“Hey, Dad. I guess I should have come before. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long…”


Jane lost track of how long she sat on the cold marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial, watching the tourists come and go, seeing watchers in the shadows, a terrorist behind every tree. So she wasn’t sure exactly when it was that she began to get angry. When she came to realize that the intruder in her hotel room might have stolen something from her that was of greater value than any painting, even a real Renoir. When she became determined that if it was the last thing she ever did, she was going to get that something back. No art thief or petty burglar was going to run her life!

What was it that nice young instructor in the self-defense class she’d taken in those first nervous, vulnerable months after the divorce-what was his name?-Shing Lee, that was it. What had Shing always said?

Take control, take action!

Yes, that was it. To get over this awful fear and sense of violation, she had to take back control. She had to take action. It was all up to her.

The first thing she made up her mind to do was what she’d planned to do in the first place-see the sights of Washington. Later on, if she felt like it and it was convenient, she’d take the painting to a gallery and have someone tell her what she already knew: that it was an undistinguished Impressionist-style painting, not especially good, but it would look quite nice hanging over her piano.

And if, during the course of the day, anyone tried to push her down, step on her back and render her unconscious, well…thanks to Shing Lee, she had a trick or two up her own sleeve.

Just let them try, she thought as she rose somewhat stiffly and started down the steps. Riled and ready, she was almost disappointed not to catch a glimpse of Aaron Campbell lurking in the trees between the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials.

But as she made her way slowly down the walkway past the rows of makeshift tent stalls manned by disabled veterans in their long hair and beards and tattered camouflage fatigues, selling memorabilia and souvenirs of a war they couldn’t leave behind, she found the incident in her hotel room, and all her fears and unanswered questions slipping into the back of her mind. As always when confronted with reminders of that war and those times, she developed an irritating little itch of guilt.

At the height of the dying and the turbulence and dissension, she’d had other things on her mind. In the early years of a marriage that had been troubled even then-though she’d never have admitted such a thing-she remembered feeling only a mild sense of sorrow and regret when her mother had called with the news that a boy Jane had gone to school with was MIA-missing in action in Vietnam. In recent years, though, she’d found herself thinking quite a bit about Jimmy Hill, though she’d never known him well at all. He’d been two years ahead of her, and in a different crowd altogether. But still…she had known him. She could recall his face even now. Where would he be today if he’d survived the war? Might he be like one of these men, with their maimed bodies and nightmares, their grizzled faces and haunted eyes?

So it was partly to scratch that little itch of guilt that Jane decided to look up Jimmy Hill’s name in the directory, partly to try to feel some sort of connectedness to a period of history that had inflicted such grievous injury on an entire generation, while leaving her virtually untouched. Beyond that, she had no idea what she hoped to accomplish by finding Jimmy’s name on that wall of so many thousands of names. Touch it, maybe? Say a little prayer for his family? She didn’t know. But it seemed important, somehow.

Her heart began to beat faster when she found the name in the book, followed by a cross that, according to the directory, meant MIA. But the awe didn’t hit her until she was approaching The Wall itself…until she saw the first of the names. So many names. That was when she knew that she should not have come alone, and that she would leave something of herself behind.

What was it about the place? She vaguely remembered controversy when it first opened…probably the statues added since had assuaged any disappointment that might have lingered. But it wasn’t the statues people came to see. It wasn’t the statues that made strong men cry.

Like that one there, the tall, lean man in the brown leather jacket, standing with his palm pressed against the mirror-like surface of the monument, head bowed, shoulders hunched with pain.

Chapter 6

She halted as if the wall itself had suddenly shifted to block her path, while her heartbeat stumbled and then lurched on, like a drunk running downhill.

Tom Hawkins. Yes, it was-and she’d have known him at once in spite of the old, worn-looking bomber jacket, baseball cap and aviator sunglasses he was wearing, and the oddly out-of-place briefcase he was carrying, if it hadn’t been for the grief that seemed to weigh him down like an invisible net.

For a few moments she stood motionless, in shock not so much at seeing him Here-she was beginning to half expect him to turn up “coincidentally” wherever she happened to be-or even at the giddy lift she’d felt beneath her ribs at the moment of recognition. But seeing him like this. Hurt and suffering, and so dreadfully vulnerable. It seemed almost indecent that she should see him like this, like surprising a stranger in the shower.

And yet it was her nature to comfort and nurture, and the urge to go to him and offer what solace she could was all but overwhelming. Or…maybe after all it would be better if she just turned and walked away and left him his privacy and solitude.

How long she stood there in breathless indecision she didn’t know, but in the end he looked up and saw her, and the choice wasn’t hers to make.

“Well,” he said in a cracked-sounding voice, “we meet again.”

Jane mumbled something equally inane and was rewarded with his crooked smile, which seemed to her even more heartbreakingly poignant than usual in that context.

“Are you-” he gestured toward the scrap of paper on which she’d written down the coordinates for Jimmy’s name “-looking for someone?”

“What? Oh, well, yes, sort of. Just a…” The guilt flooded her, filling her cheeks with warmth. She shook her head, erasing that self-conscious denigration, and said firmly, “A friend. He’s officially MIA.”

“His name’ll be here,” Tom said, his tone dry, the curve of his lips becoming even more ironic. “It’ll just have a little cross after it.”

“Yes, that’s what… And then, I guess, if they’re ever found, they just chip out the rest.” Jane watched her finger trace the diamond after a name and was astonished that her hand could appear so steady when she felt so jangled inside.

With that same soft irony, Tom drawled, “I don’t think they’re gonna be doing much more of that, do you?”

Uncertain what he meant, Jane glanced at him, but was unable to see anything at all of his eyes, just her own reflection in the sunglasses. She looked away again, down at the paper in her hand, and muttered distractedly, “I think…it should be somewhere near here.”

They weren’t the words she’d meant to say. Where were those words, the words of motherly comfort and sympathy she’d meant to offer a wounded and grieving stranger? They seemed impossible to utter now. He didn’t seem at all wounded, and she felt not the least bit maternal. What she felt most like was a girt-a very young girl, shy and awkward and out of her depth.

He took the paper from her, slipping it from between her nerveless fingers, asking permission with a quirk of his eyebrows. Silently she watched him as he moved along the walkway, scanning the list of names. She could see him reflected in the polished granite, along with the other visitors, a small V of American flags and the Washington Monument.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a spot about two feet from the base of the wall. “Is that the one?”

Jane nodded. Lowering herself to one knee, she slowly traced the letters with her fingertips. James P. Hill. And then the cross.

From behind her, his voice came, dry as the sands that blew day and night across the California deserts of her childhood. “Was he somebody close to you?”

She looked up, startled by the gruffness and by the unmistakable compassion in the voice, to find a face as unreadable as stone, the lenses of the sunglasses that gazed back at her as opaque as the face of the wall itself.

She shook her head, surprised to find that her throat was tight, and that for those few moments, at least, the denial she was about to utter was a lie. “No,” she murmured. “Just somebody I went to school with. A long time ago.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you remember his face.” Tom’s smile twitched off center as he held out his hand to help her up.

He saw it come, then, that lighting deep in her eyes, that little flare of gladness and recognition.

“Yes-yes, I do. How did you know?”

He shrugged and felt her hand warm his as he steadied her to her feet. The sun struck reddish highlights into her dark hair and tipped her lashes with gold. For the first time he noticed the faded ghosts of freckles across the tops of her cheeks and on the bridge of her nose.

She took a deep breath as she brushed off her slacks and looked sort of sideways at him, and he knew it was coming. He braced himself, but she said it so softly, so gently, that the question didn’t seem an assault at all. “And you…the name you were touching…he was someone close to you?”

He tried to take some of the pressure off his chest by releasing air in a short little laugh. It didn’t help much, and neither did the deep breath that followed. “Yeah, you could say that,” he said finally, focusing his gaze somewhere above her head, on the white puffy clouds racing across the blue spring sky. How had it got to be so beautiful, he wondered irrelevantly, after such a crappy day yesterday?