This Side of Salvation

CHAPTER 35

NOW

I wake in the tent with the taste of Cheez Croc-o-Doodles haunting my tongue. The peace I fell asleep with has fled.

It’s not the cold that keeps me awake, or worrying about how we’re going to rescue Mom and Dad from Almost Heaven, though neither helps.

It’s the silence. At home I usually play music or a white-noise app while I drift off, but until now I never realized how much I needed all that static to block out memories. The sounds from that hateful day still fill my ears when everything is quiet.

Finally I give up and crawl out of the tent. The moon has descended behind a mountain, so the stars have taken over the sky, like kids coming out to play when the adults have left. The lake laps half-heartedly against the shore, without the rhythmic roar like ocean waves. I find enough fallen pine branches to make a soft, dry place to sit and watch the water.

Bailey would love this. I pull my hood up against the cold air and try to take refuge in thoughts of her, form a protective mental cloak made up of memories of her skin and sighs. It doesn’t work. The best I can do is stay in the present and wonder if my father is gazing out at this same lake, if the silence is forcing him to relive the past too.

I remember my friends’ looks of horror and pity, the whispers in the school hallway (“he was there”; “he’s going to crack any day now. I would”; “I heard he saw the blood on the wall”), I remember the dreams where I saved him, and the nightmares where I almost saved him.

I was the last of us to see John alive, the morning of Saturday, February 27. My father was at the office and Mom was chauffeuring Mara to voice lessons. I was supposed to be at baseball practice, but I’d been grounded for some reason. At twelve years old, I had yet to truly rebel, but I was always screwing up in some way.

So when John called and said he’d snagged a surprise half-hour video-chat slot from one of his fellow officers in return for a favor, I had him all to myself.

“How’s the fastball?” John leans close to the monitor in the air base’s communal computer room.

“Awesome. They clocked me at seventy-five last practice.”

“Seventy-five. Be careful.” He fidgets with his earbuds. “Remember, it’s about control, not speed.”

“It’s about control and speed. I want to learn the knuckle curve next.”

John shakes his head and adjusts the collar of his light gray PT shirt. “You start in with the fancy stuff at your age, you’ll ruin your elbow.”

“I like the fancy stuff,” I protest, but I secretly make a mental note to do what he says. He’s never steered me wrong.

“You like making those batters look like idiots, big man. Hey, do me a favor and pull that shade behind you. With all the glare, I can barely see your face.”

I do as he asks, and when I sit back down at Dad’s desk, I remember what I was so psyched to show my brother.

“Check this out.” I push aside the half-empty bag of Cheez Croc-oDoodles and pick up the 1/68 scale model of John’s jet, the A-10 Thunderbolt II. “Sweet, huh?”

My brother grins at the sight of the lumbering, ghost-gray aircraft. “You built yourself your own piece of beautiful ugly.”

I didn’t build it, I bought it, but he looks so happy, I don’t deny it.

“No, no, no!” A man’s voice comes from beyond John’s monitor, judging by the direction his head turns. It’s definitely a guy, but his tone pitches up as his protests continue.

John’s bushy dark brows pinch together. Then he types into the chat window: One of the airmen’s got trouble at home. Like I had with Giselle.

“That sucks.” John’s girlfriend cheated on him while he was away at Undergraduate Pilot Training. “Is that his girlfriend he’s talking to?” I know the airman can’t hear me, since John’s earbuds are plugged into his computer.

Wife, not gf. Yeah, that’s her. They fight a lot, but this is the worst I’ve heard. He’s a good guy, one of the security forces, which is like our police.

He rises in his chair a few inches to peer over what I guess is a row of computers, then types again.

Might have to cut this short. I should talk to him when he’s done.

“Why?”

Bc I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to compete with Jody. “Jody” is military slang for the guy (imaginary or not) who’s sleeping with your wife or girlfriend back home while you’re risking your life for your country.

“How are the Phillies looking?” he asks me, changing the subject. “I try to keep up, but there’s not much time.”

We discuss off-season trades, which players came up from the minors for spring training and which’ll probably go down, never to be seen on prime time again. I can almost pretend he’s sitting across from me at the breakfast table. Mara’s going to be so jealous when she gets home and finds out I got to talk to John for this long.

During our conversation, my brother keeps glancing over at the heartbroken airman, whose voice rises and falls in an incoherent but unmistakable plea for mercy. John runs his palm over his own dark-brown hair, which has had that same high-and-tight cropped cut since he first applied to the Air Force Academy seven years ago. I have literally never seen him unshaven.

His nerves prompt me to pick up the model A-10 and move it from hand to hand as I speak. Its nickname is the Warthog because it’s so hideous to look at. It flies low and slow, made to swoop in and shoot everything in its path—tanks, trucks, people. I wonder how John will feel after his first mission, slaughtering up close instead of dropping a bomb from a mile up or from a control room thousands of miles away like the drone “pilots” he makes fun of.

“How long did it take you to build that?” John asks me.

I look him straight in the eye and start to lie. “About a—”

“Hang on. Sergeant, wanna keep it down over there?” He says this with a smile. My brother doesn’t like the part of being an officer where he has to boss people around. He just wants to be a pilot, not a commander.

“Oh, I’ll keep it down, Lieutenant.” The sergeant utters the last word with cold disdain. “I’ll keep it down forever.”

John goes perfectly still, then his lips part just far enough to whisper, “No.”

“What’s wrong?” My pulse speeds, and I turn up the computer’s volume to hear.

“Sergeant, lower your weapon.” A direct order, but John’s voice softens. “You don’t want to do that to yourself.” He slowly takes out his earbuds, then jumps up and disappears offscreen.

“John?” I hear his low, insistent voice (“This is not the answer,” he says) and the sergeant’s loud protests (“I’ll show her—don’t you dare try and stop me!“).

I turn the volume knob to the max. “John, what—”

An explosion comes from the speakers.

I cover my ears. “John!”

A second blast, same as the first.

“John, where are you?”

I grip the sides of the monitor like they’re his shoulders.

A gasping, liquid moan of pain. My brother spews an incoherent stream of words ending in “Mom.”

“John?” I whisper.

“David?”

My heart leaps, until I realize the voice is behind me. My father.

“I came home and heard shots,” he says. “You know you’re not allowed to play video games when you’re grounded.”

I can’t take my eyes off the screen. My mouth moves but nothing comes out.

“David, what’s going on? Isn’t that John’s?” He swivels my chair to make me face him. “Look at me.” He shakes me so hard, if I were a baby I’d be dead. “Say something!”

I have no answer, no breath to speak my brother’s name.

Another moan from John over the speaker, higher pitched but fluid muffled. He begs for Mom again. There’s no sound from the man who just shot my brother, then himself.

Suddenly the room is full of voices offscreen, shouting orders or speaking in urgent, soothing tones. We see nothing but John’s empty chair.

“Hey!” My father waves his arms at the monitor. “Over here!”

“They can’t hear us,” I rasp. “Earbuds.” I clutch the model A-10 to my chest, the tips of its wooden wings digging into my collarbone.

A man leans in front of the monitor, leaning over to see. “Oh, shit. Captain, come look at this. There’s a kid.”

An African-American woman, not much older than John, sits at the computer and tugs out the earbud wire. “This is Captain Hawkins. Whom am I speaking with?”

Dad stares at her, chin trembling. Then he clears his throat. “This is John Cooper Senior. I’m Lieutenant Cooper’s father. This is—”

“Mr. Cooper, your son has sustained a gunshot wound to the chest. The medics are attempting to stabilize him now.” She blinks rapidly, clearly rattled, but manages to holds herself together. “He’ll be taken to the base hospital for surgery.”

My father lets out a deep, whooshing breath. “He’s alive,” he says. “Will he be all right?”

The captain hesitates. “Our surgeons will do their best. They’re trained for these types of injury.”

Are they? I wondered. How often do air force fighter pilots get shot in the chest? This isn’t the army or the marines. He’s not supposed to die like this!

“I’ll have someone notify the family liaison office at your closest base. They might have a chaplain who can be of service.”

“Service?” Dad looks confused.

“To speak with. I understand this is a stressful time.”

Her words blur as I listen for John’s voice in the background. Is he still screaming, or only in my memory? Or is it me who’s screaming on the inside?

“I have to log off now,” the captain says. “Someone will be in touch.” She hesitates, then softens her voice. “Mr. Cooper, your son is a good man. We will all pray for his recovery.”

“Thank you,” my father whispers.

The video-chat window turns black. I see my father’s and my reflections in the screen now, staring. Waiting. In the black mirror I see him reach to put his arm around me, hesitate, look at me as if I’m a stranger. And I see when he finally pulls me close.

Wrapping my arms around him, I stare over his shoulder at the window. The shade is still drawn.It’s not true that I saw blood on the wall. I saw nothing.

WHY GOD WHY?

My final piece of graffiti was a question with no answer. Most of us realize that we’ll probably die for no great cause, in a car accident or from cancer or a heart attack. So it makes no sense to ask “WHY?”

But John worked for years, sacrificed every summer, put up with every bullshit demand of his commanding officers, just for the chance to have his life, and maybe his death, mean something. If you’d told John he’d meet his end in a computer room, not on a battlefield, that he’d die wearing anything but a flight suit, he’d . . .

I don’t know what he would’ve done. Maybe he would’ve been the one holding my cans of spray paint. Or maybe I’d have held them for him.

A rustle of twigs is the only warning I’m not alone. I must have missed the sound of the tent unzipping.

Mara drapes our flannel blanket over my shoulders, then sits beside me. She doesn’t ask what’s on my mind or why I’ve been groaning. She just stays, and we listen to the low, insistent hooting of owls.

“I remember coming home that day,” she says finally. “Me and Mom finding you and Dad waiting by the phone.”

Elbows on my knees, I push my fists against my burning eyes.

“You couldn’t save him,” she says, “and it wasn’t your fault.”

“I know.”

“And if we can’t save Mom and Dad, it’s also not our fault.”

“I know.” The certainty doesn’t reach my voice. “I know,” I repeat, too emphatically to believe.

Mara shivers, then draws her sleeves down over her hands to warm them. “David, I think some people are just lost.”

“Like me?”

“No, dork.” She gives my knee a light punch with her sleeved fist. “Despite your best efforts.” Her voice cracks at the end of the sentence, like she realizes it’s not a joke after all. And then she’s crying, and I lose it too, but it’s okay. There’s no one but the owls to hear us weep.