Angel rubbed at her face. Was she crying? Julia didn’t see any tears. But she could tell how much it hurt Angel to talk about this.
“The one thing I had. The one thing that made any sense of my life. Imagine it, Julia. Imagine if someone told you that you could never touch a dog again. Never work with animals, and if they caught you within a hundred yards of so much as a gerbil, you would go straight to prison. Forever.”
“It’s not the same thing—”
“It’s exactly the same,” Angel told her. “I know I’m not like you. I know I’m different. But I am what I am. So I went to my grandpa. I got a hearing with a special group in the Justice Department, and then another meeting at the Pentagon. I laid out my argument as carefully, as logically as I could. When they didn’t listen to logic — people so rarely do — I played on their emotions. I cried and told them how sorry I was, how I was duped, how I felt so bad about the whole thing. Then I asked them for a job. I asked them for a way to redeem myself.”
“This — this life,” Julia said, scarcely believing it. “This was your idea?”
“I had to beg them to let me actually work. I had to beg them to give me those trailers. Do you understand? I had to fight for what I have.”
“You couldn’t have known what it would mean.”
“I wrote my own job description,” Angel said. “When he heard it, my grandpa tried to stop me. He tried to convince me that a life of pills and no computers and maybe a job somewhere flipping burgers was worth it. I pointed out that I wouldn’t be allowed to run a cash register. You need to run a cash register if you want to work at a fast-food place. There was nothing else for me. So he relented. He said yes. And now every year on my birthday, he comes and has lunch with me in my trailer. And he asks me if I still want this life. If I still want to be me. He says he can pull some more strings, call in some more favors. And every year I smile and kiss him on the cheek and say no. I’m not a prisoner, Julia. I make my own choices.”
Angel stopped talking then. She’d said all she had to say on the matter, clearly. Julia wasn’t sure how to respond.
“I didn’t know,” she said finally.
“No, you didn’t. And you weren’t supposed to. All that is classified.”
Julia nodded.
Angel got up from the table. She started to turn away, but then she stopped herself. She took a piece of paper from her purse and wrote a phone number on it. “The next time Chapel wakes up, just call that number. It won’t pick up no matter how many times you let it ring, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll see the call came in.”
Julia took the scrap of paper. “When he wakes up—”
“Sugar,” Angel said, “I’ll come running.”
“I know you need to get to work, and it wasn’t my, ah, intention to detain you. Mostly I just came to thank you, of course. After all that you” — Hollingshead waved his hands in the air — “after all you did. Quite frankly, you saved my life. But that’s not the only reason I came. I did wish to speak with you quickly about, well. About this house.”
Top’s hand lay on the table, the fingers flexing as he gripped it hard enough to damage the veneer. He said nothing. He didn’t even blink. He just nodded.
“It’s a fascinating arrangement here. All the veterans, all your — your boys — living under one roof. Struggling through their PTSD and their physical rehabilitation together. A brilliant stroke, that. I remember how terribly alone I felt after I came back from my first tour overseas. How a situation like this might have helped! And you manage on such a shoestring budget. I know that in the past you’ve managed to get by with donations from certain of your boys. Myself, of course, included.”
Top nodded again. Hollingshead had needed physical rehabilitation after a hip replacement a few years back. Top had been his therapist. The fact that Hollingshead outranked Top by several orders of magnitude hadn’t mattered in the slightest — from that day forward, Rupert Hollingshead had been one of Top’s boys. He was rather proud of the affiliation.
“You may have heard — that is, I don’t know if you’ve heard but my, well, my job title has recently changed. To be blunt I’ve moved up in the world a bit.”
Top finally spoke. “Are you saying you want to give us more money?” he asked. “Admiral, sir?”
Hollingshead smiled and took off his glasses. He began to polish them with a silk handkerchief as if he needed time to think of how to frame his reply. “About that, well, certainly. I mean, if you think you could use more of, ah, a stipend. But what I was really thinking was, we could set you up as a pilot study. Get some data, crunch some numbers, as it were.”
“A pilot study?”
“Well, yes,” Hollingshead said. “The government does prefer hard data when it can come by it, you see. I think we can prove that a house like this does our veterans more good than — well, than the programs we have in place now. Ah, I know that look on your face. I remember it from our days together when you taught me how to walk again. You’re wishing that I would get to the point.”
“With all due respect, sir.”
Hollingshead nodded. “What I’m suggesting is simple: that we start up houses like this all over the country. Hundreds of them — as many as necessary. Places for our returning veterans to stay, to get back on their feet. To make sure that every one of your, well, metaphorically let’s call them your boys, has a chance like this. Now, of course, you and Dolores would be the directors of this program, which would mean a substantial yearly salary and—”
“You know I would do it for free,” Top interjected.
Hollingshead smiled.
“Damn,” Top said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”
Hollingshead tilted his head to one side. “Said what?” he asked. “At my age, of course, one’s hearing is the first thing to go.”
It was very quiet and very dark in the hospital room. They’d turned the lights out so that Chapel’s roommate could get some sleep.
Julia didn’t mind. She climbed into the bed with Jim and curled up against his side, careful not to disturb any of the tubes or sensors attached to him. It wasn’t the first night she’d done this, and she knew how to get comfortable.
It helped that they’d removed his artificial arm. That made some room for her on the bed. They’d stored it in a cupboard nearby, out of sight — apparently it creeped out some of the nurses.
Julia kissed Jim’s cold cheek. Laid her hand on his chest.
He stirred. He did that sometimes, in his sleep. But this time his eyes opened, just a crack, and he whispered her name.
“I’m here,” she said.
He nodded. Licked his chapped lips.
“Angel came by earlier,” she said. “She wants me to call her when you can actually talk to her—”
“Not… now,” he told her. The effort of talking visibly drained him. But he shifted a little in the bed, turned so he could face her better. “Now.” He took a long, deep breath. “Want to talk… to you.”
“Sure,” she said.
The words came out slowly, each one costing him a little strength. It was all right, though. This was the most he’d said since he first regained consciousness. Weak as he seemed, he was getting stronger. All the time.
He was going to make it.
“When you… broke up with me,” he said. “I had a little box. I put it on the… on the table by the door.”
“I remember,” she said. There’d been a diamond ring in that box. She’d already broken things off, and she was walking out the door for what she thought was the last time. She’d seen it sitting there and it had destroyed her. She’d spent that whole night crying and drinking and trying to not think about what the box meant.