Walker
It’s nearly time. I need to get dressed. Shave. Pack. Moving, though, is like dragging myself through wet mud. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Dodds is dead. I keep listening out for the whir of his wheelchair, expecting at any moment to hear it banging into my door. His face keeps flashing like a broken neon sign onto the back of my eyelids, bursting like a firework—and it’s the last image of him, not him alive but dead, his face a grotesque fright mask. That’s not how I want to remember him, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to replace that image with another.
I could have stopped him. If I hadn’t been so self-absorbed, so focused on Didi, I would have seen something was up, I would have given him some time, we would have talked things through, maybe played some poker. He would have won, gone to bed smiling. He wouldn’t have shut his door on us, tied his belt to the handle and hanged himself.
Someone knocks on my door. I turn around.
“Are you nearly ready, Lieutenant?” asks the overweight, hassled-looking woman that’s replaced José.
I nod and go back to staring out the window at the calm expanse of lake. José is on administrative leave. He should have been on post when it happened, but he wasn’t. I think he was giving Didi and me space, which only serves to double my feelings of guilt.
And then there’s Didi. She’s been told to stay away. I can’t get any details beyond that as there’s no José to ask and Doctor Monroe has been busy, wrapped up in the paperwork that erupts when a patient, your patient no less, commits suicide.
I’ve tried calling her, but her phone isn’t switched on and I don’t have an e-mail address for her. I tried Facebook, but she won’t accept my friend request. Does she blame herself? Or me? Is that why she hasn’t called me? I don’t know what’s going on. Nothing makes sense. The world has turned inside out.
Finally I force my legs to move toward the bathroom. The funeral is in an hour. I need to be there. Ashamed as I am, it’s the very least I can do. I step into the shower, letting the hot water needle my eyes.
When the hot water fails to wash away my guilt, I switch it to cold—as cold as I can take it—but that just reminds me of sinking beneath the waves with Sanchez. I step out of the shower, shaking, adrenaline pumping in fits and starts. Sanchez is going to be okay, I tell myself. He’s alive. I saved one person. I saved him.
I failed so many others.
Why am I still alive?
I wrap a towel around my waist and walk on unsteady legs into my room.
My bag is packed on the bed. I’ve been discharged. I’m leaving today. I still don’t know where I’m going. My parents want me to come home, my brother is still urging me to come stay with him. Colonel Kingsley is encouraging me to re-enlist. The only place I want to go to, the only person I want to see, the only person I want to be with, is Didi, but I have no idea where she is or what she’s thinking.
I scan the room, the place I’ve lived in for three months. On the nightstand sits Didi’s iPod and beside it a photograph. It’s an old one of Miranda. The one I used to keep in my wallet. She’s standing in her garden in Hyannis the day we got engaged. It was found in Dodds’s room. I’m not sure how he got hold of it or what it meant to him. A couple of orderlies said he told them that it was his girlfriend, and the thought that he had to invent a girlfriend and that the photograph was among his only possessions sends another stab of pain through me. His words come back to me—his anger at what we take for granted.
The elevator doors ping as I’m heading to the closet to get my uniform out, knowing it’s the last time I’ll ever wear it. I pause my hand on the hanger, my ears pricking, on alert for a familiar footstep, wanting, hoping, praying that it’s her.
It isn’t. It is a woman, though. I can hear her heels clicking mercilessly as she strides my way. Must be a doctor. The footsteps stop at my door. I turn around.
“Hi, Noel.”
I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not seeing things.
“Miranda?”
My ex-girlfriend smiles at me, her eyes tearing up.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, shaking my head in bewilderment.
“I heard you were being discharged.”
There’s a long moment while we just look at each other and I take in her cool, sleek beauty. For a half second my heart does a leap before slamming back into my chest with the heaviness of an axe smashing into rock. I shake my head at her and let out a bitter laugh. “Or you heard that I got my sight back?”
Her face contorts, a frown creasing her forehead. “Noel, that’s not fair.” She takes a step toward me. “Your mom called me,” she says. “I’m sorry. I should have called you, but I wanted to surprise you.”
She reaches out and takes my hand. I’m still in so much shock that I don’t react, don’t move to shake it off. My mind is reeling, trying to filter through all my conflicting reactions, trying to weigh up what the right response is: anger, rage, laughter, mockery, coldness, forgiveness?
“I should never have walked out like that,” she continues. “I regretted it the minute I got on the plane. I’m sorry,” she says, her voice breaking.
I cock an eyebrow. She’s had ten weeks, longer, to act on that regret and put things right. She didn’t even call me to see how I was doing. Not just as a lover but as a friend she failed me.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, stroking my palm and looking up at me with hang-dog eyes. “I was going to call. It was just so hard . . . you know? I didn’t know if I could give you what you needed. I was going to call you . . .”
I pull my hand from hers, laughing. “Sure you were.”
She places her palm against my cheek and the action jars me because she’s not Didi and her touch is alien to me—wrong. I don’t want Miranda touching me. I jerk my head away and her hand falls instead to my chest.
She presses herself closer, her hips brushing mine. Her perfume’s cloying. It makes my eyes water.
“Noel,” she murmurs, “I missed you. I came to get you, to bring you home. I want us to try again. Now that you’re not going off on deployment, it’ll be so much easier. We can be together. We can get married, just like we planned.”
She gives me a smile, her fingers twining in mine.
“Isn’t that what you want?”