answered one of my letters-not one, Dad!-and I wrote about a dozen of them? That said it all clear enough. Plus, last I heard, she had another boyfriend.'
'When did you hear that?' Eileen asked.
'At Walter Reed. In fact, the guy came to see me.'
'Who did?' Jim asked. 'Tara's new boyfriend? Why'd he do that?'
'I don't know. Guilt, probably.'
'Over dating Tara?' Jim asked.
'Over stealing my girlfriend after I sent him over with one of my last letters to hand deliver to her? And instead he snags her away while I'm half-dead in the hospital? Could a person feel guilt about that? Or maybe if you were the reason a whole squad got wiped out?'
'You mean your boys?' Eileen asked. 'Are you saying that Tara's new boyfriend is the man in your convoy who shot too soon?'
'You got it, Mom. Ron Nolan. I believe I've mentioned him once or twice.'
'Never nicely,' Jim said.
Evan slugged some wine. 'What's nice to say?'
'Evan.' Eileen frowned and threw him a quizzical glance. 'I don't think I'd heard before that he was seeing Tara.'
'But wait a minute,' Jim said. 'I thought you and Tara broke up over the war. Wasn't this guy Nolan over there too?'
'Yeah,' Evan said. 'Funny, huh? So I guess maybe it wasn't the war with me and Tara after all. Maybe she just wanted out and that was a good excuse.'
'No.' Eileen's voice was firm. 'That's not who Tara is. She would have just told you the truth.'
He shook his head. 'I don't think we know who the real Tara is, Mom. Not anymore, anyway.'
But Jim came back with his original question. 'So this guy Nolan came to Walter Reed to apologize, or what?'
'That was the spin he put on it. But you ask me, it was to rub it in.'
'Why would he do that?' Eileen asked.
'Because that's who he is, Mom. He's a mercenary who shot up that Iraqi car because he wanted to, period. Because he could. And if you want my opinion, he came to Walter Reed, among other reasons, to show me he'd gotten clean away with it. And while he was at it, he stole my girlfriend. This is not a good guy, believe me.'
'Then what does Tara see in him?'
'That's what I've been getting at, Mom. She's not who you think she is.'
'I still don't see how you can say that.'
Facing his mother's implacable calm, her hard-wired refusal to think ill of anybody, Evan suddenly felt his temper snap. He slapped a palm flat down on the table, his voice breaking. 'Okay, how about this, Mom? When Nolan told her I'd been wounded, you know what she said? She said I made my bed, I could sleep in it. Her exact words.' His eyes had become glassy, but the tears shimmering in them were of rage, not sorrow. 'She just didn't care, Mom. That's who she is now.'
For a few seconds, the only sound in the backyard was the susurrus of the breeze through the leaves of the fruit trees.
'I can't believe that,' Eileen said finally. 'That just can't be true.'
Evan drew a deep breath and raised his head to look straight at his mother. Exhausted and angry, he nevertheless had his voice under control. 'No offense, Mom, but how can you know that? That's what she said.'
Eileen reached out across the picnic table and put a reassuring hand on her son's arm. 'And when was this?' she asked.
'When was what?'
'When she heard that you'd been wounded and said you'd made your own bed and you could sleep in it.'
'I don't know exactly. Sometime in early September, right after Nolan got back home, about the time I got to Walter Reed.'
'No, that's not possible.' She told him about meeting Tara just before Christmas in the supermarket. 'I may be terminally predisposed to seeing the good in people,' she said, 'and I know that sometimes I'm wrong. But there is no possible way that she had heard about your being wounded before I told her. And that was in December.'
'If that's true, why didn't she call me then? Just to see how I was doing? Wish me luck? Some-?' He stopped abruptly, suddenly remembering the reindeer on the wall across from his bed, and that her call to him at Walter Reed-when
Or, if his mother was right, within a few days of when Tara had heard for the first time that he'd been injured.
Eileen patted Evan's arm. 'She didn't call you because maybe she was already going out with this Nolan man by then. Maybe she felt guilty about that, or maybe she just thought it would be too awkward. But my point is, she certainly didn't know back in September that you'd been hurt. And it really doesn't sound like her to say you'd made your own bed.'
'But then why would-?'
Jim, who'd been listening carefully to the debate, suddenly couldn't keep the enthusiasm from his voice. He knew the answer before Evan finished asking the question. 'Why would Nolan come all the way to Walter Reed to tell you a lie? Could it be so that you'd get to hate Tara so much that you wouldn't be tempted to call her when you got back?'
Evan's flat gaze went from his father, over to his mother, back to his father again. 'You know, Dad,' he said, 'you've gotten pretty smart in your old age.'
The sun was just settling in behind the foothills as Evan ascended the outside steps at Tara's apartment building and rang her doorbell. When there was no answer, he walked down to the kitchen window and peered inside, where the lights were off and nothing moved. He should have called first and made sure she was home, but the determination to go directly from his parents' house and talk to her had come as an impulse, and acting on the impulse-he was mostly sober, well-rested, recently showered and shaved, there'd never be a better time-he'd told his parents good-night, jumped in his car, and driven down.
Since she hadn't been with Nolan at the bowling alley, Evan had more than halfway convinced himself that her relationship with him was over. And if that were the case, he'd talk to her and see once and for all if there was any trace of a spark left to what they'd had, in spite of everything. At least they'd be dealing with the truth.
He'd parked not in the building's parking lot, but out in the street, in the same space his unconscious had apparently picked the other night. Now he went back to the car and got in. Taking out his cell phone, he began to scroll down to her numbers, both cell and home, but then stopped. If she was still going out with Nolan, or worse, if she was out with him at this moment, the timing would be disastrous.
He turned on the car's engine for a minute so he could roll down the driver's window, and saw that the clock on the dash read nine-fifteen. One of the inviolable rules of Tara's life while they'd been going out was that she wouldn't stay out too late, or party too hard, on a school night. And Sunday was a school night. Setting his seat back down a couple of notches, but to where he could still see above the ledge of the window, he turned the engine off and settled down to wait.
It didn't take long.
There was still a trace of natural light left in the day when a yellow Corvette, top down, turned into the lot. Tara was in the passenger seat and still with Nolan, all right. He got out and came around and opened her door and they walked, casually familiar, hand in hand, across the parking lot and up the stairs. She opened the door and they both went inside and Evan felt the blood pulsing in his temples. He put his hand gently over the area when he'd been wounded and imagined that it felt hotter than it had been.
In the apartment, the kitchen lights went on in the front window. A shadow passed into the frame, occupied it for a moment or two, then moved out. The room-and the entire apartment-darkened again.
