Girl of Lies (23 page)

Another wait, as the main switchboard transferred her to the Texas Senator’s office. Then she spoke again. “Hello. Yes, this is Doctor Carrie Sherman. I’m calling to request an appointment for tomorrow afternoon with Senator Rainsley?”

Another wait. Then she said, “Yes, I’m well aware of that. You can tell his Chief of Staff that this is a personal matter, that it involves the Secretary of Defense and Adelina Thompson, and that the Senator will know
exactly
what it’s about. And… please tell the Chief of Staff that if I don’t have an answer by 4 pm, my next phone call will be to the press.”

Damn,
Andrea thought. She doesn’t kid around. Of course, for Carrie this wasn’t an academic exercise. It wasn’t about reconnecting with their long lost father. It was about getting a blood test. It was about her daughter’s health.

After another wait, this one much longer, Carrie sat up. “Hello? Yes, this is Carrie Sherman. You’re the Senator’s Chief of Staff? Oh… yes… no, I don’t think the Senator would thank you if I were to tell you what it was about. It has to do with Adelina Thompson, my mother, and it’s a potential scandal, and I think the Senator will want to hear from me, and that’s all I’m going to say…” She smiled, then said, “Yes. I’ll be happy to.”

Another long wait. Then, Carrie was giving them her phone number.

“Do you think they’ll actually call back?” Sarah asked.

“It all depends on whether or not the staffers took me seriously enough to mention it to the Senator. If they do, he’ll make sure we get a meeting. I’m certain of that.”

“In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of questions,” Andrea said.

“Me too,” Carrie said. “And I think the only people who can answer them are the Senator… and our mother.”

“Try her again?”

“Yeah,” Carrie replied. She began dialing her cell phone again. She put it on speaker, and the three of them heard the ringing… two, three, four, then five rings. Finally, their mother’s voice, unusually calm. “This is Adelina Thompson. Please leave a message.”

“Mother, this is Andrea, Sarah and Carrie. We’re calling… because Dad told us about Senator Rainsley. And… we… just… please call.”

She disconnected the phone.

“When did you talk with her last?” Andrea asked.

“A few days ago. The thing is… you know she stayed with us, after…” Carrie looked at the floor. “After the accident. And honestly, it was… so strange. Mother’s never been… I don’t know. Close? Touchy? She’s always been distant. A little crazy.”

“Not always,” Sarah said.

“True. Not always. She was there for me after the accident.” Carrie’s voice came out rough. “Anyway… after the accident last year, she stayed here through the fall. Dad went home to San Francisco with Jessica, so she could finish her senior year of high school.”

“I got to home school,” Sarah said.

“Right. Screaming and bitching all the way,” Carrie said. The words had sting, but the loving tone of voice smoothed out the rough edges. “Anyway… when Dad and Jessica got here for Christmas, it was obvious something was wrong. Jessica was… a mess.”

Sarah leaned forward and said, “She was all strung out. Drunk, drugs, I don’t know what.”

“
Madre de dios,”
Andrea said. “Drugs?”

Sarah nodded, but it was Carrie who continued the story. “Yes. Mom was pissed at Dad… really pissed. It was the first time I ever heard her really launch into him. So right before New Year’s, Mom came and talked to me. She said…” Carrie swallowed, hard.

Sarah continued the story. “She said something like, we were strong enough to pick up from here, and that Jessica needed her more now.”

“Right,” Carrie said. “And so she went back to San Francisco with Jessica. Dad moved back east a few weeks later, when the administration started talking about asking him to come out of retirement.”

Andrea shrugged. This was all interesting, but it didn’t really answer anything. “So where is she
now?”

Carrie said, “I don’t know. But…I’m worried.”

I
N ANY KIND OF a decent world, you would only lose your best friend once.

But Dylan Paris had known for a long time that decent was a relative thing. Some days he woke up and stared at the ceiling and saw dead bodies. The bodies of his friends, the bodies of the people they killed. Because he lost two best friends. The first, Roberts, shredded by a bomb buried in dirt road. Roberts had probably lobbed a hundred thousand prayers in his lifetime, but they weren’t enough to save him. Eighteen months later, when Dylan had finally healed, Ray was murdered by a fellow soldier.

Most of the time he was afraid to admit it to Alex, or even to himself. But—occasionally, in times of stress, in times of emotional upheaval, he saw other dead bodies. Of the people he
wanted
to hurt, but wouldn’t. Because when Dylan Paris thought about Roberts being blown up in Afghanistan, when he thought of Kowalski’s death saving a life in Dega Payan, when he thought of the closest friend he’d ever known, Ray Sherman, being run down by a fellow soldier, it filled Dylan with unspeakable rage. The kind of rage that can spontaneously combust. The kind of rage that could take a soul and twist it, turn it black and brittle, the kind of rage that could destroy a life.

The worst part was that Dylan couldn’t tell anyone. He couldn’t talk about it. He couldn’t look his wife in the eyes and say, “Remember how I dealt with all that stuff and moved on? Just kidding.” He didn’t know where to turn. Once upon a time he would have turned to Ray. Ray was his sergeant, his leader, his best friend. Ray was his hero. Ray was the man who had inspired Dylan to heal.

Ray was gone.

After the funeral, Dylan moved on, because he had to. He cried in Alex’s arms. But he didn’t reveal the rage. He didn’t tell her, because giving voice to that anger meant he might act on it. Giving voice to that anger meant he’d failed. A week after Ray’s death, Dylan was back in classes at Columbia, buried in his schoolwork even as Ray had been buried under the ground. He went from class to class, physically healed from his injures in the Army, but internally isolated.

He knew other students talked about it. Even the other veterans. Sometimes he would hear whispers when he limped into class and slid into his seat in the back of the room. A buddy approached from the Milvets group on campus, and Dylan told him to leave him alone.

The hard part was, he knew his behavior and his isolation were hurting Alex. They’d only been married a couple of months when Ray was killed, and nothing had been right since. Every week she looked a little more haggard, a little more frustrated.

The third week in September, they took the train to DC, catching the 2 pm train out of Penn Station on Friday afternoon, both of them skipping their final class of the day. They leaned on each other the entire ride down. Sarah had been scheduled to go home that Friday, but a staph infection prevented that.

When asked how serious it was, Carrie didn’t mince words. “It’s serious. Very serious.”

Dylan remembered the train ride down. Alex had been a mess of worry. Dylan stayed wrapped up tight, his arms around her but his emotions a million miles away. They’d taken this same nightmare train ride down just a few weeks prior, a trip that ended with his best friend’s funeral.

“She’ll be okay,” he’d whispered to her, over and over again, as Alex fell apart. Inside, Dylan felt increasingly claustrophobic and angry. At one point he closed his eyes and imagined that he had somehow found Sergeant Hicks right before he pressed the gas pedal, right before he launched his jeep into a murderous downhill drive that ended with broken glass and dreams on a street in Washington, DC. He imagined that he reached over with a knife and cut Hicks’s throat, the blood spattering everywhere.

Even that vision did nothing to ease his anger. It felt cold, almost clinical.

Nothing could bring Ray back. Nothing could change anything.

They spent that weekend in Washington, holding hands with Carrie, talking with Sarah, who lay desperately in an isolation room in the intensive care unit, harboring an antibiotic-resistant infection that could easily kill her.

Alex cried the whole way home, and Dylan held her. But his heart wasn’t in it. At one point, she whispered into his neck, “You feel like you’re a million miles away, Dylan.”

Not quite a million. Kabul, Afghanistan was seven thousand miles from New York. Seven thousand miles of heartbreak. Seven thousand miles of loss.

Sarah pulled through. Dylan spent untold hours on the phone with her. After all, he’d been nearly crippled when his leg was severely injured in a bomb blast. As she began to struggle to recover and finally got out of bed, beginning physical therapy, Dylan stayed in touch on the phone almost every day. Encouraging her, because the fact was, recovery from that kind of injury was a bitter, awful process.

Finally, just before Columbus Day, Sarah went home. Not back to San Francisco, where she’d grown up, but to Carrie’s condo in downtown Bethesda, Maryland.

That weekend, Dylan and Alex returned to Bethesda. They’d settled into a new equilibrium. Not distant, but not as close as they’d once been. Dylan loved Alex. He’d do anything for her, up to and including stopping a bullet if that’s what it took.

But he couldn’t tell her the truth. Because, by October, Dylan had a secret.

It happened almost by accident. On a Friday night at the end of September, he’d dropped in at a friend’s dorm after class to go over an assignment.

“Want a beer?”

The question was casual, unintentionally deadly. Conrad Barstow had no clue Dylan had struggled with drugs as a teenager. He had no clue Dylan’s dad was an alcoholic. So when he handed Dylan that beer, it was completely unexpected. Dylan popped the tab and took a long drink.

He had sighed. Relief flooded through his bones. Dylan had been subsisting on rage for weeks. The drink didn’t fix that. It didn’t get him drunk. But it took the edge of the rage off in a way that made Dylan close his eyes and nearly weep. “Thanks, man,” he’d said.

It was that simple.

Dylan didn’t run out and become a raging alcoholic. For one thing he was newly married, and he loved his wife. For Dylan, control mattered more than anything. Control over his life. Control over himself. Control over the alcohol. Because no matter what, he was never going to hurt her. He was never going to do what his father had done.

No matter what.

Alex knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what.

His mother, on the other hand, saw right through him. In November they flew to Atlanta to spend Thanksgiving with Dylan’s mom. She met them just outside the security gate at Hartsfield Atlanta Airport, running forward and crying at the sight of her son. Dylan staggered under her weight as she caromed into him.

Linda Carlin was 42 years old. An active alcoholic until well into her thirties, her already greying hair and sagging skin made her look older. Her face was the contradictory tale of a gambler who was born again, a lifelong sinner who found God. In Linda’s case, she hit bottom when she woke up lying beside a dumpster behind one of the city of Atlanta’s many bars, her dress pushed up around her ears, sore all over her body and with no recollection of what had happened to her. Her alcoholic husband was nowhere to be found, and her twelve-year-old son was at home alone. That night she went to her first AA meeting.

Dylan only knew the barest outline of her story. But he knew that when she told others about it, her face glowed. She’d overcome the terror of that night, the shame of her drinking, the horror of its consequences. She’d learned to take care of herself, to lean on her God, and finally, in halting, difficult steps, to become the mother Dylan needed.

“Welcome home,” she said to him. Then she turned to embrace her daughter in law. Alex clutched her as if she were a life preserver.

As they walked out of the terminal, Dylan lit a cigarette. His mother said, “We won’t go until you finish—I finally quit, I don’t really want the smoke in the car.”

“You quit?” Dylan asked.

“Two months ago.”

“Jesus. Congratulations, I had no idea.”

She gave him a compassionate look. “You’ve had a lot on your mind.”

What was that supposed to mean?
Dylan thought. Did she somehow guess he was drinking again? He didn’t know how to gauge her reactions, because he knew she was watching him very closely. Linda Carlin knew her alcohol and she knew her alcoholics. And, while Dylan never counted himself as a fullblown alcoholic like his parents, he knew it was in his blood. He knew that it wouldn’t take much to push him over that edge, and he’d sworn he’d never go there.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t drink at all. That didn’t mean he had to completely restrict his life. Complete abstinence made sense for someone like his mom, who had completely wrecked her life. That’s not who Dylan was.

So he rode in the backseat of her late 80s Ford Escort station wagon, complete with cracked dashboard, fuzzy dice on the rearview mirror and a One Day at a Time bumper sticker. Dylan stared off into space in silence as his mother drove them back to her place. Alex sat up front, making awkward conversation.