When Shadows Come Read online

  “Nick, what the hell,” she barks.

  “Couldn’t resist,” I say, flipping the knife so that the blade lands flat in my palm, the wood handle pointed toward her.

  “Where’d you learn to use a knife like that?”

  I sit myself back down. “Guess I learned it in basic.”

  Basic training comes to mind. Lots of target practice, self-defense techniques, and more roadwork than I could stomach. Though I honestly don’t recall much fighting knife training, other than regulation maneuvers. Certainly I never trained with a blade while wearing a blindfold.

  “Why do you think that man would say something like ‘I see’?” Grace says after a long beat. Like I said, my fiancée is not the type to allow these, let’s call them life events, to fade away easily. Always there must be a hidden meaning, even if there is none.

  I sip my red wine, allow the liquid to rest in the back of my throat for a brief moment before swallowing.

  “Maybe it’s someone’s idea of a sick joke,” I say, following up with a nervous laugh.

  The noise coming from the kitchenette stops.

  “You did make a spectacle of yourself at the caffè this afternoon, Nick.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Okay, we both made spectacles of ourselves,” she says, “and people couldn’t help but stare.”

  “I get it,” I say, sensing the conversation going south fast.

  “You remember when we first decided to live together and I agreed to move upstate? If you call living together shacking up for a while after you got home from one of your deployments.”

  “That’s still living together. My job is my job and it takes me away. And I’ve only had two deployments since we’ve been together. One in 2008. And this last one. A year.”

  “Your job is your life, Captain. Most people talk their day through when they get home from work.” She picks up the wine bottle, sets it back down again. Hard. “You know, open a bottle of red, maybe sit out on the deck, talk about the day’s highs and lows. But you’re different. It’s not that you can’t talk about anything because it’s classified. It’s that you won’t, because of whatever invisible barrier you’ve built around yourself.”

  In my mind I see Grace making quotation marks with her fingers when she says “classified,” since I’ve witnessed her doing this on previous occasions.

  I sip some wine. Wine always loosens my tongue. I have to be careful about that.

  “Some shit is classified, Grace,” I say. “Other things,” I go on, shutting my eyes as a brief shot of dizziness sweeps in and out of my frontal lobe, “well, let’s just say they do not bear repeating. Relaying war stories to the sig other is not my idea of a good time.” I open my eyes. “Can we please, please, please talk about something else?”

  “You still don’t trust me.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “You still think I’ve been fucking Andrew for months.”

  I stand up, some of the wine spilling from my glass. “Grace, can we talk about something else, for Christ’s sake? I trust you, okay? You were with him once and that’s it. All’s forgiven.”

  The place falls silent, only the food cooking on the stove filling the void.

  “Maybe,” I go on, breaking the quiet, “we can talk about how good it was when we first got together. How much we loved staying in bed all afternoon, watching Netflix, making love. How much we loved visiting museums, going to movies, going for jogs in the park. How much we loved simply being together, trusting one another, not questioning silences or secrets or when I was going back to war or who might be sleeping with someone else.”

  I sit back down, drink down the wine. I would pour some more but I don’t want to fumble around reaching for the bottle. Besides, I think my hands are trembling now.

  “Tell me something, Nick,” Grace says. “How unhappy was Karen when she died?”

  My head spins. Pulse soars. The rage is coming on. As a soldier, you learn to recognize the signs. Why is she doing this to me? Pressing all my buttons?

  Click . . . Whatever was covering my eyes is gone, and I’m squinting painfully into bright light . . . “You need to breathe, Captain. You need to take a step back, recognize the situation for what it is. A discussion. Not a physical assault on your life, even if your first reaction is to come out swinging. Remember your training. The past doesn’t exist for you anymore.”

  “Can I have some more wine, please?” I say, a hoarse whisper.

  She refreshes my glass.

  “Let’s not talk about Karen,” I say.

  “Here’s an idea,” she says. “Let’s not fucking talk about anything at all.”

  She turns back to the stove, stirs the pot.

  We finish the wine in relative silence and take our dinner to bed. We eat the pasta swimming in fresh tomato sauce and olive oil, and we open another bottle of red and drink that. When the food and the wine are gone we make love again. Maybe we make love to the evening breeze and to the sound of the boats on the canals and the gondoliers who make music with their voices, but it is a sexual act filled with both passion and more than its fair share of anger. We don’t make love so much as we devour one another like angry lions. Exhausted, we lie on our backs on our separate sides of the bed, and fall asleep.

  I’m climbing the hill that leads to the Taliban village. But when I reach the top, there’s no village. I am instead back in my townhouse apartment in Troy. I’m dressed in full combat gear, helmet strapped to my head, M4 carbine gripped in gloved hands. I’m standing in the living room while Grace is sitting before her easel, which is positioned by the tall double-hung window. I can’t see what she’s painting since the back of the canvas is facing me, but I feel this overpowering need to see it. Like the fate of me and my men rests on what my love is painting.

  “Grace!” I shout. “Get up!”

  Her face is partially blocked by the canvas. But I make out her smile clearly enough.

  “Darling,” she says, “you’re home. What a wonderful surprise.” Then, as she stands, “Come, look what I’ve painted for you.”

  M4 aimed directly at her, I swallow something cold and hard, and I feel my heart beating in my throat while I slowly take it one step at a time.

  “See, darling,” she says, making room for me, “I can see inside your head.”

  I eye the canvas and see the face of my wife.

  Karen.

  She’s sitting inside her car, the river water drowning her, her brown hair floating like the tentacles on a jellyfish. And something else too. Painted above her is a dark human figure strapped to a chair. A man being held against his will inside a dark basement. Above the seated figure is the face of the boy I killed. The face not really a face at all anymore.

  “Do you like it, darling?” Grace says. “I think it’s a masterpiece.”

  The rage boils inside of me. Shouldering the M4 I depress the trigger and blow the painting away. Then, with tears filling my eyes, I turn the weapon on Grace . . .

  Chapter 7

  I wake with a start. I’m no longer in bed. Instead, I find myself perched four stories above the feeder canal. The roof beneath me is shingled with clay tiles, some of which have been crushed under my weight.

  The good news is that my sight has returned, however briefly.

  Now the bad news: I’m sitting up on a severely angled roof, dressed in nothing but a pair of green US Army-issue boxer shorts, barely a few inches from dropping some sixty or seventy feet into a canal. That is, if I don’t hit the narrow stone pavement that runs along its opposite side.

  The obvious question is screaming inside my head.

  How the hell did I get up here?

  The answer is that I must be sleepwalking.

  I’ve never been known to sleepwalk. I can’t ever remember waking up somewhere other than where I laid my head prior to falling asleep. Be it the solid ground of an Afghan hillside or my queen-sized mattress back in Troy. So why should it start now a
t forty-six years old? The reason behind it must be the cause behind the blindness.

  The dreaded PTS fucking D.

  But I’m supposed to be improving. Forgetting the war. Forgetting that little boy. Forgetting about Karen. I’m supposed to be opening up and healing. Instead I’m up on a roof and I have no idea how to get down.

  “Oh dear God!”

  Grace.

  “Oh Christ. Oh God. Don’t move, Nick. Please don’t move. Don’t. Move.”

  “Good idea,” I say.

  She’s looking up at me from the small stone terrace perched against the side of this old building, directly outside the open French doors.

  “How in the world—?” she asks.

  “I’ve been asking myself the same thing, babe.”

  Off in the distance, the view is spectacular. I see the Grand Canal, the early morning delivery barges coming and going from the different docking points all along the main water artery. Beyond that, and beyond the tile roofs of the buildings, I see the wide-open basin and the sea and the outlying islands and a rare off-season sun rising brilliant orange and warm. I see the birds. I see the sun. And it feels wonderful.

  “Nick, do your eyes work?”

  “Fleetingly, my dear.”

  “Great. Keep joking. You’re about to end up in the bottom of that canal. I just might be widowed before my wedding.”

  I shift myself, just slightly. The tiles crumble beneath me. I begin to slide.

  Grace screams.

  “It’s okay!” I holler. “I’ve stopped sliding. For now.” Then, feeling gravity pushing against my back, “Grace, I need your help. I’m going to try and shift onto my stomach so I’m perpendicular with the edge of the roof. After that I’m going to lower my left arm and my left leg. If I can place my left foot onto the terrace railing, I can give you my left hand to hold tight. Make sense?”

  “Yes, love,” she says, her voice trembling.

  Gently, slowly, I extend my right arm out and lower myself onto my belly. Then I extend my right leg out rigidly so it doesn’t rest on the clay tiles so much as it holds me in place. Tiles break underneath my body, sending shards of sharp clay up into my skin. It stings like dozens of needle shots. But I’m trained to ignore the pain.

  Now that I’m lying prone on the edge of the roof, I attempt to lower my left leg. I start by sliding it off the edge and then gently down toward the terrace’s stone railing.

  “How’m I doing, Gracie?”

  “Almost there, love.” Her voice is high-pitched, full of stress. My every movement bears its weight on her beating heart.

  I feel it. The solid firmness of the banister.

  “Okay, now for my arm,” I say. “When you can reach it, take hold of my hand.”

  “Yes, love. I’m here. I’m here.”

  This time, in order for me to extend my hand down over the roof’s edge, I have to stretch. I must bring my body so close to the steep edge that I find myself on the brink of dropping. It’s as if I’m floating in midair. Makes me wonder how I managed to climb up here in the first place. But take it from a combat vet: The climb is always the easy part. It’s getting back down that’s treacherous.

  “Can you reach it, Grace?”

  “I’m trying!”

  In my head, I see her struggling to make herself taller so she can reach my fingers and then my hand. I stretch until I feel our fingertips touching, and then our hands, and a second later, her tight grip.

  “Gotcha!”

  “Don’t let go,” I insist.

  I pray I don’t suddenly drop and pull her over with me. How will the headline look? Blind soldier and artist fiancée fall to their tragic death in romantic Venice. The news will be an international sensation. Death in Venice . . . Tragedy in the Midst of Rekindled Love . . . Fiancé Falls for Fiancée . . .

  I press my weight onto my left foot.

  “Grace,” I say. “When I tell you, I want you to pull me in toward the door. You got that?”

  She’s already tugging on me. “Got it!”

  “On three.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “One. Two. Three—”

  She pulls me in toward the apartment and I slide off the roof, drop onto the banister and onto the slate-covered terrace floor, my hand still gripped in hers.

  A wave of pain shoots up and down my spine and my butt cheeks since they cushioned the fall. But at least I didn’t plummet to my death onto the stone cobbles or into a filthy, shallow canal.

  Grace drops to her knees and hugs me. “You stupid jerk. What prompted you to do something so stupid? So selfish?”

  Painfully, I peer into Grace’s tear-filled eyes. I want to see them before I lose my sight again.

  “I was sleepwalking,” I explain. But the truth sounds ridiculous.

  “We’ll learn to lock the doors. I’ll hold you all night long.”

  I draw her to me and, as I do, the light of the sun begins to fill the studio. I see the back of Grace’s canvas. I see the couch and the harvest table and I see our bed, the blanket and sheets tossed about. As I soak in the vision, I sense the darkness coming on. It’s like a total eclipse of the sun, only not as achingly slow.

  We enter the apartment, hand in hand.

  “When I was sleepwalking,” I say, “I was asleep. But I could see.”

  “How can that be? What difference does sleeping make?”

  We approach the bed and I sit myself on the edge, then lie back, feeling the small cuts and scrapes from the shards of broken rooftop tiles.

  “Because there’s nothing wrong with me,” I say, my chest filling with a strange sense of optimism. “It’s more like my brain is trying to reboot or something. But it keeps getting stuck every time it tries.”

  “How can there be nothing wrong? Lately you spend most of your life in the dark.” She sighs. “Maybe the army did something to you, and you just don’t know it.”

  I laugh. “There’s nothing physically wrong. There’s only my memory. Or a version of my memory anyway. I fell asleep last night to some bad remembrances. Had some bad dreams.”

  She lies beside me, curls into me.

  “What remembrances, Nick? Open up to me.”

  I see a dead little boy. See Karen’s drowned head. See a man strapped to a chair in a dark windowless room.

  “Never mind,” I say, closing my eyes. “I just . . . can’t.”

  Grace doesn’t respond, as if making another sound will somehow send me back up onto that roof. With the sun almost fully risen and bathing our studio in radiant warmth, I once more feel exhaustion invade the blood swimming through my veins, and I surrender to a deep sleep.

  Chapter 8

  When I wake up again, I smell coffee. I reach out for Grace, but she’s not there.

  As I crawl out of bed, I feel exhausted, but still energized, optimistic. The sight has left my eyes again, but it hasn’t been replaced with complete blackness this time—as if a war is being waged inside my brain between the power of the light and the power of darkness.

  Six steps to the center of the studio, and the blended smell of oil paint, turpentine, and freshly brewed espresso fills the air. The smells tell me Grace is painting. If I look in the direction of the open French doors, I can make out her silhouette sitting at her easel. She is surrounded by light. I can almost feel the fire burning off of her.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” she says, her voice free from the stress and panic that filled it just a little while ago.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “It’s eight thirty, soldier. You slept for another two hours after I saved your life.” She laughs.

  “You saved my life?”

  “That’s my story.”

  I hear her get up from her stool.

  “Coffee?” she says.

  “Keep painting, Gracie. I can manage—”

  “To burn up the building. That’s a gas stove, my lovely husband-to-be. And must I remind you that at present we live above a book
shop? Real paper books.”

  “That place downstairs has been practically emptied out, last I looked. People read e-books on their smartphones now. On their Kindles.”

  “Last time you looked?”

  “Very funny. If I’d lost a leg in the war would you call me Peg?”

  “You’ve got to look on the bright side, babe.” She giggles. “Oops, there I go again.”

  She makes the coffee for me, and I take it out onto the terrace. If I stare directly into the sun, my head fills with a light so profound it warms my entire body. Heaven must be like this. Light and warmth and happiness. I sometimes like to think the men killed under my command over the past two decades are staring back at me, cold beers in their hands, smiles on their faces, content voices telling me everything’s okay now. That death isn’t so bad. It’s the dying part that’s hard.

  I drink my coffee with milk and soon I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  “Come,” Grace says. “I want to show you something.”

  Taking me by the hand, she leads me the three or four steps back inside the apartment through the French doors, past her easel.

  “I think I’m done,” she says, as she releases my hand. “I worked like a fiend while you slept.”

  “You’re kidding, right? I’m blinder than Stevie Wonder right now.”

  It’s true there have been times when I’ve been able to see with near 20/20 vision over the course of the past week. But during those times, Grace had always made sure to cover her work in progress with the drop cloth. She wouldn’t take a chance on my seeing an unfinished piece. Now she wants me to see when I am blind.

  “Here, Nick,” she says, once more taking hold of my hands. “What do you see?”

  Gently she lifts my hands and brings them so close to the painting it’s as if I can feel the heat radiating off the canvas. She proceeds to move my hands in the exact shape of the object she has spent the past week, on and off, sketching and painting.

  “Take your time,” she says. “Try to see it.”

  I feel my hands making a kind of circular motion. Then she drops them just a bit, and my hands make a more oval motion. Next she moves my hands to the right, then to the left. She lowers them another few inches and moves them up and down, not once, but twice, as if to translate two parallel sticks or piers or even legs. I’m still confused. But, at the same time, something strange happens inside me. I feel like laughing, but I also feel like crying. Grace’s hands wrap around my own. Her feathery hair brushes up against my face and I smell its rose-petal scent.