CHAPTER 29
After the arrangements were made, Grace got her room key from the front desk, and followed Brenna up to the third floor. She pulled the landing door open, and they emerged onto a dimly lit corridor. Two doors down, Brenna stopped, her key in hand. “Your room is just beyond here, on this same side.”
Grace hung back, reluctant to part. “Bren—”
Brenna hesitated, unlocked her door, and went in, leaving the door open. She lit a lantern hanging near the entrance and the room brightened.
Grace followed her in. This was Brenna’s private world and she wanted to see it.
Two mattresses stood on end, protectively leaning against the windows.
Her bed was neatly made, a down duvet folded at the foot.
In the closet alcove, a handful of cargo pants and jeans and long-sleeved shirts—almost all of them black—hung neatly on hangers.
No silky dresses or sexy pumps. A pair of boots on the floor, running shoes beside them.
A red toolbox. On a small table near the closet, a couple of SLR cameras and a selection of film, videotapes, and lenses were neatly laid out, along with a box stuffed with assorted cables and connectors.
The long countertop on the dresser had a camp stove sitting on a brick, plus a small pot, bottled water, and a purification unit.
Chicken noodle soup envelopes, a few tins of canned meat, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of crackers.
Grace glanced into the bathroom. It was just as tidy as her room.
A towel and facecloth were neatly folded over the towel rack.
A short stack of antibacterial soap, still in boxes, stood on the vanity beside a bottle of shampoo.
Her toothbrush was white, aligned by the toothpaste at the edge of the sink.
The tub was stoppered and filled with water.
A reservoir, she figured, refilled when there was running water.
A small bucket sat on the floor beside the toilet, for flushing.
The sight of the modest belongings saddened her.
Everything was so utilitarian. What a far cry this was, from Aya’s vanity-top.
Hers had always been so effusively feminine—the little pots of face cream and makeup and perfume always overflowing to Grace’s more restrained side.
Brenna’s whole life fit in one hotel room, devoid of light, music, color, or living things.
Brenna leaned against the wall, her hands behind her back, her photographer’s eyes reading her.
Grace returned to the entryway and leaned against the wall across from her. “I noticed you didn’t actually promise Jasha you’d leave Thursday.” The day after tomorrow, at daybreak, the Herc would return.
“Thursday’s an eternity from now.”
“I want you to be on that Herc with me.”
A look of incertitude crossed Brenna’s face.
“Leave,” Grace said, “and don’t come back. Be done with this before it finishes you off.”
She pushed off the wall, closing the gap between them, and took Brenna’s face in her hands.
She wanted to join herself to Brenna, body and soul and make it feel like a promise of something better.
Her fingertips strayed down to the thin pink scar in the hollow of her throat.
Please, she prayed. Come back with me. Let me court you. Let’s see where this goes.
Brenna put her hands over Grace’s, stilling them. “You can’t stay with me tonight,” she said.
Grace faltered. “Is it because of our age difference, Brenna?”
“What? No. Late-thirties to mid-forties isn’t that big a deal.”
“I’m fifty-two, Brenna.”
She went still, surprised. Then her mouth quirked. “You’re remarkably well-preserved for such an old woman.”
Grace shook off the remark, “If it isn’t my age, then what?”
“Because if I made love to you tonight and you were killed tomorrow, I would lose my mind.” She lifted Grace’s hand and kissed her fingers. “Just for one more day, let me pretend I could survive another loss.”
Grace straightened, shocked. She’d seen Brenna dissociated this morning. Mariana had made it clear that Brenna was in precarious condition. Just because she had rebounded, it didn’t mean she was well. “Then let’s stay in tomorrow. Or, get an APC ride back to the airport and wait there.”
“There’s a nursery near the airport, an orphanage of sorts. I’ve arranged?”
“No.”
“Yes. Children are the biggest losers in Kav?ak, Grace. It’s a key piece of the story. We need the footage to show that.”
Grace dropped her hands. “Jesus, Brenna. Do you want to die?”
“I want to finish this story. When it’s done, I can leave.”
“Dammit.” Grace growled with frustration. “You’re the most stubborn woman I ever met.”
“Tenacious,” Brenna said, gently pushing her out to the hallway. “That’s a whole different trait.”
No, Grace thought, as the door firmly closed in her face. Stubborn.
Brenna woke countless times that night, tossing and turning, reorienting herself to her room by her night light.
She pulled the bedclothes around her, sealing out a chilly draft on the back of her neck.
As usual, she was fully dressed—ready to bolt if she had to.
Only her boots were off, set neatly together beside her bed, in easy reach.
She needed sleep, but couldn’t surrender to it.
The ceaseless barrage of artillery was unsettling her tonight.
She’d lain here the night that nearly four thousand shells had blasted off the mountains to this side of the river, counting the booms like sheep to lull herself to sleep.
But tonight there was a vehemence, a particular brutality stalking the city.
She could feel evil in the air. A growing sense of dread was snaking through her. Something dreadful this way comes.
She toyed with the idea of going to the lobby and finding out what that was.
But what was the point? This time, she wasn’t reporting breaking news.
She was shooting a documentary about the effects of breaking news.
Those would be there come morning—and long after.
She closed her eyes and tried to doze. She wasn’t worried about being hit.
She gave that up long ago. It wasn’t anything she could control or avoid.
She only hoped that if she were hit, it would be instantaneously lethal.
She lay in the dark for what seemed an eternity until finally, bored by her fruitless effort, she threw the covers off, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and padded to the window in her socks.
Standing to one side, she inched one of the mattresses aside.
There were no streetlamps, of course, no buildings twinkling with lights.
The sky was ‘Kav?ak Red’, ablaze with tracers and incendiary bombs.
The brilliant successive flashes looked like dance-floor strobe lights.
Her room faced north, but she could still glimpse the western suburbs of the city.
Jasha’s mom, whom she affectionately called ‘Dr. J’, lived out that way, near the airport.
The nursery, run by a woman called Roza, was located just beyond her.
On the horizon, flames rose from a half-dozen burning buildings, blotting the sky with billowing smoke.
That’s where she was going, come daybreak.
She leaned against the window frame, feeling the cold air sheeting off it, seeing little.
It was insane, of course, to even contemplate going into that fiery maelstrom.
If she were a rational woman, she would run the other way.
But—to what? To be whom? She was empty inside, a placeholder for a real woman, devoid of all purpose except this one.
Everything she once thought real had been shattered.
Family. God. Country. Even love was suspect.
Her life was filled with questions, doubts, uncertainty.
How had all this come about? Why had Ari died?
Because some Palestinian woman’s husband, believing just as firmly in his cause, left her bed in the middle of the night and disappeared for days at a time?
Because that wife, like Brenna, hadn’t insisted her husband resign from his military?
Had that woman’s husband been a good man, too?
Had he loved and laughed and composed soaring music like Ari had?
How could two good men kill each other? Were they depraved?
Were they brutal? Had she, Brenna, fallen in love with a savage man?
Some men’s motives could be explained. They were greedy, or ruthless, or they craved power like ?avi?.
The Ukrainians and the Kav?ak mafia illustrated that clearly enough.
But what about the men in the middle, the Aris who risked their lives without getting rich?
What made a husband or a father fire mortar shells at civilians?
What made a sniper shoot a three year old?
Was it hatred? Sure. Some men’s hearts were that hardened.
Hatred was simple.
Love troubled her.
Ari loved his people. He’d dedicated his life to the safety of strangers.
He committed hideous acts at his government’s request.
She didn’t know what they were, but she knew he had.
Why else did he come home so distraught?
Why else did he writhe with nightmares? Had he been misguided?
Used? Indoctrinated—obliquely—at the behest of those same greedy men who had the most to gain by his enlistment?
Could love be implemented on a national scale?
Or was its honest form really an individual one, meant to be expressed one-on-one, within a family, between friends, with neighbors?
Had man’s capacity for love been co-opted by governments and religious institutions and twisted to serve its own purposes?
Because of her love for Ari—in her desire to let him define himself as a worthy man—had she abetted the behavior that finally killed him? Had she been complicit in his death? Had she betrayed her own core values?
Before all this, she had been a pacifist.
A na?ve idealist with no concept of how the real world worked, as her father dismissively labeled her.
She had believed there was one overarching moral guide that transcended time and culture and history.
Morality could be tested with one simple question: Was this act kind?
If the answer was ‘no’, then it shouldn’t be performed.
Could human conflict be resolved with so simple a tenet?
At the same time, she wasn’t so sure about pacifism any more, either.
History was full of examples of loving, harmless people being exterminated, sometimes millions at a time.
Were they not entitled to live their lives, too?
She abhorred violence. But why should a good man turn the other cheek?
Shouldn’t he fight back? Martin Luther King, Jr. said: ‘All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.’
She knew he espoused peaceful resistance.
But were there times when nothing short of taking up swords would do?
And didn’t that lead right back to the biggest evil of all?
War.
She sighed, exhausted by her spinning brain.
Tired of standing, she returned to bed. She sat on the edge, stuck her feet into her boots and laced them up.
All these months in Kav?ak, she kept thinking that if only she could assemble her experiences into some cogent whole, then answers might reveal themselves, and she could reconstruct herself again.
Scooting backwards, she lifted her dirty boots onto the bedcovers, laced her hands under her head, and watched daggers of light slash her ceiling.
Perhaps it was too late. She was infected. Without her story, she was empty. She needed this war. It gave her purpose. It defined her.