Chapter Thirty-One
Zack
Curtis had agreed to let me stay at his house for the week. But before I went over that night, I showed Kelli the room where she would be sleeping at the back of the house. It was my old room and, to my shame, hadn’t been redecorated since I was a senior in high school. The walls were still hung with posters from bands like Skillet and Linkin Park. A basketball jersey was draped over one chair, and my letter jacket was hanging up in the closet, smelling of mothballs.
“This is amazing,” said Kelli, gazing around the room in awe. “I had no idea you were such a dork.”
“Just be glad we didn’t know each other in high school,” I assured her. “You’d have found me insufferable.”
Kelli threw herself down on my bed, and for a moment it was all I could do not to join her there, but I knew how pissed Mom would be if she thought we were sleeping together. “That’s the one downside of spending the week here,” I said sadly. “That we have to resist our baser impulses for a bit.”
“Shame,” said Kelli, taking one of my old blankets and wrapping it around her face like a sari. “I bet your high school self would have killed for this.”
“To have a world-class, hot reporter in my bed? Yeah, that was the dream.”
When I went over to Curtis’s an hour or so later, he told me he was impressed by how well she seemed to be fitting in with the rest of the family. He had been a little worried when he first heard I was dating a journalist for a major website because he didn’t know how well she would adapt to our country lifestyle, but she took to it as easily as if she had lived here all her life. “She didn’t always live in New York,” I reminded him. “She spent her teen years in rural Ohio.”
“Where’d she live before that?”
“Somalia. But it’s weird. Every time I’ve tried to bring that up, she finds a way of changing the subject.”
“You ought to try asking her about it,” said Curtis.
“Yeah. Maybe I will.”
When I awoke the next morning, and went over to Mama’s house, I found Kelli and Mama standing over the skillet. Mama was teaching her how to make chicken crepes that didn’t fall apart in the pan. “Every time I try to make them on my own, they end up shredded,” said Kelli.
“That’s because you’re not taking your time,” said Mama, pouring olive oil into the pan. “You have to let it sit for at least five to seven minutes before you turn it over.”
“But that takes so much time,” Kelli whined. “And a lot of times I’m already late for work or yoga class.”
But under Mom’s guidance, the crepes turned out crisp and perfect. In addition to those, we ate buttered biscuits, hash browns, and leftover green bean casserole. Kelli finished her first plate with remarkable zeal and immediately went back for seconds. Meanwhile Darren and I fought over who was going to drink the last of the orange juice in the pitcher. “You ought to let Kelli have it,” said Mama, when Darren tried to grab the pitcher out of my hands and nearly sent the juice flying.
“Is there pulp in it?” Kelli asked, grimacing. “I don’t usually drink orange juice with pulp in it.”
“There’s some pulp, yeah,” said Darren. “But it’s still the best damned orange juice you’ve ever had.” He poured the last of it into her glass. Kelli stared down at it for a second with a distasteful look, then took a cautious sip. After letting it linger in her mouth for a moment, she downed the rest of the glass in one gulp.
“It’s miraculous,” she said, sounding puzzled. “And you made that yourself?”
“Squeezed the oranges and everything,” said Mama proudly.
“I’m gonna need to find a way to bring some of that home with me,” said Kelli. “Do you think they allow O. J. on planes?”
After breakfast, the two of us went out riding. Swirling gray and purple storm clouds hung low over the trail, and a cool wind whistled ominously as we rode toward the ledge overlooking Sulphur Springs. Although Kelli professed never to have ridden a horse in her life, she trotted along beside me with the confidence and ease of a woman who had been riding since she was old enough to walk.
“We’re getting close to the point where my brother’s first wife fell off her horse and died a few years back,” I told her after we had been riding together in silence for about ten minutes.
“Which one?” she asked, glancing up in surprise. “Curtis?”
“Yeah, they had just gotten married a year or two before. She was an accomplished rider, too, so it just goes to show. He wasn’t himself for a long time after that, and we started to worry that he was never gonna get over it.”
“I’d never have guessed that from looking at him last night,” said Kelli. “He seems so alive and vibrant.”
“I think there are things in everyone’s past we’d prefer not to talk about. Things that continue to affect us long after the rest of the world has moved on and forgotten about them.”
“Yes,” said Kelli, and a cloud fell over her face for a moment. “I think I know just what you mean.”
I could sense she was thinking of her own past, and I knew if I let it go now, there might not be another chance to bring it up. “What exactly happened to you when you were growing up?” I asked. “In Somalia?”
Kelli made a pained expression and drew in her breath sharply. She laughed in that way people laugh when they’re nervous and scared. “I guess I haven’t been very good at hiding the fact that something happened, have I?”
I shook my head. “No, and I can tell it continues to affect you. There’s not an hour goes by that it doesn’t.”
“Well, if you must know,” said Kelli. “I’ve never talked about this before, and I trust you to keep it a secret, especially from the other guys. I don’t want them to know.”
“Not a word,” I replied.
“When I was eleven we were still living in Mogadishu, and I was just discovering boys for the first time. There was a boy living on the naval base with us, whose name was Jeremy. He had the most beautiful wrists, and his hair…”
She sighed. “Jeremy’s father was in my dad’s platoon. He was a SEAL, like my dad. And he’d always been quite friendly with me and the other children. He was a gifted mimic who could do the most amazing impersonations, and made balloon animals, and sang songs. The kids all thought he was the funniest person, and, being kids, it never occurred to us that there might be something wrong with him.
“Anyway, one morning I was woken by the sounds of a gun firing, over and over again. Right away, I grabbed Renee and we hid under our beds because we thought we were being attacked. But then my dad came in and told us not to get up until he came to get us, and not to open the door for anyone else, not even another SEAL. Renee asked him if we were being attacked by terrorists. But it wasn’t terrorists.
“Apparently what had happened was that overnight Jeremy’s dad had just snapped. He couldn’t handle the stress of living there while trying to raise a family, couldn’t handle the constant threat of losing his wife or son. So that morning just before sunrise he got up, grabbed his sniper rifle, climbed into the lookout tower and just started mowing down Somalian children. These kids hadn’t even done anything to him, they weren’t terrorists or even the family of terrorists. They were just—they were there, and they were brown, and he thought they were a threat. So he started gunning them down, one by one.
“It took two hours before the other SEALs managed to subdue him. I thought he would go back to the States and go to prison for what he had done, but—it may surprise you to learn—he was never punished. The military covered it up. My dad was so disgusted, he resigned from the Navy and took us home. I never saw Jeremy again.”
I was quiet for a long moment as I pondered Kelli’s story. I don’t guess I could ever blame her again for being afraid of the other SEALs or not wanting to be left alone in a room with them. She had shown remarkable bravery in even wanting to visit the Congo in the first place.
“It’s pretty horrifying, what you just said,” I said finally. “And I’m sorry you had to see that, but it don’t surprise me. Not even a little. Not after some of the things I’ve seen.”
Kelli bit down on her lip and looked hard at me for a moment as though struggling to make a decision. Finally, she said, “Look, I know you’re writing a book. And together, I think we could expose this. Between your firsthand knowledge of the military and my journalistic experience, we could really drag the evils that they’re hiding into the light.”
For a moment,, an odd feeling like vertigo came over me, and I swayed in my saddle. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had this been Kelli’s plan the whole time, to get close to me just so she could exploit my knowledge of the Navy to advance her own career? Was that why she had come home with me? Was that why she had shared my bed?
“I think,” I said at last in a voice of deadly calm, “we need to go back to the house.”
“Wait.” Kelli steered the horse around and turned to face me, looking lost and frightened. “Are you upset with me?”
I was so mad just then I could have run her down with no compunction. But I only said, “I think you’d better start packing your things. You’ll be on the next flight out of here.” And I turned and began trotting back to the house, not even waiting for her to catch up.