Chapter Forty
Kelli
Two years later, and I was in graduate school studying world cinema with a concentration on early twentieth-century Expressionist films. Two nights a week, I taught a class on film theory over at Columbia. I was too busy to spend more than a couple days every week in the office, but Evan had graciously allowed me to retain my position as executive editor.
Zack and I had moved into a studio apartment in Bushwick. He was still employed as a recruiter and finishing his book in his spare time, though mostly for therapeutic reasons. There had been no further outbursts like the one on the trail back in Texas; the worst fight we had ever had was over a movie. (He wanted to watch Attack the Block ; I wanted to watch Garden State ).
Work and school kept me busy. Some nights, we barely saw each other because I had a mountain of papers to grade in addition to writing my master’s thesis on the use of intertextuality in the early films of Fritz Lang. In the last couple years, Zack had been made to watch more German films than he cared to remember. It was a testament to his devotion that he never complained about it.
One evening in late September when I was up late hunched over my desk, he came into the room carrying a plate full of cookies and a glass of hot cocoa.
“Thanks, sweetie.” I gave him a quick smooch on the lips. He was wearing a ridiculous-looking apron with bears on it, and the apron was covered in flour. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know where the flash drive is, would you?”
“I haven’t seen it lately,” he replied, pulling up the other swivel chair. “How soon do you need it?”
“I just need to transfer some files through Gmail, and it won’t let me load them because there are too many. Anyway, I’m sorry. This is boring. How are you?”
Zack laughed lightly. “Girl, you don’t ever bore me,” he said. “You could sit there and read to me in German, and I’d listen. Wouldn’t understand a word of it, but I’d listen.”
“That either means you’re a good person or you just really love me,” I said with a smile. Even though he was relentlessly encouraging, I never felt like I was being doted on. Everything he said felt right and sincere, even when I thought he was being too kind.
“I know things have been hard lately, what with both of us working and you in school.” He took my hand and massaged it lightly. “But that just means we’re on our way in the world. Someday we’ll have reached the top and we’ll be able to relax a little.”
“I can’t imagine ever relaxing.” I reached for my cocoa and held it in my hands, letting it warm me. “Like, what do you do? Do you sit on a beach? Do you go bowling?”
Zack shrugged. “Beats me, but that’s the kind of woman I’m dating. You’re too hard-working and ambitious to let up even for a second. Anyway, what’ve you got going on tomorrow?”
“Evan wanted me to come in early tomorrow,” I replied. “Says he’s got a story he wants me to cover.”
“I thought you gave up reporting when you started school.”
“So did I, but he says I’m really going to like this, and there’s no one else in the office he would trust with it.” I let out a sharp laugh. “Like I haven’t heard that before.”
Zack grinned. “Maybe me and Carson need to go pay him a visit.”
***
In the two years since I’d taken the editing position, the Bugle had left the basement and claimed about half of the first floor of the Frost Building. When I came into his office that morning, I found Evan seated at a large semi-circular desk playing the Killers on Pandora and scrolling through our main page. He glanced up excitedly when he saw me.
“So here’s where we’re going; are you ready for this?” He lifted a fat binder and shoved it into a handbag. “One of the old trees in Central Park is slated to be torn down, and there’s an old woman who’s chained herself to it. She’s been there for three days with a water bottle and a bag full of sub sandwiches. You and I are gonna go over there and interview her. I’ll take pictures while you talk to her.”
“Okay, but I don’t see why one of your other reporters couldn’t have done this,” I said as he ushered me through the door. “Dennis usually takes the ‘mad old lady’ beat.”
Evan pondered this for a second as though trying to think of a good reason. Finally, he said, “You’ll understand when we get there. Come on, we don’t have all morning!”
We caught the train through Forest Hills and Jackson Heights to Central Park. Once I had finished answering my emails, I put the phone away and sat marveling at the view through the windows: two- and three-story brick houses, residential streets lined with trees and tugboats gliding past on the water. It was one of those crisp fall mornings where the city and the world are beautiful beyond telling, where a quiet magic seems to radiate even from the gray asphalt.
“Ready?” asked Evan as we disembarked onto the platform at Columbus Circle. He looked unusually chipper, and I thought what a relief it must be for him to escape the office for a few hours.
I followed along behind him for about a quarter of a mile. It was one of those blustery, cloudy mornings that are so common in New York in early fall, and I could tell just by the feel of the wind on my skin that rain was imminent.
We walked until we came to a waist-high classical column standing in the middle of an open area with latticework all around us. I scanned the trees in the distance looking for any sign of the old woman Evan had warned me about, but there was none: no woman, no chains, no sandwich bag.
An ominous quiet fell as we stood there, motionless.
“Evan?” I said quietly. “This isn’t the place.”
“Just wait,” said Evan. He was removing his camera from its carrying case with a look of supreme unconcern.
I waited, still peering into the distance wondering what we were looking for. Finally, a tall, sculpted figure emerged from the bushes and came striding into view. In almost the same instant, I realized what this was.
“Hey, darlin’,” said Zack when he was close enough to speak without having to yell. “So, I realize this is kind of an ambush, but we couldn’t think of any other way to do it. You’re so clever you were bound to see through whatever we tried to pull.”
“We?” I motioned to Evan, who was circling around us at a distance snapping pictures. “Did you and he plan this whole thing out?”
He shook his head. “No, it was me and your sister. The two of us spent days together in the coffee shop while you were at school trying to come up with something, and well, here we are.”
My stomach gave a nervous lurch as I waited, in silence, for what I knew must surely be coming.
“My buddies and I used to joke that I would never be able to settle down,” Zack went on. “That when I found a woman the relationship would be over in a couple weeks because I’d get bored and move onto the next person. In the platoon when we started dating, they laid odds on how long we’d be together. Some said a month, some said a week.
“But I don’t know what happened when I met you. It’s not like I don’t notice other women but none of them are you. And when we broke up the first time, I was pretty excited at first about being back on the market, but the longer it went on, the more I realized I didn’t want anyone but you. That was the hardest withdrawal I’d ever gone through; giving up drinking was easier. I felt like an addict who would never be satisfied unless you were with me always. I knew then that we belonged together, and that if you wouldn’t have me I’d be single for the rest of my life.”
We had never talked about those fraught, painful weeks after the first breakup, but it was like he was speaking my own experience back to me. This was the thing I loved about Zack: that I had never felt so enjoyed and understood by another human being.
By now, we were standing close together, so close that his voice was barely a whisper. “So I just have one question, and you can say nom but I have to ask because I need closure on this, and I need you.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and produced a thin silver band. I’d been expecting something like it, but even so, my eyes teared up at the sight of it. “Kelli, will you marry me?”
I didn’t hesitate even for a moment. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”
He placed the ring on my finger. We held onto one another in silence for a moment as the clouds broke, and a light rain began falling. “You know there were several guys in your unit who asked me out?”
Zack smiled down at me. “And why’d you pick me over all those other guys?”
I shrugged. “I guess I wanted our babies to be half-Texan.”
He laughed and tousled my hair. I took his hand, and we began walking back toward the grove of trees to the east, where we were joined a second later by a beaming Evan. I’d been so busy getting engaged that I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“You ready to head back now?” I asked him. “Now that we’re all sorted?”
“Not until we find that woman,” he replied, and he went tramping off to find her. I turned to Zack, feeling puzzled.
“Did you tell him about this?”
Zack shook his head, looking as flummoxed as I felt. “I was wondering why you brought him, to be honest.”
I shrugged. “Maybe Renee told him. You want to head back to the house?”
“What about your assignment?”
I watched Evan disappearing into the grove, his shoulders hunched in determination like a hunter of wild game. “He’ll be fine. Let’s go.” And we turned and raced back to Zack’s car while the rain fell in torrents around us.
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SEAL’D BY HIM
By Naomi Niles
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Naomi Niles
One
Dwayne
I knew that we were flying through the air, but I couldn’t fully convince myself that I was in a plane. The light hit the seat in front of me and took on an elusive quality as if it were a mirage reflecting off of the Afghani sands below us.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.
The sound seemed to rise up out of nowhere, almost like I had been dreaming and now I was waking up.
Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.
I was dreaming. I couldn’t imagine how it happened. The sound of the helicopter rotors drowned out everything, even my thoughts. I had to focus. There was a group of children holed up in a school less than a hundred miles from where we were flying now. It was my job to go in and take out the Taliban operatives holding them prisoner before they killed the kids.
I tensed up and waited, watching as the Afghani desert passed below us. “Go! Go! Go!”
I jumped out of the helicopter, my body suspended in that split second before gravity caught me and pulled me back down to the ground. I was staring at a patchy, yellow canvas with jagged gray lines etched in the sand. They called it Allah’s cat box, the place that he forgot.
I could believe that. Nothing had changed there since Biblical times. The people still dressed in long pieces of cloth draped around their body. Their houses were crumbling mud brick, and they survived off of nothing but opium, wilted pot, and bread so tough it scraped against your throat going down. Life was cheap and fragile, not something to be cherished because it wasn’t worth living.
It was no wonder the Taliban didn’t have a problem using children as human shields. Everyone was disposable.
The next thing I knew, I was leaning against the back wall of a crumbling school, a concrete building with barred windows and a caved-in roof that’d long since been abandoned. I could hear the sounds of children, running around in the room on the other side, laughing and playing.
No, I couldn’t think of the children. I was in the plane. I told myself that over and over. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. I tried to see the rows of seats in front of me as part of the material universe. They existed. I could touch them, and I could smell the air around me – but I could also feel the dust blowing into my eyes as I loaded my weapon.
I couldn’t do this. I reached out to touch the headrest in front of me. Instead, I realized I was reaching out to the Afghani children staring at me, all lined up in a row, their eyes wide, like they thought I was going to shoot them.
I shouldn’t have burst in. That was stupid. The children were meant to be a deterrent. The Taliban knew we couldn’t bomb the base and risk losing our rapport with their villages. We had to go in after the kids and hope that we didn’t get killed in doing so.
The room was dark, save for the light coming in from a hole in the concrete roof. Behind the children, a tall shape was leaning against the back wall, like a pillar, black, save for the sheer fabric around her eyes allowing the woman to see through her costume.
“Are you really going to kill these children?” I asked her in broken Pashto.
My response was a hairy hand reaching out from under the burka holding an armed grenade. I looked at it, weighed my options, and decided to run, all in the time span of less than two seconds. I barely managed to get behind a crumbling, mud brick wall before I heard the crack, like the earth itself had been split in two.
“No!” My throat still hurt from the force of that scream.
“Howell!” I was back on the plane, and my commanding officer Jacobs was sitting next to me. “Get it together, soldier. You can’t let that happen.”
“What are you talking about?” I never told anyone that I was shell-shocked.
“You just yelled.” Everyone was looking at me. My head fell into my hands. “You’re going to need to learn how to stay in the moment if you want to make it on the outs.”
I nodded my head.
“How are you feeling about the discharge?”
“Jesus,” I leaned back against the headrest. “I’ve been a SEAL since I was eighteen.”
“You’re institutionalized. Reintegrating back into civilian life is a process. It won’t just happen overnight. Now, I need to know that you’re not going to have another flashback and start attacking people or something.”
“What? You’ve known me for years. Have I ever done anything that stupid?”
“No, but I’m not taking any chances. Drink this,” she handed me a shooter of whiskey, “and calm yourself down.”
“Alright.” I downed the shot, ignoring the sickening feeling of the alcohol sliding down my throat.
“What are you planning on doing about work?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I thought so.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. “My brother runs a security company in Chattanooga. When I heard that he needed help, your name was the only one that came to mind.” She handed me the card. In the middle, etched in dark green letters were the words, “Granger Security.” I stashed the card in my pocket.
“Sounds like a lot of standing around and doing nothing.”
“It’s something to consider.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a good job. They pay well, and you’ll be treated with the respect you deserve. If you want, I can call him when we land and set you up right away.”
“I don’t see how I can turn down something like that.”
“Smart boy.” She patted me on the shoulder and walked back to her seat.
I closed my eyes and rested my head back, determined to get some rest. If I could get rid of this panic, slow my breath, and calm my heart, then maybe I could stay in the moment. It’d worked before. I just had to perfect the technique.
I focused straight ahead and tried to get lost in the rhythm of the in and out. I could feel the world sliding away and my muscles relaxing. I smiled. It was working.
I’d learned the trick from one of the other recruits. They were one of those semi-profound eastern philosophy types. They called it mindfulness meditation. It was a way for people to turn their mind away from anything that was distracting them from being fully present in the moment.
I’d focus on my breath for a few seconds, then catch my thoughts drifting. Every time I did that, I thought, Breathe, like a mantra to bring my focus back to my breath and the world around me. I stuck with it until I started to forget where I was and drifted off to sleep.
“Hey.” The sound of Jason’s voice jolted me awake. I opened my eyes. He was standing in the aisle. “Scoot over.”
I did. “I was almost asleep.”
“Sorry, Jesus. Can’t expect me to sit here and twiddle my thumbs the entire flight.”
“You are the worst partner imaginable.”
He laughed. “What’d sour pussy have to say?”
“Her brother owns this security company in Chattanooga. She wants me to go work for him.” I sighed.
“She wants your jock.” He elbowed me, and I scooted to the edge of my seat away from him.
“I’m sure that’s the last thing on her mind.”
“Please, a sour old bat like that — she’s probably got a vibrator stash the size of an armory.” He laughed at his own joke.
I was getting tired of seeing his bald red head. “I don’t know.”
“I can’t wait to leave, man.” He made a sound like his body was deflating. “The second we do, I’m going to find the nearest titty bar and drink until I forget where I am.”
“That’s a good idea.”
“I’ll bet you can’t wait to find something to sink your dick into.”
“Guess so.” I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“Isn’t it crazy? We’re leaving at the same time.”
“Yeah… I’m getting tired, man. I think I’m going to pass out.”
“Ah,” he groaned, “you’re no fun.” He finally got up and walked back to his seat.
Jason had attached himself to me the moment he met me. At first I thought he was just lonely or upset about everything that we’d seen in Afghanistan, so I gave him some slack, but over time my patience started to wear thin. He would keep me up late at night asking about my life. At first, I didn’t tell him much, just quick one or two word responses, but he would keep pushing until I had to answer just to get him to shut up long enough to let me sleep.
That was a mistake. The second I’d opened my mouth, he latched onto me like we were best friends. He followed me around everywhere, constantly yammering about one thing or another. He was vulgar and moody with the sense of humor of a grade schooler, laughing about farts and talking about boobs. I couldn’t respect a man like that.
I was relieved when the Navy announced my discharge. I was certain that I’d finally get a chance to get away from him. That lasted for about three hours. Then he ran into the dorms to tell me that he was getting out the same day. Now, I was stuck listening to him talk about everything he wanted to do and how I should visit and drink with him and all the things that we could do together.
I almost told him to leave me alone when I first met him, but it occurred to me that he would probably be hurt by it. He was sensitive. He internalized everything, and I needed to be able to rely on him when I was in danger. Now that we were leaving and it didn’t matter, I decided to keep quiet to avoid having to hurt his feelings.
I went back to focusing on my breathing again, letting my thoughts pass me by with sense of detachment. I grew more and more distant as the time passed and eventually drifted off to sleep.