intellectually and had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t guilty according to any law.
But reassuring her conscience was a different story.
“Tell me how you feel,” the psychiatrist had said to her in their last session.
“Like I’m sinking.”
“Into what?”
“Myself.”
“And what does that mean? Sinking into yourself?”
It means I’m losing. It means it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again. It means I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own.
She stared at him. “Is that what they teach you in graduate school? To just ask follow-up questions? Just active listening, reflecting back to me what I’m saying?”
Where were you on career day when they brought that little gem up?
He rolled his pen between his fingers. “It’s okay to be angry,” he said. “And it’s okay to be disappointed.” He paused and she waited. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. At last he said, “But you have to learn to forgive yourself.”
“That again.”
“Yes.”
“Really. Forgive myself.”
“That’s right.”
“What does that even mean?”
“To forgive yourself?”
“Yeah.” She’d had enough of this. “And if you ask me what I think it means, this session is over.”
He took a breath and then hesitated, and she could tell he really didn’t know what to say.
Nice. He tells you to forgive yourself and then he can’t even explain what he means.
“Obviously,” she told him, “it’s not just marginalizing the event or simply acknowledging the pain and then doing your best to ignore it, it’s gotta be more than that or ‘self-forgiveness,’ if there even is such a thing, would just be a casuistic form of denial.”
He looked at her oddly, finally said, “You mentioned that your mother used to take you to church. Are you a religious person, Tessa?”
“My mom was.”
“Don’t you think God wants you to forgive yourself?”
“Well, I looked that up last week after you started in on all this. The Bible never says to forgive yourself. Not once. So apparently, it’s not exactly on God’s top ten list.”
The guy seemed to be at a loss.
“Look”-she stood, put a foot on the glass coffee table beside him-“if I break this thing, you can forgive the debt I owe you if you want, or you can make me pay for it, but how can I forgive myself for the debt that I owe you?”
He rose abruptly. “Tessa, put your foot down. I mean, you need to put it-”
Enough. This guy’s more clueless than you are.
“I am so done with this.” She bypassed shattering the glass coffee table and lowered her foot to the floor.
“Tessa-”
Without a word she’d left the office and never gone back.
Tessa entered her bedroom, closed the door behind her, and emptied her bag.
She checked through her stuff three times and finally had to acknowledge the truth-the pills weren’t here.
She replayed the morning in her mind. Packing, stressing, hurrying out the door…
Oh.
Leaving her pill bottle on the countertop beside the sink of that dorm room at the University of Minnesota.
She slumped into the chair by the desk.
Now what?
Amber’s a pharmacist. You’d think she’d have…
Feeling slightly guilty, she eased into the hall and slipped into the bathroom. Then, as quietly as she could, she searched through Sean and Amber’s medicine cabinet but couldn’t find anything she could use to help her sleep. But to her surprise she did find some Abilify, Wellbutrin, and Lamictal. She wasn’t an expert on medications, but she’d seen enough drug commercials about the first two to know they were antidepressants. All three drugs were prescribed to Amber.
Patrick had never told her that Amber was dealing with depression. If he even knew about it.
This is way uncool. You should so not be doing this, Tessa. Looking through their stuff.
Feeling worse than before, she silently returned to the bedroom and pulled out her notebook. She stared at the blank page for a long time, but nothing came to her.
When she went to draw the curtains across the window to keep out the darkness, she noticed the dusty corpses of two wasps on the windowsill.
Too many dead things in this house.
She imagined what it would have been like to see those wasps flying over and over again into the glass, thinking that they were heading toward freedom, when they were destined only for death.
Now they slept and would never wake up.
Words came to her: Time is a strange beast that cannot be tamed. It devours all things, but it lets you play with its mane in the meantime.
The distance and the days collapsed in her mind, and she went back to her notebook, wrote, dead wasps lie on the windowsill. yesterday they tried to fly through the glass. to freedom. to life. today they lie still in death; all their hopes sheathed in their dry, quiet bodies. all their busy buzzings are over now that they’re dead and forgotten on this side of the glass.
She thought for a long time and then added two more words: with me.
46
Saturday, January 10
US Naval Forces Central Command
Bahrain, Persian Gulf
12:21 p.m. GMT
Allighiero Avellino took a step forward in line and showed his ID to the Master-at-Arms, the United States Navy’s version of military police, standing sentry at the end of the gangplank to the USS Louisiana, then waited while the man used a handheld scanner to run his name through DBIDS, the Defense Biometric Identification Data System, to verify his identity.
It was the fourth and final security checkpoint that he and the fellow members of his cleaning party had to pass through before they would be allowed onto the sub to clean the urine-stained floors of the heads before setting things up to pump the solid waste receptacles into the tanker truck that was still being inspected at the entrance to the base.
Although today he had another small task to complete in addition to his official duties.
For years Allighiero had believed that the environmental activist groups that sprang up in the twentieth century-Greenpeace, Earth First! and the rest-hadn’t taken things far enough: small demonstrations, people chaining themselves to trees or railroad tracks, cutting down a few telephone poles, spiking old forest growth, unfurling banners on bridges or boats. Yes, all of it was good for a few minutes of publicity, but in the end it almost never swayed public opinion or changed the minds of policy makers. It mostly just made the activists feel good, as if they were doing something.
