On the day Mica is laid to rest, the rain has found a way to seep into the hard-packed earth and the air is dry once more. Amanda stands again with her sisters at her side. This time, she holds her son, dressed in the baby-sized vest and clip-on tie her mother-in-law had insisted he wear. Wyatt stares at the casket as it's lowered in the ground. He hasn't fussed at all, not during the hour-long service, not while half of Naval Base Coronado paid their respects, and not now. His tiny brow is furrowed as though he fully understands the somberness of the occasion.
Amanda is positive he has inherited this gravitas from his father. Mica always knew when not to make light of an occurrence and when it was acceptable to break the tension with an ill-advised joke. Except towards the end. There were no jokes then. The tension was unbreakable and so Mica himself had broken under its weight.
Tension. It is its own character in Mica's story. That's what Amanda believes. Tension is a mysterious being, a shadow figure. It awoke in a country half a world away and popped up again to wreak havoc in Amanda's own home. Now it's a parasite and, having consumed its former host, it has come to reside in Amanda's chest. Her heart continues to beat despite it. She is determined to discover its secrets and then destroy it.
Every face at the funeral displays pent up emotions on the verge of release. The most common emotion is sorrow, but it's not the only one. As shitty as it is to have tension leaning in, heart near bursting, it does keep her on guard. It makes her look, makes her observe carefully. There's more than sorrow staring out at her from the frowns of the people standing in their formal clothes around a hole in the ground. One of the people stares back with practiced stoicism. He can't hide from her. The ground beneath her feet is dry and firm and if she wasn't holding onto her son, her hands would be clenched fists at her sides ready to rise up and punch a hole through the sky. Or through him.
He makes himself look like a placid lake after a summer storm, but Amanda knows, tension has him in its grip too. He looks at Amanda and she doesn't know what he sees, her or some other place, some other time. Just like how Mica looked but didn't see her when she was standing right in front of him.
Stoicism seems worn by those who have spent a lifetime fighting a ferocious enemy. Each crease around the lips is a battle won... or lost. The eyes are the empty lenses of an old camera with an exposed roll of film waiting to be developed. Scott Talbot's eyes reflect the unknown.
Amanda looks, and she sees. But with Talbot, it's anyone's guess—he stares and stares and stares.
#
BUDS training, five years previous
There's nothing more calming than the ocean on a still night. Tonight isn't still, however. The shoreline is at war with itself. Explosions send sprays of sea water twenty feet into the air. Pockets of beach light up in quick flashes punctuated by the percussive thrum of gunfire. Captain Scott Talbot stands on a hillock overlooking this battle. A battle against man's greatest enemy: himself.
There are always casualties of war, even a war fought with simulated munitions on the beaches of a Southern California island. It's called Hell Week for a reason and the men scurrying on their bellies across the sand bought an express ticket there. It's not for the weak. Shit, it isn't even for most of the strong.
Talbot isn't a BUDS trainer; he's there to observe. He can tell who's cut out for this before the first booming hallmarks of warfare drill out into the darkness, before able-bodied men crawl through smoke and grit along a beach lit up like a strobe light. This night is designed to induce a calculated chaos. Even many of the strongest men won't wish to endure such torture.
They signed up for it, though, and they have only themselves to disappoint.
It's not about how many pushups or squats or sit-ups they're made to do while being sprayed with freezing water; it's not the grueling number of miles run. It's that they do it even though they shouldn't. No one should be able to exercise twenty hours a day or be forced to stay awake for nearly a whole week. But SEALs do it. Strength, endurance, training—none of those traits matters without integrity. If a man lacks that, he'll give up long before the sleep deprivation and hypothermia set in.
Talbot's got his eye on a few prospects. Mica Laverty comes to mind first. Tall kid with a jagged scar above his left eyebrow. There's something about him. Strong but not jacked. Slim enough to maintain speed both on his feet and in the water. His dad died when he was in high school and now he's looking for a father figure. It's obvious in the way he hangs on Talbot's every word.
Captains aren't required to psychoanalyze these trainees. Talbot doesn't need to get to know them—not yet. Seventy-five percent will say their goodbyes before Hell Week is over, so most don't see the point until the herd is culled. Talbot, though, he likes to find a point in a world of dull ends. He enjoys finding logic in futility. That's why he's determined to know something more than what's on the surface, at least about the ones he's keeping his eye on. He's got a decent integrity gage. Men either have it or they don't and those that do are the ones who will make it. If Talbot were a gambling man, he'd gamble his life savings on the belief that this fatherless kid is going to earn his Trident.
Laverty is well liked by the other trainees. His friends from PRE-BUDS, Eduardo Torres and Damon Jacobs, gravitate in his direction. They're each good men and Talbot has high hopes for them all, but Laverty has an added quality. It's a seriousness that comes when someone wears their moral compass like chainmail.
The three men comprise half of a boat crew during the log pt, one of the most demanding physical evolutions at BUDS. Talbot stands in observation of this task just as he stands watch now. The men must carry a two-hundred-pound log for close to two hours, up and down the beach and while doing a variety of calisthenics. It isn't easy for any of them. Their faces are like medieval church statues baring expressions of eternal bereavement.
Laverty is no different from his friends and the other three men. If anything, his face reveals more pain than theirs. He doesn't fight it, he lets it be. Pain is weakness leaving the body—this is a common expression anyone who's gotten this far into SEAL training has heard many times. Taken literally, Mica Laverty must be shedding weakness like a horse shedding its winter coat. It's not only his own pain that concerns him, though. He shifts his weight to carry more of the burden when at one point, Torres nearly collapsed to the sand beneath him.
Laverty doesn't make a big show of it. But he's willing to carry what others can't. The SEALs can use that. Talbot can use that. Integrity is its own burden, heavier than chainmail. Captain Talbot needs someone willing to carry it, even if that burden pounds him into the ground.
#
The Earth shifts. Mica's Earth—his own planet terraformed for him on top of one wooden casket with brass handles and beige interior. Now as Amanda thinks of it, that color was the wrong choice. Of course, it's dark in there and Mica is far beyond sight, but beige was still the wrong color to select and she could kick herself for it. She hadn't much cared at the time what his casket looked like. Her husband was dead, and she was just beginning her new mission, which had been Mica's final one. There'd been little space in her mind for funerary details. But now that color matters, unaccountably so.
Beige. Too close to the desert that wouldn't leave him, the one he slept in and woke in and struggled every day to escape. The one that finally claimed him. And now he'll rest in it forever.
She has failed him. Again. She can't even get his coffin right so what are the chances she'll succeed in uncovering what happened to him? Amanda has it in her head to approach Talbot. Mica went to see him—that much she knows. That visit made her distant husband move millions of miles further away, like they were trying to carry on a marriage while one of them was deployed to Mars.
Amanda realizes she blamed Talbot even before there was a fixed point in her brain to which blame should be assigned.
Not one to ignore her gut intuition, she contemplates making a scene. Distraught widow seeks answers from husband's superior officer. It reads like a headline. She can make it a headline. It will end her career and scandalize her mother-in-law, but it will also be a coveted moment of catharsis. She steps towards him, Wyatt balanced on her hip. Talbot's wife, Cynthia, matches her movements, minus the balancing baby act. The older woman fills the gap, her neatly trimmed figure blocking Amanda's path to her husband.
"Amanda, you poor dear." Cynthia pulls her in for a hug in which both women manage barely to touch each other. Wyatt's body is a welcome buffer. Cynthia's ballerina tutu pink fingernails graze against Amanda's shoulder. They look pretty but they are one DNA sequence away from morphing into razor-sharp claws. Cynthia pulls back and repeats her words. "Poor, poor dear. How are you getting on?"
She doesn't want Amanda's honest answer, which would be something along the lines of "I'm going to burn all Mica's enemies like they're kindling in a campfire and your husband looks dry as fuck."
Cynthia lets Wyatt latch onto one of her ballerina un-claws. She waits for Amanda to get past the response she'd like to make and replace it with one befitting her social surroundings.
"It's hard. I miss him."
Cynthia gently pries her finger from Wyatt before the baby has a chance to stick it in his mouth and ruin her manicure. "I can only imagine. Mica was such a devoted man. So loyal."
Amanda stares at her. Not a distant stare like Mica's during his final months, nor like Scott Talbot's just a few minutes ago. Hers is a pointed, close-up glare. "That he was."
This isn't the first time Amanda has wondered how much Cynthia knows. She plays the privileged Captain's wife like it's a role she's coveted from birth and will never hand over to the understudy even if she's hit by a truck. But there's more to her than that. Cynthia Talbot is hiding secrets behind her Botox injections.
Husbands and wives talk. Sons and mothers talk too. It's that last paring that itches at Amanda like a mosquito bite—a bite she could have avoided if she'd taken note of that mosquito and squashed it before it landed.
Scott Talbot recedes into the background. Social norms would generally dictate that he step forward and speak to her along with his wife but he's done the opposite. Cynthia is his stand-in, by accident or intention, Amanda isn't sure. Talbot talks with Brianna and Damon near the line of endless cars running parallel to the rows of identical white tombstones rising to a summit near the cemetery's northern end.
Cynthia looks to be moving on towards her husband. She compliments Amanda's sisters on their matching fishtail braids. Amanda should say something more to the woman, something to indicate she knows Cynthia's game, but the moment for charged vindictiveness has passed. Even hope of delivering some passive aggressive snark seems fleeting.
Then, just when there aren't enough Talbots nearby, there's one too many.
Zachary Talbot, Scott and Cynthia's eldest son, approaches. His hug does not attempt to avoid bodily contact the way his mother's had. Amanda pulls back as quickly as she can. She shoots a cautious glance in Cynthia's direction to see if the older woman observed this embrace and of course, she has. Cynthia's eyes narrow before she turns to join her husband.
"I'm so sorry, Amanda. I—I'm not even sure what to say. What can I say?" Typical of Zachary, he's sorry but not sorry and probably can't remember what he's supposed to be sorry about two seconds after his proclamation of regret.
Amanda hands Wyatt to her sixteen-year-old sister, Rachel. "Wyatt's getting tired of me just standing here. Would you mind walking him around a bit, you and Kaylee?" Rachel takes the hint and the girls carry Wyatt away.
"Why are you even here, Zachary?" She keeps her voice low.
"I... why wouldn't I be here? It would be strange if I didn't come, don't you think?"
"No, I don't think that at all."
He shuffles his feet. "Natalie would."
"What your wife thinks or doesn't think is not my problem."
Zachary flinches. "I'm just trying to go on like everything's normal. Isn't that what you wanted me to do?"
His jaw is set just like his father's. She never noticed this before. The resemblance sets her off balance. Her stomach lurches. "I'm not mad at you, Zachary. It just seems... unseemly. And disrespectful." She looks towards Mica's newly terraformed beige casket world. "To Mica."
"All I can say is I'm sorry, Amanda. Over and over again."
"I'll accept that apology once you figure out what it's really for."
He opens his mouth to say more, but whatever bit of genius that was about to be uttered is squashed by the sudden approach of his wife. Natalie's hug is genuine and without pretense. Amanda can't help but think Cynthia's "you poor dear" would have been better directed towards this naïve woman. Amanda likes her, which makes everything that much more awkward. Sure, Natalie and Zachary weren't yet married at the moment of Amanda's indiscretion. Well, moments—plural. Several dozen moments. But still.
Natalie's presence lowers Amanda's blood pressure. She stops seething and begins planning. Scott may be her main target, but those close to him are easier marks. Safer too.
What did he know and when did he know it? That famous quote from the Watergate hearings runs through her head. Amanda has a feeling Scott isn't the only one who can answer those questions.
#
One month before the death of Mica Laverty
After twenty-five years of marriage, his wife's astute powers of observation shouldn't surprise Scott Talbot. Still, her latest proclamation throws him. He doesn't know what
to do with the information, but he's pretty sure it will be useful.
"I never did tell you, Scott... I saw Mica's wife a few weeks ago. What's her name... Amanda?"
Talbot represses an eye roll. Cynthia knows Amanda's name. They've dined with the young couple on countless occasions. There's a definite personality conflict between the two women though, no doubt about it. Both are driven people, but they're speeding along at 100 miles per hour on roads going in opposite directions.
He can tell from Cynthia's tone that she didn't just happen to run into Amanda at the grocery store. She wouldn't mention some mundane encounter from weeks back if that was all there was to it. Still, he's expected to play dumb so that's what he'll do. "Oh yeah? I hope you said hi for me."
"Oh, I didn't talk to her. No, no." Cynthia clicks her tongue. "I said I saw her. From my car. She was going into a hotel with... another man."
He un-reclines his recliner, sits up strait. "This was before Mica got back? Are you saying...?"
"Yes, and also yes."
"Who was the man?"
"This isn't about the man, it's about Mica. I know you care for him. And that Amanda... she past her PST I heard. Wants to become a SEAL but she's sleeping around while her SEAL husband is risking his life for his country?" More tongue clicking. "Well I just thought you'd want to know."
"What I'd like to know is who the man was. If he's an officer, then this could be—"
"He isn't. He's no one that we know."
Talbot nods slowly. All right, he'll run with that for now. Cynthia is obviously trying to get on his good side—not something she's attempted to do in God knows how long. She wants him to think she's trying to help him, but really, she's letting him know one of her secrets so he doesn't forget how much he needs her. If there was a ranking system for manipulation, Cynthia Talbot would be an Admiral by now.
It's best to let her think she's got the upper hand; Talbot has other concerns that far outshine his wife's mind games. The chainmail weight of moral certitude he'd identified in Mica Laverty years ago has remained intact through several wars. And now, the two men are back from an event in which both innocent and guilty lives were taken and Mica is reacting exactly how Talbot should have known he would.
It's not as though Talbot wanted the collateral damage, especially Torres' death. He must tread carefully—investigations happen when a SEAL is killed in the line of duty. The same can't be said for the teenager—the Yazidi slave. No one knew she'd be there and it's not his fault that she was. No. His fault lies elsewhere. He feels guilt, sure. He'll bear his portion of it. The end justifies the means, and all that. But hell, they got their target that day. That's not all that matters, but it's a big chunk of the matter. The rest—the intel he kept from his men, the fallout from his decision—he's taken pains to keep that buried.
Mica Laverty is sniffing at the newly turned earth, though. He smells the truth and like a terrier trying to dig up a rat, he isn't going to leave well enough alone. Talbot may be fond of the kid, but he can't have that.
Laverty's leash will need to be a short one.
#
Amanda is handed the flag, folded into an origami triangle of stars and stripes by solemn officers in white gloves. She accepts it and then places it into her mother-in-law's hands. It means more to Sharon than it does to her. Mica didn't die for this flag. He didn't die for his country or for any country, or for freedom. He sacrificed for all those things, yes. He loved them. But he died for truth, a truth that battled against his sense of right and wrong. He died before this battle could be won and it was not because he was weak. It was because he chose to carry pain for others instead of letting it go when he could have. He died because he was stronger than anyone.
The Talbots—all of them—are gone now. Damon and his family and all their friends have slowly trailed off. The line of cars trickles away until there's only a few specks of metallic grey and blue aligning the white dotted lawns. Only her family remains—Amanda, Wyatt, her sisters, and Mica's mom.
Mica is in his cold, tiny world. Soon, Amanda will leave him there. But she will also leave with something—a certainty that she knows where, or rather, with whom the truth lies. She isn't like Mica; her moral compass has never pointed as due north as his. She didn't want this parasite, this horrible heart-bursting tension that's now inside of her.
But it's here. It's hers. She takes his pain and she bears it willingly just as he had. She is stronger for it even if one day it breaks her too.
Amanda clings to this as she plots her next move.