Chapter 19
CALLEN
SYLVIE ASKED ME for a night off.
That’s all. One night to go out of town somewhere she didn’t elaborate on.
She asked, standing in my kitchen with her keys already in her hand, and her jaw set for a fight I had no intention of giving her.
After Cricket found us in the car that night a few weeks ago, Sylvie has practically moved in with me.
She’s still paying for a hotel room for a little space when she needs it, but I respect that.
Moving in together probably seems too fast. We haven’t even said I love you yet.
I haven’t said it, but I think I feel it.
After the eruption of Cricket’s fury simmered—which was pretty mild I might add, she only threatened my life, thrice—Sylvie and I were able to be a real couple.
PALADIN suddenly became a couple-infused office.
Linc and Eden. Cricket and Lance. Me and Sylvie.
Vesper and all her secrets. I guess we’re all growing up in a way.
And grownups seems to crave companionship.
But they also need space when their entire lives have been turned upside down in the course of a month.
“Take it. However much time you need,” I told her.
“You’re not upset?”
“Sylvie.” I had put my hands on her shoulders. “Go do whatever you need to do. I don’t need to know what it is. Space is a normal thing to need, and honestly, I’m surprised it took you three weeks to ask.” I kissed her forehead. “Just come back to me.”
Something moved behind her face when I said it.
She left. I heard her boots on the stairs, and then the door, and then my apartment went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator thinking.
Which is how I came to disobey the only piece of advice that woman has ever given me.
I read Belai’s book. First page to last.
The laptop is out there on the coffee table with the last page still up. With the last line, a fire broke out in my chest, and the only way to put it out was to face the past. To stop running from something that has already consumed me from the inside out.
I marched into my closet, split my suit jackets apart to reveal the small black leather box I’ve been hiding from myself for years now.
My back is to the wall, and I’m seated in a position that screams defeat. The box sits in front of me on the closet floor, daring me to be brave. But I don’t know if I can do it.
Damn, Belai’s book…it was hauntingly beautiful.
I expected to open it and be twenty-seven again.
I expected the smell. It comes on me sometimes, unbidden, in a grocery store or an elevator, that cocktail of aviation fuel and scorched wiring and the acid inside Nuria’s salve.
When it comes, I have to put my hands on something solid and count backward from twenty.
I expected to get four pages in and become overwhelmed with the concept of facing it.
That isn’t what happened.
What happened is that I read a story from a whole new perspective.
Belai writes about Teret the way you’d write about a person.
He tells you where the well was. He tells you that his father built the schoolhouse with the leaky roof, but he did his best. The children didn’t mind learning under a flimsy roof.
They giggled when rain would fall, soaking their lessons.
Belai introduces you to a butcher named Hamid who spun the tallest tales about the places he’d been, even though he’d never left the village.
They all indulged him because it made him happy.
He does that for sixty pages before the helicopter ever appears in the sky.
Somewhere around page forty, I understood the point of it. He wasn’t building a case. He was recording the right side of history.
My part of the story is relatively brief in comparison to the story of an entire people.
Belai was three kilometers out, coming down from the ridge with two goats and a bad knee, and he could hear the helicopter before he heard it come over the mountain wrong.
He describes the sound. He describes it better than I could and I was inside it.
He writes that the rotor noise changed pitch twice and that the second time it changed, he began to run, and that he was forty-nine years old with a bum knee and he ran three kilometers.
Except he didn’t run away from it for some reason. He ran toward the chaos because something deep in his heart said destiny was in the bird falling from the sky.
He mentions my boys.
He writes about all five of them, by the names on their tags, because he knew how important they were to me. We still never found one, but he must’ve etched the name into his mind, because he remembers each one perfectly. Ferro. Cordova. Gray. Lex. Taylor. Callen.
What I didn’t know is that Belai found the lifeless bodies before he found me.
He pulled Ferro from the steel before his body caught on fire.
And after he helped me back to his home, he returned.
He lined my brothers up in a row as best he could with his weak knees and covered their faces with cloths out of respect.
That’s Belai’s character. At that point, he still thought we were the enemy. Hell, we were. And yet he paid his respects to the dead.
That chapter was hard. It’s the chapter where he writes about carrying me.
It was particularly hard because his account is a little different than I remember.
I hate that there’s any room for subjectivity in the account of a massacre.
But that’s how the world goes. We all remember terror differently.
Same trauma, different perspective. Same truth, different stories.
Absolutely nothing in this world is absolute.
I read it all. I felt it all.
Every page. Four hours and change. I read the strike, and the burial, and the fever, and the American woman with the cold eyes who came up the road and told him to take what he could carry.
I read a description of myself, at twenty-seven, out of my head with sepsis, and yet Belai wrote it kindly, which is more than I’d have managed.
I finished it.
I closed the laptop, and stormed in here with a renewed strength I’ve never had before.
Everybody says time heals. Time didn’t heal me. What time does is make you bigger around it. The thing that would have killed me at twenty-eight, that would have put me on a bathroom floor at thirty, at thirty-seven is just a very heavy object I can now, apparently, pick up.
The box taunts me, sitting between my legs.
It’s time, Callen.
It’s black leather, about the size of a shoebox, and I have not opened it since I bought it. I bought it because the plastic bag they came home in was obscene.
Five sets. One missing, but remembered.
I open the lid of the box and pull the tags out one by one.
FERRO, L. The best cackle of a laugh. Found the good in everything. Read paperbacks until they fell apart, then read them again in pieces, out of order, and said it improved the stories.
CORDOVA, A. Never met a stranger. Was everyone’s best friend. Had charisma and shine that the sun would envy. Devoted parent. Beloved by all.
GRAY, W. Bravest on the team. Scared of nothing but fear itself. Got engaged over a satellite phone eleven days before the mission. His widow never remarried. It was a fast love, but a forever one.
LEX, T. He isn’t contained to the box. He’s flying free. I tried like hell, but I couldn’t find the damn tag. He was fiercely loyal. Only twenty-three when he passed, the youngest of us all, yet carried the wisdom of a man three times his age. He is survived by his beautiful sons.
CALLEN, J. Right there in the middle, tucked away as if I’d passed with them.
Then the last one.
TAYLOR, J.
I hold it in my fist until the edges bite.
Jimmy Taylor. Jimbo. Six foot four, and afraid of the dentist, and the only man in the United States Navy who ever read The Great Gatsby on a deployment for fun.
He had a wife named Hollie who cooked like God created her to.
She fed me for six years and I got to know her two little girls who braided my hair into approximately forty pigtails and made me love a cartoon about ice princesses.
I have not spoken to Taylor’s widow in almost eight years. Disguised as mercy, I told myself she didn’t need the living reminder walking around, breathing, eating, alive in her home, taking up space.
I sit on the floor of my closet. I look at that tag and feel physically ill. I understand now with the most unforgiving clarity that I wasn’t having mercy on Hollie. I wasn’t having mercy on myself. I couldn’t survive with the ghosts. I ran away.
Tonight, I stop. Tonight, I stop, turn, and face all the things that have been chasing me for ten years.
I take out my phone.
Her number’s still saved in it. Eight years, four phones, and I have carried Hollie Taylor’s number from device to device like a stone in a shoe.
I dial, and it rings four times. I am praying, actively praying, that it goes to voicemail.
“Hello?”
Her voice…it’s exactly the same. It sweeps me back to another dimension. I have to put my hand flat on the floor to brace myself to speak.
“Hollie?”
“Yeah?” There’s noise behind her. Music. A lot of people. “Who is this?”
Shit. I can’t do it. I sit in the dark with my dead friend’s dog tag in my fist. The seconds go by. I clear my throat.
“Hello?” she asks to a silent line.
“It’s, uh… It’s Callen.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “Jeffrey Callen.”
The gasp comes down the line like a struck match.
Then, muffled, away from the receiver, Hollie Taylor shushing an entire house full of people with the exact same “hey—hey now, y’all hush” she used to use on Jimmy and me when we got loud and rowdy in her kitchen.
“Oh my God. Cal.” She’s breathing hard. “Cal, honey, it’s been—what has it been—”
“Almost eight years.” I close my eyes and a tear pinches out. “I know.”