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In the side-view mirror, I see only darkness behind us. We’ve been through so much since we left PA and it’s not over yet. He deserves answers. “Remember what I told you on the plane about Hope?”
A long pause. “Yeah.”
“The man I killed tonight killed Hope.”
The wheels process earth as Sandesh drives in silence. I can practically hear when he realizes what happened tonight is very personal. A lifetime of plotting, planning, and pain.
“You’re seeking revenge.”
“No. I’m seeking what’s right.” I want to call it justice but hate puns that use my name. “And maybe a bit of redemption for not being able to help her. Isn’t that why you started a charity? To seek redemption for a military life?”
Sandesh scratches roughly at the back of his head. “Redemption? No. Redemption indicates I thought what I did in the military was wrong. I didn’t. I don’t. I started my charity for another reason. And I don’t expect you to understand right now because you’re in the thick of it, but the kind of anger you have, the kind of anger I had… It doesn’t go away when you take off the uniform or put down the gun, and that’s something you need to learn to live with. Something you need to learn to understand.”
I lean back, rest my head against the seat, and stare at him. I’m so tired right now, but I want to learn more about him. “You’ve never struck me as too angry.”
“Trust me, if we had met a few years ago, it would’ve been one hell of an explosion. When I first left Special Forces, I’d had an excess amount of anger and no skills to diffuse it.”
He did? We’re more alike than I could’ve guessed. “I know that excess. I use it.”
“Sure. I get that. As a Ranger, I had a place to direct it, a need to direct it, but when I got out… It became wild. Everyday, normal encounters would escalate and I’d find a way to fight my way through. Even if it was some dude trying to bring twenty items through the ten-items-or-less aisle.”
Alotalike. Tonight, my rage had been unleashed on the world, and it’d felt justified. “Sometimes, you have to fight. Especially when there’s no one else to do the job.”
He exhales slowly through his teeth, a whistle of wind. “I know there’s a place where you can’t give an inch to the enemy. I’ve stood on that line. I’ve defended that ground, refused that inch, with every ounce of strength and courage and determination I possess. But once I no longer had to do that, I ended up trying to fight myself, trying to fight my way out of anger.”
This strikes me as a battle I might need to wage someday.IfI’m lucky. “Canyou fight your way out of anger?Isthere an end?”
He looks at me, as if reading the sincerity in my face. He shakes his head. “No. I got out of it the opposite way.”
He stops talking, but I don’t press. I know there’s more, and I also know it’s not an easy tell, so I wait.
Five minutes pass before he speaks again. “A few months after leaving the service, my friend—the guy who’d eventually help me start the IPT, Victor Fuentes—asked me to go to Louisiana and help in his childhood neighborhood. They’d been hit by a hurricane. From the moment I had boots on the ground, I felt useful. It was kind of amazing, seeing so many people with no idea what to do, but we were soldiers, we knew how to organize, keep calm, work in tough situations. I helped for weeks and realized only after I got home that I never once felt rage.
“That’s when I realized that part of me—that boy who’d tried to save the life of a dying bird, who thought that being a hero didn’t mean crossing lines, needed…”
He stops again, releases another long breath that I’m sure includes more of the anger from earlier. “Does it make sense to you if I said he needed air?”
“Yeah. It makes perfect sense.” I close my eyes for a moment, drift, for a second, into nothingness, then come back. “But that’s exactly what my anger needs. What my cause needs. What women need. What Hope was denied. Air. And, if not me, then who?”
He shakes his head. “That’s your choice, but I’m done with that chapter. I’m done walking through each day with my hands balled in fists. I’m done questioning when the violence I did helped, when it hurt, when it made a difference, when it fucked things up—fucked me up—when it saved people, or let people down. I’m done. Or, rather, I’dthoughtI was.”
The last he doesn’t say accusingly, doesn’t even glance my way, but I feel remorse like an iron-hot brand against my chest. My war doesn’t involve him. Not if it’s not what he wants. Not if he’s forced into it.
I so want to tell him I’ll make it right and get him back to where he should be. But, right now, any promise would sound hollow. And, judging by what we’re about to get into, it might, in fact, be hollow. All I can do is apologize, for what that’s worth. “I’m so sorry, Sandesh.”
He doesn’t accept the apology or tell me it’s okay, but something in him seems to soften. “Do you feel better now? Less angry?”
If he’d asked me that with an ounce of sarcasm in his voice, I wouldn’t answer, but he didn’t. He asked as if sincerely interested. Which makes me think about the answer, think about the fact that earlier, I finally destroyed the man who destroyed Hope.
A chill works its way up my spine. “No.” I turn from him and rest my head against the frosty window. “I feel tired. I’ve never been this tired before.”
My body is telling me to sleep. It pulls me toward the dark, so I give in, drifting closer.
Sandesh’s voice covers me as I succumb. “It’s the adrenaline backlash. Murder does that.”
22
JUSTICE
