The Survivor Read online

  Nate takes Casper out late when the neighborhood is still enough to mute the noise in his head. One night he arrives home to find Janie swaying on the porch swing. “Maybe you should bring Cielle on your walks. I’m worried about her weight.”

  He says, “I’m not home most nights until she’s in bed.”

  “Maybe that’s why she’s getting so heavy,” Janie says. “She’s been comforting herself with food since you—”

  “I know.” He feels a burn across his face. “I just … can’t clear my head right now. It’s just temporary.”

  “Maybe if you were busier…?”

  He waves a hand, but the gesture loses momentum. “I can’t buy men’s suits again, Janie.”

  “I don’t want you to buy men’s suits. I don’t care about the money. I’ll pick up an extra shift at the hospital if I have to, to cover the mortgage.”

  “I will always make sure the mortgage is covered. I just need a little time. I’ve been home five fucking weeks.”

  Her face reddens, bringing the freckles into relief. “You know what?” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “We don’t do this. We don’t talk to each other this way.”

  He stares at her, and she stares back, unflinching. Agitated, Casper trots to Janie’s side and whimpers until she pets him.

  “I can’t reach you, Nate. No one gets through to you.”

  “You do.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Her face holds so much sadness he has to look away.

  Janie says, “I know you loved Charles—God, we all loved Charles. But you have to let go of what happened.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  Though he never considered it, the truth is right there, waiting, and it comes out in a heated rush: “Because then I’d be abandoning him. Again.”

  She receives this, bracing into the weight of it. She nods once. The breeze blows through him.

  “When you were gone,” she says, “Cielle would crawl into bed where you used to lie. How do I explain to her that now that you’re home, you’re still not home?”

  He cannot lift his eyes from the porch boards.

  Janie says, “You are the only man I want to be with. I feel like I dreamed you up playing ‘boyfriend’ when I was nine. I love you too much for us to turn into roommates. Some couples can do that, maybe. But not us. Doing that with you … It would be worse than not being with you.”

  He clears his throat. “You and Cielle are all I want. But I can’t … I can’t find my way back here.”

  Janie quotes him to himself: “Stop fighting,” she says. “I got you.”

  His mouth is dry. “I don’t know how.”

  Silence. The porch swing creaks, Janie’s toes touching the wood as though stirring water. She says, “We build our own cells, brick by brick.”

  He thinks of his father shuffling around the house after his mom’s funeral, how he’d blank out in front of the microwave sometimes, staring at the number pad, unable to proceed.

  He says, “Maybe this is what I have to do right now.”

  She swallows hard, then says, “I have not a thing to say I won’t regret later.”

  He walks upstairs into their bathroom, shuts the door, and sits on the closed toilet. A while after, her footsteps enter the bedroom, the sheets rustle, and the light clicks off. Through the thin door, he hears her crying softly, and though he wants to hold her more than anything, he cannot rise, cannot turn the doorknob. His courage is gone; he lost it back in the Sandbox in that goddamned helicopter. He lost it when he made his daughter a promise that he’d come home to her. He thinks back to the day Charles dragged him to the beach, Janie’s cries carrying across the water. Nate was The One Who Had Jumped into the Riptide When No One Else Would. He had borne her to shore. And now he is huddled on a toilet, shuddering, scared to open a bathroom door.

  He waits until her breathing grows regular, then sneaks out to slip into his side of the bed.

  * * *

  Later that night screams awaken him. He bolts off the mattress and his boots sink into burning sand and there is smoke in the air and he is yelling for Charles: “Where are you? Where are you?” The screams keep coming in the dark, and he stumbles and smacks his head into the corner of the wall by the door. Blood streams down his forehead, tacky and hot, and then his eyes are stinging and he lurches through the door, knocking it free of the top hinge and Janie is at his side holding his arm and then he sees Abibas staring with unreadable eyes and he shoves and Janie flies back and hits the wall and he is staggering down the hall, Charles’s blood streaming down his face, bellowing, “Where are you? Where the fuck are you?” and the screams have stopped suddenly but Casper is barking and he fills his daughter’s doorway but she is gone. Janie is behind him, yelling, her cheek carrying a plum-colored bruise and her words flood in: “Stop it! You’re scaring her. You’re scaring her!” and he follows her quaking finger to where Cielle has tried to wedge herself beneath her bed to hide. Janie goes to her and holds her.

  He wipes his forehead, and his arm comes away dark. Quietly panicking at what he has done, he says, “No, no. I don’t scare her. I don’t. Do I scare you?”

  And Cielle looks out from beneath the dark row of her bangs and says, “Yes.”

  His insides crumble. He stands, swaying, mouth ajar. His skin on fire, he retreats slowly into their bedroom, Casper at his heels. Nate washes the blood from his face. Uses Band-Aids to close the gash at his hairline. Finds an instant cold pack in the emergency kit beneath the sink. When he steps out, Janie stands watching, pale, silent.

  He says, “I am so, so sorry I hurt you.”

  “You didn’t know what you were doing. Cielle was crying. She had a nightmare.”

  “It is unacceptable what I did.”

  “I know you didn’t mean it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I need to get myself…”

  “What?”

  “To a place where I deserve to live here again.”

  Janie looks away. Her eyes well. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

  He can’t find any words. His throat clutches. Desperate for something to do, he cracks the ice pack, but she says, “I’m fine.”

  He holds it out. He can barely look at the growing spot of black on her beautiful pale cheek. “Please?”

  She lifts the ice pack from his hand.

  Casper follows him down the hall. Cielle is tucked in again, but wide awake. He sits at the edge of her bed. Casper curls up in the pink nest she has made for him from an old comforter. He keeps a wary eye on Nate, which shatters Nate’s heart anew. When they are out, Casper will not allow strangers to get between him and Cielle, and that is how Nate feels now—like a stranger.

  He says, “I’m so sorry I scared you.”

  She says, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

  “No,” he says. “It isn’t.” She stares up at him with her rich brown eyes, and he strokes her nose once with his finger.

  “Why can’t it be like it used to?” she asks.

  He swallows around the lump inside his throat. “It just can’t right now, baby.”

  “Why not? Don’t I get a vote? I never get a say in anything.”

  “We don’t always get a say in what happens to us,” he says gently. He kisses her on the forehead, breathes in the no-tears-shampoo scent of her.

  He strokes her back until she falls asleep, then goes downstairs to try to catch his breath. As he paces the unlit living room, it strikes him that he is denying himself his wife and daughter as a punishment for cherishing them so much that he couldn’t unlock his legs on that helicopter and leave them behind. He pauses before the family portrait. The three of them falling over, laughing, propping one another up. He vows to get back to that place.

  What he’s dealing with, it’s just temporary.

  * * *

  And yet five years pass.

  Five years that see further dismantling of the life he knew. Nate’
s journey through that time is weightless, stunned, much like his flight from the spiraling helicopter. The point of impact comes in a medical office, from a bearded neurologist with kind, wise features—precisely how one wants one’s neurologist to look, particularly when he’s delivering a diagnosis like this. And Nate realizes that up until that moment, when it came to bad news, he’d never had a sufficient yardstick for comparison.

  He drives away in a daze, cloaked in a black cloud of dread. He pictures his mother languishing in her hospice bed, dying by millimeters, her features caving in on themselves. How his father, too, was eaten from the inside, hollowed out like a rubber Halloween mask, the eyeholes empty. As a nine-year-old, Nate had vowed that if he was ever lucky enough to have a family of his own, he would never, ever let it erode like that.

  And so he tells no one—not Janie, not his daughter. At all costs he will spare them the suffering he learned all too well in his own childhood. Soon enough he will not be able to control the deterioration of his grip, the drying out of his eyes, the strength of the breath in his lungs. But he can pick a time and a date and a ledge high enough to offer a good view and a long drop.

  He just has to do it while he still can.

  And pray that nothing interrupts. Like, say, six hooded thugs robbing a bank.

  Because then he might find himself sitting on an exam table with a neatly stitched stab wound, alive against his own goddamned will.

  LONG WAY UP

  Necessity has the face of a dog.

  —Gabriel García Márquez

  Chapter 8

  Leaving the hospital, Nate rode shotgun in the unmarked sedan, ignoring the throbbing in his shoulder and doing his best to keep up. Abara—who’d given no first name—drove fast and talked faster. Easy confidence, slender athletic build, dense hair shaved to the bronzed flesh at the sides and back. He could’ve been thirty, or twenty-four. “So first of all, forget that shit you’ve seen on TV,” Abara said. “We don’t always travel in twos, we’re not all dickheads, and”—a gesture to his charcoal golf shirt with the gold seal at the breast—“we don’t have to wear suits and ties.” He flashed an unreasonably handsome smile, complete with dimples. “Also, we play well with others. We do have juris, but LAPD’s got a talented team over at Robbery Special, so I’m not gonna march in there and bark about how I’m taking over their case.” He picked a speck of lint off the spit-polished dashboard. “You sure you don’t need to go home, catch your breath, change?”

  Nate looked down at his crisp new T-shirt, donated by the hospital. Crease marks at the chest and stomach from where it had been folded, presumably piled in a stack of other clothes awaiting stabbing victims. “Nah, I’m fine.”

  They reached the police cordon, and Abara slowed the Chevy Tahoe and flashed his badge. “Marcus Abara, FBI. I got the hero with me. Gonna go walk the scene.”

  The cop’s eyes were hidden behind a pair of Oakley Blades, but he lifted the reflective band of glass to Nate and said, “Nice work in there.”

  Nate’s heartbeat was quickening in proximity to the bank. He nodded. “Thanks.”

  Beyond the sawhorses, media and rubberneckers had massed. One woman was crying and kneading her sweater in her fists—a sister of a victim? It struck Nate that she could also be a relative of one of the men he’d killed this morning.

  He had to rewind the thought: One of the men he’d killed this morning.

  One head lifted higher than the rest, rising above the crowd as if on a stick. A man’s rough-hewn face—lantern jaw, mashed nose, slash of mouth. Flat eyes fastened on Nate as his gaze swept across. Nate did a double take, but the face was gone.

  Abara’s eyes were on him and then on the sea of folks. “What?”

  “Just a guy in the crowd. Looked … I don’t know. Menacing, I guess.”

  He put it down to nerves but couldn’t help noticing Abara file it away in some private place.

  They drove through and parked on the sidewalk. Before leaving the hospital, Nate had filled in first a patrolman, then two detectives, and finally Abara on what had gone down in the bank—or at least a version of what had gone down. Assumptions had been made before Nate had been sutured up and available to correct the record. By the time he’d entered the discussion, he was already party to the lie, and the lie had ossified into something hard and immovable. It went like this: Nate had been in the bank bathroom; he had heard shots; he had climbed onto the ledge, inched his way around, and saved the day. The questions—which had been detailed and copious—had picked up mostly at the saved-the-day part. And he’d been happy to pick up there as well. Did everyone need to know he’d been planning to pancake himself into a Dumpster? He would be made the subject of a suicide interventionist, and then there’d be a seventy-two-hour psych hold—no, that wouldn’t do at all. So rather than lay himself bare to be probed and picked at, he’d help through a few steps of the investigation, resort to Plan B, and let everyone figure it out when he wasn’t around to feel stupid about it.

  Walking toward the bank entrance, Nate was surprised to hear his name shouted out. Instinctively he stopped and looked at the swarming reporters, and the agent had to press a hand to the small of his back to keep him moving. In the elevator Abara knuckled the button for the eleventh floor. As they rose, Nate thought about the last time he’d ridden up in this car, how he’d been sweating through his shirt in anticipation of taking the leap. And yet, implausibly, here he was again, back in the same little box, ascending to the same floor, Sisyphus in the age of technology. Abara caught him smirking at himself, and it seemed to pique his interest.

  “You seem remarkably steady,” the agent said, “given, you know, everything.”

  “I must be faking it well,” Nate said.

  “Impressive stuff. The ledge, the window, the timing. I mean, six armed men.” Abara whistled. “Guess that high-end military training kicked in.”

  Nate studied Abara back. Was that an accusatory edge in his voice? Or just Nate’s guilt working on him, putting a paranoid filter on an ordinary observation? He knew the truth of who he was—Nate Overbay, failed suicide—and the hero routine was starting to wear thin.

  “Look,” Nate said, “I was a drafted dipshit. I don’t know how to kill a guy with a chopstick or anything. I’m just an army grunt who learned how to shoot a gun.”

  “You laid low five trained gunmen.”

  “Element of surprise. And a lotta luck.”

  “I glanced through your military jacket,” Abara said. “You went through quite a bit over there.”

  “Not as much as some people.”

  A familiar voice sailed out from behind him: “I’ll say.”

  Nate half turned, and sure enough there Charles stood, dripping on the elevator floor, chest blown open, heart visible through the bars of his ribs, hanging like a clump of grapes. He gave a big smile, dried blood cracking on his cheek. “You really stepped in it this time, podnah.”

  As always, impeccable timing.

  Nate turned away, annoyed.

  “Someone’s uppity today,” Charles said. “Prefers to hang out with his alive friends. No, really, it’s cool. I get it. Ignore me. But can your alive friends do … this?”

  Horrible moist sound effects from behind Nate. He didn’t even want to know. It dawned on him that Abara was staring at him expectantly.

  Nate did his best to look attentive. “Sorry. What?”

  “I said, I had some buddies came back with PTSD. You dealing with anything like that that might be relevant to how things went down today?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Nate could see Charles poking his tongue through a hole in his cheek. “Nah,” Nate said. “Got over that a long time ago.”

  The elevator doors spread to a panorama of cops, CSI, and bank security workers. Radios bleated, iPhones chimed, cameras winked. Charles had vanished—he hated commotions—and Nate found himself immersed in bloody memories of the morning. He moved forward on numb legs, the pill bottles rattling in
his pocket, untouched. By the lobby, Abara held down the crime-scene tape, and Nate high-stepped over. The black security guard was gone, but evidence cones marked the outline of his body. The smudged pool of blood looked shiny and gelatinous beneath the overhead fluorescents.

  A burly little man hurried over and blew out a breath, exasperated. He was balding, and the male-pattern swirl had lifted from his pate. It had been a long day. He introduced himself as the bank director of physical security, shook Nate’s hand earnestly, then launched into the update.

  “Looks like they dodged the parking-lot cameras downstairs, rode the service elevator up. So much for eleventh-floor security. As you saw, dark clothes, not form-fitting, big boots. Hard to read height, weight. No flesh showing anywhere, so witnesses couldn’t get a read on their ethnicity.”

  “Considerate of them to leave their bodies behind,” Abara said.

  Nate was having a hard time lifting his focus from the crimson smudges on the floor tile. He thought of the guard’s eyes, rolled back almost to solid white.

  The security director continued, “Before they hit the vault, they broke down the door to the security closet and unplugged the DVR box that caches the digital footage.”

  Abara made a popping sound with his lips. “So they could work the vault with their hoods off.”

  “Right,” Nate mumbled. He pictured the man stepping into sight in the vault doorway, gripping the circular saw, the hood pushed up atop his head. His ear, torn away in a spray of black blood. How he’d looked back and Nate had shot him again through the forehead.

  He heard Abara’s voice, as if from a distance. “… you okay?”

  Nate nodded quickly. “Fine, fine.”

  “These guys were pros, moved fast and hard,” the security director continued. “No one could get to an alarm. Our vault door’s eighteen inches of steel, tool-resistant for thirty minutes, but it was, of course, open for the business day. So they sailed in through the day gate. They used a diamond-tipped rescue saw to hit one of the quarter-inch Diebolds, got a little over three hundo into a duffel. Which, thanks to you”—a nod to Nate—“is still sitting on the floor in there. They were razoring into the safe-deposit boxes when you went in guns blazing.”