Remember Tuesday Morning (14 page)

“Well,” Clay bit his lip, again doing his best to stay serious. “Maybe we could give her another chance. She might’ve learned her lesson this time.”

Eventually Sierra agreed, and they left Wrinkles to wander off to the back of the yard. Half an hour later when Sierra was in bed, Clay and Jamie headed to the kitchen. “So,” he faced her. “How’d it go with Alex?”

A sigh slipped from her. “He wouldn’t let me tell him what I found.” She was still disappointed, but the holy encouragement she’d received earlier stayed with her. “I told him we’d pray for him.”

Clay came to her and took her in his arms. “You still think this is a good idea?”

“I think God wants me to keep at him.”

Quiet surrounded them, but Jamie could almost hear what Clay was thinking, as she sensed his deep love and understanding. “Then you do that.” He kissed her, tenderly and with a confidence that told her he was doing all he could to stand by and let her make Alex her project. “I’ll pray for him. And for you.”

Peace soothed the jagged edges leftover from her conversation with Alex, and as she did the dishes and Clay cleaned up the backyard, she analyzed the few glimpses Alex had given her of the battle that raged inside him. What stuck out most were his final words.
You have a life … I have a job to do.
And the last part, where he’d told her he wasn’t looking for healing. Jamie ran the hot water over another plate. Alex was telling the truth. He wasn’t looking for healing.

He was looking for revenge.

But that sort of angry hurt wouldn’t just consume him; it would kill him. It would drive him so hard that one day he’d make some dangerously heroic move on a call and get shot in the process. If not, he’d die on the inside, long before his heart stopped beating. Either way, spending his life seeking revenge would destroy him.

Jamie set another few glasses into the dishwasher. Somewhere in the life Alex Brady lived before the terrorist attacks, he must’ve had someone. His mother, for one. Perhaps he’d even been in love. Jamie felt the flicker of hope light the dark path ahead of her. That was it. She needed to contact his mother and find out who Alex had cut himself off from.

Maybe then she’d find the missing pieces that would better help her understand not only who Alex Brady was —

But also who he used to be.

F
OURTEEN

A
lex took Bo home, gave him food and water, and settled him down for the night. He needed to run, but since he didn’t have time for a workout before the meeting with Owl, Alex had just one choice. Let the road take him somewhere far away. He drove his truck onto the northbound Ventura Freeway and exited at Las Virgenes Road toward Malibu. No specific destination drew him, but he had to put distance between him and the conversation with Jamie Michaels. Alex turned off his air conditioning, rolled down all four windows, and let the canyon air fill the truck.

Forget about it
, he ordered himself.
She was only trying to help.
But everything about those fifteen minutes on the porch stayed front-and-center in his mind. How was it possible? Jamie and Wanda had both lost firefighter husbands in the terrorist attacks. The idea that he’d been coming to Clay’s house every month for a year without knowing about their connection was more than Alex could take in. He laughed one time, a bitter, ironic laugh. What had he just told himself? If Clay hadn’t come home from the hostage call that day, Jamie wouldn’t have known what to do, right? Wasn’t that it? He had guessed she and the kids would’ve been decimated by that kind of tragedy.

But no. Jamie Michaels had been through it all before. He drove with one hand, wishing he had a reason to open up his engines. The wind caught him square in the face, whipping his hair and filling his ears with the sound. But it did nothing to stop his mind from racing through this new reality. Jamie had been dealt the same tragic hand as he had, but somehow she’d found peace and healing.

Suddenly, he thought of something else. Sierra, their oldest daughter. If Jamie’s first husband was killed in the terrorist attacks, then … that meant the child had been four or five when she’d lost her daddy. The reason she didn’t look like Clay was because her real father was dead.

Alex sucked in a sharp breath. The information was more than he could process. Joe and Wanda’s story must’ve been different. Very different. He’d heard them talk about the younger days, so the fact that she’d been married to a firefighter didn’t really add up. He’d have to find out more about that later. But either way he was surrounded by 9/11 survivors.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Jamie’s husband had kept a journal? Notes about his days as a firefighter? FDNY guys were either loud and full of surface talk or quiet and tight-lipped — at least the ones his dad used to bring around the house. Other than his father, Alex hadn’t thought there was another New York firefighter whose passion for the job came from a tender, transparent heart. But if Jamie’s husband had kept a journal … he must’ve been very much like Alex’s dad.

Then when Jamie got to the part about finding a journal entry that mentioned his father’s name, it was all a little too far out there. Like she was making the story up as she went along, or like she was trying to crawl into a place inside his heart that he had long since convinced himself no longer existed.

He clamped his jaw tight and made the sweeping right curve that put him at the beginning of Malibu Canyon. What did it matter if Jamie’s husband had written about Alex’s dad? Nothing in the guy’s journal could’ve added a single detail to what Alex had known about his father, what he’d admired about him.

His dad was a hero long before he died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. He sat next to Alex at the kitchen table every weeknight from middle school on, teaching him how to find the circumference of a circle or the chemical names for salt and carbon dioxide and water. Testing him on the
Bill of Rights
and helping him edit his essay on George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
. He took him to the park to throw a football and taught him how to shave two seconds off his sprint time in the hundred-yard dash. He was there every single time Alex needed him — right up until the morning of September 11.

Angry tears poked pins at his eyes, but Alex blinked them back. Crying wouldn’t help. His dad was gone and he wasn’t coming back. Period. Even so, the memories remained. Like with Holly, Alex didn’t allow time for reminiscing, otherwise the pain would paralyze him. He didn’t need heartbreak; he needed determination. Drive, not grief, was what saw him through every shift with the LA Sheriff’s Department. The sort of drive that could keep him on his game sixty or eighty hours a week, so that no more creeps could steal the happy life from some other unsuspecting family.

He slowed down, taking the curves with expert care. His dad might as well be riding shotgun. That’s how clear his father’s image remained in Alex’s mind, his tall and handsome dad, the smile in his eyes, the laughter in his voice. The man never once thought of himself, not at work and not at home. His last morning alive, he’d only been concerned that he and Alex talk about Alex’s future, about him being a doctor or a lawyer or a salesman. Anything but a firefighter.

“I’m concerned for you, Son,” his dad had told him. “You’re driven and competitive. Fighting fires can take over a person’s life and leave him nothing for the people back home.”

His dad’s final concern as he left for work that Tuesday was that Alex might find a career that would allow him an amazing life.
Others.
That’s what drove his father in everything he did. Of course, he’d be racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers when everyone else was running down. His dad wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Alex dug his fingers into the steering wheel. He tried his best never to go back to that horrible Tuesday morning. But here, winding through the canyon toward the beach, he couldn’t stop himself. He’d been sitting in his Shakespeare class, first period, watching the door for the moment when Holly would pass by like she did every day at that time. Some kid from across the hall ran in and shouted something about a plane crashing into a building in the city.

There were TVs in every room, and almost instantly the footage was being broadcast throughout the school. All around him people were talking, saying things like, “Man, that’s crazy,” “How could a plane do that?” or “Look at that fire … wickedest fire ever!”

Alex tuned out every noise but one: the sound of the announcer giving updates. Let everyone else wonder about why a plane would fly into a building or how many people must’ve been killed. Alex was the son of a firefighter. Looking at the first footage from the city’s financial district told him that across Manhattan, fire trucks were being dispatched, racing into the streets and heading south to the Twin Towers. And within a handful of minutes, those same firefighters would be trekking their way up seventy stories into an inferno in the sky.

Don’t do it, Dad … don’t go,
he thought.
Be with him, God … please. He’s too good. Don’t let him get hurt. Please, God …
The frantic pleading ran constantly in Alex’s mind from the moment he saw the flames. He was still catching his breath, still wishing he could get a message to his dad when another plane appeared on the left side of the screen and flew straight into the second tower.

No, God … not again, please … no …
The horror of the scene brought Alex to his feet, coursing through him and urging him to run, to find his dad and help somehow. But there was nothing he could do, nowhere to go. He didn’t need the TV announcer to state the obvious: Someone had flown the jets into the buildings intentionally.

On purpose.

Alex couldn’t find a place in his imagination to relate to the evil that would’ve done such a thing, so he watched, too stricken to move, until finally Holly raced into the room and took hold of his arm. “I talked to my mom,” her face was pale, her eyes wide with terror. “She and your mother, they both want us home.”

The images on the television drew him, but he needed to get home. His car was at the shop that day, so Holly was his best option. He grabbed her hand and raced with her toward the school parking lot. Maybe there was something they could do. If they could make it into Manhattan, maybe they could catch his dad and get him home. Before he reached the Twin Towers. They were irrational thoughts, all of them. As they drove home, they listened to the radio, and when Holly dropped him off, tears were streaming down her face. “What’s happening? It’s like the world’s gone crazy.”

Alex didn’t know what to say, but he wanted to get inside, needed to see for himself again that the Twin Towers were really on fire. That he hadn’t dreamed it. Needed to hear the reports about whether firefighters were actually being sent in to fight what looked like unbeatable fires. He promised to call Holly later, and he tore from her car, racing up the sidewalk and into his house.

His mother was sitting there, stone still, watching the TV, and …

Alex stopped himself. Stopped the memories cold right there. He couldn’t take another minute of remembering. His heart was pounding so hard he could hear it, and his face felt flushed from the searing pain of the images in his head. He exhaled and tried to slow his heartbeat. The fear and agony and shock of that day was as real inside him now as it had been seven years ago.

Ahead of him, the ocean came into view, spread out beneath a hint of remaining daylight. With no plan, and no way to stop his racing heart, Alex took the easy route. At the light where Malibu Canyon ended at Pacific Coast Highway, he turned left and then right into the parking lot for Malibu Beach. A few surfers hung out near the showers, rubbing down their boards, peeling off wetsuits. They didn’t notice him, another guy in a truck.

He parked in a spot that gave him a clear view of the water, and again he exhaled long and slow. The events of 9/11 were too agonizing to relive, and he could do nothing to change the outcome. So why remember it at all, except to let it motivate him? The criminals on the streets of Los Angeles County? They might as well all have been members of the al Qaeda. People who plotted evil were all the same, and someone needed to take care of them.

Someone other than God, because He didn’t seem to be doing it.

Alex looked at the clock on his dashboard. It was just after eight. He didn’t want to risk being late to the meeting, so he put his truck in reverse and pulled back into traffic. He missed the beach, missed surfing the way he’d done so often when he first moved here. The power of the waves beneath him was for a few seconds like wrestling his loss, like finding relief from it.

He would bring Bo here tomorrow, after his workout at Pierce College. That way he could surf and Bo could watch, and by the end of the afternoon he’d be one day closer to wearing his uniform again.

Shadows danced between the mountain peaks as Alex turned right onto Malibu Canyon. A sick part of him wanted to go back and retrace the day of the terrorist attacks, but he couldn’t let himself think about that now, with the job ahead of him. Fear needed to be far from him, because this was his chance. An inside look at the insidious ways of the REA.

The meeting spot remained the same. Chumash Park. A sixteen-acre oasis of sloping hills and trees at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. Alex pictured the park. He’d been aware of the place before, but in the last two weeks he’d cased it from every angle. Agoura High School sat to the east, and each of the other three sides was framed with cozy cul-de-sacs and two-story homes.

The beginnings of an adrenaline rush worked through his veins. He entered the Ventura Freeway, north again to Kanan Road, just a few miles away. The meeting place didn’t surprise him, because it was smack in the middle of the sort of reclusive, high-end neighborhood that might house a member of the REA.

Once he’d been assigned to the taskforce on studying the REA, Alex had tried to climb into the REA mind-set by reading an interview with ecoterrorist Jeff Luers, a bespectacled guy with the look of a computer techie. Luers described himself as a militant, a radical who enjoyed civil disobedience. True to his passion, a year before the Twin Towers were attacked, the then-twenty-one-year-old Luers set fire to a number of SUV’s on an Oregon car lot and was sentenced to more than twenty years in prison. The sentence brought Alex deep satisfaction, but there was something even more maddening.

After his arrest, Luers created a magazine called
Heartcheck
, in which he wrote this message to those who would come after him: “Smash it. Break it. Block it. Lock it down. I don’t care why you do it or how you do it, but stop it. Get out there and stop it.” Worse, in the same publication, Luers said, “It’s a beautiful thing to see the financial district of a major city smashed to pieces.” He went on to say that what happened on 9/11 “wasn’t totally wrong,” and that the World Trade Center was a legitimate target.

The idea that there were members of the REA who actually believed and thought the same way was enough to push Alex even in his off-hours. He focused on the center line stretched out before him. Did the members of the REA ever think about the people who put the fires
out
? Luers actually said in his interview that in order to stop consumerism and overuse of the environment, a loss of life might be necessary.

Of course, not every extreme environmental group behaved like the REA did. Some had even issued statements condemning the idea of violence as a means of achieving environmental goals. But not the REA.

Alex exited at Kanan Road, turned right, and drove a mile toward the hills. A left turn at Thousand Oaks Boulevard put him just a few blocks from Chumash Park. His heart beat out a hard and steady rhythm, and he was glad he’d left Bo at home. The dog would’ve sensed something big was about to happen, and since he couldn’t be involved, it would only frustrate him.