A DECORATED SEAL BROKE MY RIBS IN A FULL MESS HALL — THEN MY DEAD MOTHER’S VOICE CAME THROUGH THE PHONE

Chapter 14

The drive home took four hours and nineteen minutes.

I know because I counted every one of them. Counting is what I do when a thing is too large to hold all at once — I break it into units I can survive, and I survive them one at a time.

Exit 41. Forty-one minutes down.

The Chesapeake bridge. Fifty-eight.

The rest stop where my father always pulled over to buy peanut brittle, the last third of which he would eat himself on the way home and blame on me. A hundred and twenty-nine.

I didn’t turn on the radio. I didn’t call anyone. I drove through the dark with the windows cracked and the smell of salt marsh coming in, past the water towers and the shuttered farm stands and the little church with the white steeple where my mother’s — where someone’s — funeral had been held.

Somewhere around the second hour I started doing what I had been trained to do, which is build a threat picture, and I built it in the only way available to me: out of memory.

Item one. My mother’s funeral, October, seventeen years ago. My father standing with his hand on my shoulder. Six pallbearers, all of them in dark suits, none of whom I recognized, all of whom my father introduced as “old friends.” I had been twelve and grief-stricken and hadn’t thought about it once in the intervening years.

Until now.

Six.

Reeve had said six original Lantern members. Six pallbearers at a funeral for a woman who didn’t have six friends in this town.

Item two. The photograph in the desk drawer. My mother with her hand on my father’s shoulder, standing beside a transport aircraft, younger than she ever was in my real memories.

My real memories.

Her hair had been short at the jaw in that photograph too.

Item three. The weekly phone calls. My father had called me every Sunday at seven for twenty-three years without missing one. Not once. Not even the year I was deployed and couldn’t pick up — he would leave a message, always the same length, always ending with the same thing: All quiet here, sweetheart.

All quiet here.

Item four. Something I had never once questioned. My father had retired from the Navy when I was eleven — one year before my mother died. He had been home every single day of the year between his retirement and her funeral.

I had always thought that was the cruelest accident of timing in our family’s history. He finally gets to be home and then loses his wife three hundred and sixty-five days later.

But it wasn’t an accident.

He had retired because something was coming.

He had been home to watch.

And someone had come anyway.

The last exit came up around eleven at night. I turned onto the county road, past the soybean fields and the one blinking yellow light, and then onto the gravel lane that runs along the edge of our property toward the house.

I killed the headlights a quarter mile out and let the car roll in on the shoulder.

The house looked exactly the way it had in the photograph.

Workshop lights on behind the garage. Front door open onto the porch. The porch light off. A dark car in the driveway — not my father’s, not any model I recognized, with dealer plates and no visible registration.

And every window on the front of the house dark except one.

My old bedroom.

I sat in the car with the engine off and the salt wind coming in through the open window and did the breathing — four in, two hold, six out — and let the room tell me what it wanted to tell me.

Front door open means an invitation, not a break-in.

Porch light off means they don’t want to be seen by the road.

Dealer plates means the vehicle was acquired recently, probably in the last few days, probably not in this state.

My bedroom light on means she’s been in my room.

Not my father’s study. Not the kitchen. My room.

I got out of the car.

The gravel crunched under my boots, loud in the dark. Someone had mowed the lawn this month. Someone had stacked firewood against the side of the workshop, split and even. My father’s routine, performed by my father, in a house that was apparently no longer only his.

Halfway up the walk, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Thorne.

Truck’s at the end of your road. Two vehicles passed me going the other way in the last ten minutes. Nobody’s come in. Door’s open — I can see it from here.

I typed back one word. Hold.

Then I climbed the porch steps and stood in the open doorway of the house I grew up in, and I smelled my mother’s lavender soap.