The taste of blood in my mouth snapped me back to the present. Harold was droning on beside me, and it wasn’t until he said the word rape that I perked up. I asked him to repeat what he just said.
“I said, ‘She’ll probably cry rape if you go to the authorities.’ Something to consider. Especially if your injuries aren’t too bad. Which they don’t appear to be. To be honest, contacting the police over this matter is probably exactly what she wants.”
I leaned over and whispered, “Harold, can you hear what I’m saying right now?”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’m going to make sure she’s arrested; then I’m going to sue the fuck out of her.”
I winced, my tongue having flopped over the bloody gap in my mouth where I had lost a tooth. I groaned as I thought about that tooth. How it had traveled with me on many journeys. Over fifty years it had been in my mouth, and now it was — where? In my stomach? On the floor of her house with my phone, the porcelain, and other assorted debris?
Harold sighed. “A shame you’ll have to take such drastic actions against a fellow war veteran.”
“She’s not a vet. Her husband is. He’s deployed, and if it makes you feel any better, I have no plans on having him arrested.”
He began to scribble on the hospital form again, but stopped. “We never talked about the war.”
“Why would we?”
“You might be surprised how I feel.”
“Maybe we’d both be surprised. Or maybe neither of us would give a shit how the other one feels.”
“Perhaps.” He set the pen down and adjusted his glasses nervously.
And that’s when it struck me, with the crystal clarity of a long-hidden truth suddenly revealed. “You know her, don’t you? You sonofabitch.”
He grimaced and shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. Please don’t be upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m just exhausted and missing a tooth, and my face is broken in about ten places. I mean, what’s there to be upset about? Now what the hell is going on?”
Harold sighed again and told me what he knew, which was a lot more than I did. The woman was a patient of a colleague, a former student of his. She was the widow of a vet — yes, her husband had been killed while deployed — but he didn’t know the details. She had been moved off base and didn’t have anywhere to stay. It was Harold who had volunteered the empty house and helped arrange for her to move in temporarily.
“Can you imagine if your significant other was lost forever?” he asked. “Especially in such a cruel and senseless war. Can you imagine such a thing? And then having nowhere to turn?”
“No,” I said, still struggling to control my anger and pain, “but maybe we should just stop talking about this.”
“Of course. But really, I had no idea she would react this way. In fact, I thought just the opposite.”
I wasn’t seen until late in the evening, having been triaged to the lowest rung of the injury ladder. The bus accident had been serious, but no fatalities. The doctor who examined me was wearing a white coat with a splotch of blood above his nametag that resembled the state of New Jersey. He apologized profusely for the long wait until he found out that I was not in fact one of the bus crash victims. He turned indignant and dismissive, telling me that my wounds were superficial, and offered vague instructions about what to do if I developed symptoms of a concussion.
When I told him I had lost my tooth, he confirmed what I already knew by peering halfheartedly into my mouth. “You bet you did,” he said. “You’ll need to have an oral surgeon look at that. Just don’t let them talk you into a porcelain bridge for any back teeth. Go with metal, and you’ll thank me later.”
After filling a prescription for Tylenol 3, Harold and I were back in the Popovs’ Strada and headed home. “What did I tell you?” he said, as if he’d won a bet. “In and out, good as new.”
“Like it never happened,” I said, trying to lay on the sarcasm.
But he didn’t catch on. Instead he grunted and fought the gearshift, grinding it mercilessly. “Who owns a Fiat these days?” he said. “Honestly.”
“At least the tires work,” I said.
For the next few weeks I simmered, I watched, and occasionally I felt better. I also steered clear of Harold, even though he called frequently and left updates on my answering machine about our neighbor or, as he called her, “my student’s patient.” She was improving, he assured me. She had not missed a single session. What’s more, although she’d clearly become more reclusive, she hadn’t bothered anyone.
I agreed with the reclusive part. Only once since I returned from the hospital had I seen her, and that was just a glimpse of her shadow, staring out the front bay window of the bungalow, watching the comings and goings in the cul-de-sac as though it were the entire world in micro and she its sentinel. And although her features were lost behind the glass, I couldn’t imagine her face with anything other than that huge psychotic grin.
I myself made a few inquiries about her background, calling a flight surgeon friend who turned out to be quite aware of the unfortunate demise of the Marine in question. In fact, he was the last U.S. military pilot shot down over Iraq. The pilot’s call sign was “Buster,” and as the name would suggest, he was a wholesome, stand-up guy and a worthwhile Marine. He had been shot down near Balad while laying down covering fire for a squad of Army Rangers. Before anyone could get to his body, insurgents had swarmed over the wreckage and spirited away most of what remained. The Defense Department had identified him by DNA left at the crash site — mostly blood and shreds of his flight suit.
“What about his wife?” I asked my friend.
He paused thoughtfully on the phone. “Didn’t know he had one.”
“She’s my neighbor.” I almost added, She beat me up, but assumed it would invite a whole new series of questions.
“It’s sad,” he said, and his voice turned bitter. “He never had a chance to punch out. Pararescue had boots on-site within twenty miles of the crash. Those fucking hajis were just a little quicker. What the PJs could get back wasn’t much, but it was enough to tell he was KIA.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yep. That’s the guy to talk to about it.”
After the call, the picture of a somber funeral with a near-empty coffin stayed with me and cooled my resentment of the woman. I even felt a bit guilty.
That is, until a day later, when one of the Popovs’ dogs turned up missing. Anna arrived at my door in a state, shaking and runny-eyed, her hands clasped together. In broken English, she explained that she had let her dachshunds out into the front yard to do their business. Only one was there when she went to call them back inside. “They are never leaving the yard, never!” Then she shivered and sheepishly extended a torn sheet of paper in my direction. “Please to tell me,” she said. “What does these message mean?”
Scrawled on the paper, in black capital letters, were the words MANY DOGS HAVE DIED HERE.
“It came in mailbox,” Anna said.
“Anyone could have put it there,” I said, realizing I sounded just like Harold, which prompted me to add, “Even Harold. Have you seen the way he drives?”
Still, the look on my face must have given Anna the answer she was looking for. She spun around and ran back across the lot toward her house, whimpering in Russian.
I left a message on Harold’s cell phone to call me.
He showed up on my doorstep the next morning, a Saturday, with two cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. I stepped out just in time to see Vlad and Anna climbing into the cab of a U-Haul truck, their surviving mutt yelping from a carrier between them. The day was overcast and windless, which spoke of a coming storm the local stations had been talking up all week. The trees in the yards and at the entrance of the cul-de-sac looked subdued in the gloom.