Beverly switches off the TV uneasily. Just that name, the “Stolen Valor Act,” gets under her skin. She pushes down the thought that she’s no better than the congressman, or the rest of the pack of liars and manipulators who parade across the television. In a way his crime is not so dissimilar to what she’s been doing, is it? Encouraging Derek to twist his facts around as she loosens his muscles; trying to rub out his memories of the berm. Thinking she can live the boy’s worst day for him.
“He’s doing amazingly well,” Beverly hears herself telling her sister, Janet, during their weekly telephone call. Bragging, really, but she can’t help herself — Zeiger is making huge strides. His life is settling into an extraordinarily ordinary routine, she tells Jan, who by now has heard all about him.
“He’s got a full-time job now, isn’t that exciting? He signed the lease on a new apartment, too, much nicer than the cockroach convention where he’s been living. I’m really so proud of him. Janet?”
She pauses, embarrassed — it’s been whole minutes since her sister’s said a word. “Are you still there?”
“Oh, I’m still here.” Janet laughs angrily. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing? You want to throw it in my face?”
“What?”
“Nice to hear you’re still taking such excellent care of everyone.”
Fury causes her sister’s voice to crackle in the receiver. For a second, Beverly is too stunned to speak.
“Janet. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t pretend like I didn’t do my part. I was there as often as I could be, Beverly. Once a month without fail — more, when I could get away. And not everybody thought it was a good idea to skip college, you know.”
Beverly stares across her kitchen, half expecting to see the dishes rattling. Once a month? Is Janet joking?
“Do you want me to get the calendar out?” Beverly’s voice is trembling so hard it’s almost unintelligible. “From September to May one year,” she says, “I was alone with her. Don’t you dare deny it.”
“It’s been twenty goddamn years. Every other weekend, practically, I was there.”
“You did not—”
“Dad thought you were crazy to stay, Mom practically begged you to go, so if you stayed, you did it for your own reasons. Okay? And I came to help plenty of times. I’m sorry if it wasn’t every fucking weekday like you. I’m sorry we can’t all be saints like you, Beverly. Healers—”
Now she sounds like the older sister that Beverly remembers, her voice high and wild, stung, making fun.
“And I had my own family.”
“You had Stuart. The girls weren’t even born yet.” Beverly sputters. You got the girls, she manages not to say, although now her outrage is actually blinding.
“You’re not remembering right,” Janet insists. We were out there a bunch of times …”
“Janet! You can’t be serious!”
“We were and you know it.”
Beverly swallows. “But that’s simply not true.”
“I know I’ll regret saying this, okay, I’ve held my tongue for twenty years, I should get a damn medal like your little buddy out there. But who else is going to tell you? You are like a dog, Beverly.” Beverly can almost feel her sister’s fingers clawing into the telephone, as if they are wrapped around Beverly’s neck. “You’re like a sad dog. Your masters aren’t coming back. Sor-ry. Mom’s been dead for over a decade, do you realize that? You need some new tricks.”
Beverly takes a breath; it’s as if she’s been punched.
“You have no idea what I sacrificed—”
“Oh, give me a break. Die a martyr then. Jesus Christ.”
For many years, Beverly will remember every word of this conversation while failing to recall, no matter how hard she tries, who hung up first.
Quaking alone in her apartment, Beverly’s first impulse is to dial their old home phone number. If you were alive, Mom, she thinks, you would set the record straight. For years she’s assumed that she and Janet agreed on this point, at least: the basic chronology of their mother’s fight with cancer. What happened when. Who was present in which rooms. Beverly doesn’t know how to make sense of who she is today without those facts in place. With a chill she realizes there are no witnesses left besides herself and Janet. She has a sense memory of steering her mother down a long corridor, her wheelchair spokes glinting. Janet missed knowing that version of their mother. If Beverly stops pushing her now, or loses her grip, she will roll out of sight.
With her hand still tangled in the telephone cord, Beverly decides that she doesn’t want to be yet another of the cover-up artists. Can’t. She won’t go on encouraging the sergeant to lie to himself, just so he can sleep at night. She’s warped the truth, she pushed the truth under his skin, but she won’t allow it to go on changing. Suddenly it is vitally important to Beverly that Zeiger remember the original story, the one she has stolen from him. Whatever she’s wiped from his memory, she wants to restore. Immediately, if that’s possible.
“Derek? It’s Beverly. Can you come in tomorrow? I have a slot at nine …”
She gets a melting flash of an obscenely blue sky, blooming fire. A large bull is standing in a river, in chest-high green water, chains of mosquitoes twisting off its bony shoulders like tassels. Its eyes are vacuums. Placid and hugely empty. The animal continues lapping at its reddish shadow on the water, oblivious of the bomb behind it, while a thick smoke rolls over the desert.
When she sees Zeiger in person the following morning, with his big grin and his smooth, unlined face, she can feel her resolve fading. She knows she’s got to help him to recover his original memory, to straighten out the timeline of April 14 now, before she loses her nerve completely. He lies down on the massage table, and she’s glad his face is turned away from her.
“I was thinking about you a lot this weekend, Derek,” she says. “I saw a news show where they interviewed an army general about IEDs … I thought of your friend Arlo, of course. That story you told me once, about April 14—”
Derek doesn’t react, so she babbles on.
“This general said it was almost impossible to spot trip wires. He called them these ‘tiny wires in the dirt.’ And I thought, I’ll have to ask Derek if that was, ah, his same experience …”
There is no warning contraction of his shoulder blades.
“Of course it’s hard to spot the wires!” Derek explodes at her. He shakes off her hands, sits up. “You need TV to tell you that? You need to hear it from some general? Jesus Christ, it’s nine a.m., and you’re interrogating me?”
“Derek, please, there’s no need to get so upset—”
“No? Then why the hell did you bring up Arlo?”
“I’m sorry if I–I was only curious, Derek—”
“That’s right, that’s everyone. You’re ‘only curious,’ ” he snarls. “None of you has any idea what it was like. Nobody gives a shit.”
Derek rolls his legs away from her and stands, struggles into his shirt and pants, knocking into the massage table. Then he goes stumbling out of the room like a revenant, half dressed, trailing one sleeve of his jacket. Walking away from her so quickly that it’s impossible to tell what, if anything, changed on the tattoo.