Free Phantom of Riverside Park by Peggy Webb Page B

past.
But there was no escape for her brother because he still had his
memories.

Chapter Six
    After McKenzie left, David sought the blessed
oblivion of books. He enjoyed fiction and nonfiction, alike, but it
was poetry that spoke to his soul. Once he’d been a dreamer. Having
seen a wild hawk descend to the valley and eat from his sister’s
hand, he’d believed that all things are possible. He believed in
the greening of leaves and the inevitability of mountain flowers.
He believed in rocks where blood faded to rust still sang of love.
He believed in the legend of the dogwood and the heart-pull of
mountains that held the colors of a million sunrises.
    Back then, he’d still believed in love.
    He skipped over the love poems and selected a
slim volume by Melville. With the reading lamp providing the only
light in his office, he let the book open where it would.
    “All wars are boyish, and are fought by
boys,” Melville had written in “March into Virginia.”
    Suddenly David’s head was filled with
screams…
    “Get it off! Get it off!”
    There was the sound of rubber-soled shoes
sliding across tile, then a familiar voice. His night
nurse.
    “Get what off, David?”
    “The sand. I’m buried in sand.”
    “Shh. There’s no sand, David.” Her hand
was cool on his brow. “You’re home now, baby. Just rest.”
    Home. A room with drab green walls and a
row of beds filled with the wounded and the dying. Windows so high
you couldn’t see out.
    Not that he wanted to see. He didn’t even
know why he wanted to live.
    The last thing he remembered was the
explosion of the hand grenade, the sharp searing pain that
enveloped his left side, the blood that bloomed out of his head and
flowed red like the sea.
    “God came down that day and Moses parted
the waters,” the preacher was shouting.
    No, it wasn’t the preacher. It was Moose,
yelling at David to hold on. It wasn’t God who was coming, but the
medi-vac chopper.
    Or maybe it was God, after all.
    David passed a hand over his face, one side
perfect, the other a map ridged with scars and sunken with
potholes, courtesy of the early Iraqi war. He tried to pull himself
out of the past, but the floodgates were down and memories kept
coming.
    The day they took the bandages off and David
first saw himself in the mirror, he vomited. That was not a man
looking back at him but a monster, a ghoulish apparition with one
eyebrow, half a nose, very little cheek on one side and a tattered
ear.
    “Plastic surgery can do miracles,” the doctor
said.
    David hadn’t believed in miracles then, and
he didn’t believe in them now. Not for himself.
    He went straight to window, pushed back the
curtains and trained his telescope into the park, his lifeline.
Elizabeth Jennings had arrived. Smiling and fresh faced and so very
young.
    David suddenly felt as old as Thomas Jennings
who was engaged with his grandson in a game of
I spy
.
Elizabeth squatted beside the boy to take his side.
    “The bird, Nicky. Look, it’s a robin
redbreast.”
    “I spy a robin bedrest,” the boy shouted, and
the old man laughed so hard tears rolled down his cheeks.
    “You got me,” he said. “I don’t see him.”
    “Did I win, Papa?”
    “You won.”
    “I won! I won!”
    Nicky grabbed his mother’s hands, and the two
of them did a victory dance.
    “Hey, you can’t cut a rusty without me.”
    Thomas Jennings grabbed their hands and
pranced around with more energy than some men half his age.
Suddenly Nicky plopped on the grass.
    “What’s the matter, darling?”
    “I’m tired. Me and Papa runned all over the
park chasin’ Houdini.”
    “Who’s Houdini? Papa?”
    “That hoodlum who gave me the check.”
    McKenzie would pop her buttons laughing.
David even found himself smiling.
    “If you don’t have a funny bone to tickle,
you might as well be dead,” his mother had always said, and that’s
the only thing David had brought back intact from Iraq. That and
his brain. The package that held it