Final impact

Julia recalled in clinical detail how she’d stood at the foot of his carved Thai teak bed and verbally lashed him like a cart driver whipping some home truths into a particularly stupid and stubborn donkey. And how he had remained cool and almost psychopathically self-contained as she fell to pieces, eventually collapsing in a fetal ball at his feet.

He’d stepped over her, sat down at his computer, and begun editing another photo shoot saying sorry, but it was overdue.

These memories came not one after another, but seemingly all at once, as a single massive eruption of recall with past and present fused in a psychic tangle. As the shout of the SS officer in charge of their firing squad-Feuer! — reached her ears, she was simultaneously learning to drive in her first car, a twenty-year-old Geo Metro, bargaining for the “morning price” on a sarong in Bali, her first overseas assignment, and attending Mass-her father’s funeral-for the last time in her life.

Forrest-fucking-Seymour of the Des Moines Register and Tribune was beating her out of first place for the Pulitzer after she’d written eight long pieces in the Times destroying Edgar-fucking-Hoover.

She was celebrating her nomination for the prize at the Bayswater.

She was being woken in her apartment by a phone call telling her Hoover was dead by his own hand, copies of her stories by his side, with the word LIES scrawled over them, hundreds of times.

She was double-dating with Rosanna, back when she was first seeing Dan, and Rosie was still thinking about Wally Curtis.

She was on the Brisbane Line in Australia, watching Artie Snider charge up that hill throwing grenades, firing from the hip.

She was partying with Slim Jim, Maria, Sinatra, and Crosby.

She was in Honolulu, fucking John Kennedy a few months after she’d first met him at that party up in Hyannisport and months before she formally split from Dan.

She was shopping for Christmas presents with her daddy at the Excelsior Springs Wal-Mart, the year he’d been laid off from the Ford plant at Clay-como and they’d had to use food stamps to buy frozen Banquet turkey meat in the huge family pack.

She was lying in bed, feeling his tears running down her cheeks as he kissed her good night and told her if she listened real hard she might hear Santa’s sleigh bells over the wind howling outside, but warning her that there might not be as many toys in the sack this year.

She was aware of how the birds fell silent in the trees behind them. Of a stone she hadn’t had time to remove from her left boot after they’d been captured. Of the smell of somebody’s bowels evacuating a few feet away. Of someone in a small voice, imploring his grandma to save him. Of the way the Germans’ helmets cast a shadow over their faces, giving them the appearance of human pillboxes. Of a woman’s face floating up from the deepest parts of her memories, her mother’s face she was sure, even though she’d run off with her boss when Julia was less than two years old, leaving her without even memories. The woman had perversely taken every photo album in the house and burned them the day before.

A small sunburst in the black maw of the machine gun that seemed to be directly pointed at her.

Someone screaming, “No!”

A massive blow to her chest, lifting her feet free of the ground, spinning her over and over, turning her around in midair. The sky, the trees, the muddy grass a blur of bluish green. And the last of her living memories swirling around inside this mosaic as darkness closed in at the edge of her vision. Of Dan, her husband, her dead ex-husband, and the day he’d found out that she hadn’t had the birth control implants removed as she’d promised. And the look in his eyes when she told him she’d switched on the gene shear, terminating the pregnancy she’d only just discovered, and rendering her barren forever after. Dan fell away from her. And all she could see was his eyes, or perhaps the memory of his eyes, so full of disappointment, pain, betrayal, and the certain knowledge that she had done this on purpose, because it suited her. Without talking to him she had cut off the life they had created together, and the life they were going to lead, the children they would have raised and loved and left to the world.

She had let all that slip away, and let him slip away with it, because in the end she was selfish. She wanted what she wanted for herself, not for them.

As the light went out he disappeared forever. And Julia Duffy cried out, weakly, wretchedly, and so softly that nobody could possibly hear.

“Daddy. Help me.”

D-DAY + 37. 9 JUNE 1944. 1151 HOURS.

ARDENNES PLATEAU.

The German front might be in complete collapse, but that didn’t make it any safer to be in this part of the world. Captain Chris Prather jumped down from the Sherman and landed on a patch of ground made boggy by the amount of blood that had soaked into the soil. He looked around for a body, but couldn’t see one nearby.