CHAPTER 4
On the way home, Brenna sat behind a bearded and turbaned taxi driver, looking out at the stately homes of the Maryland suburbs as she rode back to her place in the District.
She asked the driver to take the longer, scenic route, through Bethesda, down Little River Parkway and Massachusetts Avenue, instead of 16th Street, which was more direct.
She wanted to look at beautiful homes that hadn’t been shelled to the ground. She was luxuriating in going the speed limit in a car without the doors roped on.
She had come to D.C. to face her father—The Magnificent, as she privately thought of him.
But after the recent incident with the bayonet in Kav?ak, it had crossed her mind that she should also put out some feelers for D.C.-based work while she was in town.
To that end, she had dragged her tired butt down to the National Press Club and chatted up some folks.
Which had led to Chisolm’s call.
There were two time periods when journalists in war zones were most likely to get killed—when they first arrived, and when they had been there too long.
She was in the latter category now, only more so.
Unlike many other journalists, she didn’t drop in from the real world.
She’d lived in Kav?ak for the past thirty months, only flying out occasionally to Italy to resupply.
She’d already stayed too long, she knew that.
Her emotional stamina and her psychological stability were precarious.
The clock was ticking, and loudly. But she could get through three more days.
She simply couldn’t turn her back on Kav?ak.
She hadn’t yet told its full story. As a freelancer, she had served as a correspondent for emerging news, covering the usual firefights.
What she’d always really wanted, however, was to put the whole experience together as a unified piece—a documentary. Until now, she hadn’t found a backer.
If Sam Chisolm had placed a banquet before a starving man, he couldn’t have wanted it more than she wanted this job.
And it was Chisolm who was making this offer, not Alcott. Executive producer or not, she was being dragged along. Grace clearly didn’t want to work with her. Her subtle face confirmed that much. She thought Brenna was a wanton woman.
Which, granted, at one time had been true.
Well, so be it. Chisolm was further up the food chain.
Alcott clearly wasn’t invested in the project.
If she were, she wouldn’t have picked Geoff Garrett to write it.
Garrett couldn’t put two words together.
He was circling the drain, unable to pierce his haze of booze and drugs long enough to form a cogent thought.
It was a shame Alcott had blown off her warning. She was throwing away good money.
From a selfish perspective, though, Garrett was a hidden bonus. She didn’t need him. Kav?ak pictures spoke for themselves. She could set two bottles of cheap Scotch in front of him and leave him at the bar.
Without him, she could do the story right.
And this was her story to tell—everything in her recent life revolved around this theme.
She’d been archiving extra footage for months.
That’s why she’d set her rate so high, to pay for work already done.
Between that footage and three killer days in Kav?ak, she could drop a stack of P2 memory cards on Alcott’s desk and the material would practically assemble itself.
Any good editor would take one look and know what to do.
The voice-overs and transitions would be Alcott’s problem, her just desserts for half-assed management.
The cabbie turned onto the Dalecarlia Parkway at Westmoreland Circle and took them down to MacArthur Boulevard.
She stared out, pondering her lingering reaction to Alcott.
It had been years since she’d been with a woman.
How would it feel, after so long? That softness and emotional enfoldment that was so distinctly female had always beguiled her beyond anything men offered.
But men were simpler, easy to keep at arm’s reach.
Women… She gave herself a shake. Alcott was strictly off-limits. Brenna’s wanton days were over.
Still, as the taxi moved through the dappled sunlight, she couldn’t help being surprised. No one had tugged at her that way since Ari.
Where MacArthur Boulevard forked at Reservoir Road, her gaze drifted across the rippling waters of the reservoir on her right. Look. Infrastructure. Washingtonians turned their taps and drinking water flowed out. No standing in line with water jugs, while getting shot at by snipers.
The cab reached Georgetown and slowed. She loved the narrow colonial quarter for its heaving red brick sidewalks, secret alleyways, and ivy-covered townhouses.
It was an intimate neighborhood, crammed with houses and history and too many cars.
Parking was impossible here. A legal spot lasted only seconds.
And ticketing was the only function the D.C. government performed well.
Home to senators and students alike, Georgetown had an unwavering sense of itself, a constancy that defied the city’s ever-changing politics.
Over time, the people who trod these patchwork sidewalks and cobblestoned side streets disappeared, but the neighborhood timelessly remained.
Soon the grand old trees towering above her would form lush green archways across the narrow streets, the old-fashioned street lamps would cast their golden light, and the magic would be complete.
The driver slowed, looking for the house number she had given him. Seeing it, he stopped brazenly in the center of 34th street, heedless of the cars stuck behind him, and let her out in front of a trim two-story Federal-style house.
Property values in Georgetown were high, but she had bought the house as an investment ten years before by negotiating a deal with the elderly couple who had owned it for nearly fifty years.
The Simmons’, she had discovered, had no desire to leave their home, and had been forced by reduced financial circumstances to put the house on the market.
Brenna agreed to let them live in the house until their deaths, in exchange for a sale price below market value.
Meanwhile, her mortgage payments supplemented their fixed income.
The Simmons’ looked after the property in her absence.
The rare times she was in town, she stayed in the little carriage house in the back.
The arrangement suited them all perfectly.
The south wall of the house abutted a narrow cobblestone alleyway that from the street appeared to end at the parking shed at the rear. But the eight-foot high wall angled inward at the far end, concealing a black and brass wrought-iron gate set into an archway, accessing a private inner courtyard.
She slid the latch and stepped into the secret garden. Mr. Simmons’ prize roses lined the wall, while a serpentine flagstone path meandered past sunny benches, a small fountain which doubled as a birdbath, and two beds of perennials, one bursting with daffodils and crocuses, the other with herbs.
She kept her house key in the pot with the rosemary. She loved the scent it released when she reached among its branches.
Her home—if a place so rarely visited could be called that—consisted of two small rooms, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom.
The living area was sparsely furnished with a few old pieces from her mother’s sitting room, including a tattered armchair that Brenna had snuggled in with her as a child.
Having more was unnecessary. Her space was utterly personal. No one was invited. No one visited.
Make a home, her mother had written in a note delivered to Brenna when she came into her trust. Fill it with love and laughter and tears—all the makings of a full life. She had bought the house with part of her mother’s bequest, and filled it with nothing.
She set the key on the table near the entrance and limped to the bedroom.
Standing in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door, she carefully pulled off her cashmere top.
She leaned forward and with a fingertip, traced the thin red scar in the hollow of her throat.
Who used a bayonet in Kav?ak, for God’s sakes?
A crazed man, toying with his prey.
She straightened and looked over her shoulder at the deep purple bruise on her shoulder.
Spidery red lines—burst blood vessels—scribbled the interior of the contusion.
She touched it gingerly. The whole area was swollen and the center felt hard.
One of the bricks she fell back on had caused it.
She unbuckled her belt, unzipped her slacks, and gingerly eased her pants over the matching bruise on the back of her thigh.
Standing in her bra and panties, she regarded her reflection. That’s what you get for closing your eyes.
She hung up her clothes, pulled open the top drawer of her chest of drawers and picked out an oversized Israeli Army shirt.
She pulled the soft fabric over her head and sat at the edge of her bed, facing the gallery of her photographs on the opposite wall.
These were her private pictures, not found in any image bank or hung in any gallery.
An intensely personal vertical album, it was crowded with images of a life that scarcely felt like her own any more. Some were her first black and whites, taken before she had hit her teens—back when a camera still felt heavy in her hands.
Her mother was there—face full of love, hands gentle, body portending its fragility. It was her mother who identified Brenna’s eye for photography, her mother who insisted she should have a real camera, not a kid’s toy. Her mom had been Brenna’s first and most willing model.
Thinking of her made Brenna’s throat tighten. What would it have been like to have had a mother to guide her into womanhood?
Her eyes shifted to the print of her father.
She had stood behind him, readied her camera, and called out to him.
He turned, looked over his shoulder at her, and scowled.
She released the shutter, the naked truth captured.
She worked hard to make the print a perfect one, but once that instant was recorded, she never again photographed her famous father. That one image said it all.
The picture beside his showed her six older brothers, arms chained over each others’ shoulders, laughing, engrossed in each other all obliviously walking away from her. The only one who looked back at her was James—the family’s other black sheep.
She curled up on her patchwork quilt, knees drawn to her chest, and stuffed a feather pillow under her head.
Her eyes slid to the photographs she had hung only days ago.
The images were over three years old, but she hadn’t had the chance to hang them before now.
This was her first trip back after Israel.
And there he was.
Ari.
At the piano. In the garden. In the nude. Alive, his face shining with love for her. God. How ironic it was that the only photograph of him she couldn’t bear to see was the one she had shared with the world.
She shaped his name with silent lips. It had never occurred to her that Ari, the soldier, would die when he was with her. She closed her eyes, recalling the moment when his breath left him and he became forever irretrievable.
That last lucid moment before she lost her mind.
She glanced at her mother’s old wind-up Baby Ben ticking by the bedside. It was scarcely noon, but she was bone tired. She needed a few hours sleep before her audience with The Magnificent tonight.
It wasn’t going to be pretty.
The last time she saw him she nearly ruined his career.