But back to the funeral. Everyone would file into the church, old ladies would be crying, kids would be messing with each other, and their parents would be telling them to hush; Mass would start and Father Randy and the altar girls would walk up the center aisle to where her empty white casket-yeah, she wanted a white casket- would be sitting just in front of the altar and on top would be a picture of her in her soccer uniform because everyone wanted to remember her that way.
Gosh, it would be a great funeral. Everyone in town would be there, Mom and Dad, Nanna and Sam, Sylvia and Hilda, her teammates, Coach Wally, kids from school-they’d probably let school out that day-her teachers, and the principal; everyone would be crying and praying for the little dead girl. It sounded so neat, she almost wished she could be there. But she wouldn’t be there, and neither would Ben.
Because she wasn’t dead, and he was coming to save her.
Colonel, you saved my life. Lying in that cell at San Bie, I knew I would never see my wife or children again, but you gave my wife her husband back and my children their father. I owe you my life. God bless you.
John had found the boxes in the wooden chest; in the first box he had found dozens more letters, but these letters weren’t from Gracie. These letters were from military pilots pledging their lives to John’s father.
He did not know his own father.
He returned the letters to the first box. Then he opened the second box. He removed Ben’s framed West Point diploma, Army certificates, and a display case containing a hero’s medals: eight Purple Hearts; five Silver Stars with an empty spot for a sixth one; four Bronze Stars; two Soldier’s Medals; a Distinguished Service Cross; the Legion of Merit; and in a special case, the Medal of Honor, a round gold medal with an eagle over the word valor and a gold star with a Roman Centurion engraved in the center. John touched the medal with a reverence he had never before felt. He had never looked upon Ben as a hero. John R. Brice’s heroes were Tim Paterson, who invented DOS, Ray Tomlinson, who invented e-mail, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the HTML, HTTP, and URL conventions that powered the World Wide Web, brilliant men who made Internet shopping possible, not men who fought a war forty years ago that nobody cared about.
What was Ben like back then, when he was young and robust? What were his dreams? What life had he and Mom hoped for? Were they ever happy? What made him a drunk?
John found the answers in the third box. Inside were photos: Ben’s formal West Point graduation portrait in his high-necked dress uniform above the Academy motto- Duty, Honor, Country; Ben and Kate, him in a white uniform and Mom in a wedding dress, outside a church, ducking under an arch of sabers held out by other soldiers in white uniforms; and other wedding photos with a best man and maid of honor whose images struck John. The woman, with her curly black hair and a certain frailty about her, seemed oddly familiar to John. In another photo, the same man was standing next to the same woman in a hospital bed holding a baby; Kate and Ben were leaning in from behind. Everyone was smiling like their IPO had just hit the street.
John dug deeper and found more photos: Ben and the other man just arrived in Vietnam, looking young and eager in crisp uniforms; a team photo, both of them with other soldiers and handwritten along the bottom the words SOG team Viper, 2 Dec 68; Ben sitting in a stirrup and dangling from a rope under a helicopter flying above a dense jungle; Ben lying on the ground, his pants ripped open and an Army medic wrapping his bloody leg; Ben in a hospital bed, a pretty nurse in a white uniform on one side, and on the other side, a general pinning a Purple Heart to Ben’s pillow; Ben, in the jungle, holding a long black rifle with a scope, his boot on a dead Asian soldier wearing black pajamas, 1000 meters written along the bottom; Ben, his smile gone now, replaced by a hardness John had never seen on his father’s face, camouflage greasepaint, his uniform no longer crisp but instead dirty and worn with the sleeves cut off, revealing his muscular arms and that tattoo. He was standing among Indians.
He was not the same man.
John realized he knew next to nothing about his father. Ben Brice had been a hero, he knew that, but Ben had never talked about the war and John had never asked. His father was a loser. A drunk. That was all he had ever really known about Ben Brice.
John returned the photos to the box, one by one, but his eyes lingered on the hospital photo of the man and woman with the baby. This same man was in the early photos with Ben but in none of the later ones. Looking at this man and this woman, something strange stirred inside John, like one of those deja vu moments. He touched the image of the woman gently. John didn’t know how long he had been staring at the photo when he looked up to see Ben standing over him. John held up the photo.
“Who are these people?” he asked.
Ben was quiet for a time. He ran his hands over his face and through his hair. Then he said, “Your mother and father.”
“My dad says life is random,” Gracie said.
“What?” Jacko said without turning his head back.
“Random. You know, things happen for no particular reason. He says life doesn’t make sense and isn’t supposed to. My mom says life is fucked up, but she has some issues.”
“The hell you talking about?”
His words and smoke came out of his mouth at the same time. She sighed. “What I’m talking about is, you two lamebrains kidnap me not even knowing Ben is my grandpa, and a long time ago during Ben’s war you did something bad and Ben told on you and you got in trouble.”
“How do you know we did something bad?”
“Because I know Ben didn’t. And now Ben’s coming after me and he’s going to find out you took me, the same guy he told on. I mean, what are the odds of that? Now my dad-he’s a math genius-he’d say that’s just random, what normal people call coincidence or luck. But I don’t think so. I think it’s meant to be.”
“Destiny?”
“God’s plan. See, Nanna-she’s my grandmother-she goes to Mass like, almost every day. She’s always saying, ‘God has a plan for you, Gracie Ann Brice. God has a plan for all of us.’ She says there’s no such thing as coincidence or luck, that everything that happens in our lives is supposed to happen because it’s all part of God’s plan. So you kidnapping me and Ben coming to get me, that’s not a coincidence. That’s part of God’s plan.”
Jacko exhaled smoke through both nostrils.
“Well, sweet cheeks, I don’t know about God’s plan, but my plan is to gut your grandpa.”
“Roger Dalton was the brother I never had,” Ben said. “We went through West Point together, then to Vietnam together.” He paused. “Academy instructors, they told us it would be our great adventure. It wasn’t.”
John’s eyes remained on the photo of his mother and father; his mother was holding him and his father looked so strong and manly. There was manly somewhere in John Brice’s genes.
“You were born a week before we deployed. On our flight to Saigon, Roger said, ‘Anything happens to me, you be my son’s father.’ He was killed two weeks later.”
“How’d he die?”
“A soldier’s death.”
Ben’s voice cracked. John wanted to know more, but he decided that now wasn’t the time.
“What happened to my mother?”
“Mary, she was smart just like you. But when Roger died, it’s like her mind couldn’t handle it. She was just too fragile to fit in this world.”
“Like me.”
“She died when you were six months old. We adopted you.”
“John Roger Brice.” Ben nodded. “Where are they buried?”
“Iowa. Where they were from.”
“When this is over, I think I’ll go to Iowa. Is his name on the Wall in Washington?”
“I suppose. I’ve never been able to go.”
“Maybe I’ll go to Iowa and then to the Wall. Maybe you’ll come with me.”
“Maybe.”
John looked at the photo again. “I always thought Gracie got her eyes and hair from you.”
Would she look for her daughter in every blonde blue-eyed girl she saw on the street, in the mall, and at restaurants? Would she wonder what her daughter looked like with each passing year, like those age-progression
