The Pieces We Keep(106)

Envy for such normalcy swept over Vivian. Good or bad, she needed to know where matters stood. Anything was better than this state of uncertainty.

On the phone, she summoned the operator and requested the FBI. The receptionist, even at this hour, cited a meeting for Agent Gerard.

“Would you care to leave another message, Miss James?” Vivian refrained from her standard agreement. “That won’t be necessary,” she decided.

After all, there was no need to leave a message when she could confront the man in person.





49


His eyes stared back from the grainy pixels of a black-and-white photograph. At the top of the page, halfway into Jack’s journal, was a Nazi commander in uniform. A flag bearing a swastika hung in the backdrop. None of this, in particular, was the cause of Audra’s angst. It was the caption beneath the picture.

Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, delivering a speech.

Not Himmel. Not Hemel.

Himmler.

The entire collage represented World War Two. Prominently displayed was another disturbing image: a bomber plane diving toward the ocean with smoke pluming from its tail.

Audra rolled off of her knees to sit on Jack’s bedroom floor. She needed a solid foundation before turning the page. A snippet of an article appeared on white paper, like the various Web pages he had printed during computer class. Except this one was educational in a much darker way. It featured the account of Nazi spies who were caught on the East Coast and sentenced to the electric chair.

Audra had barely digested this when she plodded onward and found a Rose Festival calendar. Upcoming Events on Memorial Day. Included in the listing were small head shots of the soldiers being honored—including PFC Sean Malloy.

The journal slipped from her hands as she tried to make sense of it. Jack had checked the book out in March, months before the night terrors began.

From a place deep in her memory came the scene of a movie. The title eluded her, but she could see the actor’s face. It was Kevin Spacey, playing a character who was pretending to be someone he wasn’t. In an office at the police station, he recounted his life to an investigating detective. But the story he told wasn’t real. He had made it all up by combining photos and fliers and names that surrounded him. And the detective had swallowed it whole. Why? Because he was so hungry for resolution he would have believed anything.

Audra glanced around her. She saw the model planes suspended from the ceiling. She saw Captain America, the hero on the poster, his face on Jack’s backpack. She saw the toy plane on his nightstand, its paint rubbed thin from ... deception? Confusion? Desperation?

As the old saying went, the simplest answer was typically the right one.

Perhaps Jack, in his seclusion, had invented a fantasy world aided by his collage. And those images, embodying the darkness of wartime, had gained a realism that now consumed his days and nights.

She had questioned him on every element; always he’d replied with a shrug or I don’t know. After all, if he’d admitted the source of his knowledge—of the people or words or pictures—it would have meant confessing to a journal crafted from a vandalized book. More than that, his imaginary realm would be over.

Which it was, from this minute on.

Audra marched to the kitchen, grabbed a trash bag, and returned to do what she should have long ago. She blamed herself more than Jack for creating this disaster, for seeing things that weren’t actually there.

In his drawings, the people falling from the plane were her and Jack. Nobody else. The photo from the library book, of the bomber in a fatal dive, must have left him terrified to fly. It was no different from a child watching Jaws and becoming fearful of the ocean.

Sure, while half asleep he’d responded to being called Jakob. Swap out a few letters and the name would be Jack. As for the inscription, a few German words from a TV program would have sounded close enough to convince a poor combat vet that the puzzle of his own past could be solved.

In other words, there was never some spiritual message in need of decoding, no unsettled soul seeking a reunion  . But Audra had bought into everything—perhaps unconsciously craving her own fantasy world—and dragged others down with her.

Enraged at herself, she stood on a chair and yanked down Jack’s model planes. She shoved them into the trash bag and added the poster from the wall. Next she grabbed his backpack, emptied its contents on the bed, and threw the casing away. She would replace them all with better ones. Harmless and normal, they would feature robots and athletes and dinosaurs. Things that didn’t drive her and Jack to the brink of insanity or deplete their family savings. They wouldn’t draw policemen to the front door or pry open an elderly woman’s tomb of memories.