Chapter 24 The Records Arrive
The Takoma Park duplex smelled like fresh paint and Mrs. Calloway's menthol cigarettes.
Marlene stood in the doorway of the ground-floor unit, Gideon's wheelchair beside her, and stared at the empty living room.
Hardwood floors. Wide doorframes. A ramp where the back steps used to be.
The November light came through the front window in pale rectangles, catching the dust motes suspended in the air.
"Gloria had the ramp installed Tuesday," she said. "Before we even won the hearing."
Gideon's hand found hers. His grip was still weak, still trembling from the effort of the courtroom, but his fingers laced through hers with deliberate care. "She really sold her building."
"She really did."
"I haven't even met her."
"You will." Marlene looked down at him. The sling was off now—the doctors had cleared him for limited movement—but his left arm hung at his side like something he was still learning to use.
"She's in the upstairs unit. Said she'd give us tonight to settle in before she comes down with a casserole and a list of questions."
"A casserole?"
"Chicken and rice. She told me on the drive over."
Gideon's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not yet. But closer than she'd seen since the diner. "I haven't had a home-cooked meal in three years."
"Then you're about to have one." She squeezed his hand. "But first, we need furniture. And groceries. And—"
"Marlene."
She stopped.
"I need to tell you something." His voice was quieter now. The flicker of humor had faded, replaced by something heavier. "About the subpoenas. About what my father's records are going to show."
She knelt beside his chair. The hardwood was cold beneath her knees. "You don't have to—"
"Yes, I do." He pulled his hand free. Rested both palms on his thighs—on legs that still wouldn't move, still wouldn't feel, still wouldn't do anything except exist beneath him like a reminder of everything he'd lost.
"I've been thinking about it since the hearing. Since the judge said forty-eight hours. I've been thinking about all the things I don't know. All the things he might have done that I never found out about."
"Gideon—"
"Kowalski wasn't the first."
The words landed in the empty room and stayed there.
Marlene didn't move. Didn't speak. The dust motes drifted in the November light, and somewhere upstairs, Mrs. Calloway's television murmured the evening news, and Gideon's hands were trembling on his useless legs.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean—" He swallowed. His jaw worked. "There were other transfers. Other assignments. Other soldiers who got moved around, got promoted, got sent home. Soldiers my father didn't approve of. Soldiers he thought were bad influences. I never connected it before. I thought it was just the Army.
Just the way things worked. But after the hearing—after what he did to you, what he did to Hattie—" His voice cracked.
"I started thinking about Specialist Okonkwo."
"Who?"
"Tall guy. Deep voice. Scar on his face he never explained. We were in the same unit during my second tour. He was—" Gideon's eyes went distant.
"He was a good soldier. Steady. Reliable. The kind of man you wanted watching your back. But he didn't fit my father's idea of what a soldier should be. He read the Bible. He wrote letters to his mother every week. He didn't drink. Didn't chase women. My father called him soft."
Marlene's stomach tightened. "What happened to him?"
"He got transferred. Three weeks before the Mosul attack. Reassigned to a forward operating base near Fallujah. I never saw him again."
Gideon's hands curled into fists on his thighs.
"I always thought it was coincidence. Bad luck. The kind of random reshuffling that happens in a war zone. But what if it wasn't? What if my father pulled strings to get rid of him, the same way he pulled strings to get rid of you?"
"You don't know that."
"No. I don't. But the phone records will."
He looked at her. Brown eyes. Wet. Haunted by a lifetime of a man who'd never let him be anything but a weapon.
"The subpoenas cover years, Marlene. Not weeks. Years. Every call he made to battalion command. Every email he sent to personnel. Every favor he called in. It's all going to come out. And when it does—"
"When it does," she said, "we'll deal with it. Together."
"I don't know if I want to know."
"I know."
"I don't know if I can handle knowing. Knowing that every bad thing that happened to me—every friend I lost, every transfer I got blocked, every mission I got put on—was him. Just him. Just my father, sitting in his office, pulling strings like I was a puppet."
Marlene reached up. Cupped his jaw. Her thumb traced the hollow beneath his cheekbone—that familiar gesture, that familiar tenderness.
"You survived him," she said. "You survived the convoys and the explosions and the twelve-year-old boy with the crooked smile. You survived Kowalski's death and the hospital in Germany and the apartment with the wheelchair ramp. You survived everything he did to you. You're still here.
You're still fighting. You're still you."
"I don't know who I am without him."
"Yes, you do." She pressed her forehead to his.
"You're the man who walked into my diner at midnight and ordered coffee like it was the most important thing in the world. You're the man who gave me his dog tags and told me to have a reason for him to come back.
You're the man who wrote me a letter from a hospital bed and told me a secret he'd been carrying for three years. That's who you are. Not his soldier. Not his weapon. You."
His breath shuddered out of him. His right hand came up and covered hers on his jaw. "Stubborn."
"Damn right."
A sound escaped him—half laugh, half sob.
The first real laugh she'd heard since the diner, since the deployment, since the voicemail that had sent her across an ocean.
She kissed his forehead. His eyelids. The bridge of his nose.
And then his lips, soft and warm and trembling, his hand sliding from her jaw to the back of her neck.
"I love you," he said against her mouth. "I don't say it enough. I spent three months trying not to say it at all. But I love you. Every minute. Every single minute."
"I know." She pulled back just enough to meet his eyes. "That's the only thing that still works. Remember?"
"It works." His thumb traced the curve of her neck. "It works, Marlene."
The duplex settled around them. The furnace kicked on. The November light shifted, the sun sinking lower, the shadows stretching across the empty hardwood floor. Somewhere upstairs, Mrs. Calloway's television clicked off, and footsteps creaked across the ceiling.
"Tomorrow," Marlene said, "Patricia is going to call. She's going to tell us what the phone records show. And whatever it is—whatever your father did—we're going to face it."
"Together."
"Together." She stood up. Her knees ached. Her back ached. She'd been kneeling on hardwood floors for what felt like years. "But tonight, we're going to eat casserole. And we're going to sleep in a real bed. And we're going to pretend, just for a few hours, that the rest of the world doesn't exist."
"The bed—"
"Mrs. Calloway had one delivered. Queen size. Already made up. She thought of everything."
Gideon stared at her. The hollows under his eyes were still purple. The lines around his mouth were still deep. But something in his face had shifted—something that looked almost like peace.
"She's never even met me," he said.
"She's about to." Marlene wheeled him toward the bedroom, the chair gliding smoothly over the new hardwood. "And she's going to love you. Because I love you. And that's all she needs to know."
The bedroom was small. The bed was large. The sheets were white, and the pillows were plump, and the window looked out on a backyard where a bare oak tree scratched against the darkening sky.
Marlene helped Gideon out of his chair. Onto the bed.
His legs were dead weight, and his left arm was still weak, and it took longer than it should have.
But they managed. They'd been managing since the diner, since the deployment, since the voicemail and the flights and the colonel's cold gray eyes. Managing was what they did.
She lay beside him in the fading light. Her head on his chest. His right arm around her shoulders. The dog tags pressed between them, warm from their combined heat.
"Tell me about California," he said.
"California?"
"You were going to go there. Before Germany. Before everything. You were going to start over."
She was quiet for a moment. The furnace hummed. The tree scratched at the window. "I was going to go to the ocean. I've never seen the ocean."
"Neither have I."
"Then we'll go together. When you're better. When the subpoenas are done. When your father can't hurt us anymore."
She lifted her head. Looked at him. "We'll drive there. You and me. We'll stand on the beach—or sit on the beach—and we'll watch the waves, and we'll know that we made it. That we survived everything they threw at us."
"You and me."
"You and me."
Gideon kissed her forehead. Her temple. The corner of her mouth. "I want that. That future. I want it."
"Then we'll have it." She laid her head back on his chest. Listened to his heartbeat. Steady. Strong. Alive. "We'll have all of it."
The November dark settled over Takoma Park. Mrs. Calloway's footsteps creaked overhead one final time, and then the duplex went quiet. The only sounds were the furnace and the heartbeat and the breath of two people who had fought their way across an ocean to find each other.
Forty-eight hours, the judge had said.
Forty-eight hours until the phone records arrived.
Forty-eight hours until the past came crashing through the door.
But tonight – tonight belonged to them.