Chapter Four
A couple hours after a truly satisfying lunch, Gil sat in the living room alone. Miri had excused herself to do some work for school. Teachers, she had told him lightly, didn’t really get time off.
“What about summer?” he’d asked.
“We get about a month off, from the time we finish closing up our classrooms until the meetings for next year begin. Everything from refresher training to organizing and planning. It’s not what most people see from the outside. I work every evening on planning and homework, and fit in at least a few hours every weekend. You should see me in early August, when we start band camp three weeks before classes. I’m running constantly.”
Things he had never thought about. Things he’d never had a reason to think about. There was probably a whole lot of that, given the structured, mission-oriented life he’d chosen.
If he were to be honest, perhaps that constant focus he’d developed had been a sort of protection. It wasn’t as if he never had time to look outside his box. He just hadn’t. Didn’t.
He stared out the front windows at a world that was steadily going nuts. Just yesterday it had felt like spring. Now the fierce wind was beginning to blow snow around. Snow that hadn’t existed twenty-four hours ago.
Much as he suddenly wanted to get in his car and leave, he understood two things: he couldn’t drive safely in the approaching weather, and he couldn’t leave himself behind. He had become uncomfortable baggage in his own life.
Then there was Miri. He didn’t want to be rude to her. She’d opened her house to him, welcoming him almost as family because of Al. Unfortunately, one reason he wanted to leave was because of the sexual heat she awakened in him. It had been a while, but now he was experiencing a virtual storm of hunger inside himself. Even if she felt the same, casual sex would be a lousy way to repay her hospitality.
So far she’d exhibited none of the desire to attract a man that he was used to. No makeup, not that she needed any, hair in that long braid rather than carefully coiffed and clothes that steamed his brain when they clearly weren’t intended to: jeans far from skintight, loose sweatshirts or flannel shirts, and either socks or boots on her feet.
Everything about her was laid-back and casual. But then, maybe that had something to do with living in this small Western town. He couldn’t imagine who would have to dress up around here. Maybe the ranches had been dictating local styles forever.
Then his thoughts flashed back to the funeral, to Miri standing there in a long, dark blue dress, and appearing so small to him, even when she approached to speak to him.
She’d had the strength it took to play “Taps” for her cousin, so he figured her for a very strong woman. “Taps” had a way of bringing people to helpless tears, especially at a funeral for someone they loved. Yet she had stood tall and proud, and not a single note had wavered.
Kudos to her. He’d admired her then, and he admired her now. For example, the quick way she’d responded to Maude. He’d seen the older woman go to the back of the diner and it had never occurred to him there was something wrong. Then suddenly Miri had sprung into action and found Maude in trouble.
Because, according to Miri’s explanation later, the coffee was never allowed to cool down at Maude’s diner. So Al’s cousin was observant and astute. She didn’t just brush it aside. She went to see what was going on.
A caring woman, from everything he’d seen, caring and strong. And maybe the nicest thing about her was that she seemed happy with her life.
The phone rang, and she must have answered it in her tiny office space in the corner of the bedroom he was using.
Sitting there, thinking it was time to move again before he began to freeze up, Gil wondered what it would be like to grow up in one town, to know so many people, to have friends you’d known all the way back to childhood.
He couldn’t imagine it. His home was his unit. And unfortunately, too many people he had known were gone, some for good. If he had any roots, they were planted squarely in the army...and that was temporary. Never at any point had he viewed it as permanent, simply because every single mission raised a possibility that he wouldn’t come back, or would come back as he had this time.
And while he hoped they’d keep him on, even if it meant taking a desk job, he knew damn well that when his convalescence was over they might give him a medical discharge.
Hardly surprising that he was beginning to think about matters he’d held at bay for a long time. He might need to carve out a very different future.
Al’s pipe dreams of them working the ranch together had merely been a time-filler for Gil. Something to think about, but something he’d never planned to follow through on. Now it appeared that it might be time to find a plan for himself.
“Hey.”
He looked up from his rather gloomy thoughts to see Miri hovering in the doorway. She was smiling.
“Need anything?”
“I’m pretty much okay, except that I’d like to take another walk.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen right now.” She waved toward the window and he realized that while he’d been wandering unfamiliar paths inside his own head, trying to take charge of them, the world outside had disappeared in white. He could barely make out the shape of the house just across the street.
“It looks like a snow globe,” he remarked.
“Worse.” She entered the room and perched on the edge of the rocker. “We’re only supposed to get a few inches, but with the wind blowing this way it might wind up looking like ten feet. You must have seen plenty in Afghanistan and other such places.”
He nodded slowly. “Sure. Up in the mountains it wasn’t unheard of to get several feet overnight. Of course, that could happen a lot of places when you get into the mountains. I don’t need to tell you that.”
“Nope. Last I looked, we had some mountains around us,” she teased. “But we’re in what’s called their rain shadow. The dumping usually occurs at higher elevations before it reaches us. Usually. Not always.”
He glanced out the windows again. It looked wicked and this had barely started. “But it’ll clear out by tomorrow?”
“Maybe not. That phone call I just got was from one of my friends, telling me we’re going to have a conference call with school admin this evening. Depending on how it looks, we may cancel school.”
“Why decide so early?”
“Because around here, school buses have a very long way to go to reach all the kids. Just as importantly, the plows may not be able to get to many places early enough.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.” But remembering the drive out to the Baker ranch, he figured a school bus would take even longer. “I don’t recall Al saying anything about it, not that it’s the kind of thing to come up in conversation.”
“I doubt it would.”
He sensed her studying him in a way that didn’t quite go with the casual, pointless conversation they were having. Of course, he wasn’t used to this kind of conversation unless it happened over a few beers in a bar with some of his friends. Then they’d get casual, often with humor that might shock outsiders. But inside that circle, humor blew off steam, and it was often black humor.
Then Miri astonished him by asking, “Do you ever let your hair down?”
His gaze jumped to her face. She was serious. “What do you mean?”
“At the funeral, I likened you to granite poured into a uniform. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone express so little emotion. I didn’t know if that was the real you, or if you were under tight control because of the circumstances. But now you’ve been here since Friday and I still feel like you’re granite. Oh, you’ve smiled and even laughed from time to time, but it doesn’t go deep, does it.”
She wasn’t really asking, and he felt no real need to explain anything to her. He was what he was, mostly because life had happened to him the way it happened to everyone. You did what you needed to get by...within reason.
But the image she had painted of him caught his attention. Granite? He wasn’t sure he liked that. He wondered if he should apologize, although for exactly what, he wasn’t certain. But she forestalled him.
“Al was a little like that when he came home, too. There were parts of him well beyond reach. It felt kind of strange to me, because I’d known him so well when we were children. I figured it had to do with experiences none of the rest of us could ever share. But you know what I wondered?”
“What?”
“How many of those parts of him had been left behind on his missions, not just buried but gone for good. Or whether they were still there but had changed.”
“My knowledge of Al is limited to the years we served together, Miri. I wouldn’t venture to guess how much they changed him.” Especially since he’d been going through changes of his own at the same time, and probably pretty much at the same rate, he had no way to measure any of it.
But he wondered what she was hoping to discover. More than one person he’d known in spec ops had noted that when they went home they felt like aliens. No secret in that. Most combat vets probably felt the same way. They’d seen things and done things nobody who hadn’t been there could truly comprehend. Best to shut your damn mouth and do your utmost to pretend you’d left all that behind.
“It changes us,” he finally said, even though she’d already figured that out. “We don’t quite mesh with the rest of the world anymore. Inevitable.”
“So you shut down?”
He definitely didn’t like this line of questioning. Shut down? He didn’t think so. But he was extremely careful about how he spent his emotions. Too big an investment could cost heavily.
Nevertheless, her words struck him even as he argued internally with them. Nothing had been the same since he’d regained consciousness and faced the degree of his injuries, the dawning realization that no amount of recovery would be able to put him back in the field, no matter how hard he tried.
Perhaps the changes had begun even earlier with Al’s death, when he’d just put more cement in the chinks in his armor—a temporary patch, it had begun to seem.
But the fact remained that he’d been dealing at some level with the realization that nothing was going to be the same. No amount of denial was going to alter that.
As he looked at Miri, her face so earnest and concerned, he felt obliged to admit something to himself. “I tried to be granite. I guess that made me less than a whole person.”
Just saying it caused his mind to teeter on the edge of something deeper and darker. How much of himself had he amputated to do his job? And what would those parts think of him if he brought them back? Being stone had been useful. Being human might give him a whole new set of problems.
Dropping back into civilian life caused a lot of difficulty for many vets. It was never seamless, and sometimes it got crazy and painful. Gil didn’t want to be one of them, but he had to admit that as long as he had the job the demons didn’t rise very often. No room for them.
That was changing. He’d been fighting it, but he knew that sooner or later he was going to lose. Sooner or later he’d have to find a way to deal with all he’d done and experienced. There was no shame, but there was understanding that he was no longer like people who’d never walked the paths he’d walked.
“It’s daunting,” he said, though he hadn’t meant to. This woman didn’t need to hear any of this, nor was he sure he wanted to share it. Outside, even though the light had dimmed a bit with the waning afternoon, he saw the whirling, blinding snow and figured that was probably pretty much what was going on inside him. Or would be going on when he dropped the protective barriers and gave up the denial.
“What’s daunting?” she prodded gently when he didn’t speak for a while.
“The idea of being a civilian again.”
She rose, then surprised him by sitting beside him on the sofa. She surprised him even more by reaching out to lay her hand on his arm. He’d been avoiding human touch for a long time now. It had the potential to slide past his defenses. His skin tightened beneath her hand, tensing at her touch even through his shirtsleeve.
“Why is that daunting?”
“Because the person I’ve become doesn’t fit. Because I’ve got things locked away I don’t want to risk letting escape. Because like everyone else who’s ever gone to war, the only place I fit anymore is with others like me.”
Rising, slipping away from her touch because it awakened him in ways he couldn’t afford, he started to pace. He had to keep moving, keep stretching the scar tissue. After a few turns around the tiny living room, he bent and tried to touch his toes. Better than a couple weeks ago. Looser. But his hip shrieked fit to kill.
“What exactly happened to you?”
The bluntness of Miri’s question shouldn’t have surprised him. She’d already struck him as a woman who saw the world clearly and had no particular desire to be shielded from its ugly realities. Maybe because she hadn’t been exposed to many of them...but then he remembered the story of what had happened to her parents. Ugly realities and she were not strangers.
“I was shot.” She didn’t need any more details.
“And?”
And she was going to demand them, anyway. He didn’t like to talk about it, but even as he considered telling her that, he heard the rudeness in the words he’d speak. She knew what had happened to her cousin. Why not share the latest edition of what happens when you go on a covert mission?
“And?” he repeated. “We were covertly infiltrating a country where we weren’t welcome, and we were ambushed. I suppose I shouldn’t be alive. I took five bullets and some of the blast from a grenade.”
“So you pretty much got chewed up.” Her voice didn’t waver.
“Sort of. Bullets smashed my hip, injured my spine and managed to miss major arteries. The grenade got me with flash burns and some shrapnel. So here I am.”
He hoped she didn’t ask more. The edited version was quite enough.
More than enough, it seemed, because walls in his mind were shredding, turning from concrete to flaps of paper blowing in the wind. The memories were not only insistent, they forced their way in, filling his mind’s eye with horror and his heart with fury. He was tipping over an edge, and he struggled to catch himself but he couldn’t.
In an instant he was back in the place where Al had died. Except Al hadn’t died there. They had carried him out after they cleared the threat, carried him and his severed leg and arm for miles to where a rescue chopper could dart in and take him. It had taken the chopper long enough. Long enough for Al to die. Toward the end they might have overdosed him on morphine. Gil couldn’t be sure, but Al was in so much agony, begging them to kill him.
The family didn’t need to know that, but he couldn’t forget it. Would never forget how he had failed his best friend.
But then he slipped again, this time into the place where he had nearly met his own end. Memories of the bullets striking, feeling like a sledgehammer, the explosion and concussion and...
Things began to become muddled and mixed up, turning into a stew of many places, many fights, many losses. They usually got out with everyone alive, but not every time. There were the wounds, the screams, the gore, the memory of people, innocent people, getting caught in a crossfire, memories of the enemy... All of it swirled around inside him, riveting him, taunting him, filling him with anger and pain and grief and hatred and...
He fell into the abyss.
* * *
Miri saw Gil freeze and stand as stiff as a statue. Soon, a look on his face, especially his eyes, told her he was no longer with her. He was seeing something only he could see, and it didn’t appear pleasant.
A flashback? She didn’t know, but wondered. She had some familiarity with them because of her friends but was in no position to say with any surety where Gil’s thoughts had gone...or why.
She also didn’t know what to do, if anything. Should she try to draw him back to the present or leave him alone?
Leave him alone, she decided. Any sound she made, any movement, could strike him as a threat if his mind had carried him back to war. Better to feel helpless, much as she hated it, than trigger something they both might regret.
Most especially she didn’t want to cause him any regret. “Just leave him alone” was a mantra used by some of her friends. It would pass.
So eventually this would pass. Sooner or later, Gil would break free of the prison and return. She just had to be patient and wait.
But she was feeling an urgent need to answer the call of nature. She studied where he was standing and where she sat, and tried to envision a trajectory that wouldn’t startle him.
Then she heard him expel a huge sigh. After a moment, he moved a bit, as if stiff, and his gaze trailed toward her. “Was I gone long?”
“Not really.” A surprisingly short time, considering what she’d heard from her friends. “Five minutes? It must have seemed longer to you. Anyway, if I could run to the bathroom?”
He seemed a little surprised, then frowned darkly. “I’m sorry.”
“No need.” She rose, trying to appear happy. “Hey, everybody has some problems, right?”
“I don’t do this.”
She didn’t ask what he meant, mainly because she didn’t want to stir a pot that might still be simmering. “No worries. I’ll be right back and we can talk as much or as little as you want.”
Once in her bathroom, Miri was astonished by how much tension had filled her. Hardly surprising considering what an intense man Gil was even when he was trying to be pleasant. There was always an undercurrent to him, a sense that he could spring at any moment. Like a panther or leopard, sunning itself in a tree one second and then grabbing some prey in its jaws the next.
Like a cat, she thought as she leaned against the sink after washing her hands. She’d read that cats never really went to sleep the way people did, that their ears never turned off and they could wake in an instant at a worrisome sound.
Well, in some way Gil was like that. Did he ever really relax? Could he if he wanted to?
Aw, heck, what did it matter? He’d be buzzing out of here as soon as he could.
The main thing was that he was probably feeling pretty uncomfortable right now. He’d said he didn’t do that. She could only guess that he meant he didn’t flash back to the war. But whatever it was, it had left him exposed for several minutes, and he could be perceiving it as a failure on his part.
So she needed to get back out there and normalize things again, so he didn’t get the impression she was trying to avoid him. He didn’t deserve that.
Still, the breather had been good. She smiled faintly at her reflection and then marched back to the living room, only to find him staring out at blowing snow, his hands clasped behind his back. Despite having the heat on, she felt a chill snaking through the house. One of these days she was going to have to figure where her weatherizing needed some work.
“I’m thinking about a cup of tea,” she said. “You want some?”
He turned a bit, exposing the side of his face. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
It had been a while since lunch, and soon she would need to provide some kind of meal, but Miri found herself drawing a complete blank. Cooking was not at all her favorite thing, though on her own she was quite capable of scrounging up a halfway decent meal from her fridge or pantry.
But now she had someone else to think about. Distracted, aware that Gil was apparently going to share not one thing about what had just happened, she headed for the kitchen. Didn’t she have several cans of New England clam chowder? Especially tasty when she threw in some bacon bits, a staple in her refrigerator. They could make anything taste better, from salad to soup to scrambled eggs.
Rearranging cans in the cupboard, she found the clam chowder she remembered, and an unopened bag of oyster crackers. A footstep alerted her and she glanced over her shoulder. Gil had joined her.
“You okay with clam chowder?” she asked. “From a can.”
“Haven’t had that in ages, and I like it. What can I do?”
“Not much.” She smiled. “Canned soup is hard to turn into a group cooking affair.” She paused. “Are you all right, Gil?”
“I’m fine,” he said immediately. “But I guess I owe you an explanation.”
She shook her head as she lifted down three cans of the soup, hoping he would be hungry. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. Not a thing.”
He took the cans from her hands and placed them on the counter while she brought out the oyster crackers.
“My dad especially loved these crackers with soup,” she remarked. “He was a fan of almost every kind of cracker, but these were a treat. I don’t know the difference other than shape, but the habit stuck with me.”
“I haven’t had them in years.”
“Well, you can rediscover them this evening. I suspect they didn’t get soggy in the soup as fast as a regular soda cracker, because to me they don’t taste any different.”
“I’ll let you know.”
When everything was on the counter and she’d closed the pantry, he touched her forearm lightly. “I do owe you an explanation, unless you just don’t want to hear it. But talking might help me understand what I just did.”
At that she gave him her undivided attention. Miri was eager to listen. She felt seriously attracted to him, and that frightened her, because he was a great big unknown.
“I’m listening.” Such a lame answer to what she suspected had been a difficult offer for him to make. He’d already pretty much said he didn’t talk about anything except to other vets. He felt alienated, different.
Well, he’d been living in a different world from folks like her. Coming back had to make him feel like the odd man out.
She waved him to the table as her teakettle began to whistle. One green tea bag in her mug, boiling water, then she turned the kettle off. Sitting facing him seemed like a safer place than kitty-corner to him. If she grew any more attracted to Gil, she’d be daydreaming about him, wasting her time and setting herself up for a fall. Man, even now he looked scrumptious, but as near as she could tell there was no part of himself that he was prepared to give anyone.
She tamped down her female awareness of him and forced herself to wait patiently. Ordinarily she wasn’t short on patience, but Gil had some unusual effects on her. She very much wanted to hear what he might say, and the longer he hesitated the less likely he was to speak.
“I’ve never had one before,” he said slowly, “but I think I had a flashback.”
That struck her. “Never?”
His expression grew slightly wry, surprising her. This was a grim subject, she would have thought.
“Never,” he repeated. “Not in any real sense. Memories, yes, but not the kind that make me feel I’m right in the middle of it all again. I think I’ve been too busy. Just about the time something might have begun bubbling up, I was off my leave and back on duty.”
“Where flashbacks don’t intrude?”
“I can’t speak for everyone. For me, no. It was like if I stayed on the rails, I couldn’t divert. I diverted today.”
When he fell silent in thought, she dared to speak again. “That must be...unsettling, to put it mildly.”
“Very,” he said bluntly. “I don’t like my mind playing tricks on me. It’s the best weapon in my arsenal.”
She felt her mouth trying to fall open and quickly looked down, lifting her tea bag in and out of the hot water. She liked it strong. “I, um, never thought of my brain as a weapon.”
“Of course not. You’ve never had to. But consider my position. What soldier could function without a brain? A zombie?”
The way he said it drew a small laugh from her. She believed he did so intentionally. Trying to get over rough ground as lightly as possible? “Okay, I get it. It just wasn’t a comparison I’m used to drawing.”
He nodded. “Anyway...” A sigh escaped him. “That came out of nowhere and I don’t like it. Who would? All of a sudden I was back in some of the worst times I’ve had, reliving them. It’s one thing to remember. It’s another to relive.”
“Absolutely!”
“Maybe I will have some tea. Green tea?”
She nodded. He rose before she could, added some water to the kettle and placed it on the burner. “You wouldn’t believe how many places in the world I’ve drunk green tea. Or some really black tea. Anyway, no point going there, because I can’t tell you.”
Those last few words seemed to be tied up with a frown that appeared on his face. “I can’t really tell you anything,” he said after a minute. “I’ll just have some tea with you and we’ll forget this.”
She didn’t like the withdrawal. Maybe he couldn’t talk about his missions, or even the countries involved, but he could surely share his feelings about it.
“You know, Gil, you not only reminded me of granite when we first met, but now you’re reminding me of a bottle of champagne that’s been shaken and the top is about to pop.”
He lifted his brow at that, and there was not only a change in his expression, but a change in his posture. Not so straight and square, leaning more heavily on his cane... Shrinking? No, not that. Maybe weary, and not just physically.
The teakettle whistled and he ignored it for a few seconds, then seemed to shake himself. “Tea bags?”
“Just sit. I’ll get it all. How do you like your tea?”
“Straight. Listen, I’m not helpless.”
“I don’t think you are. But I’m fussy about people rummaging in my cupboards. Space is limited, so everything has a place.”
Another attempt to divert the conversation? she wondered as she pulled out a small canister with green tea bags, plus a mug, and put everything in front of him as he eased into his chair again.
He was soon dipping his own tea bag. “Part of what happened was that I went back to the day Al was killed.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. For some reason she hadn’t expected that, or to hear it so bluntly. Not with the way he’d been edging around it.
“And to the day I got wounded this last time,” he added. “But when it comes to reliving experiences, I’d choose to relive my own wounding a thousand times instead of Al’s.”
Now she was on unfamiliar ground. She didn’t want to sound trite, but what he’d just shared certainly deserved an acknowledgment. “That says a lot,” she said carefully. “It must have been horrific.”
His jaw worked and his gaze didn’t meet hers. He didn’t want to talk about it. That was fine by her. She’d learned all she needed to know when they’d been advised not to have an open coffin. Her imagination was already too good.
He dropped his tea bag onto the saucer she’d earlier placed on the table, beside hers. Then he lifted the mug and drank deeply. Evidently his tongue didn’t scald easily.
He blew out a long breath. “I’ve had too much time on my hands,” he said, as if that explained it all. “Too much time for my mind to wander into places it shouldn’t go.”
She chewed her lip for a moment. “Isn’t it going to have to go there eventually?”
“Probably. But I won’t complain if it waits a few decades.”
He looked at her then, and she was astonished to see a half smile on his face, reflected in his eyes. Talk about a fast mood change.
“I’m not always gloomy and rigid,” he said. “I’ve been known to have a good time and crack a few jokes.”
She tilted her head, thinking he was a puzzle. This felt like a non sequitur. “I believe you,” she murmured.
“No, you probably don’t. No reason you should. When you met me, I had a certain role to perform for my friend and for the army. Now I come here and all you see is someone who’s been wounded and isn’t even sure he’s ready to pick up any thread of life.”
That grabbed her attention. “You’re just tired,” she suggested. “You’ve been through a lot and you’re probably awfully tired most of the time. Wouldn’t that be normal?”
“You don’t have to make excuses for me,” he replied, his smile fading. “I’m not good company. The worst part is that I don’t especially care if I am. I came here with some lamebrained notion, thinking I could share a few stories with Al’s family that they might enjoy knowing, but I haven’t managed it yet. And the main reason I haven’t managed it is because all I can damn well think about is him dying!”