When Shadows Come Page 11

  But is it really a dream?

  Feels more like a memory. A distant, but still-vivid memory that has returned to me. But how can something return to me if I never experienced it in the first place?

  I’m not naked, but I’ve undressed during the night. I’m wearing only my pants and nothing else. The air is cool on my skin, but the sun warms it enough that I am not the least bit uncomfortable.

  I stand facing the sun, until I sense something behind me.

  Turning, I peer into the apartment. Something has happened while I’ve been asleep. The couch has been moved, along with Grace’s painting. Stepping inside, I can see that I’ve rearranged the living room so that the harvest table is now pressed up against the end of the couch to create one long continuous object. I’ve laid out the plates and bowls on the floor opposite the couch and table so that, at first glance, it gives the appearance of an S-shaped path.

  Like a child who’s occupied himself on a rainy day by using everyday household objects to create a small city on his bedroom floor, I find myself walking this little S-shaped path until I come to its end. On the floor, centered directly in between the plates to my right and the farthest edge of the couch to my left, is a card. A card containing a painting of a woman.

  Bending at the knees, I pick the card up. It’s a mass card that must have come from one of Venice’s many churches. The image is of a young woman dressed in a Renaissance-era gown. Her hair is pulled back into a kind of bun, and she’s staring up at the heavens, rays of light beaming into her eyes, which are no longer there. Rather, her eyes have been set on a round silver platter, which she holds in her left hand.

  I shiver, recalling an earlier dream: Grace’s severed head set on the waiter’s tray.

  Below the image are the words Santa Lucia.

  “Saint Lucy,” I whisper.

  I try to recall if Grace and I visited a church dedicated to Saint Lucy during this past week. For certain I know that we haven’t. We haven’t visited any churches or museums. So where did this card come from and why is it on the floor in the middle of a path I’ve created in my sleep out of couches, tables, silverware, and plates?

  I stare down at the card, turn it over.

  A short bio of Saint Lucy is printed on the back. Having sworn her devotion to God, Lucy refused to give up her virginity to her pagan husband. In turn, the evil bastard gouged her eyes out with a silver spoon. The Italian translation for Lucia means “light.” Lucy became patron saint to all those who could no longer see the light because of their blindness. I guess in a small way that makes her my patron saint, even if I’ve never heard of her until now. I wonder if I have to believe in God to believe in Saint Lucy.

  I slide the card into my pocket, and once more stare out the open doors into the light of the sun.

  “Dear Saint Lucy,” I pray aloud, “help me find my Grace today.”

  My words sound empty inside an infinite and expanding universe. But I am not entirely without faith. I find my clothes and dress while I wait for an answer. A sign. A voice, a warm breeze, a tickling sensation inside my empty gut. Anything. But nothing happens.

  I wonder if the little boy I killed in the Tajik village sees God. I wonder if Karen and our unborn child see him. If the men who died while following me into battle see him. If the enemy sees him.

  Chapter 29

  I check my e-mail and my texts. Nothing. I call Grace’s phone and get the same prerecorded message telling me her mailbox is full.

  Slipping the phone back into my pocket, I think about my next move.

  I decide to start from the beginning. When we first arrived in Venice, my come-and-go blindness seemed irreparable, and it was placing a more than considerable strain on a relationship already tested by time, separation, distance, faded dreams, war, and, yes, infidelity. Depression had sunk deep into my bones. That’s not all. I felt I deserved to be blinded. I deserved to have my sight robbed from me for what I did to that boy. If that small child had to lose his face, then it was only right I lose my eyes. Maybe it’s even right that I lose my fiancée. Lose her back to her ex-husband. I’ve already lost my first wife. Maybe it’s my fate to be forever on the losing end of the stick . . . my penitence for heeding the call of the gun.

  Grace didn’t see it that way.

  I was only doing what I was told and trained to do. Obeying orders. We’re at war. My calling in an airstrike on that village might have saved the lives of dozens or even hundreds of other soldiers and innocents alike. I’d bombed other villages and towns just like it over the years, so why should this one be any different? I’d killed countless times and never once questioned my actions, because after all, we’re at war. Sure, the death of a little kid was tragic, but I wasn’t the one who turned him into a living bomb. Grace insisted I had to believe that or else I would never recover my eyesight. But as we walked the alleyways and passages of Venice during those first few quiet days, her arm wrapped around my own, I sensed what she was really saying was this: you have to believe in your innocence or you will lose me.

  We didn’t talk much those first couple of days.

  Grace tried to paint and she tried to transcribe the scattering of pink Post-it Notes shoved in the pockets of her leather coat into some poems. But, in her words, “Nothing will come.” She encouraged me to try and write, but I told her I couldn’t see the words. I didn’t want to write if I couldn’t see the words themselves, and I didn’t want to write if that little boy didn’t have a life.

  “That little boy and what happened to him is not your fault,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

  I did the right thing, but what was it about this boy that his death affected me so much?

  In my head, I saw him coming toward me. Coming toward my men, that bomb strapped to his chest. I saw myself acting on instinct. I wasn’t seeing a little boy at that point. I was seeing imminent destruction. My training dictated that I show no sentimentality toward the enemy. No hesitation or prejudice when it came to pulling the trigger on a danger so volatile it not only threatened to eliminate my life, but the lives of my men. All of them.

  I thought about Grace’s words.

  Not your fault.

  For all our troubles, Grace believed in me. And maybe she was right. Maybe she understood what was happening more than I did. The malady. The malfunction. The short circuit that was not only causing me temporary blindness, but also a kind of confusion.

  A pressure was building up inside my brain that was inexplicable and at worst it felt like hell. At best it made me want to sleep. As if I were suffering from the results of a concussion.

  Question is, what’s memory and what’s dream? What’s imagined and what’s real? My brain feels like a computer that’s been invaded with a virus and now it produces nothing fluid, nothing logical, no single series of threads that I can piece together. Just snippets of events, emotions, fleeting visions. Like shadows that catch your attention during the deep night and send a cold shiver up and down your spine. The shadows are you. But they don’t feel like you. They feel like strangers. Strangers out to get you.

  I never know when the shadows are going to arrive.

  But one thing is certain: the moments the shadows come are the moments I’m beginning to fear the most.

  Grace and I were trying to strike a balance between the darkness and the light. Until the day before yesterday when, finally, we had it out at that caffè. If I was going to be blind, then Grace was going to try and work with the darkness. She tried to make me see things with my hands, my ears, my five senses. While a stranger stared at us from a distance, she placed the ring into the palm of my hand and she asked me to tell her what I felt. I told her it made me angry that she assumed I was blind to something so plainly obvious as an engagement band. But the ring, I now realize, had nothing to do with what she was asking me.

  She was asking me if I felt her love.

  Reaching into my pocket, I pull the ring out, stare down at it, feel the short hairs rise
up on the back of my neck.

  “You left this behind for me to find, didn’t you, Grace? Because if you no longer loved me . . . if you wanted to leave me, you would have done something else. You would have tossed it into the drink, and disappeared forever.”

  Squeezing the ring, as if Grace were the one pressing it against my skin, I return it to my pocket.

  A buzzer goes off, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  I go to the door, depress the intercom mounted to the plaster wall beside it. “Pronto.”

  “Scusi, Captain Angel. It is the police. May we come up?”

  It’s Detective Carbone. My stomach muscles constrict. If he has news of Grace, why couldn’t he just call me about it? Why make the trip over here?

  “Come up,” I say into the intercom while pushing the door release.

  It dawns on me now, I can see. But my gut is telling me not to let the detective know. I’m not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with my waiter friend, Giovanni. Like him, I’m not so sure I trust the police.

  Chapter 30

  A knock on the door.

  “Captain Angel,” barks the detective.

  “Coming,” I say.

  I open the door. I’ve slid on my sunglasses, but even with the tinted lenses hiding my eyes, I try not to connect directly with the stout, bearded man’s gaze, nor that of the uniformed cop who accompanies him. The cop with the better English, I think.

  I tell them both to come in, while I step aside. The door shuts behind them and the uniformed cop whispers something into the detective’s ear.

  “You have been doing some redecorating, I’m told,” Carbone comments.

  My stomach tightens for the second time in as many minutes.

  “Tell me, Captain Angel,” he says. “How do you manage such maneuvers in the dark?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, as if I don’t understand his question.

  “Isn’t it a dangerous proposition to be moving heavy furniture when you are blind?”

  I laugh. But nothing’s funny.

  “Now I understand, Detective,” I say, pushing the sunglasses farther up on the crown of my nose. “I’ve been trying to work with my blindness. Testing my skills without the use of my eyes. It’s a way for me to train myself for a life of no sight, should it come to that.”

  I’m not looking directly at him. But out of the corner of my eye, the detective nods, and shoots a glare at the uniformed cop. The cop returns the glare. The puckered-ass expressions on both their faces scream of suspicion.

  “Do you mind if we sit down?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I’m sorry I don’t have any coffee brewing. I can try and make some.”

  “No, grazie. We’ve already had ours.”

  I move slowly, guiding myself with the fingers on my right hand, until I pretend to locate the couch’s armrest, where I perch instead of sitting beside the detective. Behind me, the uniformed cop remains standing at the apartment door, as though guarding it.

  “Who is the painter?” the detective asks.

  “Grace is the painter,” I answer. “And a poet. You should know that by now.”

  “A self-portrait,” he says. “Then she is pregnant, Captain?”

  “It’s possible,” I say. Grace, tracing the image on her canvas with my hands, knowing what she was trying to reveal to me was far more precious than a work of art. What I find impossible to believe is that she would so willingly abandon our future.

  “Whatever the case,” he says, “she wears many hats, including that of your wife-to-be.”

  “Yes, she does. It’s all a part of what makes her beautiful.”

  “Endearing, Captain. How interesting she should fall in love with a soldier.”

  “I don’t see your point.”

  “I’m having trouble picturing an artist as accomplished as Grace falling in love with a military man. Usually artists seem to attract artists. They tend to shun the military type.”

  He smiles, but I pretend I can’t see him smiling. I know he’s trying to bait me. But I’m not sure why he’s doing it.

  “You might recall I’m a writer,” I say. “Or, hoping to be a writer one day. I might not be a visual artist. But there’s definitely an art to what I aspire to.”

  “A blind writer,” he says, as if it’s a punch line. “You’ll have to excuse me, Captain. I forgot about your book-writing aspirations. Of course you are an artist. Now it all makes sense.”

  Sliding off the armrest, I face the detective without actually looking into his eyes. “Please tell me. Do you have news?”

  “Yes,” he says, half under his breath. “I’m afraid I do.”

  My limbs tremble. I try not to look directly at him when he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a passport.

  “Hold out your hand,” he says.

  I hold out my hand, palm up. He sets the passport into it. I feel the familiar, flexible plastic-coated cover. It’s wet. It’s been dunked in water, or left out in the rain or both.

  “Do you know what you are holding?”

  “A passport.” I swallow.

  “That’s correct. Your fiancée’s passport.”

  “Where . . . where did you find it?”

  He stands. “It was fished out of the Grand Canal by tourists during their gondola ride.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “It means we know for certain now Grace is not leaving the country. We also know it’s possible harm has indeed come to her.”

  I try to avoid looking directly at Grace’s picture when I open it, and pretend to scan the pages with my fingers.

  “I’ll need that back, of course,” Carbone adds.

  Before handing it back to him, I thumb to the first page and run my fingers over Grace’s face. My eyes fill, and I find it hard to swallow. With an unsteady hand, I return the passport to him.

  He pockets it and stands in silence for a moment. The silence makes me feel uncomfortable. Exposed. Like I’m standing inside a fishbowl.

  “What are you doing to find Grace?” I say.

  He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes. Holds them up to me, as though asking me if he has permission to light up.

  “It’s okay,” I assure him. “You can smoke.”

  He lights up with his flip-top Zippo, returns the lighter to his jacket pocket. I tell him there’s an ashtray on the counter of the kitchenette. Slipping past me, he locates the ashtray and hovers over it while he smokes.

  He says, “With your permission, I’d like to list Grace as officially missing before the required forty-eight hours have passed. Now that we have evidence, however circumstantial, of foul play.”

  A part of me wants to scream, “It’s about time!” But another part of me wants to show him that it’s time we started working together to find Grace.

  “Please,” I beg. “What can I do to help?”

  I see him glance at the uniformed cop, then to me, and back to the cop.

  “I’d like you to come in for more questioning. Say later today. If that’s okay with you.” Smoking, laughing wryly. “I can’t imagine in your condition, you have much in the way of plans, Captain Angel.”

  He once more glances at the cop standing by the door, who is also smiling wryly.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t have much in the way of plans.”

  He stamps out the cigarette.

  “I’ll have someone pick you up. Say about fifteen hundred?”

  “Three o’clock. That’s fine.”

  He begins making his way toward the door. “Oh, and one more thing, Captain. You have not received any more strange phone calls over the landline? Anything my people and their tracing might have missed?”

  I tell him I haven’t.

  He nods, and I pretend not to see it.

  The uniformed cop opens the door, steps out. The detective follows. Until he stops and turns once more.

  “Captain,” he says, “I never actually asked you if I could smoke.”

  The c
omment nearly robs me of my breath.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I merely pulled out the pack of cigarettes and gestured to you like I wanted to smoke. I never actually asked.”

  “Since I’ve lost my eyesight,” I say, “I’ve learned to recognize the sounds of things. I know you are a smoker, and I heard you go into your pockets for your pack of cigarettes. I heard you take out your lighter.”

  He nods, once more shoots a glance at his colleague.

  “Of course,” he sighs. “How silly of me.”

  He steps out and politely shuts the door behind him.

  Chapter 31

  Stealing a moment to collect myself, I walk to the French doors and stand out on the terrace. Below, people are crossing the pedestrian bridge that spans the feeder canal.

  I wonder how long my vision will last. If the blindness is finally disappearing for good. The detective almost certainly saw through my act and, if that’s the case, it’s possible he believes I have been faking my blindness all along, regardless of what the US Army states about me in their reports. If he believes I am faking my condition, he will consider me a suspect in Grace’s disappearance. No two ways about it.

  I find the card bearing the image of Santa Lucia. I also take out the card with Giovanni’s cell number and recall that he added his number to my speed dial. The police will be here to collect me at three o’clock. That gives me seven hours to try to find out what might have happened to my fiancée before I drown in this shit storm and something horrible happens to Grace. That is, if something horrible hasn’t happened already.