hero, patriot, and philosopher. Such a load of crap. John with his megabucks job, celebrity profile, beautiful wife. John with the picture-perfect family, the old man retired army, Mom a freakin’ saint, a brother who was his best friend, and a kid sister who idolized him. When you have it all, people adore you and want to give you more. But why should John have all those things when he has zippo?
Yeah, yeah, life is unfair. But nobody says you can’t make a few changes to even the score.
He fits the two parts of the rifle back together and replaces a pin. John’s death is just the first step in restitution. With the king out of the way, he can move in and scoop up some of the goods left behind. What guy wouldn’t want a piece of that wife…a place in the perfect family? And who knows, if he can get close enough he might have a shot at some monetary gain, too.
Rest in peace, Johnny boy.
And don’t worry about the good life you left behind. He smiles as he removes the soiled patch from the end of his cleaning rod. I’m ready and willing to jump in your boots.
Chapter 1
Fort Lewis,
Washington Abby
It’s wrong to wish your life away.
Abby Fitzgerald knows that. Still, resting one hip against the porch rail that’s been painted over so many times it’s taken on a new, snakelike shape of its own, she wishes away a beautiful September morning. The green stretch of lawn, the yellow and orange mums bursting like a dozen suns in the community flower bed, the expanse of cerulean sky and Mount Rainier huddled on the horizon like a gentle giant—let them be gone.
Vanished.
Abby would trade them all for the grim, gray rain of December, the month her husband returns from Iraq. Gripping her hot teacup with both hands, she closes her eyes and wills away the day, the months…September, October, November, December.
Which does not work. When she opens her eyes, September reigns, dammit.
A few feet away, birds swoop onto feeders John tacked in place. Chickadees and house finches quickly snatch up black sunflower seeds, then bounce down to the bushes. At the saucer dangling from the porch overhang, the buzz of a hummingbird is slightly alarming, and Abby catches sight of the tiny bird just long enough to see the patches of iridescent violet on its head. Busy creatures. So damned chipper. She should follow their example—wake up and get to work. She needs a clear head to pull her notes together for tonight’s presentation.
But the dream absorbs her.
Last night, John seemed so real that it felt more like a visitation—a spark of contact with the warmth of his body—than a dream. Her mind replays the sequence, the sensation of John moving beside her, twisting the sheets away from her the way he always does, then flopping onto his side with a relieved sigh. Abby was so caught up in the ebb and flow of her own rhythmic breath beneath the quilt that it required great effort to open her eyes through the mask of sleep. But she did. She turned to him and observed him settling in beside her, his head a halo of dark hair, his broad back a wall of comfort for her as his solid body sank into the mattress.
The citrus scent of his aftershave clung to the bedding, and she heard him, too. Heard him calling her name, his voice a tidal wave washing through their small bedroom, breaking through her consciousness, then crashing into the street outside to resound over the neighborhood, the military base, the wide patches of green lawn and suburban sprawl that stretch north to Seattle and east to Mount Rainier.
“Abby,” he called, the tenor of his voice both heartbroken and exalted, and so heavy it rumbled the bed, shook the room, causing their wedding photo and the tiny porcelain bowls on the dresser to shimmy and clink. Abby recalls bracing herself for the earthquake, having experienced them a few times since moving to the Pacific Northwest. But it was only the ripple of her husband’s voice stirring the air.
Even as her eyes searched the dim landscape of her room, the wide expanse of pale sheets beside her, she knew John wouldn’t—couldn’t—be here. Of course not. He was on the other side of the world, where their night is our day and our day is their night. While she slept, the sun was already blazing over the desert plain of Iraq. Thousands of miles away.
And yet his presence felt so real.
“Just a dream,” Abby says aloud, for only the chickadees and nuthatches to hear. “Just a dream,” she reassures herself, knowing that it still can’t explain the vividness of the moment. The smell of sweet clove from his aftershave.
Or the warmth of her husband’s body beside her.
She’s not sure when she dozed off, but this morning she awakened to an empty bed and a beautiful morning. The golden September sun warmed the earth with one last sigh of summer, the air crisp and brash and bright. A gorgeous day, but Abby Fitzgerald has learned not to trust a beautiful morning. She’s seen tragedy dance in the arms of happiness, dance without missing a beat.
The morning her father was stricken with cardiac arrest, Abby was rolling on the grass of the junior high, playing Ultimate Frisbee with her gym class. The day John told her of his discontent with professional sports and his desire to enlist in the army began in Paris with a walk through a farmer’s market with all the color and texture of an Impressionist painting. And the most deceptive morning imaginable etched itself deep within her memory: the September day that dawned with a clear, blue sky over Manhattan five years ago, the morning she looked out from her dorm room and spotted smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center across the harbor.
Digging her fingernails into the thick paint of the porch rail, Abby turns toward the kitchen. You can’t keep going back to that. If she’s losing her mind, she’s not about to go down without a strong cup of coffee.
While coffee brews, she flips open her laptop and checks her e-mail. Nothing from John, but then sometimes he is assigned to shifts that keep him away from the computer for extended periods. She dashes off an e-mail, telling him about the vivid dream.
I knew I missed you, she writes, but now I’m dreaming you into our bed. Sure sign that I’m losing my mind without you. December can’t come soon enough.
Although this is John’s second deployment to Iraq, this time the detachment feels more acute, the parting more intimate, and Abby still wonders how she fell into this role of military wife. It was not something she foresaw for herself when she was making plans, thinking she’d make very conscious choices, as if life were a route that could be charted on Mapquest. She’d never imagined saying good-bye to her new husband and trying to patch together a life on an army base with other women married to the military. Although Abby has always been independent and competent, this separation from the man she loves seems endless, as if she’s put her life on hold, sealed into an airtight container until the day of John’s return.
You’ve got your job to do, John e-mailed her when she mentioned her feelings. Remember the deal? Finish that master’s and study for the licensing exam.
The plan made perfect sense when John departed on the drab green bus. While he was gone, she would focus on her psych degree, finishing up her course work before embarking on clinicals. But she hadn’t expected to be distracted with worry, flipping on CNN, Nightline, the Today show in search of news that might involve John. Tuning in to NPR while driving. Naively, she’d thought it would end soon. Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad fell in 2003; wasn’t that the goal of the U.S. Army? They’d found no weapons of mass destruction. Recently, she’d heard a politician compare the use of force in Iraq to trying to fix a wristwatch with a sledgehammer. But the word was, our armed forces were in it for the long haul.
Outside, she lowers her laptop and books onto the table. Their yard backs up to a common area that John rallied residents to refurbish soon after they moved here. Japanese maples and boxwood shrubs were planted, a brick barbecue was built, and a play structure installed for children of all the military families housed here. “Don’t you think you should ask permission to do all this stuff?” one resident asked, squinting at John suspiciously. Abby sips