Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
How did the year fly by so quickly? Fuck, it goes a lot faster when you’re not deployed, I realized as I put the finishing touches on dinner. Sarah’s kids were away for the weekend, so she asked if I had plans for New Year’s Eve. I invited her over—her first time at my place.
When she arrived, I observed her taking stock of my house, pulling books off my bookshelf, roaming around the place like she was getting to know me all over again.
“So this is the secret lair,” she said as she joined me in the kitchen.
“You make me sound like Batman or something.”
She shrugged. “Well, if the cape fits…”
We enjoyed dinner—stir fry—then I guided her to the bedroom. I figured her sociological study of me wouldn’t be complete without investigating the room where I slept and dreamed.
“So, you got to see your new niece when you were home for the holidays?” Her dark brows arched as she studied me, lying on my side facing her.
“Yes, when I was in Ohio, I got to see my entire family, all my nieces and nephews, including the newest, Annalisa.”
“And I understand there’s a photo of you holding her?” Her curiosity was obviously piqued.
She wanted to see a picture of me holding a baby. It was written all over her face.
“You understand correctly,” I teased her. For being a mom and an academic, Sarah wasn’t the most patient person. I’d learned that in the bedroom. But it was kind of fun to make her wait.
She bit her lip and pierced me with an expectant gaze. “So where’s this photo of you and the baby?”
I slipped my phone out of my pocket and scrolled to find the picture my sister Allie took of me with her daughter, who you would barely see because she was wrapped up like a burrito in a soft pink blanket.
Sarah studied the picture carefully, her eyes turning a little glassy. “Oh, you’ll make such a great daddy someday.”
“That’s what my mom always says. I hope she’s right.”
She was apparently going to use this as a segue way to a more extensive interrogation. “So why is it you’ve never married and started a family?”
For fuck’s sake. Has she been talking to my parents? I flashed back to the conversation I had with my dad on Christmas Eve—even he had to bring up the “disaster.”
“I was married a long time ago.”
She tried to stifle her gasp, but I could tell I’d just shocked the shit out of her. Obviously, this was going to require further elaboration.
“I went to Alabama for boot camp fresh out of high school, and that’s where I met her. She followed me to Florida for EOD school,” I explained.
Sarah’s eyebrows rose. “EOD?”
“Explosive Ordnance Disposal. I was there for nine months, then I got orders for Iraq.” Did she really want to know this shit? Judging by the way she was leaning toward me, eyes wide and brows raised, she did.
And something about the look on her face made me want to talk about it—stuff I’d never shared with another living soul. “I kind of freaked out, to tell you the truth. All I could think about was not coming home. And even if I did, not having someone to come home to.”
Sarah’s tone was not judgmental when she asked, “So you married some chick from Alabama?”
“Her name was Becca. She was very cute, very manipulative, and very crazy.”
Sarah laughed. “How so?”
“She was insanely jealous. I’m off fighting a war, and her only real concern was whether or not I was fucking anybody else. ‘Cause, you know, a Middle Eastern war zone is the perfect place to pick up chicks.”
I sighed as long-suppressed memories came rushing back to me. I hadn’t thought about Becca for years—even managed to banish her from my mind when my old man referred to her as a “disaster” on Christmas Eve. My whole family had blessedly kept her name out of their mouths for nearly a decade now.
“Yeah, how about this for crazy? She stopped taking her birth control pills so she could try to get pregnant without me knowing. Fortunately, that didn’t work.” I rolled my eyes as the memory slammed into me.
“Oh my god, James, really?” Sarah asked, incredulous. “And you still married her?”
I shrugged, probably wearing a sheepish smile. “Hey, I was nineteen years old. Gimme a break.”
Sarah placed her palm on my knee and squeezed, wordlessly telling me I could trust her with these repressed memories. They’d been stuffed inside a box, buried deep for so long, they were dredging up some emotions I never wanted to experience again.
“So what happened with her?” she asked softly.
My muscles stiffened under her touch as I tried to shake off those unwanted feelings. “It’s a pretty long story.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she assured me, “but I would like to hear about your experiences over there. I’ve never heard about war firsthand...and, well, I think it would really help me understand you.”
Why does she want to understand me? Do I even want her to? And what does it mean if I do?
But my mouth refused to stay shut. Her warm brown eyes and soft voice drew it out of me, coaxing my past to the surface like an archaeologist digging for fragments of a lost civilization.
“I had a couple of close calls,” I focused on a spot on the wall over her head, “and I lost some friends.”
She squeezed my knee, silently urging me on.
“I saw a lot of the country during my time over there, but most of it was spent in the north around Mosul. This was the area where many foreign fighters came through and was also a main corridor for smuggling weapons. One of my responsibilities was to detonate weapons caches that were discovered.”
Sarah repositioned herself slightly so we were no longer touching. She looked completely invested in my story.
“One night I was called out to detonate a cache that was buried under the floor of a house where IEDs were being made. The bad guys knew the weapons would be detonated if found, so they started to booby-trap the weapons caches. One of the less experienced guys asked to go in my place. He was full of piss and vinegar, very ideological and patriotic.” I smiled as an image of my buddy filled my mind.
“Yup, that was Will. He’d take a hill single-handedly with only a Swiss Army knife if asked to do so. ”
Her dark eyes urged me on, and the story bubbled up inside me like it could no longer be contained, so I just let it go.
“It was a small cache, and I was nearing the end of my tour, so I agreed to let him go in my place. So, Will gets to the site, and, probably due to his excitement and lack of experience, he ends up setting off the booby trap. It was likely designed just to harm the person entering, but those traps can be really unpredictable.”
In that moment, her features faded away, and I was back in the desert.
The sound of the explosion washed over me, and fear rained down like shrapnel.
But my voice kept going without my heart and mind attached: “That’s the most dangerous type of enemy.
The small explosion ended up setting off the rest of the cache, containing the material equivalent to two VBIEDs, designed to take out Iraqi Police checkpoints. ”
Sarah’s brow furrowed at the unfamiliar acronym.
On auto-pilot, I explained, “Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Devices.”
I shrugged off the guilt, sadness and anger that loomed over me like vampires grooming me to let them suck the life right out of me. “Will died. His folks were really religious. There weren’t enough of his remains to send home, so they couldn’t have a proper burial.”
When I finally met Sarah’s gaze, her eyes glistened with tears. But I couldn’t seem to stop it now. The words just kept flowing like a goddamn geyser was shooting up my throat.
“Another kid was badly injured but lived for a while, and a third, who was the first to respond to the blast and tried to pull Will out...well, they both ended up dying from inhalation of chlorine gas. Chlorine is an additive sometimes used in IEDs—cheap, plentiful and deadly.” My voice didn’t so much as waver.
Sarah wiped away a tear that had slipped down her cheek. “It could have been you,” she said so softly, it was a whisper.
I shook my head again. Why Will and not me? I would never get an answer to that question. “Yeah, it was supposed to be simple. Textbook. But over there, things have a way of getting complicated.”
Her hand returned to my knee, grounding me back in my bedroom. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course. It’s my job. It’s what I signed up for. I have to be okay. Although, if I’d been there instead of Will, I would have probably gotten the job done right—because I had more experience—but it’s just the way it worked out.”
That was one of so many damn stories. Just the first one that came to mind. I needed to shut this down before I spilled anything else. I sucked in a breath and took the hand that was resting on my knee, squeezing it.
“Other shit went down during that deployment, and I did another tour a few years after that. But Will sticks out in my mind because I still see his face sometimes. And if it hadn’t been only a month till I came home, I probably would have gone in his place.”
“So, what happened when you got home?”
I laughed. Of course the story didn’t end with Will—and she hadn’t forgotten about the marriage part. Sarah was a very clever, perceptive, empathic woman.
“Well, what do you think happened?” When she shrugged, I continued, “That fucking bitch I was married to—the one who was so afraid of me cheating on her—had gone and gotten herself knocked up. And, no, it wasn’t mine. Obviously, since I’d been gone almost a year.”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“Yeah, some nerve, huh? I’m off fighting a war, and she’s home fucking everything with two legs and a dick. So, uh, yeah, we divorced ASAP.”