Eleven Days (26 page)

*

Her emotional history’s high-water marks were almost exclusively losses. And the first shock of fresh loss, she now remembers, feels so much like fear. This is where the anxiety comes from. When he
notices her breathing, David offers her a pill. She takes it without asking what it is. At a certain point, the godfather leaves them. He moves to the back where a screen descends from the ceiling and allows him to watch
Patriot Games
with the sound turned off.

“You know the weekend after his graduation from the Naval Academy there were—” Sara starts but then stops.

“There were what?” said David.

“There were, like, twenty weddings in the little chapel at Annapolis.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“And he—he asked me, ‘Mommy, do you wish I was getting married, too?’ ”

“And what did you say.”

“I said …”

“You said?”

“I said commitment is not a substitute for meaning.” She looks up at David. “I was angry.”

“Are you still angry?”

She feels the plane dip. “Is everything all right?”

“We’re descending. Sara, we’re almost there.”

“Dick Cheney delivered the commencement address. At graduation.” And she laughs awkwardly.

“Sara, we’re almost there.”

“You should have been there, David.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why weren’t you there.”

Just before landing, Sara checks herself in the bathroom again. Her white streak is oddly prominent in this light.
He found me
, she thinks. She used to fantasize about David finding her, running into him in Adams Morgan, on the street, or in the law library at school. And in the fantasies she was always impeccable, of course. And he would hold her, and beg her forgiveness, and promise never to leave again. And in those fantasies he didn’t look half as good as he did now. That was the thing about fantasies: we think what we hate about them is that they exceed our reality, and then something reminds us that what we hate about them is that they don’t even come close.

David gives her a shawl to pull over her hair. Apparently there was a stash of those onboard, too. It’s black. As the door to the plane opens into a wall of bright heat, she sees an armored military SUV, presumably waiting to take them. There are three officers standing there, a fact that strikes her as a bit excessive. David helps her down the stairs; she’s a bit shaky from all the time in the air.

En route, David sits in the front seat and talks politics with the young lieutenant driving them. The godfather has his arm around Sara, and as they pull in front of where they’re going, he squeezes the back of her neck tightly, touching one point in particular with
his index finger. He whispers in her ear, “I love him, too.” She does not know if he is talking about David or Jason. When they get to the hospital, he stays in the foyer while she and David are walked down a white hall and met by a very young doctor.

“Where is he?” says David.

“Sir,” the doctor starts.

And Sara can tell by the look on his face.

“Christ,” she says.

And the doctor says something that sounds like “an hour ago” and something else that sounds like “tried” and then some things that sound like “fight” and “brave” and “battle.” And then Sara loses consciousness. When she wakes up, she is lying on a bed, and David is holding her hand. “I want to see him,” she says.

*

He is not wearing his uniform. He is wearing clothes clearly given to him by someone else. A white linen shirt and loose white linen pants. He never wore white, as she can remember. He looks cared for. He looks as if someone has cared for him and cleaned him. His face is immaculate, except for one long—and deep—cut running from his ear down to his chin; it looks more like a threat than a battle wound, but she catches her breath when she sees it.
Who did that to him
. He has a full beard, which surprises her. She wants—badly—to open his eyes so that she can see them but understands this is irrational.
I have so much left to tell you
, she thinks. And she can feel the sadness swelling and shifting into rage.

David leaves the room briefly and returns with scissors (marked
PROPERTY, U.S. GOVERNMENT
) so he can cut the locket off of his son’s neck. Jason is wearing it attached by a piece of thin leather.
Sara takes the scissors, cuts if off, and slips it into her pocket. David then cuts off a piece of Jason’s shirt and offers it to Sara.

“I don’t want that,” she says.

“You didn’t dip him in the river,” he says, folding the cloth into his hand and folding his hand into a fist. “But he is immortal now.” He kisses the top of her head. Sara asks for a moment alone with her son.

She kneels down on the floor and presses her forehead into the side of the bed. The floor is ice cold.
Why didn’t they get us here faster
. She holds on to her son’s forearm, the same place she’d held so many times throughout his life—the “special place” that would calm him when he woke up in the night, or when something had upset him. She had not touched him there in a long time, the inviolable line where a mother no longer comforts her son once he’s become a man having been crossed long ago.

She thinks about the physicists and their black holes. She remembers another professor from that same film, old and English and very Oxbridge, describing what it might feel like to fall into a black hole. He described how, before you lose last sight of the world, you are able to see things happening, lots of things happening, at a radically accelerated rate. These things would be flashing by your eyes so fast as to appear like “fireworks.”
The fireworks of the future
. And the image last seen of you by others, he explained, is the image frozen at the exact moment when you cross the event horizon, or the edge of the hole. Cross, poof. The quality of your disappearance is lucky for the others; their last image of you has grace, and there is nothing graceful as you fall deeper into the hole and are ultimately destroyed. Had he said, “obliterated to bits”? He had said “It would be a very exciting way to end one’s life.” And then he said, smiling, “It would be the way I would chose, if I had the choice.”

Had her son died in an “exciting” way? People might say that he had—not to her face, but they might say that. But there was nothing exciting about death. And she decides in that moment, in that room, in that country where so many have died for what seems like so little for so long—she decides that she will remember her son, frozen forever, before he slipped over the horizon, into the hole. She will remember him as he was when she last saw him—not as she is seeing him now. When she last saw him, in the fall, at home, taking the cake from the box. He had lifted the little flag from its center and licked the icing off before planting it, firmly, on top of her piece. “
Sic transit Gloria mundi
, Mommy,” he had said. And now she hears him say that and she remembers:
“When we assumed the soldier we did not lay aside the citizen.”
Or the son, she thinks. Or my son.

OVERLAND, 12:10 A.M.,
MAY 2, 2011

“Rabbit, rabbit,” Jason says, almost under his breath. It is just after midnight on the second of May, local time, still technically the first of May back home. They’re flying with SOAR, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. One of their mottos is “Death waits in the dark,” a motto more true for these wars, perhaps, than for others. Wasn’t there a time when, like football games, wars had formal starts and finishes, more well-articulated time-outs and civilized stand-downs for meals? Now war was continuous and unrelenting. The definition was not the conquering of a place or a people or a patch of grass; no one “conquered” anyone anymore. The definition of success in wartime as Jason’s generation knew it was the prevention of future bloodshed, the corralling of “terror.”

The plan was to fast-rope out from the helo (a modified Black-hawk this time) if they could, onto the roof of a building. They knew the exact size and shape of the building and the dimensions of its interior spaces; they’d worked with a mockup for weeks. The mockup got the guys used to things as simple as how to turn around inside a particular hallway, and how to categorize exit options (in this case there were very few.)

Even though the stakes tonight were higher than they had
been on other nights, the squad’s temperatures were not raised. They were doing exactly what they knew how to do, the thing at which they were, of all the special operators in the world, uniquely skilled. They would land, as planned; if an unforced error required another kind of landing, they would accommodate that fact. They would land as planned, and they would clear this house and find what they were there to find: an individual, and an item—a “document,” someone said. They were well covered and well watched. It occurred to Jason that this is just the kind of mission his godfather might one day be invited to observe, live, from a secure location.

The weather mattered on all missions, of course, but particularly on missions where helicopters were part of the plan. In terms of complexity, insertion via helo ranked below combat swimmer or HAHO, but above foot patrol from an FOB or ground assault force movement with Humvees, or MRAPs. Even the most sophisticated piece of aviation technology is susceptible to strain. And the history of mechanical mishaps was well known among them. They were lucky: the weather this night was perfect. The moon complied. They had to fly low over the land, so low that Jason could see the shapes of individual trees through the window, and the lines where snow was starting to melt into water. The air was cool, but the forecast read even for the next twenty-four hours. This was auspicious, much more time than they would need. They were hoping to take an hour—or less—and then they would turn around, return home, and have one of the best night’s sleeps they had had in a while.

He had been to this country before and, over the last weeks, had read as much as he could about its history. Certainly he’d look back on these days at another time in his life and be glad that he’d been there, right? This was the center of the world now,
if not the cradle of her civilization. It was the place where bad things were bred, according to certain politicians who selectively blended their facts; it was the place through which the money coming from bad things flowed, according to others. One fact was uncontested: it was a place of rich traditions and history, of revolutionaries who had founded it on a belief in the idea of a free and independent state, just as Americans had done in another nation over two centuries ago. Jason knew an NCIS officer who’d been born there, a girl, and she’d told him many times how magical it was. She’d made him promise to go. For a nation of its size, it performed a remarkable trick of holding larger nations in the palm of its hand by virtue of wisely timed obstinance, and threats. And access to capital. “Just follow the money,” his mother’s friends in finance would say. “I can follow the money and predict your next six missions.”

He had called his mother earlier that day but didn’t reach her. So he had sent her a text asking how her day was, assuring her he would be home soon, wondering whether they could take a trip this summer, just the two of them, something they hadn’t done since he was a kid. So many of his other leaves had been spent training; there was never an absence of opportunity for that, and so the guys always waited to purchase plane tickets before knowing the various “school schedules.” That was all behind him now. The longest he’d been home these last years at any one time was a week. Now he wanted more downtime. He wanted to sleep late. He wanted to play golf, poorly, and run around the local reservoir. He wanted to make spaghetti with clams, and eat it while watching college ball. He wanted to do all the little things that people did.

He had sent an e-mail to Sam, reminding him of his promise to take care of Sara should anything happen. That was enough,
he knew, for Sam to know that something was up, a signal that Jason was going somewhere perhaps particularly “hot”—the word they would use as a catchall for trips civilians might call “dangerous” or “suicidal.” He reminded Sam about the letter he wrote, where it is, what is to be done with it. Jason knew that In Case Of, Sam would say just the right thing to all the right people. Sam wouldn’t be intimidated by Sara’s occasionally icy exterior. And he wouldn’t be intimidated by anyone who crowded around her, from the wealthy country mothers to the Washington machers whose pieces she edited. Sam had even read the CACO handbook, online, in his spare time, teasing Jason that he’d read it “just for you, buddy,” after they’d discussed Jason’s choice to redeploy one last time. “Can you believe they actually have a line item saying, ‘Do use the word
dead
’?” he’d said.

His last night with the girl before going, he cracked. There was nothing separating this goodbye from its predecessors, except he cared more now. What he felt for her was the closest thing he had ever felt to love, and he was not sure he liked it. What he felt was that he didn’t want to leave her, and he’d never felt that before for anyone. He felt he didn’t want to leave her not because it occurred to him that he might not be back but because it occurred to him—regularly now—that life is short, and time moves too quickly, and when you find someone you want to be with, that’s rare. The realist in him tried to kill this train of thought, but the romantic, newly skilled with evidence, fought back. And so lying in bed that night, he’d cried. The release of emotion was a rare indulgence.

“Hey,” she said, and sat up. “Hey.”

“I’m good,” he said, and laughed, as he knew how that must sound given how he looked.

“You are good,” she said, and she put her hands on his heart. “You are good, and you are going to be fine.”

“Roger that,” he said.

“Take those rocks with you—just a few. A lucky charm.”

“Will they heal me?”

“Yes.”

She awoke before he did. She tied a bit of myrrh into a little pouch and slipped it into his pocket when he came toward her.