Chapter 3 - The Ghost on the Mantel
Judith Mercer did not turn on the lights.
She walked through the front door of her single-story brick home on Colonial Avenue, kicked off her low-heeled pumps, and left them where they fell against the baseboard. She didn't take off her dark blue wool overcoat. She walked through the foyer, through the dining room smelling of lemon oil and dry wood, and stopped in front of the brick fireplace.
The mantel was crowded.
In the center sat the triangular mahogany case containing the folded American flag that had draped Andrew’s empty casket. Beside it, framed in dark oak, was the portrait taken three weeks before his deployment: Andrew in his service dress blues, his white sailor’s hat tipped slightly back on his sandy hair, grinning that crooked, irreverent grin that had always gotten him out of trouble with his teachers, his fathers, and his division officers.
In front of the portrait lay his medals: the Navy Achievement Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the surface warfare pin—the twin cutlasses crossed behind the bow of a ship breaking through ocean waves.
Judith reached out. Her fingers were cold. She picked up the surface warfare pin.
It was identical to the one Elise had worn tonight on her white coat.
*“You expect me to believe you earned it too?”*
Judith’s own words bounced back against the plaster walls of the living room, sounding small, ugly, and shrill.
She turned the pin over in her palm. The tiny brass clutches were missing; she had lost them years ago when she transferred the pin from Andrew’s sea bag into the shadow box. The metal felt cheap. It felt light. For eight years, that little piece of stamped metal had been the physical anchor of her grief—the proof that her younger boy had stood tall among men, that his life had meant something grand and unassailable.
She walked to the secretary desk in the corner of the room. With trembling hands, she pulled down the sloped writing lid. Behind the cubbyholes stuffed with old utility bills and church bulletins was a large, flat cedar box.
Judith opened it.
Inside were seventy-four letters. Every postcard, V-mail slip, and folded piece of notebook paper Andrew had sent home since graduating from Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes. She had read them hundreds of times. She knew the cadence of his handwriting—the way his *T*s crossed high and wild, the way he drew little sketches of sea gulls in the margins when he was bored on mid-watch.
She dug through the layers until she reached the bottom. The thin blue airmail envelopes from his final deployment aboard the USS *Carver*.
She pulled out the last one. Dated October 28. Seventeen days before the missile hit.
Judith pulled the desk lamp chain. The small bulb clicked on, throwing a pool of amber light across the paper. She unfolded the thin sheet with frantic, jerky motions.
> *Hey Ma,*
> *Sweating through my skivvies down here in the Gulf. The water looks like flat glass, but nobody’s fishing. We’ve got a new direct-support spook team that rode out on a helo from Bahrain last week. Bunch of officer types with briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.*
> *The boss is a female lieutenant named Navarro. Small girl. Doesn't look like she weighs a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet with her boots on. The chiefs in the mess were making bets on how long she’d last before she started puking in the head from the heat in the lower auxiliary spaces.*
> *Turns out she doesn't puke. She works twenty hours a day and speaks three dialects of Arabic like she was born in Basra. She caught a targeting radar glitch yesterday that probably saved us from eating an inbound drone.*
> *Don't worry about me. I’m sticking close to Anchor. That’s her call sign. If the balloon goes up, she’s the only one down here who knows where the exits are.*
> *Love you. Tell Mark to change the oil in the Dodge.*
> *Andy.*
Judith’s hand dropped. The paper fluttered, settling against the green blotter.
*I’m sticking close to Anchor.*
She had read that letter forty times. Fifty times. She had read it on the first anniversary of his death, weeping until the ink ran blue on the edges. She had read it when Mark announced his engagement to Elise.
She had never connected the name.
*Lieutenant Navarro.*
Judith’s mind spun back to the first time Mark had brought Elise to this house. Elise had walked through the front door wearing a simple gray cardigan, her dark hair pinned back, her shoulders straight. She had stopped in front of this very mantel. She had looked at Andrew’s picture for a full sixty seconds without saying a word.
Judith had stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her with cold suspicion.
*“Did you know him?”* Judith had asked from the hallway.
Elise had turned slowly. Her face had been completely blank, her dark brown eyes unreadable.
*“The Navy is a very small community, Mrs. Mercer,”* Elise had said. *“Our paths crossed.”*
Judith had taken that as the arrogance of an officer—a dismissive, haughty refusal to acknowledge an enlisted boy’s life. She had decided, right there in the hallway between the kitchen and the parlor, that Elise Navarro was a climber. A woman who used the service to elevate herself, who looked down on the boys from the working-class neighborhoods who turned the wrenches and cleaned the bilges.
*“You translate reports for real sailors,”* Judith had said tonight in front of four hundred people. *“That doesn't make you one of them.”*
Judith sat down heavily in the cane-bottom desk chair. The wood groaned beneath her.
The room was freezing. She hadn't adjusted the thermostat, and the damp cold from the bay was seeping through the sash windows. She looked at the identification plate sitting in her memory—the blackened, warped alloy with the two names cut into the metal with a knife.
*Raven Six.*
*Anchor Two.*
She reached up and touched her own cheek. Her skin was dry, papery, and cold. For eight years, she had built a fortress out of her bitterness. She had used Andrew’s memory as a weapon to punish Mark for moving on, to punish Elise for existing, to punish the world for keeping turning while her boy lay at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
May you like
Now, the walls of the fortress were cracking, and through the fissures, the truth was pouring in like cold seawater through a ruptured hull.
***
