the stairs, followed by some sounds from the kitchen, and now she’s tromping back up to the bedroom. She enters holding a small boom box and a CD. She plugs in the boom box, puts in the CD, and hits play. A driving drumbeat begins, mixing with an electric guitar riff that is catchy and a little familiar. This is one of
those
songs: I can’t name it, I’ve heard it a thousand times, it always gets my foot tapping.

“
Hits of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties
,” she says. “It won’t deliver on
substance,
but it’ll deliver on
fun.
”

Callie has transformed the room in the space of three minutes. It has gone from shadowed and somber to bright and frivolous. Just another bedroom on a beautiful day. I think about what she said earlier, about her inability to commit, and realize that avoiding the serious in her personal life has had at least one good side effect: She knows how to have fun at the drop of a hat.

I look down at Bonnie, raise my eyebrows. “Think we can boogie our way through this, babe?” I ask.

She grins at me and nods.

“Yeah,” I reply back. I take a breath, walk over to the closet, and open the door.

6

THE MUSIC AND SUNLIGHT WORKED, AT LEAST IN MY BEDROOM.
We went through Matt’s closet without me feeling too sad.

We packed away his shirts and slacks, his sweaters and shoes. The smell of him was everywhere, and the ghost of him. It seemed like I had a memory for every piece of clothing. He’d smiled wearing this tie. He’d cried at his grandfather’s funeral in this suit. Alexa had left a jam handprint on this shirt. These memories seemed less painful than I had expected. More rich than depressing.

Doing good, babe,
I’d heard Matt say in my head.

I didn’t reply, but I had smiled to myself.

I thought about Quantico and that possibility too. Maybe it would be good to leave this place behind.

If I do, it needs to be about choice, not retreat. I need to embrace my ghosts and lay them down, because they’ll follow me wherever I go. That’s what ghosts do.

We got through the closet and the bedroom and then the bathroom, and I floated through it all, the pain there but tolerable.
Bittersweet, waitress, heavy on the sweet
.

We filed down the stairway together with the boxes, moved into the garage, then up into the attic above the garage, dropping them off and pushing them back into corners where I knew they’d sit in the dark and gather dust.

Sorry, Matt,
I thought.

They’re just things, babe,
he replied.
The heart doesn’t get dusty
.

I guess.

By the way,
Matt says, out of nowhere,
what about 1 for U two 4 me?

I don’t answer. I stand on the ladder, in the attic from the waist up.

“Smoky?” Callie calls from the doorway of the garage.

“Be there in a sec.”

Yes,
I think.
What about 1 for U two 4 me? What’s the plan there?

I had learned, doing what I do, that good men and women can still have secrets. Good wives and husbands can still cheat on each other, or have secret vices, or turn out not to have been so good after all. And, I had learned, it all comes out once you die, because once you’re dead, others are free to root through your life at their leisure and you can’t do a darn thing about it.

Which brings me to 1 for U two 4 me. It’s a password. Matt had explained the concept of picking secure passwords to me once after a family e-mail account had been compromised.

“You want to include numbers with letters. The longer the better, obviously, but you want to pick something you can memorize and not have to write down. Something that’ll be mnemonic. Like…” He’d snapped his fingers. “One for you, two for me. That’s a phrase that sticks in my mind. So I change it a little and add some numbers and come up with 1 for U two 4 me. Silly, but I’ll remember it, and it’ll be hard for someone to guess by accident.”

He’d been right. It was like gum on your shoe. 1 for U two 4 me. I’d never have to write it down. It would always be accessible.

A few months after Matt died, I’d been sitting at his computer. We had a home office, and we each had our own PC. I was feeling numb and looking for something to awaken an emotion inside of me. I scrolled through his e-mail, dug through his files. I came upon a directory on the computer labeled
Private.
When I went to open the directory, I found that it was password protected.

1 for U two 4 me, there it was, trotted out before I had to really think about it. My fingers had moved to the keyboard. I was about to type it out. I stopped.

Froze.

What if? I’d thought. What if private really does mean private? Like, private from me?

The thought had been appalling. And terrifying. My imagination went into overdrive.

A mistress? Porn? He loved someone else?

Following these thoughts, the guilt.

How could you think that? It’s Matt. Your Matt.

I’d left the room, tucked away Mr. 1 for U two 4 me, and tried not to think about it.

He popped up every now and then. Like now.

Well? Truth or denial?

“Smoky?” Callie calls again.

“Coming,” I reply and clamber down the ladder.

I still feel Matt.

Waiting.

1 for U two 4 me.

Packing away the past, it occurs to me, is messy stuff.

We’re standing in the doorway of Alexa’s room. I can feel discomfort looming in the not-far-off. Pain is a little sharper here, though still tolerable.

“Pretty room,” Elaina murmurs.

“Alexa liked the girly-girl stuff,” I say, smiling.

It is a little girl’s dream room. The bed is queen-sized, with a canopy, and it’s covered with purples of every possible hue. The comforter and pillows are thick and lush and inviting. “Lie down and drown in us,” they say.

One quarter of the floor is covered in Alexa’s stuffed animal collection. They range from small to big to huge, and the species run the gamut from the identifiable to the fantastic.

“Lions and tigers and heffalumps, oh my,” Matt used to joke.

I take it all in, and a thought comes to me. I wonder at the fact that it never occurred to me before.

Bonnie has slept with me since the day I brought her home. I don’t think she’s ever entered this bedroom.

Be accurate, I chide myself. You never brought her in here, that’s the truth. Never asked her if she might want a king’s ransom of stuffed animals, or a purple explosion of bedsheets and blankets.

Time to fix
that
, I think. I kneel down next to Bonnie. “Do you want anything in here, sweetheart?” I ask her. She looks at me, her eyes searching mine. “You’re welcome to whatever you want.” I squeeze her hand. “Really. You can have the whole room.”

She shakes her head.
No, thank you,
she’s saying.

I’ve put away childish things,
that look says.

“Okay, babe,” I murmur, standing up.

“How do you want to handle this room, Smoky?” Elaina’s gentle voice startles me.

I run a hand through Bonnie’s hair as I look around the room.

“Well,” I start to say—and then my cell phone rings.

Callie rolls her eyes. “Here we go.”

“Barrett,” I answer.

Sorry,
I mouth to them.

A deep voice rumbles. “Smoky. It’s Alan. Sorry to bother you today, but we got a situation.”

Alan is overseeing the unit while I’m on vacation. He’s more than competent; the fact that he’s felt the need to call me raises my antennae.

“What is it?”

“I’m in Canoga Park, standing in front of a house. Scene of a triple homicide.
Bad
scene. Twist is, there’s a sixteen-year-old girl inside. She’s got a gun to her head and says she’ll only talk to you.”

“She asked for me by name?”

“Yep.”

I’m silent, processing.

“Really sorry about this, Smoky.”

“Don’t worry about it. We were just about to take a break, anyway. Give me the address and Callie and I will meet you there soonest.”

I jot down the address and hang up.

The man had gotten it wrong: Death
doesn’t
take a holiday, apparently. Par for the course. As always, I am living my life on multiple levels: Make this a home, decide if I am going to leave this home and go to Quantico, go stop a young woman from blowing her brains out. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, hurrah for me.

I look at Bonnie. “Sweetheart—” I begin, but stop as she nods her head.
It’s okay, go,
she is saying.

I look at Elaina. “Elaina—”

“I’ll watch Bonnie.”

Relief and gratitude, that’s what I feel.

“Callie—”

“I’ll drive,” she says.

I crouch down, facing Bonnie. “Do me a favor, sweetheart?”

She gives me a quizzical look.

“See if you can figure out what we should do with all those stuffed animals.”

She grins. Nods.

“Cool.” I straighten up, turn to Callie. “Let’s go.”

Bad things are waiting. I don’t want them to get impatient.