Chapter 38

The kids are at school when the black SUV with government plates and an Army seal on the door parks in front of the house. Jessica knows what this is as soon as she sees the silhouettes of two men through the sun-glazed windshield, one of them straightening his beret in the visor mirror. The seal on the car had her hoping for a second that it might be Captain Farris returning Gavin’s iPad. But two men in Class A uniforms can only mean one thing.

As they approach the door, the September sunlight flares off the gold cross on the chaplain’s lapel. And if that one is the chaplain, then the other must be the Casualty Notification Officer, the poor kid tasked with giving her the news.

The reporters lingering in the last news van sitting vigil across the street spill out and trot after the officers, filming their solemn walk up the driveway and asking questions she can’t hear. For their part, the soldiers ignore them.

Jessica places her hand against the door. Her head follows, resting against the mahogany slab beneath the leaded glass fanlight. She’s been expecting this, waiting for the day, but the actual sight has drained her of the strength to support her own head on her neck. She half-expects a polite yet assertive knock to resonate through the wood, through her head and hand, but they ring the bell instead, and it suddenly seems absurd that the same innocuous, almost cheerful chime that heralds a pizza delivery could also be the death knell that will divide her life into two halves: Before and After.

She hesitates, holding the moment. It’s childish, she knows, but every second that she doesn’t open this door, doesn’t let them speak their news, is another second she can spend on this side of that divide.

But not really.

Jessica opens the door and ushers the pair in before they can say anything. Her duty now is to protect these messengers from the evening news, to rob the vultures who got lucky today—less than a week after Dave Shoemaker’s autopsy made the news—of their dessert. She has done what she can to limit Gavin’s exposure to media coverage of the case, but he knows Dave is dead and that it may have been suicide, a poison somehow smuggled to him by a fan or accomplice on the way to his court appearance. Gavin cried when she told him. It seems insane that confirmation of Matt’s death should come as a second blow to him when he’s already processing grief for a role model who tried to kill them both. Insane that the loss of his father should be complicated by that other event, entangled with it for the rest of his life. But it will be.

For almost two months, she has waited for confirmation. Now it washes over her in a blur. Finally, she can allow herself tears. Once they start, it’s a relief to give in, to be absolved of the need for strength and hope. The details don’t really matter anymore. All that matters is that he’s not coming home. In her bones, she has known for some time now.

Matt reached out to Gavin in a way she will never understand. Told him things he couldn’t possibly know. These, she has come to believe, are not things he could have done while living. She will never be able to prove that, and there’s no one she needs to prove it to. Still, timing is everything, and it’s the one detail she’s interested in, the one fact she might anchor her grief to and return to for solace in the years to come when her certainty might fade.

She has a feeling that miracles are exotic flora that wither and leave no trace when exposed for too long to the harsh climate of daily life. She wants to press this one between the pages of a book for safekeeping.

Later, she won’t recollect much of what the notification officer and the chaplain said to her about the ambush that cut Matt off from the rest of his combat patrol, or the terrain that concealed his body after the firefight. Small details of the time they spent in her home will linger, oddly amplified in her memory. The soft ticking of the clock on the wall in the spaces between words; the silky blue sheen of the cords draped from the CNO’s shoulder; a single scuff mark on the toe of the chaplain’s polished Oxford shoe; a tiny scab where the CNO nicked a pimple while shaving.

What she will remember of their conversation is the answer they gave to her solitary question.

“When?”

“It’s impossible to say with precision, ma’am, because he was missing for so long before the body was found. We believe he engaged the enemy again on his own several days after the initial ambush, but you’d have to call the CAO and ask for the forensic report to get more specific.”

“CAO?”

“The Casualty Assistance Officer at Fort Devins, ma’am. The one I said would help you with the arrangements and anything else you need?”

“Of course. Sorry. I understand you’re not supposed to go into detail on a call like this, but can you tell me if they believe he died before August fourteenth?”

The officer glances at the chaplain, and says, “Almost certainly.”

Jessica thanks them and sees them out.

Her hands shake as she dials. Twice she has to delete numbers and try again. The CAO gives Jessica a “window of death” based on the Army coroner’s report that puts it in the second week of July. Well before the FaceTime call Gavin received on August fourteenth. No sooner has she ended that call than she’s pulling Captain Farris’ card from her wallet and typing the intelligence officer’s number into her phone. Waiting for the call to connect, she watches the living room clock, making sure she’ll have a few minutes to prepare herself before Gavin’s bus drops him off at the corner. Before she has to find a way to tell her sweet, precious boy that his father is gone.

Captain Farris answers on the second ring. She offers her condolences without missing a beat, and before Jessica can ask, tells her they have been unable to retrieve the data from Gavin’s iPad. Tech Support returned it to Farris on Friday, and she was planning to drop it off tomorrow when she has other business on the North Shore, if that’s okay.

“It still won’t power up. Do you want it back, ma’am? Or would you prefer we dispose of it?”

Silence unspools between them. Jessica thinks of the news van outside and tells Captain Farris there’s no need for her to visit the house. Would she mind returning it by FedEx instead?

“No problem.”

They wrap up the call with small pleasantries before Jessica steps into her shoes to meet the bus.

Standing alone at the bus stop, her eyes fixed absently on a quarter shining in a shallow puddle among the first fallen leaves at her feet, she can’t quite explain to herself why she didn’t tell Farris to just toss the broken tablet. It’s as dead as the man who last connected to it. And yet… When she imagines opening that FedEx box, she sees herself placing the black tablet beneath Matt’s folded flag in a drawer beside her bed, where she might hear it if it ever chimes again.