He got up and went into the bedroom, retrieving the toy airplane and bringing it back to the living room where Tom still sat.
Al saw the model and the expression on Sam's face. "Uh, oh. You've got an idea, don't you?"
Sam smiled grimly. Maybe Ziggy couldn't play it back for Tom-but he, Sam Beckett, didn't have a photographic memory for nothing. And he, Sam Beckett, was the only one who could play it back. Because he had been there.
"I don't like the looks of this," Al said.
Neither did Tom. "What the hell is that for?" he said. "I told you that subject was closed."
"I know what you said," Sam answered. He set the model down on the coffee table between them, propping up the broken strut so it looked whole. "You really don't remember how this happened?"
Tom looked at the model and shrugged. "Stepped on it, probably."
Sam thought about it, nodded. "Something like that." He leaned forward in his chair, placed both feet flat upon the floor.
"Don't you remember what your room looked like in Hainerberg?" he said. It was there before him, as if a picture in stereoscope, the gift of a photographic memory when there weren't any holes. "You had modelplanes hanging from the ceiling. You had a Fokker and a Mosquito and a bomber, a B-52, and one of those big transport planes I never knew the name of. Remember?"
Tom shifted uneasily, shaking his head. "So? Every kid had planes."
"You had airplanes on your bedspread. With pic-tures of pilots wearing red silk scarves and wearing goggles. Remember, Tom? And you had one of those rugs, a shag rug, and it had an airplane on it-what kind of plane was on the rug?"
"A Messerschmidt. It was a German design. Mom made it up for me."
Sam nodded. "Yeah. Messerschmidt." He reached out with one finger and touched the wing of the wooden model. "But you built the others. The ones hanging from the ceiling, and the ones on the table, the finished ones you didn't have time to hang up yet. The room smelled like glue, airplane glue. You spent a lot of time on it, didn't you? Building those planes was a lot of fun."
"Yeah, so?"
"It took a lot of time. A lot of effort. Didn't it? Can you remember how careful you had to be . . ."
"Oh, will you cut it out! Yeah, I was careful! I was a kid! It was a kid's hobby! So what!" He started to get to his feet.
"So what," Sam said, his voice as low and as ugly and as much like that of Jane Robicheaux, that long-ago Monday afternoon, as he could make it. "Don't you talk to me in that tone of voice."
Tom flinched back. "What-"
With a sweep of his right hand, Sam knocked the model off the table, sending it crashing into the wall, and got to his feet, standing over the man on the couch. "Don't you talk back to me! Damn you, don't you talk back to me! You little ungrateful monster! Monster!
"All you wanted was something to eat," Sam went on, in his own voice, but still shouting, still chipping away. "You were late. Daddy came home and left again, we had dinner and you weren't there, all you wanted was something to eat! Remember? Remem-ber?" He stepped away long enough to snatch up the pieces of the model, thrust it under the man's nose. "You were working on this model. This model!"
His voice changed again to the pitch and texture Jane Robicheaux had used, so many years ago. "You came home late. Your father was here for dinner!'" he screamed at the man on the couch. "Your father was here and you weren't home! He called you and you didn't come! Where were you? You lazy, useless, disobedient boy! You don't deserve to have a father!
You don't deserve to have a family!' Isn't that what she said to you that day? Isn't it? And she said, 'Don't you ever do what you're told!' and you said, 'All I wanted was something to eat! What are you going to do, starve me?'
"And then what happened? What happened, Tom? What came next? You remember, don't you? What came next?"
"She hit me," he said, shrinking back into the cushions. "She hit me, and she knocked the models down, and she broke it. She hit me into the wall and she broke it-"
"And then what happened?" Sam said inexorably, hammering at him. "What happened next, Tom?"
"I-hit-her-back-and I ran away," he gasped. "I ran away, and then there was the alert, and the fire, and you came-"
"Why did you run away, Tom? Why did you run away?"
"Because she hit us, and she yelled at us, and she called us names!" Tom was crumbling, caught up in the memory Sam was being for him, playing back for him.
"And it hurt, didn't it?" He couldn't let up now. Not yet. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Al, burning cigar forgotten, staring at him with his mouth open, and he could tell that the major was standing in the doorway just outside the periphery of his vision. "It hurt, didn't it!"
"I was bad!" Tom wailed, weeping openly now. "I didn't check in! I talked back! I deserved it!"
"No," Sam said, in an almost normal voice now. His throat hurt. It didn't matter. He was breaking through. "You did not deserve it. If you remember what happened to you, you remember what hap-pened to me, too. Neither one of us deserved it. No kids deserve that kind of treatment. We didn't deserve it then, and your kids don't deserve it now."
"I-I don't hit my kids," Tom gasped.
"Neither did your mother, to begin with," Al and Sam said at almost exactly the same time, and tradeda startled glance.
"It doesn't start with hitting," Sam went on. "It starts with yelling. And you are yelling exactly the same things at your boys that your mother yelled at you, twenty-eight years ago. You almost hit them this afternoon for tearing their clothes. Can you see this? Damn it, Tom, can you see it now?"
He wouldn't look up at Sam, but he looked at the broken pieces of the model, took them up in his hands, and he nodded. "She said those things to us," he whispered. "That's how I learned to say them too. Those are the words you say." His gaze shifted then, and he met his sister's eyes. "I remember. It happened just that way. I remember."
"No," the major said from the doorway. "No. I don't believe it. You're making it up. You're lying."
He faced his children and he denied it, denied his son's tears, his daughter's unfamiliar rage.
"You saw my face when you came home that day," Sam said. "You saw."
"You fell into the coffee table. You were always falling into things."
"I was pushed. I was slapped. I was hit with a closed fist. I was thrown against the wall."
"Liar." There was utter loathing and condemna-tion in the old man's tone. "Liar."
"No. I am not a liar."
"She's not lying," Tom said. "She's not. I remem-ber."
"Liar," the old man repeated. "I want you to get out of my house. I want you to go away and nev-er come back. Your mother loved you. She never hit you."
"Jane Robicheaux loved her children," Sam said with precision. "She loved them desperately. And she was in terrible, terrible pain. And as a result she abused them every day, verbally and physical- ly. She cut them down with words as well as with blows. She told them they were stupid, that they were worthless. She hit them and told them it was their fault for getting hit. And because they were kids they believed her, and now Tom is doing the same things to his children, the children that he loves, because he was taught that that's the way you love someone. And I want to see it stop now."
"Liar," the old man repeated, and turned his back on him.
"He's never going to believe you," Tom said. "He wouldn't see it then and he won't believe it now."
"The point is, do you? Are you going to get help?"
"That stuff you were talking about in your let-ters?"
"Exactly that stuff," Sam agreed. "Are you going to do it?"
Tom looked down at the model in his hands. "I love my kids." He caught back a sob, startling himself. "I love my kids."
That was it. The moment of completeness. Of rightness. Of redemption.
"Bingo," Al said.
And Sam Leaped.
AUTHOR'S NOTE.
The American housing development of Hainerberg, Germany, is a real place. Street names in Hainerberg did consist of state names combined with the Ger-man word for "street"-thus, "Texasstrasse" is a real street, and the apartment building described did (and still may) exist. American dependents living in Hainerberg and elsewhere in the Federal Republic of Germany in the late fifties and early sixties did keep bags packed and ready in case international tensions exploded and evacuation was required on short notice.
The author is not, however, aware of any actual evacuation alert or drill taking place in Wiesbaden on the date, or during the time period, described. The Robicheaux family is fictional, and any resemblance to any real family living in Hainerberg at that time or at that address is purely coincidental.The quotations that head the chapters are either from actual documents provided by the American military to its dependents, or from the public record of the time.