“What?” Kevin says. “What is it?”

“I’ll explain at the hospital,” Mitzi says.

Kevin tells Isabelle to stay put—there’s a turkey in the oven and Genevieve is napping—he’ll call once he figures out what is going on.

Mitzi is standing outside the emergency room, smoking a cigarette. Kevin does a double take. Mitzi doesn’t smoke. But that’s Mitzi and she’s smoking. She says, “Left over from my days with George. You want a drag?”

“Actually, yes,” Kevin says. He takes the cigarette from Mitzi and thinks how much better growing up would have been if he and Mitzi had been able to commune with each other like this every once in a while. “What are they saying?”

“He’s in with the doctor.”

“He just fell over?”

“Fell over,” Mitzi says. “Unconscious. I couldn’t wake him, though the paramedics did.”

“And what’s the news about Bart?”

A nurse pokes her head out the doors. “Mrs. Quinn?”

Kelley is being flown to Boston in the MedFlight helicopter. The local on-call doctor—who is probably the low man on the totem pole, working on Thanksgiving—didn’t like what he saw and thought Kelley would be best served at Mass. General. Dr. Cherith will be there waiting for him.

“Dr. Cherith?” Kevin says. “His oncologist? They don’t think this has anything to do with the cancer, do they?”

No one in Kevin’s vicinity is able—or willing—to answer that.

Mitzi says, “I have to go too. Can you take me to the airport?”

“Yes,” Kevin says. “Of course.”

On the way to the airport, Mitzi tells Kevin about the phone call from Margaret. Another soldier from the missing platoon escaped. It wasn’t Bart. But this young man is coherent. He has valuable intelligence about where the rest of the soldiers are being held.

“He said—” Mitzi pauses and stares out the window. “Half the soldiers are alive and half are dead.”

Kevin pulls into the airport parking lot. He can see Air Force 2 out on the tarmac. The vice president is on island.

“Wait a minute. What did you say?”

“This soldier told the officers who found him that half of the other soldiers are alive and half are dead.”

“Half are dead?” Kevin says. His eyes are suddenly swimming with tears. Thirty minutes ago, he was hunting for the potato masher in the utensil drawer of his rental house, and now his father is being flown in an emergency helicopter to Boston and there’s a 50 percent chance his younger brother is dead.

“Half are alive,” Mitzi says. Kevin pulls up to the front of the terminal to let Mitzi out. “Don’t you get it, Kevin? Bart is alive.”

“Is that confirmed?” Kevin asks. “Did the soldier give any names?”

“No,” Mitzi says. “No names, nothing confirmed.” She steps out onto the curb and smiles at Kevin. “But I’m his mother. I know.”

KELLEY

Charitably, Dr. Cherith waits until Friday morning to deliver the news.

Brain cancer. Or, more correctly, prostate cancer that has metastasized to the brain. Kelley has a tumor blooming in the back of his occipital lobe, creating pressure against his skull, which was probably what caused his fall.

“Blooming?” Kelley says. “Like a flower?” He pictures a rose or a peony on the back of his head.

“The tumor has tentacles, some of them far-reaching,” Dr. Cherith says. “It’s not resectable.”

Tentacles now, like a squid. Kelley prefers the former analogy.

“So you can’t operate?” Kelley says.

“No,” Dr. Cherith says.

“What can you do?”

“Well, radiation, certainly. That should shrink it. The chemo protocol for this particular kind of cancer is notoriously nasty and effective only twenty-five percent of the time.”

“Kind of like our new president-elect,” Kelley says.

Dr. Cherith smiles, but just barely. Honestly, Kelley is so confused and overwhelmed, he can’t remember who won the election.

“I’ll give you all the information about the chemo and you can make your own decision,” Dr. Cherith says. “For now, I suggest radiation, much like before—thirty days.”

“Just keep me alive as long as you can, Doc,” Kelley says. As soon as Mitzi arrived at Mass. General, she told Kelley what she’d been screaming about right before Kelley fell over. Another soldier found, reporting that half of his fellow soldiers were alive… and half dead.

“Bart?” Kelley asked. He’d wanted to ask if Bart’s specific fate had been decided, but he didn’t know how.

“They’re going to find him,” Mitzi says. “He’s coming home.”

Kelley had asked for Dr. Cherith to give him the diagnosis privately so he could decide how much to tell Mitzi and the kids. Everyone is consumed with thoughts of Bart. The AP reports on the recovered soldier, Private Jonathan Mackie, on Thursday night included his quote that half of his brothers-in-arms were killed by the Bely, but half remained alive. Kelley admires Mitzi’s certitude that Bart is alive, and as much as he would like to join her in this steadfast belief, he can’t seem to keep his mind from visiting the dark side. What if Bart was killed? What if Bart mouthed off or otherwise angered the Bely? This is certainly possible, but Kelley thinks back on everything Bart has gone through since he enlisted. The thirteen weeks of boot camp on Parris Island, where the drill instructors broke Bart down to nothing—he referred to himself only in the third person—then built him back up into a Marine. By his own account, he excelled at his PFT (physical fitness test), running three miles in twenty minutes, doing thirty-nine pull-ups and then seventy-two crunches in sixty seconds. His basic training culminated in the Crucible, a fifty-four-hour exercise during which he was allowed to sleep for only two hours and had to hike forty-two miles with obstacles. After boot camp came the Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune, where over the course of three months he learned skilled rifle shooting. Mitzi had initially had a hard time thinking about Bart handling weapons but that had been Bart’s favorite part of ITB. Every Marine is a rifleman, he said.

Bart had been trained by the best drill instructors, men and women far tougher than the enemy; he had learned the finest combat techniques. His body was strong, his mind stronger. He would have found a way to survive.

Kelley tells Mitzi that the cancer is back, now in his brain, and that the only treatment Dr. Cherith can recommend is thirty more days of radiation.

Her bottom lip quivers and then her chin drops. He kisses the part in her hair. She smells vaguely of cigarettes. She’s back at it. But under the circumstances, Kelley really can’t blame her.

“I’m going to beat it,” he says.

Mitzi says something he doesn’t hear. She’s weeping.

“What’s that?” he says. He rubs her shoulder.

“We,” she says.

As with all things related to events around Bart, Kelley expects a lull to follow. It may take weeks or even months for the Pentagon to move on the intelligence they received from Private Mackie. But a scant week later, the Monday following Christmas Stroll weekend—which Kelley passed quietly while Mitzi and Isabelle tended to the guests; no parties or celebrations this year—the phone at the inn rings. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Mitzi answers right away, as though she has been waiting up for the call, but she is trembling so badly, she hands the phone to Kelley.

Kelley clears his throat. “Hello?”

It’s Major Dominito, calling from Washington, DC. Navy Seal Team 6 was deployed and the major reports that they have recovered all of the missing Marines, alive and dead.

The major asks Kelley if he is in a place where he can receive news about his son.

Kelley pauses before he answers. He’s safe in bed with his wife. The inn is quiet; most of the Stroll guests checked out the day before. But if the major is calling to say that Bart is dead, then no—he is not in a place where he can receive that news. He will never be in a place where he can receive that news.