Hailey's War

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked. “Like, last night, when you nearly ran away and I stopped you?”

She said, “I thought you would laugh.”

“No, I wouldn’t have,” I assured her. “Go on inside now. I’ll be along as soon as I park the car. Things are going to be okay.”

Payaso and Iceman drove down a little later, and we slept in turns. Around three A.M., I was in a quiet, dim waiting room on the hospital’s top floor, stretched out along a row of linked chairs with padded seats.

We had ten hours, roughly, before Nicolas Costa would call. There was nothing to be gained by telling him that Nidia was giving birth-or, by that time, maybe had given birth-to the Skouras grandchild. I planned to go through with the plan I had come up with that morning. We’d need to stall for time if I was still going to hit Skouras.

That had become my word, hit. That was how I sanitized it to myself. That and reminding myself, over and over, that he’d done it to me first, or tried to. In Mexico, Tony Skouras’s men took me to the limits of my fate, and it had been no thanks to them that those limits stopped short of death.

Soon I was going to repay them.

If I succeeded-and that wasn’t a given-things would change once again as drastically as they had after Trey Marsellus’s accident. Another flight, another new home. I had yet to think about where I’d go.

Closing my eyes, I remembered CJ’s offer to lend me enough money to open a little bar and restaurant on the Gulf Coast. I’d never take him up on it, of course. I’d already taken ten thousand dollars from him that I could almost certainly never repay.

But for the moment, on a chilly December night, it was too comforting to slip into a fantasy of faraway warmth, and I did. I imagined a place in a small Louisiana town, down on the end of a pier, where I’d string white lights along the roofline and keep cold Jax beer in the cooler. At night I’d sweep up and wash dishes and watch the lightning out over the water. CJ would come visit me. I’d mix him up dirty martinis and cook Cajun food like he asked. He could play his guitar for my customers.

Sure, the good times. The ones you know are never really coming.

forty-seven

When I slept, I didn’t remember my dreams, but I woke up paranoid, my hand twitching for the SIG.

“Hey, Insula, take it easy,” Serena’s voice said.

I rubbed sleep from my eyes. Serena was bundled into a heavy flannel shirt, and she looked cold. At least that was my first impression. Then I realized that there was something wrong with her face, a guarded apprehension that had nothing to do with physical discomfort. I thought of Babyface and Quentin and the rest of the tunnel rats, that somehow they’d found us despite every precaution we’d taken.

“What’s up?” I said. “Did she have the baby?”

She said, “They’re still getting the baby out.”

Serena wasn’t a sentimental person, but getting the baby out was not the way she would refer to a mother giving birth. Getting the baby out meant something was wrong.

“What’s going on?”

“Nidia must have had an undiagnosed heart condition,” Serena said. “A weak heart. It gave out during labor.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“She’s dead.”

“She can’t be dead, Serena.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true,” Serena told me. “They’ve got to get the baby out now, because I guess there’s no oxygenated blood without the mother breathing, and… I thought you should know.”

People in TV and the movies were always breaking bad news to people by saying, You’d better sit down, but as soon as Serena told me this, I thought, I’ve got to stand up. So I did. My legs were a little shaky, and once I was up, I didn’t know what to do.

I said, “Do you know what practically the last thing I said to her was? ‘Things are going to be okay.’ What a fucking idiot.”

“No,” Serena said flatly. “Of all the things you could have looked out for, this wasn’t one of them. You did everything you could for her, prima.” She paused. “That probably doesn’t help, right now.”

Nidia’s baby was a healthy boy. I wish I could say that he gave a lusty, life- affirming cry just as the first rays of morning light slanted through the hospital windows and Serena and Payaso and the rest crowded around to marvel at his little fingers and his little toes, and it was a great life-in-the-midst-of-death moment. Maybe some of that even happened; I don’t know. I was outside, where the fresh, cold air and the light was almost assaultive after the stale recycled air of the hospital. It had snowed during the night, and most of it was still fresh. I walked over to the quadrangle of lawn and I sat on my heels to touch it.

The first time I saw snow, we’d been based in Illinois. Like this one, that snowfall had come in the night. I had been afraid to touch it until my father did. In that memory, I can’t see the features of his face, just his big bare hands, picking up the snow, showing me how it melted as he rubbed it between his fingers.

Like he’d done, I got my fingertips wet from the snow, then painted that wetness onto my eyelids. My eyes felt dry and bloodshot from poor sleep, and I felt the relief as the water sank in and stung my eyes, then ran down onto my cheeks like the tears.

Since I’d first heard her name, Nidia to me had been a series of imperfect motivations. I’d driven her to Mexico for some cash and maybe drugs, plus for a break from my daily life in San Francisco. Then I’d tried to find out whether she was alive or dead, because I’d needed to understand what happened in the tunnel and why. Finally, I’d taken on the job of rescuing and guarding her to prove to myself that, given the chance, I could have been a good officer.

Nothing I’d done had been because I’d known who Nidia was or cared about her, and now it was too late to try. Somewhere inside that religious, distant person had been a real girl who’d loved a real man, and later had a sexual indiscretion with another one, a man with whom she’d known there was no future. I’d never known that Nidia. Serena and I had both held her at arm’s length for fear that her victimhood was some kind of catching illness.

Should that matter to a soldier? Wouldn’t such personal feelings simply be an encumbrance? If so, why did I feel guilty for not having them?

I straightened up and went back into the hospital. We had things to think about, Serena and I.

But when I got to the neonatal unit, Cheyenne was sitting in the waiting room, her eyes reddened. Payaso was stretched out along several hard plastic chairs like I had been, sleeping with his head pillowed on a rolled-up sweatshirt. Iceman was doing the same, but sitting up with his head tipped to the side.

No Serena.

I turned to Cheyenne. “Where’s Warchild?”

She frowned. “We thought she was with you.”

I walked the corridors, looked into other waiting rooms, checked the women’s restrooms. No luck. But by then I had an idea about where she might have gone.

It wasn’t difficult to find the morgue. No one was around to stop me, to ask to see my ID. There was a sign above the double doors that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, but Warchild wasn’t one to let the rules stop her.