I FULLY INTEND TO DO SOME WORK BEFORE I GO TO BED.
Three weeks ago, shortly before the holiday, Thompson announced his administration’s determination to forge better relations with Russia and its new president – a bold play, given the contempt with which every spook, diplomat, soldier and politician holds what they have come to stand for these days. So I now have to ensure that the medical safety nets are in place for a Moscow summit in April. My team has drawn up a shortlist of hospitals capable of treating the President in an emergency, and tomorrow I’m due to discuss the protocols with Colonel Dmitri Sergeyev, their defense attaché.
I flip open my laptop and catch up on the damage inflicted by the storm: the counties left without power around the capital; a train that’s derailed somewhere south of Baltimore; Thompson’s impending return to D.C., just announced, following the re-opening of Joint Base Andrews and the city’s airports; and, of course, the Guido shooting.
The chief of the MPD announces what everyone else seems to have known for most of the day – that, pending the results of ongoing investigations, the MPD’s actions are ‘99.9 per cent likely’ to have been responsible for the death of ‘the peace protester’ and that a single tactical officer – not the entire squad, as had been tweeted earlier – has been suspended while the inquiries continue.
There’s a smattering of foreign news. A bomb has gone off in Oslo, stock markets all over the world have been veering wildly on the year’s first day of trading, and China has unveiled a solar farm the size of a small city.
The Middle East remains ablaze, with several moderate Arab countries teetering on the edge of conflict as warring factions in the remainder of the region continue to tear each other apart.
American warplanes have bombed a terrorist camp in northwest Africa …
It’s coming up to 2 a.m. when I shake myself awake.
I step into the bathroom, splash my face, run my fingers through my hair, and marvel at how so much can be going on behind my eyes that the world never gets to see.
I move – as I do on restless nights – to the smaller of the two guest rooms and push back the door.
The portrait of Jack is mounted on its easel. Hope never got to complete it, but captured the essence of him as he was in the days before his death – quiet, composed, still. His shoulder-length hair is the color of gunmetal, and his old Shawnee blanket is wrapped around his shoulders. An ankh, the cross with a loop beloved of the hippy community, is hanging from his neck at the end of a leather cord, alongside his ‘tree of life’, framed within a circle, and a star, also in a circle, which he told people was some kind of Native American good luck charm. Hope depicted the three pieces of jewelry in intricate detail, unlike the rest of the painting, so they always catch my eye.
With his clapped-out Chevy Impala, they amounted to his sole possessions, aside from the clothes he stood up in. Well into his sixties, Jack hadn’t carried an inch of slack. He was part Shawnee on his mother’s side, and for all his kindness and otherworldliness, there was something hard and primal in his spirit, too – something of his ancestors.
He’d grown up on a reservation someplace in the Midwest and taken refuge there after Vietnam, until the day he’d climbed into the Chevy and found his way to the care home owned and run by Hope’s mother in Pennsylvania. He soon became part of Pam’s furniture – a Mr Fixit who did the books, paid the wages, mended the electrics and tended to the yard.
Over time, he also became Hope’s surrogate dad, and taught her how to paint. I didn’t think there was anything going on between him and her mom, but seeing them together, you could be forgiven for disagreeing.
Standing there in front of Jack, I can still smell the oil and the paint thinner and see Hope, too, as she was the day she began work, standing on the porch she used as a studio when the breeze off the ocean allowed.
I came home early, snuck in the side gate and made for the fridge we kept by the hot tub, where three or four beers would provide the prelude to oblivion.
But something about her that day had made me stop and catch my breath. Something about the way her hair caught the wind and the light. Something about the way she was focusing on the brushwork, head tilted to one side.
It was like seeing her for the first time.
She was crying, and smiling too. As if, in the midst of that stillness, she was having a conversation with him.
Tattered and leached of almost all its color – except around the border where the green and yellow threads in the running motif seem as vivid as the day they were stitched – Jack’s blanket is now draped on the back of a nearby armchair. I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw it out.
A part of me is tempted to go and sit in the chair, to wrap myself in it and conjure up Hope’s serene presence; to see if I can drift back to sleep as I gaze at her finishing Jack’s unfinished portrait.
But I head for bed instead, where the dark will cocoon me until another day begins, another day when the thing that I do thank God for – my work – stands between me and the mind-numbing relief offered by the Triazolam in my bathroom cabinet.
I have no idea how long I have been out when my phone goes.
It takes me a second to realize where I am, a beat longer to focus on the screen, the time and the caller ID. It’s Reuben. And I’ve been asleep for less than an hour.
‘It’s happening again,’ he says. ‘How long till you can get here?’
He doesn’t do panic, but there is an edge to his voice I haven’t heard in years.