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Breck tells me the funeral is the twenty-first. Being shot keeps me from getting there in time.
I try to wrap my head around the fucked up circularity of fate.
I tell no one—certainly not Breck, who brings me fast food and spends hours laughing his ass off as I play Assassins’ Creed doped up on opiates—but for the first time in my life, I use pain like a salve.
Action and consequence. Isn’t that life?
I should have fought harder to get back stateside. I should have seen Ly. I should be there now with Kelly.
I embrace the gunshot as my punishment.
When, a week later, I’m discharged back to Afghanistan because our guys are getting their asses handed to them by the angry Taliban, I fight like I never have before. For Lyon. For me.
Blood drips down the backdrop of my dreams.
FIVE
BARRETT
November 5, 2015
It’s not hard to tell myself this is the best thing for her.
I’m still waiting on the house to close. Mallorie the realtor says she thinks it’ll be next week. Next week, I’ll be glad I did the right thing. Actually, I’ll probably still feel guilty. But at least I won’t have fucked things up worse than I did already.
Gwenna last touched me on Monday.
Tuesday, I call in a favor and have Bluebell’s phone tracked to a little highway in bumfuck Illinois. I get a chuckle when, that night, he spends three hours in a country music bar, then drives his luxury rental car to a nearby roach motel, where he stays for four hours before driving to the next Hampton Inn: the only place stateside where fucking Blue will lay his carefully gelled head.
I wonder when he’ll be off leave. I could find out if I answered Dove’s calls—but I don’t.
Dove and his fucking writer wife.
I spend Wednesday burning all the Polaroids I have of Gwenna in the bedroom fireplace. I keep one in which she’s sparring on the foothill behind her house. Most of the days I’ve been here, that’s the way I spent my time: watching her practice her Taekwondo.
She looks pissed off in the shot. She’s got her arms out and her hands balled into fists. Her hair is swept up in a ponytail, but much of it has come loose and hangs in her face. In the image, her left ankle looks uncomfortable and stiff. I remember in the moment after I took the picture, she said “shit-fuck” a bunch of times and kicked a stump.
I watch the other pictures burn, and tell myself she won’t always have so many shit-fuck moments. I have plans to ease her pain.
In the light of morning—I still watch her lights come on: the bedroom first, study, then den—I can sometimes tell myself I didn’t really hurt her. I don’t even know her. Or maybe I do know her, but it never was reciprocal. So how much could it really hurt—our two trysts that one night?
I focus on the fact that she felt comfortable with me. Didn’t she say that? I was her first since what happened. First to what, a small voice mocks. I look down and find myself hard. Always hard now. Never satisfied.
In the wee hours, I’m honest about Gwenna to the point of pain. I know that she will hate me. In that first moment, especially, she’ll feel betrayed and maybe even used. She’ll never understand. Of course not. I will always be the end of all things good. The grim reaper. I will always be a thief, and she my victim.
I put a coaster over the photo I saved. Looking at it makes me feel like sucking on the barrel of my .38.
Thursday sometime after midnight, I slip into sleep and wake up screaming with an aching boner. My battered mind is full of Gwen and Breck and diapered children bleeding on the dry Iraqi dirt, their mothers wailing as our convoy rolls by. When I wipe my eyes and look outside from where I’m sitting in the armchair, I find it’s snowing.
Snow here is a rarity. I can’t help but see it as a sign.
Gwenna’s bedroom light comes on at 4 a.m. I watch her windows through my scope, unmoving until 6, when she lights up her study, then the den.
I take a shower. As I trim my beard, my mind drifts off the road and tumbles down to what will happen after. After. After.
Dove calls a short time later. He, too, wants to know.
With a towel tucked around my waist, I check my phone and find Blue cutting down toward Kentucky. So he’s coming my way. Why would I think any different? Dove told him what was up and Blue will spend his leave time checking up on me, going back to wherever the fuck they are now—North Korea?—with his pretty reassurances. With the illusion of control.
