Page 9 of Girl, Remembered

She’d bought the briefcase at a church sale for two dollars. Backpacks were eleven dollars at the Kmart, so it was an easy choice for the thrifty old woman. She’d polished the brass catches at the kitchen table the night before and told him he looked like a young professional. Keith had believed her, because he was twelve, and he had carried that briefcase up the steps of Percy Middle School and, for all the good it did, Keith might as well have been carrying his own gravestone.

That day, Dean Coyle had been waiting at the top of the steps.

‘What’s in the briefcase, Briefcase?’

Keith’s whole life had run downhill from those five words. By lunch the entire seventh grade was calling him Briefcase, and by October so were kids he’d never met, and the name had a persistent stench to it that nothing could touch, not even swapping his briefcase for a backpack. In the end, Keith had committed to the briefcase full time, because not carrying it drew more attention than carrying it.

It didn’t help that he’d been born Keith Brace, which, with a little twist of the tongue, rhymed with briefcase.

The creek was the part he still dreamed about. Late December, the footbridge behind the school, Coyle and two others waiting for him because his route home had been common knowledge by then. Coyle had taken the briefcase off him without effort and held it out over the railing while the water ran brown underneath.

‘Beg for it. Like a businessman. Say please advise.’

And Keith had. That was the wound under the wound. He had stood on that bridge and said please advise, sir, please advise, while Amy Ostrowski watched from the path with her hand over her mouth. Dean Coyle had smiled and opened his fingers anyway. Keith had gone into the creek after it, into water that came up past his knees, and gathered his ruined homework off the surface while the three of them honked laughter above him.

The nickname followed him out of Percy, through high school, and into the world, which turned out to be more or less the same as Percy. High school never ended, they said, and Keith Brace was living proof of that adage. At twenty-nine, Keith had taken a job at a logistics firm in Rockville and lasted six good months before a new hire arrived – a Percy boy, class of ‘96 – and by Friday of that man’s first week a briefcase sticker had appeared on Keith’s monitor.

Keith had simply added the moment to the account he kept. The long unpaid account, and the account had gone on gathering interest for thirty years.

This went on for the rest of his life, and Keith could no longer look at a briefcase without suffering an intense bout of rage. To compare his struggles to soldiers with PTSD might be laughable, but the symptoms matched any checklist he’d dared to read. Besides, she had been the one to make the comparison, not him.

It had begun last spring, When Keith had met a woman who’d asked him about those mental accounts he’d been keeping since seventh grade. She never once told him to let it go. Everyone else in his life, the two therapists and the pastor and his sister, had pushed forgiveness. The woman, however, had listened to the whole ledger and put what he always suspected into simple words: he was an unwilling soldier who’d been forced into a war he wanted no part of.

That was why, now, he was standing outside the End Zone Bar in Wheaton, and for the first time in decades, he’d brought his briefcase along too.

It might have been 3AM, but the bar still had occupants. The End Zone usually closed at eleven, but tonight they’d stayed open for the boxing match from Las Vegas. Judging by the lack of movement through the window, the fight had ended, but the lone car in the lot suggested someone – one person – was still in there.

Keith waited in the dead ground between two parked delivery cages across the lot, where the streetlight didn’t reach. He’d spent a lot of his life just waiting around. The only difference tonight was that for the first time in thirty years, Keith Brace was waiting for something instead of enduring it.

Inside the bar a light died, then another, and the neon Bud Light sign in the window went dark and left its ghost floating on his retina. Keith’s hand found the handle of the briefcase.

Then, the click of keys.

The front door of the End Zone swung open and a big man backed out of it, pulled the door shut behind him, then worked the deadbolt by feel while a ring of keys chimed against the glass.

He was heavier than the boy on the steps had been, thick through the neck now, wearing a fleece with the bar’s logo on the breast, but Keith would have known him in total darkness, in a crowd of thousands, at the bottom of a creek.

The man reached up to a small grey box mounted beside the door and pressed a button, and the electric shutter above the frontage came to life.

Now.

Keith found his adrenaline response was strangely minimal. He’d played out this scenario in his head so many times that the tangible act of it merely felt like a routine performance.

He stepped out from between the cages and crossed the lot.

The shutter was not yet half down when Dean Coyle heard him coming and turned.

Recognition took a few seconds. Keith had wondered for months whether it would come at all, whether he’d have to explain himself, and the thought had bothered him more than anything else in the plan.

But then Coyle’s face opened up, and there it was. Delight. The joy of a child reunited with his favorite toy.

‘No way. Is that you? Briefcase?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get out of here!’ Coyle fully spun. ‘What’s going on, man? It must be nearly thirty years!’

‘Please advise,’ Keith said, and opened the briefcase. The gun came up out of the felt lining where it had ridden all evening, and Dean Coyle’s face was still rearranging itself when Keith fired.