Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

I answered the call. “Patty, is everything okay?”

“Nick? Please. How soon can you get here?”

“How soon do you need me?” I mentally ran through the list of client meetings and phone calls I’d scheduled. Which ones I could reschedule and which ones I couldn’t.

Her voice had gotten high and small. I barely heard what she said and almost asked her to repeat it, until it sank in.

“He’s — dead,” she said. “Overdose.”

“I thought he was clean.”

“So did I.”

“The kids — never mind. I’m going to leave Boston now. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, Nick,” Patty said. “The kids really need to see you. Stay at our place. The guest room’s free.”

An hour later I was in my Land Rover Defender 90, driving along the Southeast Expressway toward Cape Cod and Sean’s house.

I was shocked yet not shocked to hear that Sean had died. I thought he’d successfully gotten free of an insidious opioid addiction. But he’d died from an overdose. It was easy to relapse.

His death wasn’t just heartbreaking, it was infuriating.

I liked him a lot. Most people did. He was a natural extrovert, very friendly, very funny, very smart. I used to imagine him running for office, becoming a state rep or a congressman or something. He had the right personality for it.

Sean was stocky, and strong, and short. Like a lot of the guys in the Special Forces. He had a baby face, and it took forever for his beard to become visible. When it came in, it was a scraggly, patchy mess.

He and I joined the army at the same time, in what’s called the 18 X-ray program, which was then sort of a new thing. It was an accelerated path into the elite Special Forces. You used to have to join the army and make the grade of E-4 before you could even apply to join it. Instead, in the 18X program, if you’d done some college, you could apply to try out for the Green Berets. The army was recruiting scholar-athletes — the ideal being the PhD who could win a bar fight, or so the joke went. Smart kids who also played football or ran track. That didn’t quite describe me, since I was a pretty mediocre student. But I was a dropout from Yale, which must have intrigued the recruitment office. I was nineteen.

You went through basic training at Fort Benning plus advanced individual training in one seventeen-week course. Then to jump school for a few weeks — five static-line jumps — and then you’re shipped to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where you go through the unique torture that is Special Forces training.

Those of you who are left in the program, that is. More than sixty percent of the candidates drop out along the way. You went on long rucksack marches. You went slogging through the swamp. You were constantly wet and cold and exhausted and desperate for sleep. The process weeded out the weak of body and spirit. Sean endured the whole drill without complaining. He always seemed happy despite it all. He’d make jokes to jolly everyone else up.

I’d been so surprised, at first, that someone that strong could succumb to pain pills.

After we qualified for the Special Forces, Sean and I were assigned to the same A-team. I was the junior weapons sergeant for some reason — I guess I demonstrated competency in weapons handling, though I was and am no gun nut. (Later I went through the training and became the intel sergeant, which seemed a more natural fit.)

Sean was the junior engineer, which meant he worked with demolitions. He was our breacher: he blew up doors and walls so we could go in.

All those years of working closely with explosives must have done damage to his brain. At least, that’s the theory. It’s called breacher syndrome. Repeated exposure to low-level blasts can cause traumatic brain injury. He came back with terrible headaches, shooting pain in his forehead. He also started getting regular migraines. A doctor at the VA hospital prescribed Oxydone, a nasal inhaler that dispenses a powerful opiate quickly, and just like that, Sean was hooked.

I should have checked in with Patty weeks ago. I guess I was figuring that if he was back on drugs, she’d let me know. I obviously figured wrong. I was angry at myself for not staying more closely in touch.

He saved my life once; I should have been able to save his.

I drove past Sidney’s Clam Shack ( Voted best fried clams on the Cape! ), a few motels with vacancy signs, and competing beach-toy stores on either side of the road that were both shuttered now that summer had passed. I drove carefully and at exactly forty miles an hour. Westham was a famous speed trap, crawling with cops waiting to ticket summer visitors for driving two miles an hour over the speed limit. This was the off-season, but the Westham cops would probably be even more aggressive than usual given the scarcity of prey.

When I rang the doorbell, Patty flung open the screen door and hugged me, hard. She was a small, compact brunette, a former high school cheerleader who ran almost every day. She was a nurse at Cape Cod Hospital and worked long hours, and she seemed to have an infinite supply of energy. Like a lot of military wives whose husbands were gone so much, she ran the house; she had no choice.

But now you could see she was depleted, her eyelids heavy, her eyes swollen. Her mascara was smeared. She was still in her hospital scrubs. Her kids were swarming and bickering behind her.

“Thank you, Nick,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being here.”

“Come on,” I said.

Brendan was ten, and the oldest. He was a cool, smart kid whose dad had been deployed for much of his childhood. And when Sean got back, he soon became an opioid addict. So for much of Brendan’s life, his father was absent, in one way or another. I was Brendan’s godfather and his surrogate dad. I was sort of a surrogate dad to his brother, Andrew, and his sister, Molly, too.

I know I’m never going to have children — I don’t want them, thanks — but I admit to getting a paternal glow from helping these kids out. My nephew, Gabe, is the closest I’ll ever come to having my own. I love him dearly, but he’s an odd one.

I felt terrible for Brendan and his siblings. Normally, when I came by their house, Brendan would come running. Not like when he was four or five, literally racing through the house to fling himself at me. But still, he hustled and beamed. This time he was hanging back. His eyes looked bruised. He was mournful and distant, just like his mother. Brendan was often called on to be the man of the family with Dad gone a lot, and he took it seriously.

I stepped into the room and hugged Brendan and then Molly, who was eight and just as tall and played soccer. “Where’d Andrew go?” I said. I could see Andrew, six, hiding behind the La-Z-Boy recliner. “He just disappeared.”

Andrew burst out laughing. He didn’t seem to be sad at all. I wondered if he was too young, if he just didn’t get the enormity of what had happened to him.

“Andrew’s being annoying,” Brendan said.

Andrew ran over to me and hugged me around the legs. “When’s Daddy coming back?” he said, his words muffled.

Oh, he understood something.

“Baby,” Patty said, “Daddy’s not coming back. He’s in Heaven, honey.”

“ No! ” Andrew said, correcting her as if it were obvious. “He’s coming back. Daddy always goes away, and he always comes back.”

“Dad’s dead,” Brendan snapped, stunning everyone into silence.

“Hey, Bren,” I said. “How’s the coin collection?”

He turned to me. “I got the new proof set — you wanna see?”

“I would.”

We went to his room, where he pulled out from a desk drawer the latest additions to his coin collection and made sure I understood their importance. How all the proof coins bore the “S” mark of the U.S. Mint at San Francisco. The special-edition Lincoln penny struck with the “W” mark of the West Point Mint. When he finally fell silent, I said, “I know how hard it must be to lose your daddy.”