Carthage

I will never open it now. Now you are safely returned to us.

  Yes, I still have it of course. Hidden in my room.

  My sister knows of the letter—I mean, she saw it in my hand. She has no idea what is inside it. She will not ever know.

  She has told me I am not worthy of you—I am “too happy”—“too shallow”—to comprehend you.

  In fact Cressida knows nothing of what there is between us. No one knows, except us.

  Those special times between us, Brett. We will have those special times again . . .

  Cressida is a good person in her heart!—but this is not always evident.

  It’s hurtful to her to observe happiness in others. Even people she loves. I think it has made a difference to her, to see you as you are now—she has been deeply affected though she would not say so.

  But if you speak to her of anything personal she will stare at you coldly. Excuse me. You are utterly mistaken.

  She has refused to be my maid of honor, she was scornful saying she hasn’t worn anything like a dress or a skirt since she’d been a baby and wasn’t going to start now. She laughed saying weddings are rituals in an extinct religion in which I don’t believe.

  I said to Cressida What is the religion in which you do believe?

  This question I put to her seriously and not sarcastically as Cressida herself speaks. For truly I wanted to know.

  But Cressida had no reply. Turned away from me as if she was ashamed and did not speak.

  I wish—I am praying for this!—that Cressida will come to church with us sometime. Or just with me, if you don’t want to come. I know that she has been wounded in some way, she has been hurt by someone or something, she would never confide in me. I feel that her heart is empty and yearning to be filled—to cross over.

  NO, BRETT! Not ever.

  You must not say such things.

  We could not feel more pride for you, truly. It is a feeling beyond pride—such as you would feel for any true hero, who has acted in a way few others could act, in a time of great danger.

  What you said at the going-away party, such simple words you said made everyone cry—I just want to serve my country, I want to be the very best soldier I know how to be.

  This is what you have done. Please, Brett! Have faith.

  The war in Iraq was the most exciting time in your life, I know. Those months you were gone from us—“deployed.” It was a dangerous time and an exciting time and (I understand) a secret time for you, we could know nothing of in Carthage.

  Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those words!

  We tried to follow in the news. On the Internet. We prayed for you.

  Daddy would remove from the newspaper things he didn’t want me to see. Particularly the New York Times, he gets on Sundays mostly.

  Photos of soldiers who have died in the war—the wars. Since 2001.

  I have seen some of them of course. Couldn’t help but look for women among the rows of men looking young as boys.

  There are not many female soldiers. But it is shocking to see them, their pictures with all the men.

  And always smiling. Like high school girls.

  In Carthage, there are some people who do not “support” the war—the wars. But they support our troops, they make that clear.

  Daddy has always made that clear.

  Daddy respects you. Daddy is just awkward now, he doesn’t know how to talk to you but that’s how some men are. He was never a soldier himself and has strong feelings about the Vietnam War which was the war when he was growing up. But Daddy does not mean anything personal.

  You have said It’s a toss of the dice. You have said Who gives a shit who lives, who dies. A toss of the dice.

  I know you don’t mean this. This is not Brett speaking but the other.

  You must not despair. Life is a gift. Our lives are gifts. Our love for each other.

  It was surprising, my mother is not very religious but while you were gone—she came to church with me, almost every Sunday. She prayed.

  All of the congregation prayed for you. For you and the others in the war—the wars.

  So many have died in the wars, it is hard for me to remember the numbers—more than one thousand?

  Most of them soldiers like you, not officers. And all beloved of God, you’d wish to think.

  For all are beloved of God. Even the enemy.

  Just so, we must defend ourselves. A Christian must defend himself against the enemies of Christ.

  This war against terror. It is a war against the enemies of Christ.

  I know you did not want to kill anyone. I know you, my darling Brett, and I know this—you did not want to kill the enemy, or—anyone. But you were a soldier, this was your duty.

  You were promoted because you were a good soldier. We were so proud of you then.

  Your mother is proud of you, I wish she could show it better.

  I wish she did not seem to blame me.

  I am not sure why she would wish to blame me.

  Maybe she thought I was—pregnant. Maybe she thought that was why we wanted to get married. And maybe she thought that was why you enlisted in the army—to get away.

  I wish that I could speak with your mother but I—I have tried . . . I have tried and failed. Your mother does not like me.

  My mother says We’ll keep trying! Mrs. Kincaid is fearful of losing her son.

  I know that you don’t like me to talk about your mother—I am sorry, I will try not to. Only just sometimes, I feel so hurt.

  I know, the war is a terrible thing for you to remember. When you start classes at Plattsburgh in September, or maybe—maybe it will be January—you will have other things to think about . . . By then, we will be married and things will be easier, in just one place.

  I will take courses at Plattsburgh, too. I think I will. Part-time graduate school, in the M.A. in education program.

  With a master’s degree I could teach high school English. I would be qualified for “administration”—Daddy thinks I should be a principal, one day.

  Daddy has such plans for us! Both of us.

  I WISH YOU would speak of it to me, dear Brett.

  I’ve seen documentaries on TV. I think I know what it was like—in a way.

  I know it was a “high” for you—I’ve heard you say to your friends. Search missions in the Iraqi homes when you didn’t know what would happen to you, or what you would do.

  What you’d never say to me or to your mother you would say to Rod Halifax and “Stump”—or maybe you would say it to a stranger you met in a bar.

  Another vet, you would speak with. Someone who didn’t know Corporal Brett Kincaid as he’d used to be.

  There is no “high” like that in Carthage. Tossing your life like dice.

  Our lives since high school—it’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, I guess—so small.

  Those sad little cardboard houses beneath a Christmas tree, houses and a church and fake snow like frosting. Small.

  EVEN OUR WOUNDS here are small.

  IN CARTHAGE, your life is waiting for you. It is not a thrilling life like the other. It is not a life to serve Democracy like the other. You said such a strange thing when you saw us waiting for you by the baggage claim, we were thrilled you were walking unassisted and this look came in your face I had not ever seen before and it was like you were afraid of us for just a moment you said Oh Christ are you all still alive? I was thinking you were all dead. I’d been to the other place, and I saw you all there.

  THREE

  The Father

  OH DADDY WHY’D YOU call me such a name—Cressida.

  Because it’s an unusual name, honey. And it’s a beautiful name.

  FIRE SHONE INTO the father’s face. His eyes were sockets of fire.

  He hadn’t the strength to open his eyes. Or the courage.

  The doe’s torso had been torn open, its bloody interior crawling with flies, maggots. Yet the eyes were still beautiful—“doe’s eyes.”

/>   He’d seen his daughter there, on the ground. He was certain.

  The sick-sliding sensation in his gut wasn’t unfamiliar. In that place, again. The place of dread, horror. Guilt. His fault.

  And how: how was it his fault?

  Lying on his back and his arms flung wide across the bed—(he remembered now: they’d brought him home, to his deep mortification and shame)—that sagged beneath his weight. (Last time he’d weighed himself he’d been, dear Christ, 212 pounds. Heavy and graceless as wet cement.)

  A memory came to him of a long-ago trampoline in a neighbor’s backyard when he’d been a child. Throwing himself down onto the coarse taut canvas that he might be sprung into the air—clumsily, thrillingly—flying up, losing his balance and falling back, flat on his back and arms sprung, the breath knocked out of him.

  On the trampoline, Zeno had been the most reckless of kids. Other boys had to marvel at him.

  Years later when his own kids were young it had become common knowledge that trampolines are dangerous for children. You can break your neck, or your back—you can fall into the springs and slice yourself. But if he’d known, as a kid, Zeno wouldn’t have cared—it was a risk worth taking.

  Nothing in his childhood had been so magical as springing up from the trampoline—up, up—arms outflung like the wings of a bird.

  Now, he’d come to earth. Hard.

  HE’D TOLD THEM like hell he was going to any hospital.

  Fucking hell he was not going to any ER.

  Not while his daughter was missing. Not until he’d brought her back safely home.

  He’d allowed them to help him. Weak-kneed and dazed by exhaustion he hadn’t any choice. Falling on his knees on sharp rocks—a God-damned stupid thing to have done. He’d been pushing himself in the search, as his wife had begged him not to do, as others, seeing his flushed face and hearing his labored breath, had urged him not to do; for by Sunday afternoon there must have been at least fifty rescue workers and volunteers spread out in the Preserve, fanning in concentric circles from the Nautauga River at Sandhill Point where it was believed the missing girl had been last seen.

  It was the father’s pride, he couldn’t bear to think that his daughter might be found by someone else. Cressida’s first glimpse of a rescuer’s face should be his face.

  Her first words—Daddy! Thank God.

  HE’D HAD SOME “heart pains”—(guessed that was what they were: quick darting pains like electric shocks in his chest and a clammy sensation on his skin)—a few times, nothing serious, he was sure. He hadn’t wanted to worry his wife.

  A woman’s love can be a burden. She is desperate to keep you alive, she values your life more than you can possibly.

  What he most dreaded: not being able to protect them.

  His wife, his daughters.

  Strange how when he’d been younger, he hadn’t worried much. He’d taken it for granted that he would live—well, forever! A long time, anyway.

  Even when he’d received death threats over the issue of Roger Cassidy—defending the “atheist” high school biology teacher when the school board had fired him.

  He’d laughed at the threats. He’d told Arlette it was just to scare him and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared.

  Just last month his doctor Rick Llewellyn had examined him pretty thoroughly in his office. And an EKG. No “imminent” problem with his heart but Zeno’s blood pressure was still high even with medication: 150 over 90.

  Blood pressure, cholesterol. Fact is, Zeno should lose twenty pounds at least.

  On the bed he’d tried to untie and kick off the heavy hiking boots but there came Arlette to pull them off for him.

  “Lie still. Try to rest. If you can’t sleep for Christ’s sake, Zeno—shut your eyes at least.”

  She was terrified of course. Fussing and fuming over him to deflect her thoughts from the other.

  That morning at about 4 A.M. she’d wakened him. When she’d discovered that Cressida hadn’t come home. Since that minute he’d been awake in a way he was rarely awake—all of his senses alert, to the point of pain. Stark-staring awake, as if his eyelids had been removed.

  A search. A search for his daughter. A search that was for a missing girl.

  These searches of which you hear, occasionally. Often for a lost child.

  A kidnapped child. Abducted.

  You hear, and you feel a tug of sympathy—but not much more. For your life doesn’t overlap with the lives of strangers and their terror can’t be shared with you.

  Was he awake? Or asleep? He saw the steeply hilly forest strewn with enormous boulders as in an ancient cataclysm and from behind one of these a girl’s uplifted hand, arm—a glimpse of a naked shoulder which he knew to be badly bruised . . . Oh Daddy where are you. Dad-dy.

  “Lie still. Please. If something happens to you at such a time . . . ”

  The voice wasn’t Cressida’s voice. Somehow, Arlette had intervened.

  He knew, his wife didn’t trust him. Married for more than a quarter of a century—Arlette trusted Zeno less readily than she’d done at the start.

  For now she knew him, to a degree. To know some men is certainly not to trust them.

  She was breathless, irritated. Not terrified—not so you’d see—but irritated. The house was crowded with well-intentioned relatives. There were police officers coming and going—their ugly police-radios crackling and squawking like demented geese. There were reporters for local media eager for interviews—they were not to be turned away, for they would be useful. And photos of Cressida had to be supplied, of course.

  Coffee? Iced tea? Grapefruit juice, pomegranate juice? With a grim sort of hostess-gaiety Arlette offered her visitors refreshments, for she knew no other way to deal with people in her house.

  Somehow, before she’d had a chance to call her sister Katie Hewett, Katie had come to the house. This was by 10 A.M. Katie had taken over the hostess-role and was helping Arlette answer phones—family phone, cell phones—which rang frequently and with each call, despite the evidence of the caller ID, there was the hope that the next voice they heard would be Cressida’s.

  Hi there! Gosh! I just saw on TV that I’m “missing”. . .

  Wow. Sorry. Oh God you won’t believe what happened but I’m OK now . . .

  Except the voice was never Cressida’s. Remarkable, how it was never Cressida’s.

  Years ago Arlette would have crawled beside her husband in their bed, in a crisis like this; she would not have minded that her husband had sweated through his clothes, T-shirt and khaki shorts that were now clammy-cool, and smelled of his body; she would have held the anguished man in her arms, to shield him. And Zeno would have gathered his wife in his arms, to shield her. Shivering and shuddering and dazed with exhaustion but together in this terrible time.

  Now, Arlette tugged at his hiking boots—so heavy! And the laces needing to be untied. Pulled the boots off his enormous feet seeing that, even in the rush of preparing to leave for the Nautauga Preserve, he’d remembered to put on a double pair of socks—white liner socks, light-woolen socks.

  For all his careless-seeming ways, Zeno was a meticulous man. A conscientious man. The only mayor of Carthage in recent decades who’d left office—after eight years, in the 1990s—with a considerable surplus in the city treasury, and not a gaping deficit. (Of course, it was a quasi-secret that Mayor Mayfield had written personal checks for a number of endangered projects—parks and recreation maintenance, Little League softball, the Black River Community Walk-In Clinic.) One of the few mayors in all of upstate New York who, as he’d liked to joke, hadn’t even been investigated, let alone indicted, tried and convicted, for malfeasance in office.

  Arlette had asked the young man who’d driven Zeno home in Zeno’s Land Rover what had happened to him in the Preserve, for she knew that Zeno would never tell her the truth.

  He’d said, Zeno had gotten overheated. Over-tired. Dehydrated.

  He’d said this was why it isn’t a g
ood idea, a family member to be searching for someone in his family who’s been reported lost.

  Zeno smiled a ghastly smile. Zeno managed to speak, for Zeno must always have the last word.

  OK, he’d try to sleep. A nap for an hour maybe.

  Then, he intended to return to the Preserve.

  “She can’t be there a second night. We can’t—that can’t—happen.”

  He stumbled on the stairs. Didn’t hear Katie speak to him, and didn’t seem to register that WCTG-TV was coming to the house to do an interview with the parents of the missing girl for the Sunday 6 P.M. news, later that afternoon.

  Arlette had accompanied Zeno upstairs trying unobtrusively to slip her arm around his waist, but he’d pushed from her with a little snort of indignation.

  He’d needed to use the bathroom, he said. Needed some privacy.

  “I’m not going to croak in here, hon—I promise.”

  This was meant to be humor. Just the word croak.

  She’d made a sound like laughter, or the hissing rejoinder to laughter, and turned away, and left the man to his privacy.

  Almost, they were adversaries now. Grappling together each knowing what must be done, what should be done, annoyed with the other for being blind, stubborn.

  Arlette had known he’d become overheated in the Preserve, he’d had no right to rush off like that tramping through underbrush while she was alone at the house. Waiting for a call—calls. Waiting for something to happen.

  After a distracted hour she returned to check on Zeno: he was sprawled on the bed only partly undressed. As if he’d been too exhausted to do more than pull off his khaki shorts and let them fall to the floor.

  Sprawled, breathing hoarsely and wetly, through his mouth, like a beached whale might breathe. And his face slack putty-colored, you’d never have guessed had been a handsome face not so long ago.

  Unshaven. Wiry whiskers sprouting on his jaws.

  Zeno Mayfield was a man who had to be prevented from pushing himself too hard. As if he had no natural sense of restraint, of normal limits.

  As, when he’d been a young attorney taking on difficult cases—hopeless cases—unpopular cases; once, unforgivably, taking on a case so controversial, anonymous callers had threatened him and his family and Arlette had worried that some madman might mail a bomb, or affix a bomb to one of their cars. In the name of God think what you are doing, man—one of the anonymous notes had warned.