The Sin-Eater's Confession, page 24
“We didn’t know Jimmy,” I said firmly. “We have no idea what he was really like or how he felt. Those are all things we assumed about him, just like Mom’s done all my assuming for me. Mal, I have to know who I am before I can figure out what I want to do. I can’t do that in college right now. I know that sounds dumb.”
“Maybe because it is. I don’t see how you’ll find out who you are if you get blown up.” Her face crumpled and her eyes pooled. “I love you, you jerk. I don’t want you to die.”
“Believe me, I’m going to try very hard not to let that happen. Someone has to pony up, though. Someone has to be responsible.”
“Why does that someone have to be you? Is this because you didn’t get into Yale?”
“How do you know I didn’t? I never said one way or the other.”
“Well, of course, you couldn’t have gotten in, if you’re doing this because…” Her mouth dropped a smidge, and her eyes widened. “Oh my God. You got in?”
I said nothing.
“Well?”
I showed her a thin smile. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“I can’t believe it. You’re throwing that away. Why?”
A good question, one I’ve been asking myself for a couple years now. Maybe this will sound completely lame to you, but I guess I came out here to see what I’m really made of. Getting myself exiled to the desert and plunked down in the middle of an endless war is about as elemental as you can get, all this life and death, violence and calm, blood and rock, and endless sky and a land so barren it’s as if I’ve landed on an alien planet, a stranger in an even stranger land. I guess I came here to force myself to run toward something for a change. Before Afghanistan, I’d been running all my life: not just from Jimmy but my own thoughts and dreams, who I really was, what I wanted out of life.
So, is this all a delayed guilt trip? My way of atoning? Maybe. But let me tell you a story. Let me tell you what I’ve learned.
A month ago, I went on a medevac to a village maybe twenty miles from here where a bomb unit had been doing a sweep and got blown up instead. The bomb guys figure that the IED must’ve been hidden in the middle of the road and then paved over. Like, a while ago. So there was no pressure-trigger, someone had to be right there to trigger it, you understand? Someone hunkered down in a house and watched the Humvees going by and then actually picked out the one he wanted to blow up. Some coward waited and watched and then chose who he wanted to kill that day. There was no heat of battle. This was calculated, cold-blooded murder.
The other reason they suspect that’s what happened is because everyone knows it’s the lead truck in a convoy you want to avoid being on. The lead’s always the most vulnerable position. But it was the third vehicle that went up, the one with the bomb-sniffing dogs. They weren’t even going for us, for people. They were going for the dogs.
By the time I hopped off the chopper, the driver was already dead. The other guys had dragged two wounded men out of the ditch. Everyone was talking at once, the guys freaking out and saying that they lost one already. From the looks of things, they were about to lose another guy who was really bad, decaying right in front of my eyes, his blood pressure going down the toilet.
So it was chaos, an assault on the senses: the frantic shouts and screams and groans, the rusty stink of superheated blood that you never ever get out of your nose and this black oily smoke. The Humvee was a total loss, just a cratered chunk of smoldering, twisted metal. From the number of pieces, I figured there’d been maybe two dogs, but with a blast that powerful, everything gets vaporized pretty darned quick.
But that’s when I noticed another dog, a big German shepherd maybe thirty, forty yards from the drainage ditch where he’d been thrown when the Humvee blew. Burned off some of the fur on his rump, and he had this big gash over his right shoulder that was bleeding like stink and it looked like his left back leg was broken. Yet, despite all that, this bloody, soot-covered dog was dragging itself along with all the strength it had—
But not toward us. The dog was trying to reach what was left of a fender, and that dog was going nuts, barking and whining and carrying on.
And then I saw this guy’s hand sticking out from a scorched tangle of metal and flap of rubber tire.
That’s when I realized: we’d missed one of the handlers. That dog just wouldn’t give up, either—wasn’t going anywhere without his handler. Every movement had to hurt that poor animal like hell, and yet it saved that man’s life.
After something like that, you got to think: I can at least try to be as good and loyal and brave as that dog. I can try.
At the time all the stuff with Jimmy went down, I did the best I could and knew how. It wasn’t near enough, and not remotely close to right. I know there’s no going back, no way of making this turn out differently for Jimmy or me. What the truth was about Jimmy, about us, about me or Black Hoodie … whatever the truth is… I’m no longer certain.
I cared about Jimmy. I might even have loved him. Maybe what I felt was the same as for a brother or sister.
But maybe not. Maybe not.
Maybe those feelings are so gnarly and tangled with everything that happened in between, I can’t get an objective read. And forget about figuring out Jimmy: he’s dead and gone.
And the dead really are silent, even in memory.
Black Hoodie? Girl? Boy? A man? In the persistence of memory, I keep clinging to girl. Don’t ask me why. I thought I recognized her in Evie. Maybe I had, but maybe not. Take it from someone who knows about ghosts and shadows. The mind’s funny that way. The mind lets you see what you want and ignores the rest. I guess you could say I went a little crazy after Jimmy died. Or maybe a lot crazy.
I have no answers.
Which is hell, believe me. Remember: I’m the guy who can be eating breakfast with a buddy and scraping him up with a spatula by dinner, and so you tell me how that makes any kind of sense.
I know you want answers—and, brother, that makes two of us. If this were a book or a movie, you’d be like, What, how can he not know? You’d want your money back.
But I don’t know. I can’t. Maybe that’s because I won’t let myself. I have memories, but they’re all in pieces and so mixed up with what the me I was then felt that asking the me I am now to put them together is impossible. It would be like trying to repair a Humvee, or a soldier’s who been blown all to shit. The Humvee’s scrap. The soldier might live, but he’ll never look the same, be the same, not only because of the explosion, but also because that marked the moment when his future changed forever. He didn’t ask for it, but he can’t take his past back, and nothing from that second on will be like anything he could ever have imagined. When he can stand it—when he’s gotten his courage up—he will look in the mirror in six months or a year, or ten, and try to square the face he sees with the ghost he was. What he was before will be so alien that trying to look for it—see his true self beneath all the scars—will hurt. It’ll drive him crazy. He can’t get his old face back, and there’s no point in looking any deeper.
And yet … and yet Jimmy’s murder is the explosion that, like an IED, is powerful and so horrible it generates its own kind of terrible awe. Like trying to stare at the face of God, I guess. You can’t stand it. It will kill you. But you can’t look away, either, even as looking steals your sight and leaves you, groping, in the dark.
I have looked at this for so long—and I am blind. I’m in the dark. Maybe I always have been. I have worked so hard to see things clearly, to put them in order, to understand how I felt, what I needed. Whether or not I really wanted Jimmy that way. Because not everything is fantasy, and what we desire is so much sweeter when we can’t have it. Maybe the truth was in that picture of me, that shimmering sleeping boy Jimmy wanted so badly that the looking and the longing made me beautiful when I am anything but.
I know what I have to do, but I have no answers. I can’t put this puzzle together for me, much less for you. I’m sorry, but I can’t.
Anyway, my fingers are all cramped up, but I’ve gotten down what needed saying. The captain’s Humvee pulled up about an hour ago, and I got stuff to do.
I said I don’t have answers. I don’t know what happened to Jimmy. That’s true. But writing this all out has helped me see, more clearly, the patterns. Mine, mainly, how I’ve spent my life like a gerbil, spinning my wheel, following a prescribed path that leads nowhere. When I wasn’t doing that, I was running. Even when I joined the military, I was laying down distance between me and what happened. I ran from Brooke—for good reasons; I really did want to protect her, didn’t I? But you kind of wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t stopped being her friend in the first place.
In school, we called them decision trees. Each point branches in a couple different directions, and then the next point after that and so on. Like that hallway in school: what would’ve happened if we’d gone down the same corridor together?
So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to put these in an envelope and drop that in the mail. I wasn’t going to. I was going to slip the envelope into my personal effects. That way, anyone going through my stuff before shipping it back stateside would send it, or my parents would.
But then I’d be off the hook, again, wouldn’t I? Because sending this when I’m no longer around to take the heat … that’s still running.
And I got to tell you: I’m pretty tired of that.
When I began, I wasn’t sure to whom I’d address this. I was going to include a list of all the people who’ve sent things over the past couple years, but the more I’ve written, the more I’ve come to realize that these really ought to go to one of two people.
If I could only decide which is the right one.
These letters ought to go to you, Brooke. I’m sorry I didn’t write back after the second letter. I told myself that our connection was formed in the transient stew that was high school, and fleeting at that. I ran from what you offered with the best of intentions, and I want you to know that. What I did with Jimmy—or didn’t do—was like fresh blood on a crisp, clean, white shirt. After a while, the blood sets, and if you don’t work fast, the stain can fade with time, but it will never vanish. That blood remains as a shadow, a ghost of pain and violence that will haunt you forever, like memory. And I couldn’t do that to you, Brooke. Not to you.
These letters aren’t meant to pull you back in, either. I had my chance. These are my diary, I guess, the one you told me to write to help me see patterns, get my head straight. You were right on that score.
What I wanted you to know is why I never kissed you that night. I hope you know now that it had nothing to do with you. Trust me on this. You care about pigs, for chrissake. You cared about me.
I figure that, now, you’ve got a pretty good life going. You must be, what, a sophomore in college? Are you going into medicine? I hope so. You’d be a great doctor. But take it from an expert: if the train feels like you’re going to pull into the wrong station, get off. Find your own path. Don’t let the adults tell you what to do. Well, except me. Okay, I’m not that much older. Still. I’ve seen a couple two-three things, and let me tell you something: it’s a hell of a big world out there.
These letters are to let you go, Brooke. Or maybe they’re about me allowing myself to watch you walk one way while I go the other. And that’s okay. That’s how things have to be.
Keep going, Brooke. Keep going, and don’t look back.
But here’s the thing.
Agent Thorne? These letters could also go to you. You told me you already knew that I’d lied about something, but that doesn’t mean I’m not sorry that I did so. I did what I thought I had to do, and I am more ashamed and sorrier than you can know.
Just … go easy on my parents, okay? They didn’t know a thing. No need to wreck their lives—or Mal’s … Jesus, leave her out of this. None of them deserve that.
Enclosed, you’ll also find the memory cards. I don’t know if they’ll help you now. They might. You’ve probably got cool facial recognition software or something. I’m betting the Penitents are still around, if you think you might want to talk to them. Or Pastor John. But I’m not the special agent; don’t let me tell you how to do your job. God knows, I had one chance to be Jimmy’s friend—and I blew that. So I’m not one to talk about jobs well done.
I just never knew how to see what was right there in front of me all along, the same way I never took what Brooke offered, not completely, or understood that Jimmy was, in his own halting way, trying to make a human connection, maybe share the secret that so haunted him. Whatever that secret was.
In the end, connections are all we have. They are all the meaning we’ll find in this frigging universe. Trust me on this. You know what the wounded need? The touch of your hand. The knowledge that there is someone holding on. They take your hand and they hang on, yes, for dear life, and in that moment, when their fingers close over yours, is the instant you come to life, too. Like that painting by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel, when God touches Adam and gives him life. Comforting the wounded and dying is like that. For that moment, you are the center of their universe and you are the only real, tangible thing.
The reason is blackness, chaos. Death.
So, everyone, hold on tight while you’ve got the chance. Hold on.
Anyway. Time to get off this merry-go-round and go volunteer.
Now, there are two ways this can go. Either I won’t come back, but it won’t matter because the cat’ll be out of the bag, the train will have left the station, hasta la vista, babeee.
Or maybe a month, two at the most after I get back, my lieutenant will want to see me because he’s gotten a very disturbing e-mail from my distraught parents because Brooke—being Brooke—knows what’s right.
Or maybe that e-mail will come from a very special agent stateside and there are questions that need answering, ASAP.
What happens after either of those scenarios … I don’t want to think about that because then I might lose my nerve. I don’t think so. After all, I’m sending this to someone, right?
Right?
You hold the first YA novel I ever sold. Rediscovering Ben’s story is like meeting your best college bud and picking up where you left off. Such a gift. I don’t know how Ben’s story began or where I got the idea, but it must be the shrinkly part of me, always interested in how we form our notions of who we are and what we’re all about. I can’t read this, even now, without choking up because I do think that Ben’s struggle—his desperate attempts to figure out just who he is and what he believes—are ones every kid knows. Because, really, where does a person begin and his parents leave off? How do you know when you’ve had an original thought or feeling not predicated on where you came from, what you’ve been taught, or whom you love and wish to please? As for Ben’s story, his town: you think you live in a world where these things can’t happen? That adults don’t act this way? That a kid can’t lose sight of himself—if he even knew whom that person was to begin with? Guess again. Blame all the years I spent mucking around as a shrink, but I know what I know.
I will never forget—it was a Wednesday in April—when Andrew Karre e-mailed that we really had to talk. As always, Andrew, I am blessed to have such a fearless champion. Here’s to many risks, together, in the years to come.
To my agent, Jennifer Laughran, the woman who routinely talks me off the ledge and tolerates my babble: OMG, woman, I am so glad you have my back.
To the entire team at Carolrhoda Lab: thank you for your support and hard work.
To Dean Wesley Smith, whom I can never thank enough for a steady hand and level head.
And, lastly, to my stalwart husband, David, who has yet to eat a cat when I’m on deadline: thank you, darling. Dinner’s on me.
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and award-winning author of dozens of short stories and novels, including the critically-acclaimed Draw the Dark and Ashes. Ilsa lives with her family and other furry creatures near a Hebrew cemetery in rural Wisconsin. One thing she loves about the neighbors: They are very quiet and only come around for sugar once in a blue moon. Visit her online at www.ilsajbick.com and @ilsajbick.
Ilsa J. Bick, The Sin-Eater's Confession
