Eden in Winter (16 page)

‘In retrospect, my solution was both desperate and revealing. My real sin, I remember mumbling through the screen, was making my father so angry he was forced to hit me. As soon as the words escaped my lips, my eyes filled with tears, and I couldn’t speak anymore. I must have hoped that in the guise of confessing my own sins – my father’s, really – I could get Father Riley to help my mom and me. But all he said was that I should obey my father. So I recited the act of contrition for my sins, just as my mother taught me.

‘I left feeling empty and bereft, knowing that no one would protect us.

‘By then, I‘d learned to lose myself in motion – some activity that took me out of my own thoughts. So I got on my bike and began peddling like the Furies were after me, and I had to outrun them or die.

‘As I rounded the corner, the neighbourhood Irish crone, Mrs O’Gara, was watering her roses. She made it her business to know everything, and to pass judgment on the propriety of everyone around her. When I nearly hit her, she began screeching like a banshee that no girl should ride her bicycle before her First Communion. I felt my heart sink; it didn’t occur to me that there was no such prohibition, and that this bitter old woman had no business visiting her misery on a child. The next day, I went through the First Communion – supposedly this sacred moment – filled with dread, certain I was not in a state of grace, and that my bicycle had become a ticket straight to hell.’ Rereading these words, Carla smiled a little. ‘I know it sounds funny now, and it is. But my interior world at seven was a pretty scary place.’

Fingers resting on the keyboard, she imagined the much more frightening reality in which Adam now lived – and, she feared, might die. She bowed her head, a moment close to prayer, and then wondered where to go next before typing, ‘“Gee, Carla,” I imagine you saying, “this is absolutely fascinating. Please tell me how you became an actress.” So I will.

‘Within the confines of our home, Mom couldn’t save either of us. But my father was handsome to look at, and I sensed early on that he enjoyed the attentions of women. So I learned to deflect him with humour and charm, trying to please him while becoming my mother’s protector.’ It was odd, Carla thought – this seemed so obvious now, but only
at Betty Ford had she fully comprehended it. ‘As a defence against reality, I escaped into an imaginary world, casting myself as someone else. I began to play-act for my father in scenarios that I’d invented – like the absent-minded hairdresser who gave Mrs O’Gara a Mohawk, in which I triumphed in both roles. Pretty soon, Dad was insisting that I do this for the neighbours.

‘Without knowing, he created a monster, desperate to appease him. My performance as the baker whose wedding cake collapsed was my absolute apotheosis, a masterpiece of overacting that moved Mrs LoBionco to tell my dad, “with that talent, Carla should be an actress – God knows she’s pretty enough”. The word “actress” sounded so magical that pretty soon I was in every play at school, always in the lead. Acting was better than riding my bicycle – a transcendence so complete that I forgot myself and everything that troubled me.’ Briefly, Carla experienced a residue of guilt and sadness. ‘My other reward was that Dad stopped hitting me. Unlike Mom, I’d became special in the eyes of others and, therefore, to him.

‘The irony is that my mother saw this. She implored my father to enroll me in acting lessons at A.C.T. – the theatre company in San Francisco where Annette Bening got her start. I became addicted in the true meaning of that word – only acting gave me the approval I craved and, on stage, it was immediate. My mother was giving me an escape she could never have.

‘She began sitting up with me at night, listening to my ambitions and my dreams. When my drama teacher said I should consider acting as a career, I knew that everything in my life had destined me for this. And when my mother
heard the news, tears of joy ran down her face, and she told me she had prayed for this.’

Remembering her mother’s arms around her, Carla felt herself swallow. ‘The Church,’ she went on, ‘remained the centre of her life. Every night, to please her, I recited the Hail Mary, the Our Father, and an act of contrition. I never let on that they were white noise to me now, like the rules that came with them – that birth control violated God’s will, or that sex outside marriage was a mortal sin. My high school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, had begun accepting non-Catholics, girls who believed in nothing at all. I was moving outside my parents’ world.’

She was making a confession, Carla reflected, offered to Adam Blaine. ‘For the first time I was special – an actress, and pretty, a girl other girls envied and admired. And I’d begun hearing rumours about my father and other women. One night, cruising with friends in another neighbourhood, I saw my father coming from a bar with his arm draped around a much younger woman – wearing too much makeup, but nice-looking enough, with a body that made the obvious even more so. The kids I was hanging out with didn’t recognize him. But I was devastated and then furious: this was the ultimate insult to my mother, still more punishment for all that she’d endured, and a complete denial of all the rules they’d pressed on me. The next night, I slept with my first boy, a guy I barely knew and cared about even less.

‘That Sunday morning I took a certain savage pleasure in my confession. I’d been taught that if you sincerely repent your sins, God would forgive them, and if you went outside and got hit by a bus, you’d immediately go to heaven. So I confessed my sins with a vengeance – drinking, smoking pot,
the guy I’d just slept with. When dried-up old Father Riley admonished me from behind the screen to avoid boys – the “near occasion of sin”, he called them – then gave me a penance of six Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys, I could barely keep from laughing. All this incense and mirrors had ever gotten my mother was another beating from her adulterous husband, my father.

‘To me, she was more than my father’s victim. She was the victim of her Church and all the rules enforced by men: no divorce; mute acceptance; redemption in an afterlife I no longer believed existed. But still I’d go with her to church – to refuse would have shattered her, and she’d already endured too much. So I was relieved when a new young priest, Father Vasquez, took Father Riley’s place. He seemed friendly, and more approachable, not pickled in the stifling Catholicism I’d grown up with. Through him, I decided to give the Church a final chance.

‘The opening I chose was confession. Instead of the usual sins, I began telling Father Vasquez about my childhood, what went on within our four walls – my father’s brutality, my mother’s silent suffering. As I spoke, I imagined his silence as compassion, and the words began escaping in a rush: my mother needed help, someone to protect her. “Please, Father,” I implored, “tell me how to help her. Please, help us.”

‘Behind the screen he was still quiet. Then he said, “You must come here to seek forgiveness for your own sins, not your parents’. I will pray for your mother and father, as you should. But it is not your place to confess your father’s sins.”

‘Suddenly I imagined my father confessing to brutalizing my mother, and this priest sending him back home to beat
her up again with six Our Fathers on his lips. “All right,” I answered. “You want to hear
my
sins. My father is a policeman – you know him well. Every night I pray that someone will kill him and set my mother free. When I’m not praying for that, I wish it with all my heart. Because there’s no other hope for my mother – trapped in this marriage and this Church, by men who care nothing for her.” Shaking with rage, I placed my lips close to the screen, and whispered, “Fuck you, Father Vasquez. What’s the penance for that?”

‘I left before he could tell me.’

It was a moment before Carla realized that the tightening in her stomach was not a delayed reaction to the past.

Rushing to the bathroom, she stripped off her clothing, and saw the spotting of blood – the first sign of miscarriage, she knew from her own mother. Filled with apprehension, she dressed again, and went back to the computer.

‘I’m sure this is more than enough,’ she typed for Adam Blaine. ‘Please keep safe, and know that I think of you often.’

She hit the Send button, then walked gingerly to her car, driving to her doctor’s office without calling ahead.

Alone in his quarters, Adam stared out at the starkly beautiful mountain ranges, waiting for the call from his case officer.

He had been blunt about his own misgivings. ‘This Afghan could be a plant,’ he had told Brett Hollis, ‘and his P.O.W. tip completely bogus. They may be thinking we’ll respond like Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the chance to retrieve one of our own – the kind of showy operation that got bin Laden. That would confirm me as C.I.A. Way more important, they could lure us into Pakistan and expose our assault teams operating against Al Qaeda and the Taliban inside the border. All on the word of an agent we don’t know and have never tested.’

‘All true,’ Hollis said tersely. ‘But I need to report this now. If the information is solid, they may be moving Bergdahl soon.’

‘That’s another thing that bothers me,’ Adam replied. ‘Maybe everything he says is true – or, at least, he believes that it is. But why hide our guy in a populated village instead
of in some cave? This story is perfectly designed to make us rush into a trap, get a bunch of guys killed or captured because we just couldn’t stand to wait. Instead of one P.O.W., they could have a whole fucking platoon.’

‘I’ll pass on your reservations,’ his superior responded glumly. ‘But this one’s not our call.’

So Adam waited.

Restless, he read Carla’s email for the second time that morning. He was thinking about her too much. For the last decade he had lived without a past or future, functioning in the moment. Now, against all of his instincts, he had begun to imagine a life beyond Afghanistan. Another reason, perhaps, why he was so wary of the Afghan’s story – he wanted to leave here alive, and sensed some new danger at hand. In the curious logic of his job, the fear of death could make him more hesitant and edgy, dulling the reflexes he needed to survive. He should never have risked himself with her.

And yet, in her own way, Carla was also taking chances. Her email made light of this, mocking its supposed self-absorption. But she was giving him a part of herself, so that he might understand her better, and perhaps respond in kind. It was no accident, he suspected, that she had chosen to reveal truths about her family; as Carla surely knew, what haunted Adam resided there, unresolved.

Still, she had written, and he should answer.

Sitting at the computer, he began by describing things he could talk about – the terrain, the people, the semi-fortress in which he lived. ‘In a way,’ he told her, ‘the walls around us symbolize the pointlessness of our mission. We don’t want Afghanistan to be the base for another 9/11. But we won’t leave a positive imprint here, any more than foreigners did
before us. This isn’t a country at all, as we understand that – it’s a bunch of tribes. Outside of Kabul, Karzai is a joke – he’s the mayor of a city, not the president of anything. Each tribe runs their self-allotted territory, and mountain ranges divide them from each other. So the locals depend on mullahs and religious leaders, a lot of whom hate the government for taxing them, or for helping us cut down opium production and kill their friends with drones. When we go, we’ll leave nothing behind but corpses. Including our own.’

This was what he would tell anyone in a moment of honesty, Adam knew. But all it would mean to Carla was that his death, should it happen, would be as meaningless as the rest – a pointless sacrifice to his own personal code. He owed her better, if he could find the words, and Charlie Glazer would say that he owed this to himself.

Like Carla, he had memories of a father – first poisoned by betrayal, then by the searing discovery that Benjamin Blaine was not his father at all. For years, Adam had sealed them in a psychic box he never opened. Now he allowed himself to recall Ben teaching him how to sail the Herreshoff on Menemsha Pond – how patient he was; how different than on land. As if recalling someone else, Adam felt a distant, odd affection for the boy he had been, so trusting of his father, so innocent of all that lay ahead. He could not reach back and protect himself – he had learned to be a fatalist, dealing only with whatever he had to face. But he wished better for Carla’s son.

That was the festering core of things – the man who had been the foundation of Adam’s life, then changed it irrevocably, had been Carla’s lover and the father of this boy. Yet there
were
good memories, as painful as they were to
resurrect, and perhaps it would help her to know this much. After gazing at the screen, lost in time, he wrote, ‘I know you wonder what happened between Ben and me. That’s for another day, if ever, and certainly not for an email. But the way in which your father planted the seeds of acting, without meaning to, reminded me of the things Ben did as a father that were for the better.

‘One memory stands out. Baseball was the spectator sport he most loved, and he grew up worshipping Ted Williams, the left fielder for the Red Sox who he insisted was the greatest hitter who ever lived. He told me everything about Williams – how he sacrificed five years of baseball to be a fighter pilot in two wars; how he played to his own exacting standards, and not for the adoration of the fans; above all, the molten, uncompromising integrity with which he drove himself to get the most out of his talent.

‘This statistic may not mean anything to you, but seventy years ago Williams became the last man to hit .400 – an average of four hits in every ten at bats. That’s a stunning athletic feat. I still recall Ben telling me, “To accomplish that by swinging a wooden bat at fastballs coming at ninety miles an hour from sixty feet away, or curveballs that dip just when you’re swinging, is incalculably difficult. But on the last day of the season, that’s exactly where Williams stood.

‘“His manager offered to take him out of the line-up for the final two games, a double-header, so that Williams could preserve this record.” At this point in the story Ben would begin speaking in a gruff Ted Williams voice. “If I don’t earn this record on the field,” he’d say, “it isn’t worth a damn, and neither am I.” Then Ben would smile, and deliver the punch line: “That day, Ted Williams got five hits and
raised his batting average to .406. No man has done it since.”