The Revisionists (56 page)

He didn’t answer for a few seconds. “Not many people knew about the two of them, just me and some others. And we didn’t… We didn’t feel there was any reason to hurt his name like that. He was a great soldier, so we kept our mouths shut.”

During Tasha’s many conversations with other soldiers, and with other families, she’d been told about how commanding officers and fellow soldiers continued to protect the deceased. If they found letters to a lover on the person of a fallen—and married—warrior, they burned the letters. Ditto anything that looked like a suicide note. This wasn’t censorship, everyone told Tasha, it wasn’t revisionism—it was respect. You respect the dead and what they’ve suffered for. You erase the secrets, destroying anything that might tarnish the family’s memory. You let the reputation live, the honor and duty that the soldier stood for. But she hadn’t thought that could apply in Marshall’s case; she’d been unable to imagine his doing anything that required a cover-up. And what was the big deal about falling in love?

“Was she in his platoon?”

“No, no. That would’ve been real bad. I mean, it’s against general orders for
any
officers and enlisted soldiers to, you know, get together. But especially if one serves under the other. And, honestly, I don’t know if the two of them ever actually—
you know
. But I could tell they were a thing. Becoming a thing ain’t easy out there, believe me, but it happens.”

Tasha thought about that modern way in which people become “things.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me this from the beginning? You all made me think there was some grand conspiracy against him or something.”

He exhaled loudly. “She was one of the hostages I told you about.” He paused. “They’d been missing a couple of hours, then someone in our platoon got a tip on where they might be, and Lieutenant Wilson ordered us in. Even though she wasn’t in our platoon and wasn’t technically his responsibility.”

She remembered then how Velasquez’s eyes had looked at Walter Reed when she’d asked him if the hostages had lived and what their names had been. He’d been lying then, gently steering her away from Marshall’s indiscretions.

New dramas were slowly unfolding in Tasha’s mind. Velasquez seemed crushed by guilt that some perceived failure of his had resulted in Marshall’s death. Yet surely he must see that the same could be said in reverse, that Velasquez would still have both legs—and Marshall and the two other men who’d died that day might still be alive—if only Marshall hadn’t been blinded by his emotions.

“So some people think Marshall… made a mistake.”

“It’s not like that.” His voice quieter now. “We loved Marshall. What happened, it happened.” He drew in a long breath. “I mean, ultimately… how can you blame someone for falling in love?”

Of all the hard questions she’d faced of late, that might have been the hardest. It lingered while she scanned some of her brother’s lines, trying to better understand what had happened.

“I still don’t see why he stopped contacting people back home for a week or why he took down his blog.”

Again there was a pause as Velasquez weighed his response. “I can’t swear to it, ma’am, but it seemed to me they’d broken things off around then. I kind of… overheard them arguing one day. I don’t know if he was breaking it off with her, if she was dumping him, or if one or the other of them finally decided it was too risky. But I’m pretty sure they ended it about a week before he died. And afterward he was… different. A little shorter with people. However it happened, I guess his head was in a bad place and he needed to shut down, you know?”

“Yeah.” That sounded exactly like Marshall; he’d always been one to close himself off when he was down. “This Sunny—you said she’s still alive?”

“Yes, ma’am. Her tour ends in a month or two, I think. But she’s still out there.”

“Sunny’s not her real name, is it?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What
is
her real name?”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not saying.”

“Why not?”

“Because Marshall wouldn’t want me to, ma’am.” He paused. “I’m sure someone as bright and determined as you could track her down eventually, but I’m telling you, you shouldn’t. Out of respect for your brother, let it go.”

There were few tasks that Tasha was less constitutionally suited to than refraining to acquire some item of information. If it was out there, she needed to have it. To make her smarter, to strengthen her, to gain an advantage in this infuriating world. The existence of this latest piece of unknown knowledge seemed to hover in front of her, a tangible thing, and all she needed to do was reach far enough and she’d grasp it. What Velasquez was proposing was nearly impossible.

A gust of wind blew and the pages fluttered in her hand as if pleading for release. Tasha stuffed them back in the envelope. She thanked Velasquez and hung up.

Marshall had died for love. At least she could say that. No matter how she felt about the wars or the politics of her age or the feuds in Washington and the wider world, her brother had found something good to hold on to, and had sacrificed himself for her.

Maybe if Marshall had never met her, he’d still be alive. Or maybe not. Maybe you could drive yourself crazy trying to chart backward all the causes and effects, all the ends and means, tracing everything to some original sin that may or may not have actually occurred but that people accepted as true, or true enough. Maybe staring into the eyes of all that history was a dangerous thing to do, as her mother had calmly warned her. Maybe you were supposed to move forward armed with just enough history to help you figure out the present without obsessing over the past. But how much was enough? Where was the gray area between ignorance and obsession?

Tasha stared at her tiny front plot. The tall oak was no doubt decades older than the 1912 row house, which had been a blue-collar family’s home for years, then a crack house during the eighties when this block was among the nation’s most neglected, and then an abandoned building for a full decade before the previous owner had started fixing it up. Tasha was doing the rest: she’d put in a new bathroom, removing the matching all-black toilet and sink and bathtub (all the better for finding your spilled cocaine, apparently), and she’d patiently re-topsoiled the front plot, removing pieces of broken bottles and the occasional razor blade, and planted new bushes and perennials. She’d spent an entire weekend the previous spring gardening and, the very next Monday morning, had been stunned to find that two of her new bushes—each a fifty-dollar sarcococca—were gone, in their place nothing but two gaping holes. What the hell? Had she bought migrating bushes? She’d stood there, confused and enraged, as her neighbor, the friendly gay man and proud survivor of worse times on that block, informed her that such crimes occurred now and again. Botanical thieves would dig up expensive-looking shrubs and hock them at yard sales. Tasha was floored.
Shrubbery theft?

So the next weekend, early on a Saturday morning in March, she’d driven around the Hill in search of yard sales. She hadn’t found many, but there was an enormous market set up in the vast parking lot of RFK Stadium. Stalls of pirated CDs, incense, secondhand clothing, baked goods, and folk art were perched there on the banks of the Anacostia, as if people were selling all the belongings they couldn’t carry with them as gentrification pushed them farther southeast. It had taken Tasha only ten minutes to find the lady with the bushes.

Two of the sarcococca had looked familiar, though she couldn’t be certain. She knew of no way to DNA-test bushes. But her rage, and her righteousness, had burned hot enough.

“Where do you get your bushes?” she asked the heavyset woman who sat on a wheeled office chair that was as out of place here as everything else was.

“Oh, my grandsons grow ’em.” She wore a thick blue sweater and had a blanket across her knees even on that glorious spring morning. Her voice was pure country by way of two or three generations in D.C., from the state of North Carolina to North Carolina Avenue Southeast. “Which ones you innerested in?”

Tasha looked around but didn’t see anyone grandsonish in the vicinity.

“I’m looking for the kinds of bushes that don’t up and walk away.”

The lady laughed, genuinely mirthful. “Girl, I ain’t never seen that happen!” She slapped a knee and managed to recover. “Though, in
this
town? Wouldn’t be the craziest thing I ever seen.”

The satisfaction wouldn’t be there, Tasha realized. So she reached into her pocket and allowed her two fifty-dollar shrubs to be price-cut down to twenty-dollar shrubs.

She’d just started wondering how exactly she was going to get the two bushes into her car when the old lady whistled.

“Ay, Darnell! Delivery, boy!”

The kid wandered over from one of the CD stalls. Wearing a black Heat jersey over a black tee whose sleeves reached past his gawky elbows. High school, if he still went. He loaded the two shrubs onto a flat hand truck and asked Tasha which way her car was, never making eye contact. She didn’t recognize him from the neighborhood but wondered if she’d start noticing him around now. If he recognized her, he didn’t show it.

She walked alongside him, his crooked red Phillies cap facing her even though he did not. He had long, skinny fingers, and she imagined them tearing into the earth. He slowly weaved his hand truck through the stalls, and the sun off the asphalt was warmer than it had been in months.

She popped open the back of her hatchback. He didn’t bother to protect the young boughs as he muscled the plants inside.

“You know, my little brother used to steal stuff too.”

He looked at her. “Huh?”

“My little brother. Though I doubt he ever boosted a bush.”

He adopted the blank look with which she’d once been annoyingly familiar. “I ain’t know what you talking about, lady.”

“I’ve never had to plant something a second time before. But I guess there’s nothing wrong with needing a second chance, so long as you use it right.”

His blank stare vacuumed her own gaze for a moment, then he turned without a word, the now-empty hand truck squeaking on its wheels. Tasha shook her head. She would have to tell Marshall about this, she thought. He’d get a kick out of it. He was out in the desert again, doing God knows what and hopefully being safe, and she’d just bumped into his past on the ever-changing streets of D.C.

 * * *

She read through a few of the e-mails again, then looked up at her reclaimed bushes—which weren’t doing so well due to the dry fall and her complete failure to water them since August—when she saw Troy Jones, a bandage covering his right eye and two more on his left cheek, same damn clothes as before, walking her way.

Z.

S
he’s sitting on her front stoop surrounded by text. I wondered if she might back away at the sight of me, but she watches calmly as I walk down the sidewalk and up the short path. I stop at the base of her steps. Bits of the padded envelope stuffing are sprinkled on the steps like gray snow.

“Surprised to see you,” she says, voice decidedly neutral. Which is an improvement over how she sounded the last time. “I assumed you’d just vanish into wherever it is you people hide before popping up again to follow someone else.”

“That’s what I’m supposed to do, actually. But I’m not doing it anymore.”

She watches me for a moment, judging. The wind blows; leaves scrape their fingers against the brick sidewalks.

“Thanks for sending this to me,” she says.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner. I wasn’t sure how to show you without…”

“Without letting on the type of work you do?”

“Used to do.”

“You’re very past tense today.”

“I’m feeling the opposite. That night, at the restaurant. When I told you some of us can imagine a better future? I’m putting that theory to the test.”

She doesn’t dare smile or lighten her voice, yet her eyes are round, more vulnerable than she wants them to be.

“Your brother. I’m sorry I read his messages, but I needed to, to find what you were looking for.”

“Wow, an apology. Aren’t you used to reading other people’s things?”

“I’m apologizing anyway.”

“It’s okay.”

She watches me for another moment, then pats the stoop beside her. “Pull up a brick.”

I sit there, our knees almost touching, the angle of the autumn light so sharp I have to squint.

“There’s a lot that I need to explain,” I say. “Once I figure out how.”

“You’re in the obfuscation business. Truth doesn’t come so easily, huh?”

I don’t answer that one.

“What happened to your face?”

“I spent the last thirty-six hours with the FBI, and—”

“The FBI did that to you?” Eyes wider now, ready again for the world to confirm her worst opinions of it.

“No, no. They patched me up. And I needed their help with something else.”

I was at the Washington field office of the FBI for more than a full day. I explained my story to at least three underlings and sat for hours in a windowless holding room before they finally sent someone with any kind of authority over or familiarity with what I was talking about. Special Agent Westerberg, he introduced himself, and we spoke for hours. He asked me to tell my story, then asked for it again, then asked every conceivable question that might trip up a liar. But I had the facts down, my internal databases there to guide me, my own experience and memory as well, though those are decidedly less reliable.

“You’re technically a missing person, as I understand it,” Westerberg said at one point.

“I’ve been found.”

I showed him some of the files in my briefcase, explained their relevance to what was happening, what had already happened, and what might still happen if he and the Bureau didn’t step forward and impose some order on this chaos.

I told him about the gunfight, and Leo. While we sat there he dispatched other agents to the scene, which, one hopes, was already being investigated by local police by then. At some point a medic came in to clean my wounds and look at my eye. He told me I should see a specialist immediately because I risked permanent damage to my vision. But I’d already lost so many things, this latest loss seemed fitting. First the GeneScan, then the ability to foresee what would happen next, and now basic three-dimensionality. All these extra layers were being peeled away from my world, or from my perception of it. And is there any difference? Everything before me now seemed flat, stark, a blank canvas.