things only you could have done. Maybe you're walking in your sleep. That might explain things. Who else could be moving things around?”
“You blame me for Barney,” he said. Natasha rolled her eyes. “The only person who blames you is you. It was a horrible accident. That's what accident means. If one of us blames the other, it isn't me.”
“But you could have saved him,” he said, an anger growing. “Don't tell me you haven't thought a million times that if you'd just been here instead of me, he'd be alive. You would have resuscitated him. Admit it. You think I killed him.”
“Your feelings of guilt are self- induced. You're projecting what you feel inside onto me.”
“I can't talk about this,” he said, feeling nauseated.
“Then what else can we talk about?” she asked, throwing her napkin on the table. “You want the truth? My son is dead and now I feel like you want me to get into his grave with you. Maybe you want to die, but I don't. I won't.”
Natasha stood and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Right now, I just want to take a hot bath and go to sleep.” She started to leave, her eyes filled with fury, perhaps disgust, but definitely tears.
“Don't forget your Ambien.” He knew better than to say that, but he'd said it anyway.
“Go to hell,” she said, storming from the room.
After she slammed her bedroom door, he stared at her plate, her nearly full glass, and for a second Ward had the strangest feeling that Barney was watching him. He stared out through the dark window and he could almost see his son standing there, staring at him. His look would be asking, Why are you being mean to my mama?
I don't know, Barney, Ward thought. He was sure Natasha had put the ball under the pillow. Why would anyone else do such an absurd thing? It wasn't the first time in recent weeks; either she'd moved things around and accused him or he had done so and didn't remember. Sure, he had felt oddly detached from the real world, but not that disconnected. If one of them was losing his mind, he didn't think it was only him.
Ward walked down the hall and stood frozen outside Natasha's door. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to hold her, to be in her arms again the way it was before. He raised his hand, but he couldn't force himself to knock. He imagined her lying alone in their bed. He wanted to comfort her, to make love to her, to make her feel something for him, but somehow he couldn't make the leap.
He thought about the last time they'd made love, seven months before, and how mechanical and unsatisfying it had been. Love with a stranger, but who had been the stranger? Filled with the fog of uncertainty and perhaps insecurity, he just could not make himself open the bedroom door.
He moved silently into the guest bedroom and, without taking off his clothes, lay awake in the dark for what seemed like hours after getting into bed. Something he couldn't understand, or didn't want to admit, was keeping him from reaching out and trying to make things right.
Ward couldn't imagine life without Natasha, but forgetful or not, he wasn't going to pay some pompous, two-hundred-dollar-an-hour asshole to make him let go of Barney.
EIGHTEEN
After leaving Ward at the dinner table, Natasha took a long warm shower, brushed her teeth, and toweled off her hair.
She was still upset-more upset than angry- and mostly because she'd blown an opportunity to really talk with Ward and resolve their problems. Her psychiatrist had suggested that she give Ward an ultimatum of sorts, force him to understand what he was about to throw away. Barney was dead, and she'd accepted that. She knew Ward knew it as well, but he couldn't put it aside and move on with what was left of his life-of their life together.
She often wondered how she, Barney's mother, was trying so hard to come to terms with Barney's loss and her husband wasn't. She had carried him in her womb, had given birth to him, nursed him, and loved him beyond rationality or description. Yes, Ward had seen him die, had held his cooling body as he waited in immeasurable anguish and pain for the ambulance to arrive. Yes, Ward alone had suffered that, but she certainly felt the same horror and grief even so.
Due to the demands of her career, Ward had spent more time with Barney than she had, and in the last years had been closer. She couldn't compete with the father/son contact and shared interests that became more and more important to them both. As a woman she'd been the odd one out, and she'd accepted that-had welcomed watching their bond strengthen, even at the expense of her own. She knew she loved Barney every bit as much and missed him every bit as deeply. How could it be otherwise?
Ward appeared to be in more pain, and it most bothered her that there was a wall between them that kept them from sharing the pain, the grief, from talking about their lives, and how they would go forward together. She wanted nothing more than to be in Ward's arms, to feel him against her, his warmth to fight away the cold, his strengths to shore her weaknesses, to lessen her fears, maybe even somehow mute their emptiness.
Natasha climbed into bed and turned off the lamp. She reached for the familiar stuffed bear, and after not finding it where she'd left it, ran her hands top to bottom and side to side over the bed, seeking it. Turning on the lamp she got on all fours and, from the bed, looked around the floor. Panicked, Natasha slid off the bed to peer under it, but the bear was not there.
She climbed back into bed, cut the light off, and tried to decide what to do. She didn't want to confront Ward and demand the toy's return. That was impossible after she'd made the point about him taking the little blue car to Las Vegas to be close to something Barney had treasured above all of his other possessions, even the bear.
At Ward's insistence, she had recorded the bear's short message for her child's ears alone. She had imagined that anytime he needed to be comforted by his mother, and she wasn't there, he would have her assurance that her love was constant and he was safe.
Ward had obviously taken it, and if he had, it was maybe because he had needed it as an anchor, since his own line to his dead child-the metal car-had been stolen from him. If he needed Buildy more than she did at the moment, she only prayed that if he pressed the bear's hand, her message would comfort him.
Through everything, Natasha had fought to believe in God, and to believe that He had their son in His arms and loved him-as she had been taught since childhood-more than his parents possibly could. Hugging a pillow to her, she prayed to God to keep Barney in His arms so that he was never afraid, and that God would make sure the boy knew how deeply his parents loved him.
NINETEEN
From his hide overlooking the house, Watcher observed the couple through his binoculars as they ate dinner. The romantic tint to the evening was an unpleasant development, but his spirits soared when the meal was ended by an argument. Dr. McCarty stood up, had a few heated words to say-no doubt about what a limp- dick idiot her hubby was-and left the room. Seconds later her bedroom light came on. Ward remained seated at the table alone after she was gone. The man watched through the binoculars as Ward stared out through the window into the darkness-a beetle in a jar. Watcher knew McCarty couldn't see him, but he found himself holding his breath as their eyes met.
Watcher waited until Ward was in the kitchen cleaning up like a housewife before he put down the binoculars. He pulled out his survival knife and the diamond stone and started sharpening the blade slowly and deliberately. The tip was the only part of the knife he had used in a long time, and it was the tip he concentrated on sharpening while he waited in the hole he'd dug into the earth.
He looked at the blade in the moonlight, tested the edge with the sole of his thumb. He felt the notches he'd filed into the top of the blade near the hilt years earlier. Each represented a man killed in a war in a country whose landscape looked like the surface of Mars. He had liked doing it, more than that; Watcher had felt like he'd been born to end the lives of his enemies.
The luminous hands on his watch dial told Watcher it was nineforty He gathered his binoculars, notebook, and camera, and packed them all away in the rucksack. That done, he lifted the hinged roof and slipped out of the
