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“No, it’s been a while now. I used to see him all the time, but he hasn’t been around lately.”
“So you don’t think it has to do with your injury?”
“No. I first started seeing him after I got out of prison. When Lia was around, he stopped appearing. He came back when she left.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Mark’s making furious notes in his little notebook.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Sometime before Rinaldo died, I believe. Things in my head are kinda jumbled. The timelines are messed up, I think.”
“That’s not uncommon.”
“I think it was around the time Alina moved in with me,” I say. “I think the last time I saw him was just before that.”
“Can you describe Ralph to me?”
“He’s…he’s…” I pause and collect myself. “He’s a kid I killed in Iraq. An insurgent kid. He was heading for our base when I shot him.”
“I remember you bringing that up before,” Mark says. “You refused to give me any details and never mentioned having hallucinations about him. Why the name Ralph?”
“It just fit.” I shrug. I really don’t have a better answer.
“Tell me more about this kid in Iraq.”
“I used to talk to myself a lot,” I tell him. “That always kind of pissed me off. Like, it was admitting I was crazy. Talking to Ralph is still crazy but different. Does that make any sense?”
“I can at least understand the difference,” Mark says. “Can you tell me about the real Ralph?”
Mark’s tenacious; I have to grant him that. I go over the story slowly—from the first moment I saw the kid in my crosshairs to exactly seventy-five seconds later, when I pulled the trigger. By the time I finish, I’m sobbing.
“Who does that?” I choke out the words. “Who sends their kid out there like that? It was a fucking battle zone. And he knew…I could see it in his eyes. He knew he was going to die. He was either going to be shot or he was going to blow himself up. Someone just sent him out there to die! Why? Why the fuck would anyone do that?”
“It was war, Evan,” Mark says quietly. “People do things in a war that they would never do under other circumstances. You did what you needed to do to protect your unit.”
“I didn’t protect them,” I remind him. “They all died a couple of months later.”
Mark passes me a handful of tissues from a box on the side table, and I take a few minutes to get myself back together.
“Shit, I don’t usually do this.”
“Maybe you should.” Mark stares at me. “It’s good to see some emotion come out of you, Evan. That’s not a bad thing at all.”
“Maybe getting all sensitive will help me keep the girl this time.”
“Alina is important to you.”
“Yeah. You met her?”
“She was here when I came to check on you the first time,” he says. “She seems very sweet. She obviously cares about you a lot.”
“I really like her, and she seems to understand me. Even though she knows what I can be like, she’s stuck by me. Still, I’m not sure about it all.”
“Why not?”
“Because I thought the same thing about Lia.”
“That was the woman you left Chicago to be with, correct?”
“Yeah.”
