Chapter Thirty-Two
Kelli
It was happening again.
Just like it had happened before, in Somalia. And every few years since.
After Jeremy’s dad shot those kids, my dad had raised hell about it. He wanted the man to be disciplined, to face some sort of accountability for what he had done. To his horror, he soon realized that there were men who were more upset with him for talking about it, than they were with the murderer for committing those crimes in the first place. “Son, you best keep your head down and stay quiet,” a corporal had warned him. “You’re messing with things that you ought not be messing with.”
“But he murdered multiple children in cold blood,” Dad protested. “We need to be talking about this.”
“I don’t think it’s up to you to determine what we do and don’t need,” the corporal said. “If I was you I’d leave it alone, before you land yourself in real trouble.”
Dad found the hypocrisy of this immensely frustrating. Night after night, he paced the kitchen while my mom cooked beet kavass and rice, fuming over the inability or unwillingness of the military to discipline their own. Like the corporal, Mom urged him to let it go before he drew the wrath of his commanding officers.
But Dad wouldn’t let it go, and eventually he was shunned by the rest of his platoon. They refused to be in the same room with him unless they were required to be as part of their exercises. If he sat down to eat with them at lunch, they would get up and walk away. If he found himself in the dorm alone with an old friend, the friend would turn and leave without saying a word.
And basically, the same thing happened to me and Renee. We’d grown up with these kids, had spent years together playing bocce and soccer and jaggi jaggi, years wondering which of them we were going to fall in love with and marry. And then one day seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly and mysteriously, they all decided to stop talking to us. Renee and I no longer had a single friend on base—not even Jeremy, Jeremy with the wrists and the wide eyes and the hair that was just slightly too long. One time, I found him alone by the fountain and cornered him, demanding to know what was going on, but he turned in terror and ran. I had never seen him so scared before, not even on the night when the compound was rocked by gun blasts.
The memory of that event stayed with me always; it was never very far from my mind. And it had instilled in me a certain fear and distrust of others, a sense that no matter how close we were and no matter how much they might claim to love me, they were only ever a moment away from turning against me, without warning and without explanation. It hadn’t been so bad for Renee; she had been younger and could barely remember the shunning. But I remembered, and it seemed like every day, in one way or another, I was reliving it.
So of course when Zack turned in the saddle and told me to pack my bags, my immediate thought was that it was happening all over again. No matter that we had just finished eating breakfast; that we had been laughing together around the kitchen table; that I had just shared my unhappiest memory, the one that I never spoke of. Soon, I would be on a plane back to New York City with only a vague knowledge of how I had gotten there. I would try to text him and find he had blocked my number. We would never see or speak to one another again.
On the way back to the house, I found myself worrying how the family would react. If the past was any guide, they would follow his lead and refuse to speak to me. I would try to make polite conversation with his mother as I packed and she would turn away in disgust. His brothers would talk over me as though I wasn’t even there. It was like a horror movie every time it happened, the way they acted in concert like a single person to pretend I didn’t exist.
“Be ready in twenty minutes,” said Zack in a low growl as we reached the front yard. “I’ll have Darren take you to the airport.”
I tried to imagine Darren sitting silently beside me in the front seat of his pickup, refusing to speak to me and turning up the music to full volume when I tried to talk. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just call a cab.”
Zack shrugged and continued on his way toward the barn.
***
But those last moments in the house weren’t as awkward as I had feared they would be. His mother could sense that there was discord between us and kept trying to ask him why he seemed so upset, but he just stalked past her without offering a response. When I told her I was leaving, she must have known then that we had fought while out riding, but rather than choosing sides she poured me a glass of her famous blue lemonade and played a video of Zack rocking out to Nirvana when he was all of about six years old. I pretended to be entertained, grateful for the distraction.
I called Renee in the cab on the way to the airport and told her I was coming home. “What?” she balked. “Already?”
“Zach and I had a pretty nasty fight,” I explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when you pick me up.”
As much as Renee and I had been fighting lately, and as moody as she had been ever since it became clear Max was about to break up with her, there was no one else in the world I would rather have seen waiting for me when I stepped off the plane at JFK at around sundown. The moment she spotted me in baggage claim, she ran up and threw her arms around me, and we stood together like that for a long moment, neither one wanting to be the first to break away.
“So,” she said as I followed her through the parking garage, “what happened?”
“Can we, like, not talk about it just yet?” I replied. “I just want to go home and get into my pajamas and sit on the couch with you watching every Colin Firth movie in chronological order.”
“Fair enough,” said Renee. “But you know Pride and Prejudice alone is going to take, like, six hours.”
“I don’t care; I’m supposed to be out of town for the next week, and as long as we don’t tell my boss I’m back early, I don’t think he’ll mind. I’m supposed to be putting in some hours while I’m gone, but I just want to watch every movie.”
“Okay,” said Renee, “but after we finish Kingsman you’ll have to tell me what happened between you and Zack. You can’t keep me in suspense like this indefinitely.”
“Fine,” I replied. “But not until then.”
As we sat on the couch that night watching Dutch Girls, I checked my phone periodically, half-expecting to find Zack had texted me and apologized for the way he had behaved that morning in throwing me out of the house and humiliating me in front of his family. But he never texted, and I went to bed still waiting.