Ashes (5 page)

“That’s enough.”

“—that it’s people who do these things. People. All the technology in the world can’t help you if you don’t have someone who knows what makes these guys tick. Satellites can’t get inside, only people can. And I mean people who know the territory and can blend in, not some glorified pencil pushers like you.”

“I said that’s enough!”

“I was out there in the field while you were riding Daddy’s coat-tails into business school. You’re a bean-counter, Halsey. Nothing but a fucking bean-counter.”

Halsey’s ears got red, his nostrils flared. “You can’t talk to me that way. You know what you are? A dinosaur. Your day’s over, and you know it. Almost over,” he amended. “You may come in handy one day, who knows? Now go back to Florida. Don’t come back unless we call.”

The dull heat of anger had faded, and Sean felt calm. “Call all you like. It’s done. I’m out.”

The red spread from Halsey’s ears, down his neck. “You are out when I say you are out, and in when I say you are in. Do you hear me?”

“Oh, I hear you.” Sean got to his feet. “But I’m out for good. I owe you nothing anymore.” He fished out some bills, enough for his coffee and a generous tip for the waitress. “I won’t even let you pay for my coffee.”

Sean turned and left. His heart was pounding with the enormity of what he had done, but he felt the mad happiness a skydiver must feel when he throws himself into the air and trusts in only luck and a flimsy billow of silk to keep him from death.

For the first time in four years, he felt alive.

T
he speaker was a tall, well-groomed woman who had a habit of pausing, looking down at the podium, and then looking up demurely at her audience when she wanted to make a point. “And most of all, we’re here to help you find your way toward.” Pause. Down, up. “Closure and healing.”

Jennifer sat in the next-to-last row. Gathered in the hotel meeting room was a group of twenty-five survivors from the bombing. Like all the rest, she’d gotten a call from a government representative inviting her to come. Counselors would be there. So would refreshments. They would even pay for cab fare.

So she went. Why not? It wasn’t as if she had anything else to do.

It was over a month now, but Jennifer thought sometimes that time was playing tricks on her
.
A month should have been ample time for her to start putting it all behind her. To start feeling some of that closure they kept talking about.

She had not been able to work.
Go on, Jennifer, if you fall off the horse, you have to get back on again soon,
her mother had said, trying to be helpful. She had tried, had even arranged two interviews through a temp agency. But the moment she stepped into the lobby of the first business, though she had never worked there it was too familiar, the cubicles and the office chatter and the fluorescent lights. With every step she expected to feel the floor shake under her feet and the building rip apart. She fled the lobby, called to apologize and plead illness. The same thing happened with the second interview, and after that she could not bring herself to try again. She rarely went out, and when she did she kept to the suburbs. She could not pass by tall office buildings without looking to see if they were swaying, crumbling, ready to fall.

No matter where she went, someone recognized her. Every time she convinced herself the whispers and looks had nothing to do with her, someone removed all doubt by coming right up to her, offering sympathy, telling her how brave she was. One even asked if he could sign the cast on her arm.

Jennifer never knew what to say or how to accept their sympathy when there were others far more deserving of it. Others who were widowed or orphaned, blinded or maimed. All she had lost was her car, her job, and the use of her arm for a few weeks.

She had even less to say when they told her how brave she was. Brave? Was a rat fleeing a sinking ship brave? Was a man who threw others out of the lifeboat to drown showing courage? If she had shown any valor, it was on those levels, a medal of tinfoil instead of gold.

The woman at the podium droned on and on about finding inner strength and the courage to heal, about facing the fear. What next? Would they pass out free copies of
Chicken Soup for the Soul
and ask everyone to think about their power animal?

“And now,” the woman said, “I think we should all take a break for a few minutes, and then we’ll split up into groups, so you can talk, and share your experiences.”

They all rose, and so did Jennifer. She walked with them toward the back of the room but she did not stop at the refreshment table. She kept walking, down the hotel hallway and out a set of glass doors. There was a patio there, and a fountain that had been turned off, and blessed night silence. She went to the edge of the patio, stared down at the glittering lights of Los Angeles. So lovely, a bright shiny lie. One would never know carnage had happened there recently.

Soon the refreshment break would be over and people would be gathering in their groups. Perhaps healing and closure would be found there, but not for her. She could not go back in that room, could not sit with people and tell them that she’d run like a rat. She could not tell someone who had lost a loved one that she was afraid to go back to work. She could not tell them that she felt so dead inside when she should have been happy to be alive.

Alive. When would she feel that way again? Would there ever be a week, a day, or an hour even that she didn’t think about the bombing? When did it stop?

Perhaps it would not stop, ever.

I’m afraid.
Two simple words and yet they summed up everything. The distant city lights blurred in her vision and she wept, leaning on the patio rail and swiping a sleeve across her eyes and nose.

When her weeping had tapered off a bit she heard a voice say, “Here.”

Jennifer looked and saw a man. Her father’s age perhaps, tall, his dark hair and beard going gray. He held out a handkerchief.

“I’ll mess it up,” Jennifer said. She had never used a cloth handkerchief before.

“That’s the idea,” the man said and smiled gently. The sticker on his blazer said he was Dr. Duncan Levinson.

“Thank you.” Jennifer took the proffered handkerchief, attended to her nose and eyes. She didn’t know whether to return the handkerchief. What was handkerchief etiquette?

But the man did not seem interested in the handkerchief. He stood beside Jennifer, leaned on the railing. “I don’t come up here to L.A. often, but when I do I always like to look out at the lights. Man-made things usually aren’t so pretty.”

Jennifer had seen the man inside, knew he was one of the counselors. It was such a surprise to hear him talk about something besides the bombing; it seemed to Jennifer that she’d heard talk about nothing else this last month. Before she knew what she was saying, she blurted out, “When I was little we went up to the Planetarium, at Griffith Park, you know? And I thought the lights looked like the biggest Christmas tree in the world. And now...” She stopped.

“Now what do you see?” asked Dr. Levinson.

“I don’t know. Nothing. It’s like I see it but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s like a word in a language I don’t understand. And it’s not just the city, everything’s that way now.” She caught herself starting to cry again and bit her lip hard to keep the tears back. Crying solved nothing.

She could see through the glass doors that everyone had gone back in the meeting room. “The break’s over. Do you want to go back inside?” she asked.

“Do you want to?”

“No!” She said it louder than she’d intended. “No, but go ahead, I’m fine.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Are you sure? Don’t they need you in there?”

“I think I’m needed here,” he said.

Jennifer opened her mouth to protest that there were others far more deserving of Dr. Levinson’s help than she would ever be, twenty-four of them in that room, then turned away. She sat down on the edge of the fountain, and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the water.

Over the last month she’d mastered the art of drying her hair and dressing without seeing more than the general outline of herself. It could have been the ripples of the water, but there was no face she recognized as her own in that reflection. She reached out to touch the reflection, and it broke apart as her fingertips touched the water’s surface.

All the fear that had been building up inside her this last month could no longer be contained. “I’m so scared,” she whispered.

“Of what?” Dr. Levinson knelt beside her.

“I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t know who I am or why or anything.” Jennifer started to cry again because she wasn’t making any sense, the doctor would think she was nuts. But she felt a comforting hand on her shoulder, and Dr. Levinson didn’t seem to mind that she was making no sense. She cried for a while and when it seemed the flow of tears had eased, at least for a while, she blew her nose in the handkerchief. “I keep messing up your hankie,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s a hankie, mess it up all you want. If you use my sleeve, then say you’re sorry,” he said with a smile. “Come on. Let’s go to the coffee shop down in the lobby. It’s too cold to stay out here much longer.”

You don’t have to stay,
Jennifer started to say, then stopped. She couldn’t do this on her own any more. “Sure. Let’s go.”

* * *

T
hey sat in the leatherette booth, off in the back where they would not be disturbed. “I’m buying,” said Dr. Levinson. “Get whatever you want.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“At least order something. You’re a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”

“OK.” She had never felt less like eating, but she was afraid Dr. Levinson would leave if she didn’t. “I’m sorry, I just haven’t been much on eating lately.”

“Why so?”

“I don’t know, I just can’t. It’s like my body says, OK that’s enough to stay alive, no more for you.”

“Do you have any idea why that is?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with me. Physically, you know. I’m fine, except for the arm. But I feel cold all the time and I don’t want to eat. I feel...” Jennifer swallowed hard, felt a click in her dry throat. She wanted to say it but could not. If she said it, it might become real.

The waitress brought them drinks, an iced tea for Jennifer, decaf for Dr. Levinson. Jennifer dumped a packet of sugar into her tea, stirred it longer than necessary. She took a sip, and later wondered if he had somehow slipped one of those truth serums they used in the spy movies into her tea, for she began talking and could not stop.

“It’s so many things, all at once. Maybe if it was just the bombing. Or if it was something like a car wreck, where it was just me. It’s just so big, all those people hurt and killed. And everywhere you go it’s on the news and I think, won’t I ever have one day when I’m not thinking about it? All I want is one day when something won’t remind me of it, and it’s stupid things that do, you know? I can’t go back to work because the office buildings remind me of it. I couldn’t go outside the other day because it was the winds, the Santa Anas, they were kicking up all this dust and it was like the dust in the air when the building went down. That was the worst part. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. Everything was spinning and getting dark and...” Jennifer took a breath. “And ever since then I haven’t been able to get rid of it. The feeling that...” She stopped.

“What is it?” asked Dr. Levinson, so softly that Jennifer thought it was her own voice, in her mind.

“I feel like I’ve died. Maybe that’s why I feel so cold and I can’t eat, maybe I’m dead and I don’t know it, a ghost or something. And I know that’s not true. But it is in a weird way. It’s like my whole life up to that day is gone. It’s so far away from me and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to be that person again. I’m not Jennifer any more. I don’t know who I am. And I don’t know why.”

“Why the bombing happened?”

“No, why I made it. Why me and not them? There’s nothing that makes me special. I’m nobody. A monkey could do my job. All those people and they all had better reasons to make it than I did. And that picture, that damn picture, total strangers come up to me and tell me how sorry for me they are, how brave I am. I’m not brave. I didn’t help anyone. I could have gone to help Mr. Danvers and I didn’t, I just ran away.”

Jennifer stopped. She had not meant to say so much, but there it was, all out in the open.

“You ran. You got out,” the doctor said.

“I feel like you’re charging me with a crime.”

“I’m stating the facts. Did Mr. Danvers ask you to help?”

“No. He just told me to get out. He told me to take the stairs, not the elevator.”

“Did you shove people out of the way to get to the stairs? Trample old ladies?”

“Stop it. I know what you’re trying to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Make me feel better about it.”

He shook his head. “No, Jennifer, only you can make yourself feel better about it. If you want to.” He reached out and took Jennifer’s hand in his. “The past is not where you find answers. The reason things happened is because they happened, and the reason why is simply because.”

“So it’s all for nothing?”

“I didn’t say that. What I mean is that you had no control over events. You made your choices, and they were good choices. Perhaps there could have been better choices. Or maybe they would have only been different. Maybe you are what you say you are, nothing. But that’s not what matters. What matters is what you do now. What you become. How you earn the life you’ve been given.”

“But people deserve it more than I do.”

“Look around you, Jennifer. Who has exactly what they deserve? Life’s not a movie where the bad guy gets his just desserts in the last reel. It simply is. The past is past. The question you need to be asking yourself is not what you’ve done, or even what you didn’t do. But what you
will
do.”

Jennifer was silent for a moment, then said, “Do I have to go save the world or something? Find the cure for cancer?”

“What did Mr. Danvers say to you again, there in the building?”