27. Lilah
27
LILAH
I sat at the island while Jude went through the now-familiar grilled-cheese prep: putting the pan on the stove, getting the mayo and cheese from the fridge, slathering the bread with the mayo.
“I’m really confused right now,” I finally said.
“I know.” Jude turned on the burner. “Want tea?”
“Uh… sure.” I was only half in the kitchen with Jude. The other part of me was still in the hall, listening to Rafe scream, to his keening cries.
I sensed that Jude wasn’t quite ready to talk, so I let him move around the kitchen, boiling water for the tea, flipping the grilled cheese sandwiches and putting them on plates.
Finally he turned off the stove and sat down next to me at the island, each of us with a sandwich and a steaming cup of the chamomile lavender tea Jude made when I couldn’t sleep.
I watched him take a bite of the grilled cheese and tried to figure out how to make the questions swirling in my mind coherent, then decided on the direct approach.
“What the fuck was that, Jude?”
“Eat your sandwich before it gets cold,” he said, staring at his plate while he chewed. “Cold grilled cheese is gross.”
He wasn’t wrong, and I sensed he was building to the answer to my question, so I took a bite and waited.
“We saw some things,” he said, wiping his hands on one of the paper napkins he’d set down with the grilled cheese. “In the military.”
I took another giant bite of the grilled cheese because it really was amazing and there was no reason I couldn’t eat and listen at the same time. “What kind of things?”
“It’s a long story. And it’s not all mine to tell.”
“I’m not going anywhere, so tell me the part that is.”
He took a drink of the tea, wrapping his hand around the mug. “When we first joined, Nolan and I were still in awe of Rafe. He’d always been the de facto leader in our friendship, the one who made the decisions, who steered the ship. He was the one who wanted to join up in the first place, and also the one who wanted to take a run at SEAL training.”
I thought about what Nolan had said, about how his dad had died in a car accident and Rafe had the kind of big-dick energy Nolan had been missing. He hadn’t wanted to tell me Jude’s side of things, but now Jude was right in front of me and I wanted to know, not just why they’d followed Rafe into the military but why they’d followed Rafe’s lead that night at Brandon Miller’s party.
“Nolan said his dad died.” I was hoping to get Jude to talk about his own. “He said that was why he followed Rafe.”
Jude took another bite of grilled cheese before continuing. “We’re the same age, but, well… you know how Rafe is. He never asks anyone’s opinion, never seems to need help, always seems so sure of everything. But my dad didn’t die like Nolan’s. I don’t have any excuse for following Rafe like I did except I was young and weak.”
“So you all agreed to join the military,” I said.
Jude nodded. “And I surprised myself by liking it. I felt like we were making a difference even though my dad and my older brother — both suits with big corporate jobs — thought it was a ‘waste of my potential.’” He used air quotes on the last three words.
I washed down the first half of my sandwich with some tea and started on the second. “Then what?”
“We went to SEAL training, surprised ourselves by getting in, and were assigned to the same unit.” Jude’s expression darkened and I put my sandwich down, sensing this was where the story turned. “The guy who led our unit — Sandoval — he was a real douchebag, but Rafe fucking loved him. He was exactly the kind of guy Rafe had been looking for, someone with an even bigger dick who got off on swinging it around.”
I wanted to ask about Rafe, about why he’d gotten sucked in by this guy Sandoval, but I could already hear Jude’s response: not his story to tell.
“Did you and Nolan tell him?” I asked. “That this guy Sandoval was a dick?”
“We tried,” Jude said, “but it was like rowing upstream. Sandoval could do no wrong in Rafe’s eyes. Then we got deployed and the shit really hit the fan.”
I studied his face. “In what way?”
Jude stuffed a quarter of his grilled cheese in his mouth at once. I sensed he was giving himself time to think, to consider his words. When he finished chewing, he brushed his hands on his sweatpants instead of using the napkin.
“Let’s just say Sandoval played fast and loose with the rules of engagement.”
“The rules of engagement?” I’d gotten used to military time and phrases like “negative” (which meant no) and “squared away” (which meant you had your shit together) but I had no idea what the rules of engagement were.
“There are rules to war and peacekeeping,” Jude explained. “Some of the rules are set by the DOD. Others are in place because of the Geneva Convention, which was created to make sure we don’t commit unnecessary atrocities against our enemies — civilian and otherwise — in a time of war. And the Convention is for us too. It means if we’re captured by the enemy, we can expect the same kind of humane treatment.”
“And this guy, Sandoval, he didn’t follow the rules?”
Jude snorted. “That’s a nice way of putting it. Sandoval liked breaking the rules, liked seeing how far he could push the envelope.”
The phrase made me uncomfortable because it was exactly what I’d thought about the Bastards when we’d been on our way to the beach. Except the Bastards were clearly okay jumping off buildings with parachutes and not okay with whatever Sandoval had done.
“It got…” Jude wiped his hands on his sweats again and I realized he was sweating.
I reached out to touch his knee. It was the first time I’d ever initiated physical contact with one of the Bastards, but I could tell he was upset and it was instinct to reassure him. “You don’t have to tell me.”
He squeezed my hand and shook his head. “No, I want to. I… Listen, whatever we did — or tried to do — after high school doesn’t make up for what we did to you, but I kind of want you to know we tried.”
I yanked my hand away, feeling like I’d been burned by his mention of what had happened between us. “What does your time in the military have to do with me?”
He took my hand again, rested it on his knee, covered it with his. “We wanted to do something good. We wanted to…” He trailed off, like he couldn’t find the right words.
Or like he was afraid to say them.
“Redeem yourselves?” I suggested.
He shook his head. “I don’t think anything would do that. But we wanted to do something , something to prove we weren’t total pieces of shit.”
“Even Rafe?” I hated myself for asking but the question was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Even Rafe.” He sighed. “That’s what we thought we were doing — something good — when we first got to the desert. A lot of it was handing out food and supplies to locals, talking to the kids, hearts-and-minds shit in between the occasional raid on an underground safe house.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t. It was actually good. The people were nice. They were…” He shrugged. “Just people. But Sandoval was always pushing, ordering us to do things that were against the rules, getting off on how much damage we could do when we were supposed to be helping.”
“What did you guys do about it?” I asked.
“We went along at first, on the small stuff. We should have spoken up from the beginning, but when you go through training with these guys, when you deploy with them… they’re like family. Snitches get stitches and all that.”
My stomach turned and I pushed away the rest of my grilled cheese. I had a feeling this was going to get really bad.
“Anyway,” Jude continued, “we looked the other way until we couldn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I don’t know why I asked. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.
“I’m not going to… I can’t…” He ran a hand over his head and I heard the scratch of his short blond hair against his palm. “There were some villagers… We thought they were harboring one of the terrorists, one of the guys who’d taken out a member of our unit with an IED the week before. Sandoval was on the fucking warpath when we went in there, except once we got there, it was just women, old people, kids… But Sandoval didn’t care.”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. “What did you do?”
“Rafe, Nolan, and I didn’t do anything.” I hated the relief that flooded my body when he said it. I already knew my roommates were bastards. Why did it matter that they weren’t indiscriminate killers? “But we couldn’t stop Sandoval and the others. So we filed a complaint with JAG. There was an investigation, but when we agreed to testify against Sandoval, he claimed accusations had been raised against us . It was all lies, retaliation for blowing the whistle, but he got some of the other guys in the unit to commit perjury and testify, and that’s how we ended up with a dishonorable discharge. We were lucky we weren’t sent to Leavenworth.”
I sucked in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, trying to calm the beating of my heart. I could see it: soldiers in the desert, houses in a dusty village, innocent people surprised by a bunch of scary men holding weapons, a volley of gunfire cracking through the dry desert air.
Horror on horror on horror, close enough to touch.
Too close.
“Rafe has PTSD,” I said, finally getting it.
Jude nodded. “Although he’s too proud to get therapy so they can actually treat it.”
“That’s…” I shook my head. I’d been about to say it was dumb, but I was feeling pretty humbled in the Rafe department. Sure, he was still a bastard, but he wasn’t the devil. That title belonged to guys like Sandoval and the people who followed him. They’d killed people. Innocent people. “How often does he have nightmares?”
“Not too often anymore,” Jude said. “Not that I know of anyway.”
I reached out to touch his face. “I’m sorry.”
He covered my hand with his own and stared into my eyes. “It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it because of what we did to you.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. Honestly, I wish it was. I wish people who did bad things got punished for them. But I don’t know… it seems to me like this life is just controlled chaos. Bad people get away with bad shit all the time.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of the bad guys.”
“Then don’t.”
His smile was a little sad. “You make it sound so easy.”
“It’s not easy. It’s just… a choice. You made the right one with Sandoval. Now you just have to keep making them.”
“I wish I could go back to high school,” he said. “Do everything differently.”
“Me too,” I said, feeling the weight of my past, of everything that had happened after that night at Brandon Miller’s party. “But we can’t, so we just have to make things right now.”
He stared into my eyes. “I’m actually feeling pretty good about how things are going right now.”
I swallowed the lump that rose in my throat. “I’m coming around on it.”
And for the second time that day, I kissed one of the three guys who’d made my life a living hell.