Chapter Fifteen
Kael
Karina called me before I even made it to the stop sign. She must have heard my truck rev up and pull away from the curb. I hadn’t even told them I was leaving. I’d hung up the call from Karina’s dad and walked straight to my truck. If Elodie or Karina had said anything to try to stop me, I hadn’t heard them.
My mind roiled as I drove myself into a situation that had less than a 1 percent probability of ending well for me. On the phone she begged me to turn around, to take her with me, but I pleaded with her, told her to keep herself and Elodie home. There was nothing either of them could do right now, and seeing her distraught would only make me act irrationally. I was so used to calling in backup, to radioing my platoon to come save my ass, but this time it was just me. Though I had been on death’s door many a time, the stakes somehow felt higher in that moment driving away from her house.
For the first time in my life, I realized I would genuinely choose another person’s well-being over my own. Not in an “every soldier has each other’s backs” kind of way, but in an “I would burn this entire post down, I would go against every moral I had, I would do fucked-up, unspeakable things to anyone and everyone I had ever met for her” way.
“I’ll bring your brother home,” I said. “You keep Elodie calm and don’t answer the door for anyone, I mean anyone, in case Phillips shows up there.”
The thought chilled me to the bone. I would finish what I’d started the night before if he so much as came within a hundred feet of Karina.
“I don’t like it, Kael,” she said.
“You don’t have to like it, but listen, please.”
She said okay, and we hung up. As I pulled into the parking lot, I spotted Lt. Fischer standing against his truck with his arms crossed. I parked beside him and climbed out of mine. My leg was still sore from last night, but I’d be damned if I showed any weakness in front of him. I straightened my back and stared directly into his eyes as I approached him.
“That was quick,” he said, indicating the space behind me.
“It’s important.”
He nodded as if that mattered to him.
“Come sit in my truck, Martin.” He craned his neck; the blue veins were a grayish color under his slightly yellow skin.
“Does our conversation need to be that private?” I asked, knowing my rebellious questioning would piss him off.
“Yes. Yes, it does. If you care about my family the way I have the impression you do, then you’ll do what I say.”
The urge to tell him to fuck right off was strong but both of us knew I wouldn’t do that. He knew as well as I did that I would do exactly what he said if it meant that Karina and Fischer would be okay. We got into his truck, and I couldn’t help but scoff at the small photo of Karina and Fischer stuck inside his dashboard near the speedometer. They looked about ten in the photo; Karina’s hair was to her waist and she was hanging on to her brother’s back. He had a goofy-ass smile on his face, and it gave me the tiniest ounce of peace to know that at some point their home life was decent enough to have caused those smiles.
“That photo was taken when the twins were about eleven. We were camping outside of Houston.” He handed me the old photograph. It was cut around the left edge and I realized someone was cut out of it. Their mother.
“Funny that you have such sentiment about it, yet your son is being held without reason and your daughter is losing her mind over it, and you don’t seem to give a shit.”
All pretense and manners were gone. He didn’t deserve my respect, and now that my discharge was right around the corner, there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“You know, the one thing I like about you is how decided and direct your opinions are. It’s refreshing to have someone speak to me like they’re my superior,” he told me, a half smile lifting the right side of his face.
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I thumbed the picture, looking at the cut edge.
“Anything else you like about me? Or are we just going to hang out in your truck while your children suffer?”
He laughed a bit. “Suffer? My children don’t have a clue what suffering is.”
In a way, he had a point. They’d grown up in a warm house with an officer’s income, flat-screen TVs, hot meals, clean water. But human suffering came in a magnitude of forms. It wasn’t as simple as saying someone hadn’t suffered because they’d had necessities. Karina had been so emotionally neglected since her mother left, and that had taken a toll on her. Her father’s coldness, along with being abandoned, was suffering. Fischer’s attempts at being someone his dad respected while drinking and getting high to take away the pain he wasn’t comfortable feeling was fucking suffering. Me watching my mother work herself sick and never having a support system, listening to my sister cry when the kids at her private school full of upper-middle-class white kids made comments about her dirty uniform and sneakers was absolutely fucking suffering. I’d watched children die in front of me; I’d seen a man get his head blown off his fucking body as his wife screamed for help that wasn’t coming.
“If you’re too arrogant to consider that your children are going through the pain they’re in because of you, I don’t have anything to say to you. You and I both know the impossibility of putting a measure on what it means to suffer. We’ve seen it all, you even more than me, and if you can’t separate being a soldier in the middle of war and being a father, you’re useless anyway,” I told him, not editing my words.
I wasn’t talking to my lieutenant. I was talking to Karina’s father.
“Look,” I continued, turning my body to fully face him in the passenger seat and sighing. “I don’t know why you called me here, but I’m done pretending that I don’t hate you. Every breath you take feels unfair and unjust. Stop with the vague bullshit and tell me what you want.”
I’d seen this man in the middle of a rocket attack, in a sandy tornado of shells, bullets, and explosions. I’d seen him watch innocent people die. I’d seen him ruin my battle buddy’s sanity for the sake of his own reputation. I’d seen him with blood on his hands in every sense of the word, but I had never seen him speechless. He stared at me, and seconds felt like minutes before he finally spoke. Light rain began to tap against the truck, filling the windshield with tiny drops. I watched as they slid into one another, being immediately replaced by another. It felt metaphorical.
“I need you to get my daughter out of Fort Benning,” he finally said. I cocked my head, not sure if I’d heard him correctly.
“What?”
“I need my daughter to leave this post, Martin. There’s something bigger going on here, and despite what you think I feel for my children, I’d like them safe. I will do something in return for you—I’ll get Mendoza the help he needs, I’ll even help him get medically discharged if that’s what he wants. I already made sure you got your ninety-percent disability so you can still work when you get to Atlanta. I tried to keep Phillips in Afghanistan as long as I could but—”
My head was spinning from each statement he made. Did he really have something to do with my discharge going so smoothly? Would he try to make up for what he’d done to Mendoza?
I asked my last question out loud. “Why would you want to keep Phillips deployed?”
He stared at me. The interior of the truck was so humid that the windows were fogging, and he had a bead of sweat above his gray brow.
“He’s a bloodthirsty fool. You know that.”
“You know he almost shot your son last night, right? So when you scolded me earlier, you—”
“He did what?”
“He had a gun and pointed it at Austin last night.” I’d called Fischer by his first name only a handful of times, but this felt like the right time to use it.
This seemed to be news to him.
“Whose idea was it to arrest and drug test Fischer?” I asked, my thoughts forming a completely different situation than the one I had pieced together this morning.
“I’m trying to find the answer to that question. I did what I could, and he’ll be free to go in a few, but they’re trying to ruin his chances of enlisting.”
“Who’s they?”
Of course he wasn’t going to tell me. The details didn’t really matter anyway. What mattered was that Fischer needed to be careful; we all did.
“I’ve made many, many mistakes in my life, but this time, it’s pure spite. The less involved you are the better, but ironically, you’re the only one who can help get my kids out of here before anything escalates and my health grows—”
I didn’t have to hear the end of his sentence to know something was going on with him—something more than some melodramatic villains from his past trying to sabotage his children’s lives. The real reason he was attempting to repent was that he was going to die. I could practically smell it on him, the stench of a rotting man. I should have caught on sooner, but now it was obvious.
“Is it cancer or something else?” I asked.
He ran his hands along the edge of the steering wheel. “Tar pits. Enough about me. Can you make Karina leave with you? I can make sure Austin gets to basic before Thanksgiving, but Karina will never listen to me, as you know.” He almost smiled, and for the smallest breath, I felt a little pity for him.
What a miserable existence, what a wasted legacy, and now it was going to be cut short, leaving his relationship with his kids in limbo, even after his last breath.
Karina was not going to be able to handle his death. That was the only thing that made me wish it wasn’t coming. I wondered how much time he had and if anyone else knew.
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Like I said, you’re the only one who can help. Not help me, but help my daughter. She is going to lose her brother to distance and will be left with no one by her side, and you seem determined to stay, so all I’m asking is that you convince her to go to Atlanta with you, and soon.”
My head pounded as the rain picked up, mimicking the noise in my mind. I couldn’t guarantee that Karina would leave this place, and she 1,000 percent wouldn’t move if she knew her dad was dying.
“I can’t and won’t promise you anything, but I’ll do what I can. For her,” I finally agreed.
I needed to get out of the damn truck and have space to process this bizarre conversation, the situation with Fischer, the fact that Phillips was roaming around with a gun. As overwhelming as it all was, as I mentally listed it I shifted my process to what Sergeant Martin would do, taking the emotion out of it. I needed to come up with a plan that wouldn’t make Karina hate me, and execute it quickly.