Free Phantom of Riverside Park by Peggy Webb

school she’d talked
David into driving her to the lookout in Hawk Mountain,
Pennsylvania, where broad-winged hawks like Solomon could be seen
by the thousands in spectacular September migration.
    “Fly away,” she’d said. “Find a nice lady
hawk to love.”
    Solomon, aptly named, had answered her with
his thin un-hawk-like whistle and sat staunchly on her shoulder
where he would remain until Della Jean drew her last breath. Then
he rose up on his barred wings, circled the house once and soared
over the valley toward Doe Mountain, his mission at last
complete.
    McKenzie never had another hawk, but she’d
learned her lesson from Solomon well. Now she was the one with a
mission.
    The work she did for David was merely a
sideline, a labor of love she often told him, and he knew it was
true.
    No one loved him as much as McKenzie. In
fact, no one loved him
except
McKenzie. He would never
have what his parents had. He would never know the joy of finding a
soul mate and loving her so much that the two of them could never
be parted, even in death.
    And why should he? He was the one who had led
his men into that death trap in Iraq. Nine men went in and only one
came out. Macky Evans, about to become a father for the first time.
Dead. Jim Branch, living for the day he could return to Maine and
buy his own lobster boat. Dead. Charles Black who would never be a
farmer, Wayne Linden who would never be an avionics engineer, Clyde
Mason, John White... The list went on and on.
    They’d all started out like David, full of
hope and dreams, and they’d all been blown to bits. All because of
David. The darkness of his tower room couldn’t begin to hide his
shame.
    Deep down in her soul where the wild hawk
still soared McKenzie believed she could love him back to life.
    He knew this ... and knew its
impossibility.
    “What’s so funny?” she asked.
    “Life.”
    McKenzie had learned how to endure David’s
dark room and his darker moods. She’d learned the art of
tranquility. David envied her. He could remain silent for hours,
unmoving except for an occasional twitching muscle. But there was
nothing tranquil about his stillness, nothing peaceful. He was a
deep river, full of treacherous shoals and turbulent currents, dark
and murky and filled with memories that made him wake at night
drenched in sweat.
    “Are we going to sit in the dark long?” she
asked.
    “I am. You don’t have to stay.”
    McKenzie didn’t answer right away. She’d
always been this way, even when she was a little kid, weighing her
words so long that sometimes the person she was talking to gave up
and went home before the conversation was finished.
    David had learned to read her silences.
    “No, I don’t plan to go down to the farm, and
I don’t want to go to your apartment to eat chicken soup,” he
said.
    She didn’t deny that she’d made soup. Every
time she made the drive up to Memphis to do one of David’s errands,
she made a big pot of chicken soup. She subscribed wholeheartedly
to their mother’s wisdom. Della Jean had always said, “If you want
to nourish the soul, you must first nourish the body.”
    “Food for the soul,” McKenzie said.
    “I don’t have a soul.”
    The fact that she didn’t light into him right
away didn’t fool David for a minute. She was saving her guns for a
bigger target.
    “I’m getting too old for these errands,” she
said. “You’re going to have to find somebody else.”
    “You’re in better shape than most thirty year
olds I know, and you’d scratch out the eyes of anybody who tried to
take your place.”
    “The trouble with you, David, is that you
don’t know any thirty-year-olds.” His look warned her, but she
ignored him. “I wish you’d consider seeing Dr. Michaels again. Or
even consulting someone else. I really think plastic surgery would
help.”
    “Help what? Make me look less like a monster
and more like a man wearing a Halloween mask?”
    Ignoring that shot, she plowed right on.
“Have