The Revisionists (55 page)

Then he’d tip the cabbie well and climb up to his safe row house less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol building, and try to let all this slip away as he fell asleep.

She was so beautiful.

Standing there surrounded by overpriced canned goods, hits from the early nineties faintly playing around her. The sounds of his high-school days, The Cure and the Lightning Seeds, reincarnated as a shopping sound track, and he wanted to dance with her. Only she looked so confused. And scared. His eyes drawn to hers, and to that crescent moon darkening her face. Leo thinking,
There is something I can do. I can’t let her walk away. I need to tell her something.
Pushing his grocery cart toward her, thinking up a line.

Then she dropped that can, and he managed to say something, and she looked at him for the first time, and he didn’t feel so cold anymore.

35.

T
asha didn’t sit on her stoop as much as she should, she realized. The autumn sun was beaming down on her, just enough light to warm her on this breezy morning. Above her the oak tree’s last holdouts were descending in the wind, and she could faintly hear a high-school marching band practicing for the weekend’s big game. Sitting on a stoop was such a stereotype of poor black folk that she’d felt compelled away from her own stoop, not a consciously political act so much as a stylistic one, as if stoop-sitting were the same as Afros or bell-bottoms, something any wise Gen Xer would avoid. But it felt so good to sit here, the bricks cold and solid beneath her, the street quiet but for the occasional cars winding their secret routes to avoid the congested avenues.

Another gust of wind and some of her papers almost blew away, but she grabbed them in time. There was a loose brick in the top step, so she picked it up and placed it on the pages to keep them there. Still their edges fluttered, humming at her like the wings of a bird.

She had spent the previous two nights at her parents’ house, too afraid to return to her own looted home. After walking into T.J.’s safe house and nodding to the assorted rebels who were busily typing and uploading and looking very engrossed indeed in their various screens, she’d borrowed a phone and called for a cab to Maryland. It was late by the time she got to the block where she and her family had moved many years ago, abandoning the city and its crime and cocaine and horrid schools, hoping these suburbs would turn out to be better. Fleeing history and hoping that the future would eventually catch up. Capitol Heights had been a good place to live, but her parents had seemed pleased when Tasha, after finishing law school, had decided to get a job in D.C.
and
buy a place in the city, as if her home purchase were not only a wise financial investment but also a reclamation of family history, a righting of past wrongs. The better future was indeed here, or close enough.

The lights were out and it was too late to ring the doorbell, but she had a key. She let herself in, walked through the hallway, and heard her mother, Lynn, ask who was there. Lynn was sitting at the kitchen table, the scent of chamomile in the air.

Tasha told her only that she hadn’t wanted to sleep at her place that night. Her mother looked in her eyes and, misunderstanding, told her that it was all right. They hugged and Tasha felt herself crying. She didn’t want to tell her mother why she was really crying and what had happened that night. But the longer they stood there together, the more she wondered why she was crying, whether the reasons were more complicated than even she could understand.

So, two mugs of tea then. “Neither of us has been sleeping well lately,” Lynn said. “But I have trouble falling asleep, whereas your father falls asleep just fine but then wakes in the middle of the night and is up for hours. So we have incompatible insomnias.”

“There are worse things.”

“I know it.”

Lynn and Reginald Wilson had been married thirty-two years, and, though Tasha had witnessed plenty of debates and loaded moments, they’d never had any major troubles she was aware of. Tasha was almost alone among her friends in having such strong matrimonial role models. She wasn’t sure if that was because their relationship had been forged in the cauldron of civil rights activism, if they really were a perfect couple, or if they were just lucky. But she’d recently seen some frightening numbers about the prevalence of divorce in couples who lost a child. Marshall wasn’t really a child, of course, but he was still their child. Funny that English didn’t have another word for it; if you were someone’s child once, you always were. You never grew out of it and into another word.

They finished their mugs of tea and were on to second helpings of a carrot cake a neighbor had brought over, and which Tasha tore into, realizing she’d never had dinner, when Lynn asked, “Are you still calling the men in Marshall’s company? Trying to find out what we weren’t told?”

She’d spoken calmly and matter-of-factly, as was her way, which always made it annoyingly difficult for Tasha to detect any opinion. Tasha knew her father was opposed to her research, but Lynn hadn’t commented on it.

“I might be giving that up.” She told her mother, very briefly, about her experience with Velasquez, the mutual and immolating guilt of their conversation. “I felt terrible. So, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking maybe I need to let it go.”

Lynn nodded. “How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t know. Not good. But it seems like the lesser of two evils. Better to… let it go and hope, I don’t know, that it fades. The anger, I mean. The anger about not knowing.” She looked at her hands, then at her mother. “What do you think?”

“I’ve felt the same as your father on this. I think… you needed more time. It’s a generational thing, sweetie. You all have your phones and your computers and you seem to need to know everything, immediately. Honestly, you’ve always been like that”—and she smiled—“but all these changes, the technology, they bring it out in you more.” She shrugged. “Your father and I, maybe we’re just old. I’m more comfortable not knowing some things, at least not right away. I hope they were telling us the truth when they say he went quickly. I hope they were being honest when they said he was trying to save his men and that it wasn’t friendly fire. I hope all those stories are true. I’m just not anxious to disprove them.”

Tasha slept there in her old house, in her old room, one door down from Marshall’s. The next morning she was startled to see their framed version of Marshall’s army photo, the same one that had been destroyed in her house the night before. She could always photocopy theirs, she told herself.

She called the office, said she was ill. She wondered how quickly the partner was moving after receiving that anonymous tip about Tasha and GTK; she didn’t check her work messages or voice mail, didn’t even turn on her phone. She stayed in with her mother, ran some errands with her, pretending this was regular life again. Trying to make it so. It almost felt like being home from college on break, and that evening they rented some ridiculous comedy about characters driven by situations that had nothing to do with the terrors and confusions of real life. Her parents didn’t ask how long she was staying or if she was hiding from anything.

The second morning, she’d taken the train back to her place, holding her breath when she walked by the stretch where the Metro van had abducted her two nights earlier. Checked behind her back several times to see if she was being followed. Wore old clothes salvaged from her former closet and felt exhausted, physically and mentally.

She would hire a lawyer, she decided, but would put herself at the firm’s mercy—she knew she would be fired and would never get even a mediocre reference to justify her two horrible years toiling there, but she crossed her fingers that they’d let her off with that and would not recommend disbarment. Hopefully they would realize the cost to the firm of public disclosure and the benefits of keeping this in-house. She started wondering what it would be like to be a public defender; and even if she did lose her license, there were plenty of infinitely more fulfilling jobs that she’d too quickly assumed were impossible for her to take given her school debts. So she’d need twenty years to pay them off rather than seven; so she’d need to sell her row house and downsize. She felt a shiver of fear at the vastness of the changes before her, but also a kind of clarity, an almost puzzling lack of puzzlement. Maybe she could do anything.

As she approached her house, she saw something that didn’t belong. Given the last day and a half, she would not have been completely surprised to find the entire structure had vanished, to see nothing but a blank space between the neighboring row houses, the result of some celestial erasure. What she saw was reassuringly minor in comparison: the house was still there, and none of the windows were shattered, and nothing was burned, and there were no strange men waiting for her with windowless vans or guns or television cameras or handcuffs. But nestled in the grating of her metal security door was a large UPS envelope.

The sender was Troy Jones. Or at least someone claiming to be Troy Jones. She wondered if it could be a lethal mistake to open it. Perhaps one of her important, mysterious, powerful enemies had sent her a little something explosive or poisonous as a final farewell. But the way the men in the van had talked about Troy was softening her on him again. Maybe he wasn’t what she had feared he was in that white-hot moment when he came down the stairs; or maybe she was still blinded by her earlier feelings for him, maybe her heartache was tricking her into a sympathy he didn’t deserve.

She opened it anyway.

Tiny bits of cardboard and stuffing blew in the wind, and she puzzled through the barely legible handwriting of the cover letter.

Tasha—

I know these will interest you. I’d have provided them sooner, but cracking into this system took longer than I expected. I hope this relieves you of some of the weight of uncertainty about your brother’s final moments. I didn’t fully understand how you felt, as I myself tend not to be uncertain about how events will unfold. I think, however, that I’m understanding it better now.

I’m sorry again that I deceived you. Please believe I had the best of intentions. Or at least I thought that I did. It’s so hard, isn’t it, when the ends and the means feel so very different? We trick ourselves sometimes; we justify things we shouldn’t.

I won’t bother you again, and I’m glad I met you, that we were able to share a moment I’ll take with me. If anything, what your brother experienced here only echoes that.

She was more confused than ever, unsure what motivation Troy had to dig up files on Marshall after she’d blown his cover. Was he trying to win her favor? Show off how powerful and connected he was? Or was he really apologizing and trying to help?

After the cover letter were thirty pages of e-mails. They had been printed, she saw, from a cached version of e-mails Marshall had saved in his drafts folder. The account was dead, but Troy had found its ghost in cyberspace. These were messages Marshall had written but not finished, things he’d wanted to send at a later time that never came, or things he had preferred to hide in a place no one could see.

She thought about what her mother had said last night. Still: How could Tasha
not
read them?

A couple of letters were intended for Tasha, and as she read she recognized them—Marshall had ultimately sent them to her. But then she’d catch a few subtle differences, discover omitted sections. These were longer, unedited versions of those e-mails. It wasn’t just misspellings and silly anecdotes he’d cut. There was something larger: Marshall Wilson had fallen in love.

He’d tried to say this in a few of his e-mails to Tasha, mentioning a certain someone, Sunny (not her real name?), in those original e-mails but always editing her out before sending it. Why would he do this—simple embarrassment, some macho thing? He didn’t want to tell his sister about his new girl, didn’t want to misrepresent his stint in the desert as a romantic adventure? Was he ashamed to have violated the army’s anti-fraternization policy?

She could see that he had tried to tell her (and her parents, and some of his friends) many times—she found no fewer than seven drafts of attempted “Hey, sis, I met a girl” e-mails, each of them trying a different angle. Flippant, casual, serious, guilty. For a moment she even wondered if Sunny was in fact a man, as that might have explained the secrecy, but no, there were too many references to her appearance; she was clearly a woman. Yet Marshall had never been able to tell his family or friends about her.

Tasha read everything twice, the morning commuters walking past her on the sidewalk, and finally she took out her phone. She turned it on for the first time in two days; there were three new messages from the firm and one from Leo a couple nights earlier, all of which she deleted without listening to.

Velasquez answered on the second ring and, to her immense relief, seemed happy to hear from her.

“I had this fear that I ruined your day when I visited,” Tasha said.

“Ma’am, my day is ruined ten times before eight a.m. Goes with the territory. But I put it back together every time.”

“There was one more thing I wanted to ask you about Marshall.”

“Fire away.”

Tasha tried not to sound too much like the cross-examining attorney when she asked, “Could you tell me about Sunny?”

She could hear him suck in his breath. “What do you want to know about her?”

“I’m just wondering why Marshall kept her a secret from my family. I mean, had he just not gotten around to telling us, or—”

“Telling you what?” He was trying too hard to sound confused.

“That he was in love with her. I found some of his old e-mails, okay? I’ve seen it in his own words.”

“I’m really not sure what—”

Exasperated, she read from one of his e-mails. A couple of sentences about a walk Marshall had taken with the mystery woman, the way he felt in her presence.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she asked. “Everyone I’ve talked to in the platoon, they dodged me or played dumb. Why?”