SEA-TAC AIRPORT
BURIEN, WASHINGTON
Already barely hanging on, Sloane knew the thread holding him upright would snap if he lost Jake. He had initially refused to get on a plane back to Seattle, wanting to at least try to find Jake, which provoked a confrontation with Jenkins outside the building.
“We have no idea where he is, and even if we did, it won’t do Jake any good to be part of a confrontation between you and his grandparents or his father.”
“I’m his father.”
“Then act like it. Do what’s in the best interests of your son. You’ll have your day in court. Until then, the last time I checked, taking a child by force across state lines would be a federal offense.”
“He’s my son. Jake will go willingly.”
“Not legally, he isn’t, and the Larsens will tell the police you kidnapped him.”
It all added to Sloane’s mounting frustration. Despite all the rational evidence that he had been more of a father to Jake than Frank Carter had ever been, he knew it would be an uphill battle to gain custody of a child from his biological father. The law did not want parents to negotiate their legal and moral obligations to their children. So even though Tina’s express wishes were for Sloane to take the boy, her will could not trump Frank Carter’s legal right and obligation, especially if Carter sought custody. The court would be hard-pressed not to give him that opportunity. Sloane had also not helped his cause with his outburst; the Larsens would use it to obtain the temporary restraining order to which their attorney had alluded, prohibiting Sloane from initiating any contact with them, Frank Carter, or Jake. They would say Sloane was mentally unbalanced, that Tina’s death had caused a breakdown, that he was too unstable to raise a young boy.
Maybe they weren’t far from the truth.
As Jenkins drove from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport garage he instinctively followed the exit signs toward Burien but must have realized what Sloane had already come to know.
“Where to?”
Sloane had no idea. He knew only he could not go back to Three Tree Point. It was no longer his home or a place of comfort and warmth. The happy memories he and Tina and Jake had shared there had been shattered, replaced by one horrific nightmare.
“We’ll go to Camano,” Jenkins offered. “We have more room than I know what to do with.”
Sloane declined. Jenkins and Alex had their own life with a new son, and while Sloane was happy for them, he feared the daily reminders of what he would never have would only make him bitter.
“Take me downtown.”
“Alex understands, David.”
“I know she does, but I need some time,” he said.
“David—”
“Damn it, Charlie, just do what I ask, will you, please.”
They drove the freeway in silence. When they reached downtown Seattle, Jenkins steered the car to the curb on Sixth Street and stopped just outside the front entrance to the Washington Athletic Club, which included a hotel with workout facilities and a restaurant. The club was within walking distance of Sloane’s office. Sixth Street was deserted, enveloped in darkness but for the dull glow of the streetlamps.
“You want me to come in?” Jenkins asked.
“No. Go home to your wife and son.”
“We’re all hurting, you know. Alex loved Tina too. You don’t have to go through this alone.”
Sloane knew his friend meant well, but he also knew Jenkins was wrong. No one could go through this with him. He had to endure this pain alone.
He reached for the door handle. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.”
Jenkins touched his shoulder, causing Sloane to stop, though he did not turn back.
“I know you don’t want to hear this now, but I’m going to tell you anyway, as your friend.”
Sloane didn’t want to hear it, not from Jenkins or anyone else, but Charlie had earned the right to say what he had to say when he sat in the hospital room and bore the burden of delivering the news that Tina was dead. Sloane would listen, not because there was anything Jenkins could say to help him, but out of respect for their friendship.
He took his hand off the door handle but kept his gaze fixed out the windshield.
“When you leave the Nam they don’t put you in a decompression chamber and wean you off the jungle the way they wean junkies off dope, but they should,” Jenkins said, “because Nam gets in your veins just as bad. It gets in and it won’t let you go. But we didn’t have that back then—detox and counseling. One minute I’m walking through foot-sucking muck, sweating my ass off in a rice paddy, wondering where the sniper is waiting to kill me, and the next I’m on a public bus on the streets of New Jersey.”
That got Sloane’s attention.
“They wouldn’t even give my mother the day off to pick me up. How do you like that? And I’ll tell you this. I was scared a lot over there but never as much as those last few hours waiting to step aboard the Big Bird to Paradise. I didn’t close my eyes until the pilot said we were leaving Vietnam airspace, and even then I couldn’t sleep. It seemed surreal, to actually be going home, because I had resigned myself to the fact that I never would. When I got there I used the key hidden under the ceramic cat to unlock the door. I didn’t even have to think about it. It was still there. I just walked in and dropped my duffel bag in the front hall, made a sandwich, and lay on the couch, watching the news and smoking a cigarette. Next thing I knew I was choking on smoke. I’d finally fallen asleep, exhausted, and the cigarette had fallen on one of my mother’s crocheted throw pillows. ‘God Bless This Home.’ I survived thirteen months over there and nearly burned to death on my mother’s couch.”
Sloane wasn’t sure where his friend was going with the story, but he let him continue.
“My point is, it seemed as if nothing had changed,” he said. “Nothing, except me. I went back to the same place, but it no longer felt like home and I no longer felt like I belonged there.” Jenkins let out a breath. “I slept on the floor because I couldn’t get comfortable in a bed. I kept beer in a cabinet because I couldn’t drink it unless it was warm.” He shook his head. “For the longest time over there I hadn’t cared if I lived or died, because for the longest time nobody else cared either. I was just another grunt who was going home in a body bag. It was easier that way, not caring, not making plans, but then God went and played a cruel joke on me.”
Sloane waited.
“He let me live.” Jenkins shook his head. “For so long I felt so guilty knowing that so many of my brothers over there died. I mean, why me? Why did I get to go home and not them? I kept seeing all their faces. It got so bad one afternoon I pulled out my dad’s revolver, loaded a bullet, and spun the chamber.”
Sloane looked over at his friend, but now Jenkins had looked away.
“I never told anyone this, not even Alex. I made a deal with God right then and there. And I put that gun to my head and pulled the trigger.”
“Jesus, Charlie.”
“Yeah, I know. But you know what, I got my answer. I found out why I was alive.”
“So what was the answer?”
A thin smile of irony creased his lips. “Dumb, blind luck.” He shrugged. “It was just dumb, blind luck. It wasn’t God who kept me alive. The bullets just missed me and hit someone else. After that I realized that I didn’t have to feel guilty because it wasn’t anything I’d done. It was just the luck of the draw, like spinning that chamber. Once I had accepted that, I could settle in to living again. I could move on. So when two guys showed up out of the blue and gave me a second chance with the CIA, I took it. I had a reason for getting up in the morning, a purpose. When I went to Mexico City everything seemed right with the world again.”
Jenkins shook his head with a look of disgust. Sloane knew what was to come.
“Then I stumbled into that village in the mountains, your village, and saw the carnage, and I was right back in Nam again. I’d gone full circle to a place that made no sense and where I didn’t want to be. And I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t go through it, not again. So I checked out and went to live on an island. The next thing I knew I’d lost thirty years of my life. I didn’t deserve a third chance, David. I’d already had two, which was two more than my brothers in Nam got. But then Alex showed up. God knows I didn’t deserve her, but she came into my life just the same.”
Jenkins squeezed his arm.
“Don’t do what I did. Don’t lose thirty years of your life. Tina wouldn’t want that. She loved you too much to see you suffer. There’s another chance out there for you.”
At the moment, Sloane didn’t believe that to be true.
Jenkins’s voice cracked with emotion. “I’m not going to insult you by telling you that I can imagine your pain, because I can’t. And I’m not going to preach to you. I’m just telling you that if you go and live alone on an island you won’t find any answers. You’ll just find yourself alone. Don’t go to that island.”
The silence lingered. Sloane pulled the handle and pushed open the door, stepping out. He leaned back inside the car. “Get me what I asked for, and maybe I won’t have to.”
SLOANE FELT THE walls closing around him as soon as he entered his room on the twentieth floor and couldn’t stand the thought of being confined. Leaving, he wandered the streets without destination or purpose, everything a blur, foreign, surreal, and inconsequential. At one point he found himself limping down the cobbled road of the Pike Place Market, the outdoor booths shuttered closed, the street deserted and quiet. He looked up at the arched windows of Matt’s, which had been one of their favorite restaurants, and could still see her.
- • •
TINA STOOD BESIDE the table, gorgeous in a sleeveless white dress that hugged the curves of her body and accentuated the sheen of her dark hair and tanned skin. The arched window framed her like a portrait, and the red glow of the three-story neon sign outside it, PUBLIC MARKET CENTER and its famous clock, bathed her in a soft crimson. This time she had outdone herself; the flowers he had purchased in the market no longer seemed worthy of her beauty.
They kissed warmly, unconcerned about those seated nearby. When their lips parted neither pulled away and Tina’s smile became an impish grin. “You’re drooling, Mr. Sloane.”
“New dress?”
“Do you like?”
Sloane’s smile broadened.
Tina placed her elbows on the table and leaned across, whispering, “We could just skip dinner and go to our room.” She opened her hand and dangled a hotel key from her finger.
But before Sloane could throw a glass of cold water in his face, or rush from the restaurant dragging Tina by the arm, the waiter appeared at the table with a bottle of wine and two glasses. He showed Tina the label.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said.
Neither spoke as the waiter opened the bottle and poured. When he had departed, Tina raised her glass. “Cheers.”
Sloane laughed. “Not fair, Mrs. Sloane. This is not fair.”
The summer night was warm enough that the multipane window, which pivoted in the middle, had been pushed open to allow a light breeze.
“Are we celebrating anything in particular?” Sloane asked.
“Do we need a reason to celebrate?”
“No. But I don’t want to get in trouble for missing an anniversary or anything.”
“In that case we’re celebrating our eleven-month anniversary,” she said. “And the fact that next week we’ll be moving into our first home together.”
“And our last home,” Sloane said. “I don’t plan on doing this again, so just cremate me and put my ashes on the mantel.”
“Well we won’t have to worry about those kinds of decisions for many, many years, will we?”
THE PAIN SHOT up and down his leg, nerve endings regenerating. Sloane turned his gaze from the window and walked to a railing overlooking the Alaska Freeway, taking a moment to rest. The lights from a passing ferry boat and the windows of homes on Bainbridge Island shimmered on the pitch-black water of Elliott Bay. Lying in a hospital bed for three weeks, Sloane had realized his life had come full circle—once again an orphan, but this time without a child’s naïveté to blindly assume that everything would be all right, that his only option was to get up each morning and put one foot ahead of the other. The harsh reality of life had stolen that child’s naïveté bit by bit. You realize there can be no Santa Claus, no matter how much you wish it were so, because it is simply impossible for one man to visit every house on the planet in one night. And you realize that you aren’t going to become president of the United States, or walk on the moon, or become a famous Hollywood actor. You realize you are like 99.9 percent of the rest of the world, just a cog in the wheel trying to make some sense of where you belong in the incomprehensible grand design of it all. And you realize that people you trust are going to disappoint you, friends will come and go, and those you love will die.
Sloane had met people who coped with life’s harsh reality by believing everything to be a part of God’s divine plan, but Sloane had never found that comfort. He was not a religious man; he was no longer certain he even believed in a God. What kind of a God would take Tina?
Others found their peace in the families they cultivated, the children they nurtured, seeing in them the hope they once had for themselves. Tina and Jake had given Sloane a purpose in life. They had given him a reason to live. They had restored a bit of that lost naïveté. But now her death had plunged him back into the dark and harsh reality, and he had no idea what to do, how to cope, how to exist.
Turning from the railing, he steeled himself for the walk back to the Athletic Club, his leg throbbing, at times so bad he had to stop and look again for a taxi, seeing none. When he reached his hotel he collapsed in a chair by the window, uncertain how long he had been away. He felt even further adrift, alone and lost. He stared out at the lights of the downtown office buildings, wondering again how he was to go on, and saw his answer.
He slipped his jacket back on, swallowed two ibuprofen, and walked one block up Sixth Street to the only place that still had meaning, where he still had a purpose. The security guard dutifully checked his identification and unlocked the elevator in the lobby. On the twenty-fourth floor Sloane entered the six-digit code on the keypad on the wall, pulled open the security door, and stepped inside. He did not turn on the overhead lights, choosing instead to stand at the window in darkness, searching again until he found the man framed in the rectangular pane of one of those thousands of windows, seated at his desk, still working, alone.
It was how Sloane had survived all those years in San Francisco, working, allowing the hours to pass one at a time.
He pulled the chain on the antique desk lamp he rarely used, opened the McFarland and Gallegos files, and did what he did best, what he would need to do again to survive.
He went to work.
