Tess Gerritsen - Never say die

"No."

"You should be."

"I'm not."

A pause. They both looked down, looked back up, strangers groping for common ground.

Softly he asked, "How's your mother?"

Willy blinked away a new wave of tears. "She's… dying." She felt a comfortless sense of retribution at her father's shocked silence. "It's cancer," she continued. "I wanted her to see a doctor months ago, but you know how she is. Never thinking about herself. Never taking the time to…" Her voice cracked, faded.

"I had no idea," he whispered.

"How could you? You were dead." She looked up at the sky and suddenly laughed, an ugly sound in that quiet circle of trees. "It never occurred to you to write to us? One letter from the grave?''

"It only would have made things harder."

"Harder than what? Than it's already been?"

"With me gone, dead, Ann was free to move on," he said, "to… find someone else. Someone better for her."

"But she didn't! She never even tried! All she could think about was you. "

"I thought she'd forget. I thought she'd get over me."

"You thought wrong."

He bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Wilone."

After a pause, she said, "I'm sorry, too."

A bird sang in the trees, its sweet notes piercing the silence between them.

She asked, "What happened to you?"

"You mean this?" He gestured vaguely at his face.

"I mean…everything."

"Everything," he repeated. Then, laughing, he looked up at the branches. "Where the hell do I start?" He began to walk in a circle, moving among the trees like a lost man. At last he stopped beside the fuselage. Gazing at the jagged remains, he said, "It's funny. I never lost consciousness. Even when I hit the trees, when everything around me was being ripped apart, I stayed awake all the way down. I remember thinking, 'So when do I get to see heaven?' Or hell, for that matter. Then it all went up in flames. And I thought, "There's my answer. My eternity…'"

He stopped, let out a deep sigh. "They found me a short way from here, stumbling around under the trees. Most of my face was burned away. But I don't remember feeling much of anything." He looked down at his scarred hands. "The pain came later. When they tried to clean the burns. When the nerves grew back. I'd scream at them to let me die, but they wouldn't. I guess I was too valuable."

"Because you were American?''

"Because I was a pilot. Someone to pump for information, someone to trade. Maybe someone to spread the Party line back home… "

"Did they… hurt you?"

He shook his head. "I guess they figured I'd been hurt enough. It was a quieter sort of persuasion. Endless discussions. Relentless arguments as I recovered. I swore I wasn't going to let the enemy twist my head around. But I was weak. I was far from home. And they said things-so many things-I couldn't argue with. And after a while… after a while it made… well, sense. About this country being their house, about us being the burglars in the house. And wouldn't anyone with burglars in their house fight back?"

He let out a sigh. "I don't know anymore. It sounds so feeble now, but I just got tired. Tired of arguing. Tired of trying to explain what I was doing in their country. Tired of trying to defend God only knew what. It was easier just to agree with them. And after a while, I actually started to believe it. Believe what they were telling me." He looked down. "According to some people, that makes me a traitor."

"To some people. Not to me."

He was silent.

"Why didn't you come home?" she asked.

"Look at me, Willy. Who'd want me back?"

"We did."

"No, you didn't. Not the man I'd become." He laughed hollowly. "Everyone would be pointing at me, whispering behind my back, talking about my face. Is that the kind of father you wanted? The kind of husband your mother wanted? Back home, people expect you to have a nose and ears and eyebrows." He shook his head. "Ann…Ann was so beautiful. I-I couldn't go back to that."

"But what do you have here? Look at you, at what you're wearing, at how skinny you are. You're starving, wasting away."

"I eat what the rest of the village eats. It's enough to live on." He picked at the rag that served as his shirt. "Clothes, I never much cared about."

"You gave up a family!"

"I-I found another family, Willy. Here."

She stared at him, stunned.

"I have a wife. Her name's Lan. And we have children. A baby girl and two boys… eight and ten. They can speak English, and a little French… "he said helplessly.

'' We were at home!''

"But I was here. And Lan was here. She saved my life, Willy. She was the one who kept me alive through the infections, the fevers, the endless pain."

"You said you begged to die."

"Lan was the one who made me want to live again."

Willy stared at that man with half a face, the man she'd once called her father. The lashless eyes looked back at her, unblinking. Awaiting judgment.

She still had a face, a normal life, she thought. What right did she have to condemn him?

She looked away. "So. What do I tell Mom?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing."

"She has a right to know."

"Maybe it would be kinder if she didn't."

"Kinder to whom? You or her?"

He looked down at his feet in their dirty slippers. "I suppose I deserve that. Whatever you have to say, I deserve it. But God knows, I wanted to make it up to her. And to you. I sent money-twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. You got it, didn't you?"

"We never knew who sent it."

"You weren't supposed to know. Nora Walker arranged it through a bank in Bangkok. It was everything I had. All that was left of the gold."

She gave him a bewildered look and saw that his gaze had shifted toward the plane's fuselage. "You were carrying gold?"

"I didn't know it at the time. It was our little rule at Air America: Never ask about the cargo. Just fly the plane. But after she went down, after I crawled out of the wreckage, I saw it. Gold bars scattered all over the ground. It was crazy. There I was, half my damn face burned off, and I remember thinking, 'I'm rich. If I live through this, son of a bitch,

I'm rich' " He laughed, then, at his own lunacy, at the absurdity of a dying man rejoicing among the ashes. "I buried some of the gold, threw some in the bushes. I thought-I guess I thought it would be my ticket out. That if I was captured, I could use it to bargain for my freedom."

"What happened?"

He looked off at the trees. "They found me. NVA soldiers. And they found most of the gold." He shrugged. "They kept us both."

"But not forever. You didn't have to stay-" She stopped. "Didn't you ever think of us?"

"I never stopped thinking of you. After the war, after all that-that insanity was over, I came back here, dug up what gold they hadn't found. I asked Nora to get it out to you." He looked at Willy. "Don't you see? I never forgot you. I just…" He stopped, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "I just couldn't go back.''

In the trees above, branches rattled in the wind. Leaves drifted down in a soft rain of green.

He turned away. "I suppose you'll want to go back to Hanoi. I'll see that someone drives you… "

"Dad?"

He halted, not daring to look at her.

"Your little boys. You-say they understand English?"

He nodded.

She paused. "Then we ought to understand each other, the boys and I." she said. "I mean, assuming they want to meet me… "

Her father quickly rubbed a hand across his eyes. But when he turned to look at her, she could still see the tears glistening there. He smiled…and held out his hand to her.

She'd been gone too long.

Three hours had passed, and Guy was more than worried. He was scared out of his head. Something wasn't right. It was that old instinct of his, that sense of doom closing in, and he was helpless to do anything about it. A dozen different images kept forming in his mind, each one progressively more terrible. Willy screaming. Dying. Or already dead in the jungle. When at last he heard the rumble of the jeep, he was hovering at the edge of panic.