Chapter 19 #3
“We were all grieving.” She says it fiercely. “We all lost, Cal.”
We.
We, we, we.
I’ve spent a decade constructing a private cathedral out of that word’s absence. My guilt. My dead. My debt, mine alone, and I have guarded it like it was the last thing I owned, and here is a woman who lost her husband telling me she’d have driven up and put me in a car.
I forgot I belonged to anyone.
I forgot that I was somebody’s, and that I walked away from it, and that they never once locked the door behind me.
“Yeah,” I manage. “You’re right.”
“Course I am.” She’s steadied herself now.
“So if you’re going to do this. If you’re going to pull the curtains open.
I’m ready. I’ll call the girls, rally the troops.
We all still keep in touch, all the wives.
I’ll tell them to brace up,” she says, resolute.
“Whatever you need. Paperwork, testimony. We’re all right here. ”
“Thanks, Hol. I’ll let you know.”
“Can I tell them you called?”
“Yeah.” I have to stop and take a small, wobbly breath. “Yeah. Please.”
“Because we all get together, you know. Once a year. There’s a retreat, the first week of fall, once school’s back in and we get a little break.” She sniffs. “Hilton Head. That beach where we did the Fourth of July that year. You remember that place?”
Do I remember that place. Pfft. I’ve made the memory of it my personal paradise.
I remember it so completely that for a second I’m not in a closet at all. I’m on wet sand with a beer sweating in my hand, and Jimmy Taylor is holding a sparkler over his head like a sword and shouting something obscene at the ocean, and the whole sky is going the color of the inside of a shell.
“Yeah… Who could forget those pink skies?”
“Pink skies.” She’s crying openly now. “I loved that place so much I moved near it. Savannah. It’s an easy drive.” She sniffles hard, trying to suck in enough composure. “Where’d you end up, Cal? Where are you these days?”
“I did a stint with the Bureau. So, D.C.”
“The FBI? Big career, then.”
“Big distractions. I’m with a different agency now.”
“Oh, I gotcha.”
I can’t elaborate about PALADIN, so I’m glad she doesn’t ask.
“Hey. That retreat. Is that just the wives, or—”
“Please come.”
“Hollie—”
“Please. Please do.” Her voice breaks all the way apart. “Please come, Cal.”
“Send me the details,” I tell her. “I’ll make it work.”
“Holy shit.” Her laugh is watery and full of disbelief.
“Holy shit, Cal. Just—wow. Thank you for calling me. I mean it. This is everything.” A sniff, and then, warningly: “I’m saving this number, you understand?
Now that I’ve got it, I am going to bother you.
Constantly. For the rest of your natural life. ”
“I’d like that.” I make a mental note to warn Sylvie that Hollie comes in peace. I’m laughing and it’s coming out cracked. “Now go back to your party.”
“Okay.”
“And Hol?”
“Yeah, honey?”
I look down at the tags laid out on the carpet in a row like men.
“I’m sorry it took me this long. I feel…” My throat closes and I need a few deep breaths until it relaxes open. “I feel bad about it. About all of it.”
There’s a long pause on the line.
“Cal.” Her voice is very gentle. “If you need somebody’s permission to set it down, I’m giving it to you.”
“Set what down?”
“The guilt.”
I suck in a deep breath and hold it.
“Just set it down, honey. Set it down for good and walk away from it and go live in peace.” She’s steady as a rock now, this woman, this widow, with more bravery in her pinky than I’ve had in my body all this time. “You know that’s what Jimmy would have wanted. You know it just as well as I do.”
I nod.
I nod at a wall, in the dark, in a closet, like an idiot, because there is not one single word available to me.
“Bye, Cal,” Hollie says softly. “We’ll talk again soon.”
The call ends.
I make it about four seconds.
Then it comes up out of me like something tearing loose, and I fold over my own knees with my face in the crook of my arm, and I sob. Ugly. Loud. Ten years of it, all at once.
I punch the wall. The drywall gives, and my skin splits, and I don’t care.
I punch the floor which has no effect except punishing my knuckles even more.
I scream into my hands until my throat tears, and the neighbors can pound if they want to. I don’t fucking care. They can bang their protests against the walls while I fall apart, because this needs to happen.
It takes a while longer, but then it’s over.
It’s over. I’m sitting in the aftermath of it, breathing steady. The apartment is silent. My hand is bleeding.
I’m still here.
I’m still here.
I gather the tags one by one. Ferro. Cordova. Gray. Taylor. Mine. I say a silent prayer for Lex. And then I lay them in the black leather box, and I set it back on the shelf where it lives. But I leave the lid open, so my brothers can breathe. So they can see the light when it filters through.
Then I get up off the floor of my closet.
I stand there for a few seconds in the dark, giving myself one more moment to feel it all, and then just like Hollie told me…
I set the guilt down.
I walk away.