Chapter 4 - The Cedar Chest
The drive from the Half Moone Center to my father’s colonial estate in the Bay Colony section of Virginia Beach was forty minutes of unadorned, black-water silence.
I didn't drive my truck. Admiral Carrow had ordered her official staff car—a pristine, dark-blue armored Cadillac bearing four silver stars on the front bumper plates—to follow my father’s Lincoln Navigator. I sat in the rear passenger seat, still wearing the Admiral’s service dress jacket, looking out through the rain-streaked, ballistic-tinted glass at the long rows of naval supply warehouses lining Hampton Boulevard.
In the front seat, Commander Bradley drove with two hands locked on the wheel at ten and two, his eyes flicking toward the rearview mirror every twenty seconds with a mixture of reverence and unspoken sorrow.
"You should have called us, Maya," Bradley said quietly as we cleared the bridge over the Lynnhaven Inlet. "Five years ago. When you were in the burn unit. The whole wardroom from the Hampton Roads was waiting for word. We were told you requested no visitors."
"My father handled the patient communications, Brad," I murmured, resting my forehead against the cool glass. "He told the hospital staff that the family preferred private convalescence. He told me the wardroom had already deployed on their next training cycle."
Bradley let out a low, venomous curse under his breath, his knuckles whitening against the leather of the steering wheel. "He lied to you. We were tied up at Pier Four for two months while the ship underwent dry-dock repairs on the auxiliary space. Jackson... the kid you pulled off the catwalk... he sat in the hospital chapel for three days straight praying you'd wake up."
"How is Jackson?" I asked, a sudden, sharp ache flaring behind my ribs that had nothing to do with scar tissue.
"Master Chief now," Bradley smiled, though his eyes in the mirror were wet. "Leading the propulsion division on the Ford. He carries your picture in the lid of his damage control toolkit, Maya. Every time a new fireman comes aboard, Jackson makes them touch the brass relief valve on the manifold and tells them about the woman who kept the fire from eating their racks."
We pulled through the brick pillars of Hugh Alden’s driveway.
The house was an enormous, multi-million-dollar brick Georgian manor nestled behind towering loblolly pines, overlooking the dark, brackish waters of the inlet. The circular gravel drive was wet, littered with needles brought down by the coastal squall.
My father’s Lincoln had parked crookedly beneath the carriage port, the driver’s side door left hanging half-open in the rain.
I stepped out of the Admiral’s vehicle.
The wind off the Atlantic was cold, carrying the sharp, clean scent of brine and pine resin. I walked up the wide brick steps, pushing open the heavy mahogany front door.
Inside, the house was dark, save for a single amber lamp burning in the corner of my father’s private study at the end of the hall.
The walls of that hallway were a museum of naval pedigree.
There were black-and-white portraits of my grandfather, an admiral who had commanded cruiser divisions at Leyte Gulf; framed commissioning pennants; ceremonial naval swords crossed above the wainscoting; and rows of silver-framed photographs documenting Hugh Alden’s career from his plebe year at Annapolis to his retirement ceremony on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
In thirty feet of wall space, there was only one photograph of me.
A small, four-by-six frame from my graduation from the Naval Academy, tucked away on the lowest shelf of an umbrella stand near the coats.
Beside it, occupying pride of place beneath an illuminated brass picture light, was a towering, eighteen-by-twenty-four oil painting of Marin in her debutante gown, smiling down with that practiced, aristocratic poise our mother had drilled into her before she died.
I pushed open the heavy oak door of the study.
The room smelled of twenty-year-old single malt scotch, stale tobacco, and aged paper.
Hugh sat on the floor.
The retired Navy captain, who had never allowed a crease in his trousers or an unpolished buckle on his belt, was sitting with his back against the base of his mahogany bookcase, his dress uniform unbuttoned at the neck, his medals hanging crookedly across his chest.
In the center of the Persian rug lay an antique cedar sea chest—the chest my grandfather had carried aboard the USS Enterprise in 1944.
The brass padlock had been cut off with a pair of bolt cutters that lay discarded on the leather blotter. The heavy cedar lid was thrown back, and the floor around my father was covered in stacks of yellowed letters, military orders, and official registered mail packets.
In Hugh’s lap lay a thick, cream-colored vellum folder bearing the embossed gold seal of the Department of the Navy.
He didn't look up when my boots touched the hardwood.
He was staring down at the parchment in his shaking, liver-spotted hands, his chest heaving with shallow, rattling breaths that sounded like dry leaves scraping across concrete.
"It was here," Hugh whispered.
His voice was hollow, stripped of every ounce of the booming, command-presence baritone that had terrorized junior officers for four decades.
"It was in the bottom compartment," he rasped, his fingers trembling as they traced the raised lettering of the citation. "Beneath your grandfather’s flight logs. Registered mail. Postmarked November 14th, five years ago."
I stopped four feet from where he sat, my hands resting in the pockets of Admiral Carrow’s jacket.
"You didn't open it, Dad," I said softly.
"I didn't open it," he choked out, a single, heavy tear finally breaking free from his eye, running down the deep, weathered trench of his cheek and splashing onto the parchment. "Marin brought the mail in from the box that morning. She told me... she told me it was the administrative discharge paperwork. She told me you had refused the Navy’s offer of a shore billet in San Diego because you were too traumatized to look at an engine again."
Hugh slowly lifted his head, his bloodshot eyes searching my face with a terrifying, agonizing bewilderment.
"She told me you had begged the medical board for a full severance payout so you could move away from the family. She told me you blamed me for pushing you into the Academy. She said... she said you were ashamed of the uniform."
"And you believed her," I said.
The words weren't shouted. They were quiet, flat, and colder than the rain falling against the leaded-glass windows behind him.
"You believed her because you wanted to believe her, Dad. Because in your mind, an Alden who gets burned in an auxiliary machinery room isn't a hero. She's a failure who didn't keep her department clean."
"No..." Hugh wept, shaking his head frantically, clutching the vellum against his medals. "No, Maya, God forgive me... I read it. I just read it five minutes ago."
He held the paper out toward me with both hands, his knuckles shaking so violently the parchment rattled against the air.
"Listen to this," Hugh sobbed, reading his own daughter’s medal citation like an executioner reading his own death warrant:
“...For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry at the risk of her life above and beyond the call of duty. Lieutenant Commander Maya Alden, while serving as Chief Engineer aboard USS Hampton Roads, entered a raging diesel fire to manually secure the fuel manifold. Despite sustaining catastrophic third-degree burns across forty percent of her upper body and the failure of protective equipment, Lieutenant Commander Alden refused to abandon her post until forty-two crew members were successfully evacuated from the berthing spaces directly overhead. By her unyielding courage, superior airmanship, and complete devotion to duty, Lieutenant Commander Alden saved the lives of her shipmates and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service...”
Hugh collapsed forward, his forehead pressing against the worn wool of the Persian rug, his shoulders heaving with ragged, violent sobs that sounded like an old building collapsing in on itself.
"Forty-two sailors," he cried into the floorboards. "Forty-two boys... and I wouldn't even walk into your room in Portsmouth because I didn't want to see you on crutches."
I stood above my father in the dim lamplight.
I looked at the silver stars on my shoulders.
May you like
I looked at the oil painting of my grandfather on the wall.
And for the first time in five long years, the cold, heavy knot of unworthiness that had lived beneath my scars simply dissolved, carried away by the clean, salt wind of the truth.
