Via Dolorosa(77)

Again—madness…

“He was a good boy,” Granger said flatly.

Standing in the doorway beside Nick, Myles Granger whispered, “Shoot me in the head.”

“A good boy,” Granger continued. “He thought so highly of you, Nick. Over and over he talks about you in his letters.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s how you wound up here.”

“Yes,” Nick said, not knowing what else he should say. “Thank you.”

“A good boy,” marveled Granger, his eyes scanning letter after letter. He had them balled in his fists, damp with his tears, the writing smeared and smudged in places. Nick thought of Emma, and how she had said something about the smell and feel of a letter doused in tears. When had that been? He couldn’t remember. Suddenly, he found he could not remember a single thing.

Cicadas slammed against the glass doors.

We’re under attack, he thought with little emotion. We’ve been ambushed and we’re under attack.

“Eleven months,” Granger went on. He set one of the letters aside and brought his eyes up, unfocused, and looked out across the room and at nothing in particular. “Eleven months of handwriting, and that’s all I have left of him. Summed up and kept in a shoebox, and that’s all I have of him.”

“I’m sorry,” he told the bell captain.

“Not you,” Granger said. “Never you. Don’t be sorry. Everyone else, Nick—everyone else can be sorry. All of them, they can all be sorry. But not you, Nick. Never you.”

“Mr. Granger—”

Granger raised a handgun and pressed it to his temple.

“Mr. Granger!”

Shoot me in the head, Lieutenant, his mind yammered.

“You can’t save everyone, Nick.”

“Put the gun down, Mr. Granger.” And it suddenly occurred to him that he did not know the old man’s first name. “Please…”

“I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger confided. The gun was still to his head, his eyes still focused on nothing across the room. “I’m tired of seeing him sitting at a table or walking up the beach or standing just behind me in a mirror. I can’t keep seeing him.”

These words touched Nick’s spine with an icy finger.

“I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger went on, “and I’m tired of thinking I hear him and I’m tired of dreaming about him every single night.” The bell captain’s wet, rheumy eyes slid in Nick’s direction. His flesh looked nearly translucent. “Do you know what it’s like to be haunted by the dead?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

“Why won’t the dead rest?”

“They do,” he told the bell captain. “Maybe it just seems like they don’t to people like you and me.”

“Why?”

“Guilt,” he said.

“Yes,” Granger said. “Oh, yes. Guilt. Because my boy is dead. Because my boy is dead and there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about any of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “They rest; we don’t.”

Granger, pressing his eyes shut, cocked the hammer of the handgun.

“I killed your son,” Nick said.

And suddenly he was back there. There was the sound of a deep-belly roar. It did not strike suddenly and all at once but, rather, it appeared to create itself—birth itself—rising up from the earth and gaining momentum as it climbed. It defined the word “force,” as it was a force, as it was a thing, a noun. Then it burst. The sound was a storm showering down. It was a mortar, and it was very close. It had gone off directly outside the building they were holed-up in. Aftershock resonated in their bones; dust and powdered concrete roiled into the open doorway, the glassless window holes in a single, hot exhalation. Smoke came with it, heavy and black. No one breathed. Outside, perhaps directly over their heads, the sound of rocks and shale sliding off the roof and smashing to the ground was audible through their cotton-plugged ears…

Nick’s words seemed to hang forever in the air. Standing in the doorway of the hotel room, he merely stared at the bell captain’s hunched form perched on the edge of the bed. After some time, Granger’s eyes peeled open; Nick could hear the sick, sticking sound of his wet lids coming apart.

“I killed your son,” he repeated. “I killed them all.”

And it was only the second time he had spoken the words aloud. The first time, he had been back home, injured and beaten and hollowed, and he had managed to arrest himself before a hallway mirror in his father’s house when no one else was around, and he had looked at himself—had looked at the deep-set eyes, the rough and stubbly neck and chin, the haunting pallor of his skin, the old man face—and he had said those very words for what was the first time and for what, he could only hope, would be the last: I killed them all. He’d said, Coward. He’d said, I killed them all.

Granger brought the gun away from his temple. “What are you talking about, boy? Why say such a horrible thing to me?”

“Because it’s the truth,” he said solemnly. “And if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, you might as well shoot me dead first, and we can end this thing together.”

A second shell exploded. The brunt of it reverberated all through his body. Pushing himself against the far wall, hugging the wall with his back, he gripped his rifle and kept his eyelids pressed shut. He tried not to breathe. He couldn’t breathe; there was no breathing. The smoke pried at him and poked him and attempted to gain access to the inside of his body any way it could. Like osmosis…as if it could simply seep in through the pores of his skin. And while the smoke itself did not last long, it seemed an eternity not to breathe…