Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

The tears were spilling now, threatening her makeup. “But it was good enough for Jerret. He didn’t care whether I got A’s or D’s. Didn’t care if I dropped out of college. And then suddenly you were back, telling me that if I loved you I’d quit seeing him. And then you were gone again. You had no right . Do you hear me? No right . I know he was a lot older than me. I know he was getting a bit scary—after I dumped him, he came back five times. I’m not stupid , Daddy. But it was my decision. Not yours. Not when you were then gone again on that ‘last’ mission. The one that was only going to last three months but went on for years. I can’t believe I fell for it.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got wounds, too. It’s just that mine aren’t the type to leave scars you can see.”

Her face scrunched, and she knuckled tears out of her eyes, undoing any pretense of saving the makeup. “Damn you, Daddy. Damn you for everything.”

Then her focus shifted and she swiped at the air in front of her, as fiercely as moments before she’d dug at her tears. “And what the hell is it with these flies?”

For a long time, I stared at her image, frozen in the act of reaching for the off-switch. I could have replayed the whole thing, but there was no point. I merely looked at her, remembering the little girl—the pert nose and half-smile, the eyes, now rimmed with ruined eye-liner, that once never left my own. The eyes in which, once, I could do no wrong. The eyes I had managed to wrong so deeply.

I would give anything for a chance to do it over. But would it be any different? Surely it hadn’t just been adrenaline I’d craved. It was the need to be whole: the knowledge that the moment the missions ended, they’d take it away. The dead, sick fear that someday, inevitably they would.

Sometimes I’d thought it might be better if I died in the field. Because with each passing year, the fear of the end had grown: a continual feeling in my gut, like dread crossed with nausea. But then I’d think of Denise and Cora, and know that coming home was worthwhile. Until suddenly, they were gone and it hadn’t been.

I never knew how Jerret found her. He’d been finishing De-con about the time I went in, and had been better at telling the psychs what they wanted to hear. Because if you didn’t, they’d keep you forever.

He knew I had a family, so maybe he just thought he’d let them know I was still alive. Not that it mattered with Denise. She may not have known where I was, but the Corps did, and dutifully served her court orders on me. Divorce. No-contact/keep-away. The whole shebang. Custody also—a real insult, with Cora only months from turning eighteen. They wouldn’t even let me out of De-con to defend myself. Sent some damn Corps lawyer to represent me—as if he knew anything about what really happened, because if I’d told him, he’d have told the psychs, and Cora would have been a grandmother by the time I got out.

Then one of the orderlies told me about Jerret and Cora.

I spent a week trying to figure out what to do. All the while wondering if they were having sex. Forcing myself not to think about it. But that’s not why I eventually went out the window. Even before the ravine, I’d never have wished a Corps member on her. Afterward? I’d seen his eyes. And if I could lash out at my wife…

When I’d first seen Jerret in De-con it had been a relief: a familiar face—the only one other than the soon-to-be-too-familiar psychs. It was only gradually that I realized how long it had been since he’d been choppered out of the ravine. After he was discharged, I did some asking.

Jerret had been in and out of De-con a half-dozen times.

“I can’t say anything specific,” one of the psychs told me, “but in the combination of PTSD and withdrawal, it’s the withdrawal that’s the hard part. You have to quit wanting it back. If you don’t, you’ll never get rid of the bad stuff, either.”

“Does that go for my family, too?”

She gave me one of those sympathetically sad looks they must practice in psych school. “Probably.”

That was the night I went out the window. For once, I truly knew my priorities.

I was only gone a couple of days, but they cost me two extra years of De-con. It would have been longer if, like Jerret, I’d not gotten good at telling them what they wanted to hear. Until recently I’d thought rescuing Cora had been worth it. But, that was because I thought I’d actually succeeded in rescuing her. As she put it, silly me .

Being in the Corps teaches you to strike fast. Court orders teach the opposite.

Technically, I wasn’t restrained from talking to Cora or even dropping by her apartment. But Denise wouldn’t see it that way.

For three days I tried to figure out what to do. Jerret and flies. I had no idea how he’d gotten them, but he was CI-MEMS again. Bootleg CI-MEMS, apparently.

Part of me was appalled. Cora had been wrong about one thing: Jerret’s visible scars were only the tip of the iceberg. Give him back a swarm and he’d still not be whole. He’d just think he was.

But I was also jealous.

What would I give to have the Sense back? My pension? My soul? Whatever tenuous link I still had to Cora?

For three days, I listened to her vidblogs, as she rattled on about her health-club job, her plans to go back to college and maybe become a physical therapist, the weather, friends—the aimless chatter of a young woman looking to find her life. No more mentions of Jerret sightings, pesky insects, or me.

Stupidly, I did nothing: the basic training of court orders, not the Corps.

Then on the fourth day, it stopped. No chatter, nothing.

She hadn’t missed a posting in six months. Maybe she was just busy. Maybe she had the flu. But the next day was the same. I called her work, but nobody had seen her. “She’s never missed a day before,” a bouncy-sounding young woman told me. “You don’t think anything happened… ?”

The day after that, I booked a flight and was on her doorstep. Nothing visibly wrong, but that didn’t mean anything, so I retired to my rental car with a super-sized cheeseburger, fries, and enough coffee to keep an elephant awake.

By dawn, I knew. Cora was gone.

Contacting Denise was risking an arrest, and being arrested for anything worse than unpaid parking tickets would probably put me back in De-con forever. Still, I had no choice.

“Woodruff Realty,” a voice not Denise said. “How can we help you?”

Denise had done well since divorcing me, but nobody has live, human secretaries any more. This had to be an answering service. Probably computerized.

“I need to leave a message for Ms. Woodruff,” I said. “Tell her it’s Kip, and it’s about her daughter. Tell her it’s urgent.”

“Certainly, sir,” the voice said, confirming that it was a machine. Nobody outside the military calls people “sir,” either.

Denise chose to call back, rather than have me arrested.

“This better be important.”

No hi, howya doin’ . Jerret had somehow sold his soul to get CI-MEMS back. I’d lost mine trying to keep it in the first place. But it wasn’t the time for any of that. “I think Cora’s in trouble,” I said. “We need to talk in person.”

She agreed to meet at a Starbucks a few blocks from her Arlington office. Another flight, another lost night’s sleep. Both my pension and my body were going to take a beating before this was over.

Other than walls decorated with photos of autumn oaks and maples, the Starbucks might as well have been in Seattle. Probably why she picked it. Generically neutral. Not the perfect place to breach national security, but the best I was going to get.