Chapter 16
The November sky was a brilliant, breathtaking blue. Acold front had passed through during the night, lowering thetemperatures to the thirties, chapping faces and hunchingthe shoulders of the pedestrians who paced the streets ofWashington, D.C. The trees that exploded into blossoms in the spring huddled against the cold in empty rows.
Claire had never been here in the winter before. Somehow it seemed more appropriate, more desolate, as if thepatina of glory had been completely stripped from the wars that were remembered along these streets.
She stood up among the trees, just as before, her hearthammering, her palms sweating, her throat dry. She had come back to The Wall, and it hurt.
She’d never really cried at The Wall before. She’d neverallowed herself. She’d never faced the grief in the faces of that statue and told those young men she was sorry. She’dnever walked close enough to The Wall to find out just howmany of them had died on her shift. She’d never tried tofind a familiar name or let her fingers stray to feel the granite. She’d never gotten close enough to hurt, like a guest ata wake who stands just inside the doorway, as if pain weremeasured by a perimeter.
Today she was coming out of the trees.
“You ready?” Peggy asked.
“I’m not going to be ready as long as I live,” Claire assured her, shaking. “I wish Tony were here.”
“This move is the oneyouhave to make.”
Claire laughed, a breathy sound of nerves. “Yeah, okay.I know. He was right all along. If I hadn’t done this by myself, I wouldn’t have been able to face him again.”
Peggy took her hand, and together they walked toward the end of The Wall. Glossy black granite, ground level, anarrow slash against the earth. Rising as the years of the warcollected, the names increasing geometrically, the worldfalling away beyond into muted silence. Claire saw thenames and felt the old rage, the old futility. She knew there was a crowd around her and heard their bright tourists’chatter as they set out on the same walk. She heard it diearound her as The Wall rose above them, as if they werewalking into the depths of some lofty cathedral.
Or some great tomb.
They walked right up to the panels that represented thosewho had died in 1969, nearing the apex of The Wall, wherethe names piled upon each other, where they rose row afterrow over her head, each name an image, each image morepainful than the last. Each moment pressing down on her asif the granite itself were tilting.
The names. So many names. Claire hadn’t really realized. Gonzalez, Smith, Washington, Patterson, Wilkerson,Jones. On and on and on, a flood of names, a torrentwashing over her. Claire saw the names and thought of herdream, the one in which the boys’ hands were out to her andshe couldn’t catch them all. She hadn’t understood why until she stood at this wall and saw all their names. Until thetears came and washed away her sins.
With trembling hands, she reached out to the granite thatreflected her face. She reached back in time to all thoseyoung boys she’d held and told them again she’d never forget them. She held them to her where they’d be safe andalive again, if only for a moment. She told them she wassorry, because she was.
She felt the warmth of the stone and realized that Samhad been wrong. He had only felt the pain through his fingers, not the life. Not the memory and the voices and thefaces that were finally given a place to gather. Claire placedher hands against those names, stroked them with her fingers, all the names, because even though she couldn’t remember their names, she’d known them. She’d carried theirwishes and their dreams and their regrets with her fortwenty-three years, and now she could give them back.
She’d been so afraid of The Wall. She shouldn’t havebeen. She should have come here a long time ago.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to those young faces who hadhaunted her, to her own children who had been held away, to Sam, who had never recovered from what he’d seen and done there.
“I’m sorry.”
Here where it was a gift, she offered her tears where somany others had offered theirs before her.
“I’m sorry.”
Peggy held on to her, just as she had so long ago whenClaire had been forced to give Humbug back. Just as Clairehad done for Peggy when her fiancé had failed to comehome. They shared the old memories and the old pains andthe old promises. And Claire realized that Tony had beenright all along. She was going to make it. She was going tomake it with her friends, and with her family, and by herself if need be.
“You ready to see our statue?” Peggy asked.
Claire wiped her tears and nodded. “Yeah. Let’s see ifthey got us right.”
The statue commemorating the women who had served inVietnam was at the other end of The Wall, set opposite themen they’d helped. Claire and Peggy made their way over.
“My God,” Claire murmured, the tears welling all overagain as they approached. “She got it right. She really gotit right.”
All Claire could think of was an American pieta. Threewomen each facing a different way, each reflecting the desperation, the frustration, the despair. One woman, her eyes soft and sorrowful, on her knees with a dying soldier in herarms. Claire felt the weight in hers all over again.
“It’s beautiful,” Peggy said, “isn’t it?”
Claire couldn’t speak. She walked right up to it, drawn to the memories it evoked. She reached out to the nurse’s face,lifted fingers to soothe the grief there, because it was hergrief. She felt the old tears well again in her chest, and shecouldn’t stop them. They spilled down her cheeks and downher hands and down to the grass below.
“I was my best there,” she admitted softly, a secret she’dnever shared. The final truth that had always seemed tooinconceivable to admit. “I miss it.”
