When Shadows Come Read online

  If Grace’s embarrassment were a flamethrower, my face would be burned away. Why the hell am I being so tough on her? Maybe I’m projecting my anger. My disappointment. My sadness. My profound sorrow for the loss of the man I was before I cut out my heart and left it on the brown hills of Afghanistan to be ravaged by the crows and the wolves and the relentless, dust-filled wind. Or perhaps that’s not quite right. Maybe I managed to rip my heart out long before the Afghan war.

  Back when they fished my first wife out of the Hudson River.

  Get your act together, soldier, and stop being an ass. Stop lamenting a past that, for the most part, seems like a blur . . .

  I reach out for Grace’s hand, but instead, manage only to tip over my beer.

  “Nick!” she cries, sliding back her chair to avoid the tsunami.

  Feeling for the tipped glass, I drown my fingers in the beer that’s pooled on the table. At the same time I feel the rainy mist blowing under the canopy, coating my blushing salt-and-pepper-stubbled face. Christ almighty, I’m helpless. The fearless leader, finally put down.

  The waiter approaches.

  “Non è un problema,” he insists. I know he’s wiping up the beer because I hear the cloth against the tabletop. “Un’ altra birra per voi signore.” It’s a question.

  “Uno birra,” I say. “Due birra. Tre birra . . . and a fucking shot of Jäger.”

  “Most certainly,” he follows up in his perfect King’s English.

  While he retrieves the beer, the tourists gradually resume their conversations. Grace sits, stewing. I would never tell her this, but I like it when Grace stews. Gives me time to think. Probably if we were back in America, back in upstate New York, she’d have stormed away by now to the apartment we rented together in Troy not long after we met five years ago. Maybe she’d secretly place a call to her ex-husband. But she isn’t going anywhere and she’s not making any calls.

  Not in Venice, where we’re four-sided by water, and only one out of two sets of eyes are in working condition.

  After a time, Grace lights what for her is a rare cigarette, slaps the lighter down on the now-clean table. The waiter is back.

  “Uno birra,” he states. “And one fucking shot of Jägermeister.”

  Grace and I both burst out laughing. That’s exactly what the doc ordered. A waiter with a sense of humor. As he sets the drinks down onto the table, Grace reaches into her purse.

  “Remember,” I say, running both hands over my military-short hair. “Tip’s included in the bill.”

  “Grazie,” she says politely. Tyler School of Art, undergrad. Vermont College, master of fine arts in poetry. A dual artist is my Grace. Funny, I didn’t meet a soul in Afghanistan, my side or theirs, who went to Tyler or did an MFA in writing school. But I did have a guy in my squad who made it through one year of juco where he studied construction management. Stepped too close to an IED, got “blowed up,” as the army grunts like to say, and lost both his legs all the way up to the business part of his groin. Now he’s a spokesman for the Wounded Warrior Project.

  Grace smokes for a while.

  I think about asking for one. But then I’ll want to smoke the crap out of a whole pack and I’ll want to drink more Jaeger and more beer and my dark mood will darken further. Getting hammered in Venice without the use of my eyes is not my idea of a good time. Not now. Not when Grace and I are supposed to be getting reacquainted after my year-long tour in Indian country.

  The initial tour was supposed to last six months, but the army has a way of persuading you to overstay your welcome, especially when you’ve traded in your dreams of becoming a great American novelist for a career in ambushes, night watches, and enemy eradication—a job I happened to be pretty damn good at. Maybe too good.

  So then, getting drunk is most definitely not a smart idea. Not when we’re supposed to be forgetting the mistakes and missteps that occurred during those twelve months when we were so very far apart. Not when so many questions remain. Questions about fidelity, about fault. About forgetting. About letting go.

  Drinking down my shot of Jaeger, I set the empty shot glass back onto the table. I feel the slow burn in my chest and throat. Grace stamps out her cigarette, exhales the last hit of ash and nicotine so that I catch a good strong whiff of it.

  “What exactly is it you’ve been trying to tell me, my lovely wife-to-be? Or, put another way, what is the nature of the message you are trying to convey with your object identification game?”

  I sense a big fat sigh. Because there’s a voice speaking inside her pretty little head. It says, Maybe now’s a good time to tell him. Tell him exactly what happened with Andrew. If there was more than that one night. Or maybe the old soldier is just trying to size the enemy up. The enemy being the unknown and the overimagined. Is it possible there’s nothing to tell other than what she’s already confessed?

  What about you, Captain? You gonna open up for once, reveal all the juicy tidbits you carry around? Tell her about the head shots you’ve perfected, the way a knife feels when you plunge it between the ribs and puncture a lung or, if you’re really lucky, sever the pulmonary artery? Tell her what happens when your eyes get better—about that plane ride back to Kabul?

  “I’m trying to help you heal,” she says. “But did you have to drop the ring like that?”

  “Is this about losing the ring, Grace Blunt? Or is this about my embarrassing you?”

  She’s shifting uncomfortably in her chair. If only I could see inside her mind, get the true scoop on her thoughts.

  “Well, have I?” I push.

  “Maybe a little, but . . .”

  “Uh-oh,” I say. “One of those dreaded improvised explosive dangling buts. Very dangerous. But what exactly?”

  “I’m not trying to insult you, Nick. It’s just difficult for me. We haven’t been this close in a long time. Physically close. Give me a chance to understand. You’re a different man now, but the same too. You’re that closed-in man. A protected shell of yourself. It’s only gotten worse with every deployment.”

  “You trying to say I’m emotionless and so bottled up I might spontaneously explode? Or better yet, maybe I’m the Manchurian Candidate and all it will take is a specific word or two spoken over the phone to persuade me to climb a tower, start shooting people?”

  “Not . . . at . . . all.”

  “Well, you are aware that in the old days, a man like me would have been referred to as the strong and silent type.”

  “Yes, you’re strong,” she says. “But who the hell are you? It’s impossible for me to know what you’re feeling. I know you see things inside your head, in your dreams, because you say things in your sleep.” She exhales. “I don’t know what you’re seeing inside your head when you’re awake. Whether it’s me right now, right here. Or the made-up, pretty picture of me you carry around in your back pocket next to your pistol. You can’t see the real me, Nick, we’re doomed. If you go back to that never-ending war, we are so absolutely doomed.”

  What I see is nothing. The nothing I see is not cold, absolute black. The nothing I see is dark gray and lifeless.

  But here’s what I imagine: Grace’s fingers fiddling with her engagement ring. A nervous habit of hers I recall from long ago. From before six weeks ago, when I ordered the airstrike on a small Taliban stronghold situated on the top of a mountain with a name I can no longer recall. Mountain 346.1/B or some such army fugazi nonsense. Just a hill, really. Not a fortress but a village made of stones fitted together without mortar, and thatched roofs and dirt floors. A village surrounded by terraced gardens, dogs, horses, chickens, and the occasional cow grazing the property. And one more thing.

  A small boy.

  When it was all over, and I found myself the victim of an inexplicable temporary blindness, the army doctors and shrinks thought a nice relaxing stateside vacation might do me some good. They promptly shipped me back to New York. But I had barely stepped off the plane when I began hitting up every officer I knew from West
Point to DC to pull some strings. The US was the last place I wanted to be to heal. Too many memories there. Too much hurt from a first marriage that ended in a suicide, and brand-new injuries from a fiancée I hadn’t seen in over a year.

  I’d had hours to think it over on the plane from Germany to JFK and for some reason all I could picture in my head was Venice. I’d traveled there fresh out of college, and it had been a time of hope for my future. I was going to follow in the steps of Ernest Hemingway, who came to the water city to write one of his greatest war novels while serenading a beautiful Italian countess in Harry’s Bar, just footsteps from Piazza San Marco.

  I would go to Venice to heal. But I couldn’t do it alone. Not in my condition. Didn’t matter how badly Grace and I were feeling about our bruised and battered, forever put-on-hold relationship. I needed her as much as she needed me. But if we needed fixing, we would do so far away from familiar places. We would do it in a place where the only people who knew us were ourselves.

  Just as it had been twenty-five years earlier, during my first visit to Venice, the future was uncertain. Now, like then, I was entirely blinded to what it had in store for me.

  For us.

  “Close your eyes, Grace. See for yourself what your memory drags up from out of the past. What do you see first? Who do you see? Me or somebody else?”

  Once more comes the sound of her hands tap-tapping the table. She’s playing with the diamond and growing agitated. I sense the voices in her head, whispering, warning, scaring the daylights out of her. Who does she see exactly?

  “Close your eyes,” I press. “Stop looking back at the stranger in the overcoat and tell me what you see.”

  Her table tapping stops. She begins to speak slowly, softly, almost whispering, and I know she has closed her eyes. “Okay, wise guy,” she says. “Here’s what I see. I see that man standing by the fountain. I see him even with my eyes closed. It’s pretty damned frightening, Nick. He’s scaring me with his black eyes.”

  I down the last of my beer. The sitrep is getting serious. Defensive position officially compromised.

  “Black eyes are impossible.”

  “They feel black to me, Nick.”

  I turn and try to get a look at him. But, of course, all I see is darkness. Still, you can’t stop more than twenty years of military instinct on a dime.

  “Well, like the song says, you got to know when to fold ’em. I think it’s time we retreated . . . Hastily, me lady.” My insides are beginning to do a slow burn. I feel like a helpless new recruit who doesn’t know diddly about defending himself, much less his brothers and sisters in arms. I should take action, but the most I’m capable of is waving my arms at the stranger and making a fool of myself.

  Grace takes hold of my hand. This time there is no object to push into my palm. No engagement rings, no drinking glass. Nothing. There’s only Grace’s touch.

  But what surprises me is this: her hands aren’t trembling.

  They are the hands of a calm, secure woman. A woman who, at this very moment anyway, is secure in her love for her future husband and so very sorry for what happened when I was away. The hands are thin and warm and smell of rose petals and they beg forgiveness. The hands are the way I remember them when I asked Grace to marry me, and I want never to let go of them again, the way I did Karen’s.

  “Just promise me one thing,” she says. “That you won’t go back. Do you promise me? I mean, who keeps going back to war again and again unless you’re programed to go back. Like a robot. Please tell me you won’t go. Won’t . . . fucking . . . go.”

  “You’re my state of Grace,” I say, feeling a pressure behind my eyeballs and my throat constricting. “I want you to be happy.”

  The pressure builds until something inside my head goes click, like a light switch that’s been turned on, and for the briefest of moments, I’m in a windowless room, a bright white light shining in my eyes. I feel a tickle on the back of my neck as my hairs rise up and the vague beginnings of a headache settle in. The image fades—but then so does my blindness. A gradual undimming while the shades covering my eyes are slowly drawn open. Shapes begin to appear. A head and a body. Arms and hands. Tables and faceless people sitting at them. Pigeons walking along the cobbles and taking flight inside the square.

  I let go of Grace’s hands, shift in my chair, and turn toward the fountain. The blurry image of a man is standing there. He’s the only person standing still in the rain. He’s wearing a long overcoat. He can’t be more than twenty feet away.

  Turning back to Grace, I begin to lift myself from the table. The alcohol kicks in, making me unsteady and off-balance. I reach out with my hands, try to take hold of the table, but the table isn’t there. Grace catches my arm as I’m about to fall over.

  I peer into her face.

  A somewhat obscure face that is only now taking shape.

  I’m beginning to see her eyes. She steadies me, holds me tight, as if to assure me, Don’t worry, I’ve got you now.

  “What is it, Nick? What’s happening?”

  I want to tell her I’m in the early stages of sight again. That my blindness is receding. That I can even see the stranger in the overcoat. But I have no idea how long this will last. One minute or one day or one year. Telling Grace that I can see right now will be a cruel joke if, just a few seconds later, I’m once again blind as a bat.

  “Let’s just go,” Grace insists. She slips her left arm around my right arm, begins to guide me out from under the caffè awning, past the tables of tourists who can’t help but notice the blind man and his lover.

  Stumbling away from the caffè in the direction of the apartment we’re staying in, I see the birds and the stone fountain inside the square. Through blurred vision I make out the overcoat man as he follows us with eyes so impossibly dark, they look like two round black holes set inside a gray, featureless face. Just like Grace described them. His gaze makes me feel weak and cold and exposed.

  The cool rain touches my face and I sense the hard, unevenly placed cobbles against the bottoms of my boot soles, my heart pounding in my chest, and I suddenly feel the need to be away from this piazza. Away from my memories. Away from the stranger with black eyes.

  I’ve been crippled by combat and bid my farewell to arms. For the moment anyway. But one thing is for certain. The war wages on inside my head, the true extent of its many casualties only now beginning to reveal themselves.

  Chapter 2

  The last thing I saw was death.

  I ordered an airstrike.

  The last thing I’ve truly seen with these eyes is the death that came about because of that airstrike.

  For a few brief moments, the blindness has gone away. But I do not see anything like I did on the morning I requested the services of an A-10 Thunderbolt “Warthog” to blow a hot village to kingdom come. I see that moment all the more vividly as my eyes again fill with darkness. See things my Grace could never imagine. Brilliant colors and vivid shapes. Blue skies, brown rock, and running brooks with water so green you would swear it was liquid jade. I see an old village with a stone well in the center. I see it during a time of peace and tranquility. I see women tending to children, and men seated on the ground, finger-combing their thick beards and engaged in heated discussion.

  My mind sees something else, too. Something not so tranquil.

  The gentle layer of white dust that covers the arms and legs of a boy. The black object strapped to his chest. His little hands laid out palms up over his head. His bare feet.

  My mind sees his face. His eyes.

  I am haunted by his eyes.

  What’s left of them.

  Chapter 3

  You learn to sense the dangers all around you while in-country. You use your built-in shit detector like it’s a warning beacon. I’m using it now. For me and Grace.

  “Stop,” Grace says, as we come to the far edge of a piazza. “Stop, Nick,” she pleads, gripping my arm and digging her heels into the cobblestones.
/>   Leaving the caffè, my eyesight already dimming to shadows, I was certain I could make out a pair of footsteps that were different from the others. Footsteps that for a brief second or two seemed rapid, but that slowed as we slowed, stopped as we stopped.

  The stranger. Following us? I’m not about to lead the enemy . . . any enemy . . . back to our temporary home, so I stop again and listen. “Is he there, Grace?”

  “I don’t see him,” she says. “Now you’re the one who’s scaring me.”

  For the past few minutes I’ve insisted on taking a circuitous route past the Grand Canal, the water taxis, the barges, the water busses, the sleek black gondolas creating a confusion of swells and ripples in the dark green water. Through three different passages, all of them narrow, all of them going to a different place inside the heart of the water city. A route that will confuse a man trying to tail us.

  I can almost feel the fear radiating off Grace, as if it were a vapor. Her arm wrapped around my own, I’m pressed up against her beating heart.

  “You’re sure he’s not still behind us?” I whisper. “Don’t turn right away. Just do it gradually.”

  “Nick. There’s no one there.”

  “He was following us,” I say. “I could hear him. Feel him. See him in my head. We should go to the police.”

  “We don’t know for certain that he was. Maybe he was just taking the same route. Or maybe he wasn’t behind us at all.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Maybe . . . A little. We’ve had a lot to drink today. We should just go home.”

  But I know the truth. It’s because of us that the stranger was staring. Grace and me. My condition. My secrets. My wars.

  The pain returns to my head. Is it because of the booze?

  Click . . . A scream coming from a man’s open mouth . . . It’s my face, frightened, wide-eyed. I’m a ghost looking down on my own body . . .

  Dizziness sets in.

  I reach out for Grace, balance myself by holding on to her shoulder.

  “What’s the matter?” she says, urgency in her voice. “Are you feeling sick?”