“Wait!” she said. “I have these.”
She reached into her jacket pocket again and pulled out a pair of dog tags on a chain. She passed them to me across the table. I read the words stamped into the stainless steel:
BOWDITCH
JOHN, M.
004-00-8120
O NEG
NO PREF.
My father had done two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and had returned home a hero. But the war had left him badly scarred, both physically and mentally. What he’d experienced in the jungles of Southeast Asia—killing men, nearly being killed by them—had managed to turn him into the worst version of himself, or so people told me who had known him before he left Maine.
He had continued to wear his dog tags long after he’d left the army. In every memory I had of him with his shirt off, they hung around his neck. They seemed to have some talismanic power, as if he credited them with having saved his life, while so many of his friends had died. I had been surprised to hear those tags hadn’t been found on his body at Rum Pond. I had always wondered what had become of them.
“Jack gave those to me the night he first held Adam in his arms,” Amber said. “He wanted me to give them to him when he was older.”
Another invisible blow struck my chest. “You mean my dad knew?”
“He offered to take care of us, but I was still with A.J. and trying to make things work. Besides, as young as I was, I knew that Jack wasn’t going to make a good husband—or a good father.”
I was having a hard time getting my wind back. “You need to leave.”
“What about Adam?”
“What about him?”
“You won’t help me find him?”
“No.”
“Not after what I just told you?”
“Especially not now,” said a rough voice issuing from my mouth.
She remained seated, looking up at me. I could see her in the act of thinking. In the quiet, I heard the furnace start up in the basement.
Then Amber twitched her nose. “Is something burning?”
I had left the venison stew simmering, and it had begun to scorch the pot.
I hurried out to the kitchen. I used a dishrag to lift the handle and drop the bubbling contents into the sink. A haze hung in the air, its odor as foul as a failed animal sacrifice.
When I returned to the living room, I found Amber standing with her purse over her shoulder. I had thought I might have to throw her out, as emotional as she’d been. But she seemed strangely composed now.
I held the door open for her. Sure enough, it had begun to snow while we were inside.
“Don’t you want to know how to reach me?” she said.
“I can always ask Gary Pulsifer.”
Her expression softened. “It’s better that you know about your brother, Mike.”
I barely stopped myself from saying “It doesn’t feel better.”
I followed her out into the driveway and waited while the Jeep started up and the headlights came on. After she had driven off, the silence of the woods closed in around me. The sensation was of being imprisoned inside a snow globe.
I went back into the house to deal with the burned mess in the kitchen. It wasn’t until later that I found Adam’s picture where she had hidden it, under a dirty plate on the coffee table. She had scribbled her phone number on the back of the photograph. She had left the dog tags, too.
3
I read a lot as a kid. My mother used to come home from the library with free books she’d found in the donation boxes by the door. I remember one battered paperback in particular. It was an encyclopedia of different kinds of ghosts: phantoms, wraiths, apparitions, et cetera. A field guide to the undead. There was a chapter on poltergeists that has stayed with me. We tend to think of them merely as noisy, mischievous specters, but what this book explained was that, unlike other ghosts that tend to haunt places, poltergeists haunt specific people. No matter where you go, those loud, disruptive spirits will always follow you.
My father was my personal poltergeist.
I tossed the dog tags in my hand, listened to them jingle, turned them in my fingers, felt the stamped letters like braille I was unable to read. I had never known that we shared the same blood type. As if I needed another reminder of how much we had in common. I clenched my fist so hard around the tags that they left a rounded rectangle imprinted in the skin of my palm.
I knew that my father had always been a womanizer. He had been a handsome, red-blooded mountain man, possessed of an unshakable self-confidence and an animal magnetism I had seen on display in too many barrooms. But he had also loved my late mother in his own oddly ardent way, and the idea that he had fathered a child with another woman while he was still married to her—I didn’t want to believe it.
And yet my dad had made a fool of me before. Why shouldn’t he do it again from beyond the grave?