Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alzheimer’s, hope being a place to die with a slice of dignity rather than a place to recover. Since arriving at Jefferson just over a year ago the Captain had lost all ability to speak and walk, and the best reactions Jonas could expect from his father were open eyes, an occasional nod, and the thinnest crack of a smile. Smiles were rare.
    Jonas keyed in the code to the second set of doors and entered the north wing. The Captain’s room was first on the right. Jonas checked there first, but he found Carolyn—an eighty-something ex-fashion designer—asleep in the Captain’s bed. Carolyn had a tendency to sleep wherever the hell she wanted.
    A familiar nurse stuck her head in the door.
    “He’s in the hallway,” she said. “God, what happened to you?”
    “Long story.” He walked down the hallway, finding his father in the corner at the far end.
    In earlier years, the Captain made the Great Santini look like a pussy. He was the warrior who had seldom spoken, but when he did, every word carried the weight of the world with it. He was the decorated soldier. The brother among his fellow soldiers. The dedicated—though distant—husband. The man to whom duty meant everything, before that very idea became a cliché. The Captain was the reason Jonas went into the military. Not to try to please his father. But to try to be his father.
    The Captain sat alone in his wheelchair, his chin touching his bony chest, his hands gripping the chair’s arms for support. He wasn’t asleep because Jonas could hear sounds emanating deep in the Captain’s throat. Sounded like humming. Jonas pulled up a cracked plastic chair and sat next to his father, silent in his attention, trying to recognize the song. After a minute he gave up.
    “Hey Dad. It’s Jonas.” He leaned down and looked up into his father’s face. The Captain’s eyes opened halfway and the humming stopped. “You look good, Dad. Real good.”
    No reaction. The humming started again.
    In warmer weather Jonas would wheel his father outside for some fresh air and sunshine on his milky skin. Too cold for that today, so Jonas picked up one of the Captain’s hands and held it tight as he recounted the week’s events.
    “Big week, Dad,” he said. “Got hit by a car. Can you believe that?” He held up his cast to prove it.
    More humming.
    “Yeah, could’ve died. But then I figured you would be
    bored as hell if both Mom and I were dead, so I decided to live.” Jonas thought he saw a smile, but couldn’t be sure. “Got a pretty bad concussion, though. Real pain in my ass. Threw up like a drunken frat boy last night because of it. And now I have to go to a funeral for someone who was crucified. Crazy fuckin’ week.”
    He looked again. The Captain was a big fan of salty language, and often a well-placed fuck or shit got a reaction. Not today.
    Jonas kept talking and the Captain kept humming, their respective sounds in a rhythm and cadence that somehow worked together, the two men in worlds far apart but still somehow connected. Jonas ran his thumb back and forth over the bones in the back of his father’s hand, a gesture he never even would have dreamed of doing when his father was healthy. It was amazing, Jonas thought, how only a disease that rendered the old man demented could allow Jonas to share affection with him.
    He even told his father about the flashback he had of Somalia. The explosion. Falling from the building. The little black arm, detached from its owner, lying in the dirt road next to him.
    “I wanted to forget,” Jonas told him. “And I thought I had, but something made me remember. Maybe it was the accident. Maybe it was just time for me to think of it again.” But there was more, wasn’t there? The car accident. The flash of his time in the Mog. They weren’t quite separate events. There was a thread between them, one connecting the other, and Jonas understood that thread, because it also passed directly through the man sitting in front