Making Faces (38 page)

When they rushed into the ER and identified
themselves, the two police officers on their heels, they were led
to an empty partition. A thirty-something man in green scrubs with
Dr. Norwood written on his nametag, dark circles under his eyes,
and a subdued expression on his face, informed them that Bailey was
gone.

Bailey was dead. He'd been declared dead on
arrival.

Fern was the first to break down. She'd had
longer to process the possibility, and she'd known. Deep down she
had known the instant she saw the chair. Angie was in a state of
shock and Mike angrily demanded to be taken to him. The doctor
acquiesced and pulled the curtain aside.

Bailey's face and hair were wet and matted
with mud, the area around his nose and mouth wiped partially clean
during attempts to resuscitate. He looked different away from his
chair, like someone Fern had never met. One of Bailey's fingers was
bent at an odd angle and someone had placed his thin arms by his
sides, making him look even more foreign. Bailey called his arms
T-rex arms–completely useless and disproportionate to this rest of
his body. His legs were equally thin and the shoe on his right foot
was missing. The sock was soaked with mud like the rest of him and
his headlamp lay beside him on the gurney. The light was still on.
Fern couldn't take her eyes from it, as if the lamp was to blame.
She reached for it and tried to turn it off, but the button was
flat, permanently pressed down, and it wouldn't release.

“It was the light that helped us find him so
quickly,” Landon Knudsen offered. But it hadn't been quickly
enough.

“He was wearing his light! He was wearing his
headlamp, Mike!” Angie collapsed into the chair by Bailey's side
and clutched his lifeless hand. “How could this happen?”

Mike Sheen turned on the officers, on Landon
Knudsen whom he'd coached and taught, on the senior officer who had
a son who had attended his youth camp last summer. With tears in
his eyes and with a voice that had made his wrestlers sit up and
listen for three decades, he demanded, “I want to know what
happened to my son.”

And with very little resistance, knowing full
well that it was against protocol, they told him what little they
knew.

911 Dispatch had gotten a call from Bailey.
They had an idea of his general location and the fact that he was
in duress. Dispatch sent all available units to that location, and
within a few minutes, someone saw the light from his headlamp.

Interestingly enough, the band was twisted so
the actual light was on the back of Bailey's head, the way a kid
sometimes wears his hat with the brim in back. If the light had
been on the front of his head, it would have been submerged in
water and mud. Bailey had been found in the ditch with his headlamp
shining up into the heavens, marking the spot where he lay. The
officers would not confirm that Bailey had drowned. Nor would the
doctor. Both simply said that an autopsy would be performed to
determine cause of death, and with an expression of sorrow for
their loss, Bailey's parents and Fern were left alone behind the
thin partition, faced with death as life moved on around them.

Sarah Marsden didn't sleep well. She hadn't
slept well in years. After her husband Danny had passed away she
was sure she would sleep like she too had died, delivered from the
strain and hard labor of caring for someone who couldn't do much
for himself and who was angry and abusive toward anyone who tried
to help him.

Danny Marsden had been paralyzed from the
chest down in a car accident when their daughter Rita was six years
old. For five long years, Sarah had done her best to take care of
him and her young daughter, and for five long years she'd wondered
each day how she could go on. Danny's neediness and his misery took
a toll on them all, and when he passed away the day before Rita's
eleventh birthday, it was hard to feel anything but relief. Relief
for him and relief for herself, relief for her daughter who had
only seen her father at his very worst, though if Sarah was being
honest, Danny Marsden wasn't a nice man before his accident.

Yet Sarah still didn't sleep well. Not then,
and not now, more than ten years later. Maybe it was worry over her
daughter and young grandson, because Rita had chosen a man just
like her father. The difference was, Becker was able to inflict
physical pain as well as emotional pain. It was the bodily harm
Sarah worried about most. So when the phone rang at midnight she
was immediately alert and reaching for the phone.

“Hello,” she answered, hoping Rita just
needed to talk.

“She won't wake up!” Becker's voice blared
out, making her wince even as she pressed the phone more firmly to
her ear.

“Becker?”

“She won't wake up! I went in to get a couple
of beers at Jerry's and when I came back out to the truck she was
just laying there like she had passed out. But she wasn't
drunk!”

Fear slapped Sarah across the face and left
her reeling from the blow. Staggering, she braced herself against
her nightstand and kept her voice steady, “Becker? Where are
you?”

“I'm at home! Ty's screaming, and I don't
know what to do. She won't wake up!” Becker sounded like he'd had
more than a beer at Jerry's, and Sarah's fear swung on her again,
catching her in the stomach and doubling her over.

“Becker, I'm on my way!” Sarah was shoving
her feet into flip flops and grabbing her purse as she ran for the
door. “Call 911, okay? Hang up the phone and call 911!”

“She's tried to off herself! I know it! She
wants to leave me!” Becker was howling into the phone. “I won't let
her leave me! Rita–”

The phone went dead and Sarah trembled and
prayed as she threw herself into her car and squealed out of her
driveway. She punched at the keypad on her phone and tried to keep
herself together as she gave the 911 operator Rita's address and
repeated Becker's words: “Her husband says she won't wake up.”

Ambrose arrived a few minutes behind Fern's
parents, and all three were ushered into the ER at the same time
the gurney with Rita Garth was pushed through the emergency room
doors, an EMT calling out her vitals and giving an update on what
measures had been taken en route. A doctor shouted for an MRI, and
medical personnel descended on their new patient as Pastor Taylor
and his wife stood dumbfounded by the arrival of a second loved
one, still unaware of the condition of the first. And then Sarah
Marsden was rushing through the doors, little Tyler, wearing a pair
of mud-streaked pajamas, in her arms. Becker lurked behind her,
seeming distraught and ill-at-ease. When he saw Ambrose he fell
back, fear and loathing curling his lip. He shoved his hands into
his pockets and looked away disdainfully as Ambrose focused in on
the conversation that was taking place.

“Sarah! What's happened?” Joshua and Rachel
swarmed her, Rachel taking the filthy toddler from her arms, Joshua
putting his arm around Sarah's shaking shoulders.

Sarah had very little to tell them, but
Rachel sat with her and Becker in the waiting area, while Joshua
and Ambrose went to check on Bailey's status. Pastor Joshua missed
the fear that stole across Becker's face and the way his eyes slid
to the exit upon the mention of Bailey's name. He also missed the
two policemen that were positioned just inside the emergency room
door and the cruiser that had just pulled up at the curb beyond the
glass doors of the waiting room. But Ambrose didn't.

When Joshua and Ambrose were led to the
little room where Bailey lay, they saw Bailey's parents gathered at
his bedside, Fern huddled in the corner, and Bailey lying with his
eyes closed on the hospital gurney. Someone had brought Angie Sheen
a small plastic tub filled with soapy water, and with loving care,
Bailey's mother was washing the mud and grime from his face and
hair, gently administering to her son for the last time. It was
obvious from the grieving of those gathered that Bailey was not
simply resting.

Ambrose had never seen a dead body before.
The man was just lying in a heap outside the south entrance to the
compound. Ambrose's unit had patrol duty that morning and Paulie
and Ambrose came upon him first. His face was a swollen mass of
black and blue, blood was dried at the corners of his mouth and
beneath his nostrils. He wouldn't have been recognizable if not for
his hair. When they realized who it was, Paulie had walked away
from the dead man they all knew and thrown up the breakfast he'd
consumed only an hour before.

They called him Cosmo–the a mass of
frizzy, curly hair that stuck up and out from his head identical to
Cosmo Kramer on the popular American sitcom,
Seinfeld.
He'd
been working with the Americans, feeding them tips here and there,
giving them information on the comings and goings of certain people
of interest. He was quick to smile and hard to scare, and his
daughter, Nagar, was the same age as Paulie's sister, Kylie. Kylie
had even written Nagar a couple of letters and Nagar had responded
with pictures and a few basic words in English that her father had
taught her.

They had found his bike first. It had been
tossed outside the base too, its wheels spinning, handle bars
buried in the sand. They checked for a flat and looked around for
Cosmo, surprised that he had just abandoned it in the middle of the
road that circled the perimeter beyond the Concertina wire. And
then they found Cosmo. His dead fingers had been wrapped around an
American flag. It was one of those little cheap ones on a wooden
stick, the kind you wave at parades on the fourth of July. The
message was clear. Someone had discovered Cosmo's willingness to
assist the Americans. And they’d killed him.

Paulie was the most shaken of all of them.
He didn't understand the hate. The Sunnis hated the Shiites. The
Shiites hated the Sunnis. They both hated the Kurds. And they all
hated Americans, though the Kurds were slightly more tolerant and
recognized that America might be their only hope.

“
Remember when that church burned down in
Hannah Lake? Remember how Pastor Taylor helped organize a
fundraiser and everybody kind of pitched in and the church got
rebuilt? It wasn't even Pastor Taylor's church. It was a Methodist
church. Half of the people who gave money or helped rebuild weren't
Methodist. Heck, more than half had never set foot in any church,”
Paulie had said, incredulous. “But everybody helped
anyway.”

“
There are scumbags in America, too,”
Beans reminded gently. “We may not have seen it in Hannah Lake. But
don't for one second believe there isn't evil everywhere.”

“
Not like this,” Paulie whispered, his
innocence making him resistant to the truth.