4
COLFAX, WASHINGTON
Nothing had ever come easy for Tom Miller.
His dad split the day after Miller turned five, ditched him and his mom to move to Florida. Time to start fresh, he said. Conveniently forgetting what he’d already spoiled. Veronica and Tom spent the next decade near poor. Like poverty was a place, a barren land easy to enter, hard to leave. They were never evicted. But sometimes they moved in a hurry. Tom never went hungry. But sometimes Veronica came home with a pizza on Tuesday, and he knew it would have to last them both until her next check on Friday.
Lucky him, she didn’t eat much.
They lived in Chula Vista, Phoenix, Las Vegas. Dusty, overgrown desert cities where dreams went to wither, in apartments built to code but never better. By ten, Miller knew what they’d look like before he saw them. Two little bedrooms, a toilet that needed careful handling, a kitchen with a wall-mounted microwave and an electric range.
Veronica mostly worked telemarketing. When Miller was in ninth grade, she met a trucker named Jared over the phone, pitching life insurance. Jared lived in Colfax, the southeastern corner of Washington State, and to Colfax they went. It was a town of three thousand people, better and worse than the desert cities Miller knew. It was pretty. Not the forests he’d expected, more open. Big rolling hills that rose to the Idaho mountains.
But it was seriously hick. The nearest city of any size was Spokane, sixty miles north. And Spokane hardly counted, anyway. At least in Vegas, Miller and his mom went to the Strip once in a while, checked out the limos and the strippers handing out nudie postcards. Once, outside Caesars, a guy in a Hawaiian shirt pushed two tickets on Veronica—I can’t, he said. Long story, my wife. Anyway, Cirque du Soleil, the Bellagio. You look like you could use it. Go.
For an afternoon, life was magic.
Nothing like that could ever happen in Colfax. Colfax was white guys in pickup trucks. Miller was brown. His mom was Mexican. He had a white name from dear old Dad, the only proof the guy had ever existed. Miller didn’t make friends easily, had never bothered to try since he always figured he’d be moving again soon enough. The handful of Hispanic kids at Colfax Junior-Senior High didn’t know what to do with him. The white kids ignored him.
He had acne scars and a voice so quiet the teachers asked him to speak up. He was sturdy, though, and tougher than he looked. After his first fight, the bullies left him alone. He was physically exceptional in only one way, his eyesight, 20/9, the edge of the curve. He could see the spin of a baseball as soon as it left the pitcher’s hand, though he still couldn’t hit it. In a luckier life, he would have been a fighter pilot.
He was an average student, lousy at math. A slow reader with his good eyes, though he loved to read, loved it all the more because he was slow. The Harry Potter books gave him a full year of pleasure. Senior-year English he wrote looping strange stories. After a while, he realized they weren’t good, and he didn’t know how to make them better. He was devastated. He’d thought about community college, trying to write. He realized he’d have a better chance at being an astronaut.
Jared had a house, the first time Miller had lived in a house. Even had a lawn. But it didn’t feel like his. His mom was home all the time. She said she was tired of working. And Jared made enough money for them, anyway, so why bother? Once in a while, he’d hear them screwing and wonder how they managed. Jared was three hundred pounds of rest-stop fried chicken and waffles. He couldn’t possibly be lying on top of her. Were they on all fours? Gross.
Jared was all right otherwise. He treated Veronica decently. But he’d made clear he wouldn’t be paying for college or anything else for Miller.
Time to go.
Miller decided to enlist. He’d probably wind up in Afghanistan, the war was hotting up, but why not? He wondered if his mom would try to talk him out of signing up. She didn’t. Jared was all for it, of course. Miller checked out the Marines first, but they were a little in love with themselves. The Few. The Proud. The whatever. Miller wasn’t that proud. He went with the Army and, from the start, he liked it. He didn’t mind the yelling. The sergeants seemed to care about him. Or at least about making him a better soldier. Case you didn’t notice, there’s a war on, dummy!
After Basic, Miller signed for the infantry, the real Army. He spent 2011 patrolling villages in Kandahar Province. March through October, the insurgents showed up for firefights once a week. Like they were punching a clock. Maybe they were. Two guys from the company died in IED attacks. A sniper paralyzed another. It wasn’t fun, exactly, especially when the Talibs got around to mortaring their combat outpost, but it was fine. Miller’s eyesight came in more than handy. On patrol, he spotted bombs and hidey-holes everyone else missed. Enemy fire didn’t rattle him. If anything, he felt calmer after the shooting began. Confirmed kills were tough to come by because the Talibs pulled their corpses after skirmishes, but he wound up with two. He was pretty sure of three more, even if the Army didn’t give him credit.
On base, he found the Game of Thrones series, five beautifully long novels. After a couple months reading about Sansa Stark, he made the mistake of telling a couple of the guys that he was a virgin. Women had always been a foreign country to him. The mockery that followed was good-natured but relentless. It peaked when Miller’s platoon sergeant, a Kentucky fireplug with the up-country name of Willie Coole, paid a late-night visit to his hutch, leading a donkey wearing a big red ribbon.
Got her greased for you, PFC. No soldier of mine dies without getting his dick wet. ’Course, you’ll have to wear this. Coole wagged a condom at Miller. Maybe you didn’t know, but Mexicans and donkeys can breed.
He was surprised to realize that the guys liked him, and he liked them. He would realize later the tour had been the best year of his life.
When it ended, Miller’s captain told him he should go to Sniper School, a five-week course at Fort Benning. Soldiers didn’t have to be in the Rangers or other elite units to apply. Regular infantry needed snipers, too.
Think I can be a Ranger, Captain?
Start with Sniper School.
The shooting wasn’t the problem. His eyesight gave him a natural advantage. But his ghillie suit never looked quite right. And though he was great at spotting enemy positions, he couldn’t figure out the best spots for his own hides. Just try to imagine what they’re seeing, his instructors said. What you’d see if you were on the other side. He tried. But he couldn’t. He knew he was bumping up against the limits of his brain. He remembered those stories senior year, how flat they’d seemed when he reread them. He couldn’t make them work, couldn’t figure out how to tell the world what was in his head.
He wished he was smart enough to understand. Or dumb enough that his failure wouldn’t bother him.
Still, in the real world, snipers set up inside buildings and on rooftops, where a ghillie suit didn’t mean much. And no one could argue with his aim. Miller passed, barely. Three months later, he signed for Ranger training. Back to Fort Benning. He survived the preliminaries. The instructors liked him. But he couldn’t lead patrols for all the money in New York. He moved his men the wrong way, called in artillery on his own positions. He was overwhelmed rather than afraid. But from the military’s point of view, the reasons hardly mattered. After he flunked the second time, he thought about begging for one more shot.
But he knew he’d fail again.
He told himself he didn’t care. He did. Being a Ranger would have meant really succeeding for the first time in his life. The Army respected its Rangers. Instead, Miller would be just another grunt who couldn’t earn his tab.
While he was at Ranger School, the Army broke up his company. He was reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, at Fort Hood, Texas. He’d been there seven long months when his phone buzzed with a middle-of-the-night call. A 509 area code. Colfax.
“Mr. Miller?”
Strange to hear Mr. rather than Specialist. “Yes, sir.”
“This is Deputy Drew Caprin of the Whitman County Sheriff’s Department. Any chance you can come down to headquarters?”
“I’m in Texas, sir.”
“In that case, I have some bad news.”
Deputies had found his mother and Jared dead in their living room. Heroin. At least now Miller understood why Veronica had acted so weird the last time he’d seen her. Sleepy, mumbly, hardly interested in what he was saying.
“What about your mother’s body? Should we hold it for burial?”
Miller hesitated, realized he was furious with her for leaving him this way. “Cremation’s fine.”
He flew to Colfax to clean out her stuff, got one surprise. Jared and Veronica hadn’t married, so Miller wasn’t entitled to anything of his. Veronica’s life savings consisted of two thousand dollars he found stuffed in her panty drawer.
But Jared had bought a new pickup a month before the overdose. A Ram 1500 Quad Cab with all the trimmings. Fifty-five grand. Jared had borrowed against the house instead of taking out a note, so it was free and clear. And for reasons only Jared and Veronica knew, they’d titled it in her name. Jared’s crummy kids moaned to high heaven when they found out, since the pickup was worth more than the house. But the sheriff left no room for argument. Her truck, so it belonged to Miller now.
On the way back to Fort Hood, he stopped in Vegas, dumped Veronica’s ashes into the Bellagio fountain. Maybe the lights and the noise would give her something to do. Inside, he met a girl. Chloe, so she said. She was taller than he was. Long brown hair. Breasts too perfect to be anything but fake. Sixty seconds in, she whispered, Six hundred for an hour, two grand for the night. Her fingers stroked his wrist, and he wanted her as he’d never wanted anything. Even the Rangers.
In the room, she made him show her the money before she undressed. He blurted out that he was a virgin, and she laughed. Nobody’s a virgin. Miller hadn’t cried since his sixth birthday, when he’d realized his dad wouldn’t be coming home to take him to McDonald’s. He didn’t cry now. But he wished he could. His mom hadn’t been perfect, but he’d loved her. He’d trusted her. Wrong. He couldn’t trust anyone. Not even a woman he’d bought and paid for.
Chloe must have seen he was telling the truth and decided to go easy on him. Guess it’s your lucky day, then, soldier. No condom. Normally, that’s double.
An inheritance well spent.
Three months later, the pickup was in storage, and Miller was back in Kandahar. The war had changed, for the worse. Fewer soldiers, more insurgents. The Talibs were bolder, the bombs bigger. And this time around, Miller’s company captain was a jerk. Guy seemed to think he could win the war all by himself. We’re taking it to them, he said. High ops tempo. Move to contact. So they moved to contact. Which mostly meant IEDs. They rode in mine-resistant armored protecteds, MRAPs, heavy trucks with steel plates underneath to deflect blasts. But a big enough bomb could bust all that steel.
The first hit came two months into the tour. Miller had taken off his helmet. Dumb. But the truck’s air-conditioning was out, and he was sweating like a pig, and they were on a stretch of road that had been safe. He heard a whoosh as the truck, all eighteen tons, went airborne. His head slammed against the truck’s steel wall. The world went dark.
When he came to, he couldn’t figure out where he was. For a few seconds, he was almost giddy.
“Miller . . . Miller!” A round white face, his sergeant, though Miller couldn’t remember his name—
Nausea replaced euphoria. Miller tried to vomit, came up with only a thin stream of sour drool.
The blast had blown the truck’s rear axle, leaving it stuck. Miller watched as the back gate dropped and the rest of his squad piled out. He couldn’t move. He felt like he was inside a video game and whoever was playing him had dropped the controller. His sergeant grabbed him, wrenched him out. The Afghan sun clawed his eyes. He hid them behind his palms and sagged until his knees touched soil.
At the outpost, the company medic prescribed rest and darkness. Three days passed before his captain came to his hutch and asked how he felt. Miller made the mistake of telling the truth. He still had some buzzing in his ears, but the dizziness was gone.
“Good. We’re setting a checkpoint on the road to Helmand, and you’re gonna overwatch. I’ve had enough of you lying in here.” The captain looked like he was made of blocks, a square head on square shoulders that filled out his perfect neat uniform.
The checkpoint was set to last four days. The first three days went fine—they even caught a couple guys—but on the fourth it turned out the Talibs had been watching them, too. The IED was dug deep by the side of the road, a quarter mile before the checkpoint.
This time, Miller was wearing his helmet, but it didn’t seem to matter. He fell down a hole and vanished. When he woke, his head hurt like somebody had cranked a vise around his skull. A black man in a white coat stood near the bed. “Specialist. How are you this morning?”
Miller could feel the words forming in his head before he said them. Uncanny. “Head. Hurts.”
“Believe it or not, that’s a good sign. Remember me?”
Miller tried to shake his head, decided he’d better not. He was sure he’d never seen this man before.
“I’m Dr. Morgan. I’ve treated you since you were brought in last week.”
“Where I am?” The wrong way to say it, but he didn’t know the right one.
“KAF.” Kandahar Airfield. “Remember anything?”
The MRAP’s engine rumbled in his ears. “IED.”
“Good. More than yesterday. You’ll start making new memories soon.”
The thought didn’t particularly please Miller. He looked around the clean white room. “Sir.”
“Call me doc.”
“Doc. When do I go back?”
“Soon as you’re fit to fly.” Morgan rested a hand on Miller’s shoulder. “Your war’s over, Specialist.”
Morgan was wrong. Miller’s war had just begun. He spent a month at Walter Reed, where he was officially diagnosed with a moderate traumatic brain injury and post-concussive symptoms. He received a medical discharge four months later, at Fort Hood. His sensitivity to light had faded. But he still had regular headaches and anxiety attacks.
The Veterans Administration gave him a sixty percent disability rating, entitling him to a little more than a thousand dollars a month. Miller had never believed that the military would take care of him for life. Being a soldier was a job. No one had made him sign up.
Even so, the payment seemed stupidly small. Almost disrespectful. His mood swung from angry to depressed to empty. The emptiness scared him most of all. The military shrinks called it loss of affect. He even stopped reading. For a while, he couldn’t make the words stand still. Then his brain recovered enough to put them together in sentences. But they felt as silly as a Halloween costume. Heroes and villains, swords and sorcerers, when the reality was buried bombs and ice-pick headaches. For this, the United States government saw fit to give him not even forty bucks a day.
After his discharge, he went back to Colfax. He wanted quiet and green. Between the pay he’d saved and the disability check, he figured he could rent a trailer and get by. Wasn’t like he had fancy taste or a wife to worry about. He could always sell the pickup, if cash ran low. Plus the VA had a clinic in Lewiston, just over the border in Idaho. He wouldn’t have to go too far for his meds. The shrinks at Fort Hood had made a point of telling him, Stay connected to the community, isolation kills more soldiers than anything else.
To which Miller wanted to answer, Try IEDs.
Mostly, the shrinks gave him meds. They’d put him on half the alphabet: Ambien, Celexa, Depakote, Imitrex, Klonopin, Paxil, Risperdal, Seroquel, trazodone, Valium, Wellbutrin. Usually, he was taking at least four at once. He didn’t know if they made him better or worse. They fogged him up so much that he stopped them cold turkey. Then he couldn’t sleep, and the panic attacks came back. He wound up mixing old and new prescriptions, a one-man psychotropic clinical trial.
In Colfax, Miller found himself a clean enough trailer east of town for six hundred a month. It had four acres, nestled between a hill and a stream, so he couldn’t see his neighbors. He spent the rest of his monthly check on beer, pizza, and pot. Eastern Washington was home to some of the best dope in the United States and it was now legal. Not medicinal marijuana. Fully legal, thanks to the wisdom of the voters of Washington State. Anyone over twenty-one could buy weed.
Miller hadn’t smoked much growing up. But he found marijuana took his headaches away better than the pills. Bad news was that it killed whatever motivation he had left. Made him a little paranoid, too. Maybe paranoid wasn’t the right word. He found himself watching the Weather Channel for hours, hitting his bong and wondering what it would be like to control the weather. Then he’d start thinking he did control the weather. Because he knew exactly what the forecasters were going to say. No great secret why. They repeated themselves every hour.
Plus he put on twenty-five pounds in six months. One day, he realized his gut stuck out so far, he couldn’t even see his little man. He decided to quit smoking for a while. Which wasn’t easy. His headaches came back, though not as bad.
Worse, he now had to waste all those hours some other way. Pot had helped him forget how lonely he was. He’d lost touch with everyone but Coole, his old platoon sergeant. Coole was out of the Army now, too. He’d invited Miller east a couple times, but Miller just couldn’t deal with being anyone’s charity case.
Lucky for him, he had the Internet, the greatest time waster and friend substitute ever invented. He joined a vets-only message board. Guys posted about how the VA was killing them all, how much civilians sucked, how they wished they could go over again and this time they wouldn’t go light on the hajjis. In truth, the boards could be whiny. Miller said so. I was a sniper, he wrote. Bet most of you never even got off KAF.
Sniper, my ass, a guy whose handle identified him as 82vetlittlerock wrote back. Prove it.
Miller posted a pic of his certification. Then, showing off, a pic of his best shooting ever, a three-round cluster, four inches at a thousand yards.
At the end, he’d figure out that’s how she found him.
A VA therapist put him in touch with a vet who lived south of Colfax. Fred Urquhart. A few years older. He’d done his time in Baghdad instead of Kandahar. But he was infantry. He knew the drill. Once in a while, they met up at the Hyde Out Tavern to drink beer and not talk. Urquhart was as close to a friend as Miller had found since that first tour.
Six p.m., and Thursday Night Football was about to start. The Bengals and the Falcons. One of the benefits of living on the West Coast. Miller could watch the game and be home by ten. He was three beers in. Light beers. He’d lost fifteen pounds, but he had ten to go. Or maybe a little more.
A woman came in. Blue eyes, blond hair, tight sweater, long legs in black pants. Urquhart’s head swiveled to follow her like he was a radar dish and she was a missile.
“Kidding me? Do you see that?”
Miller saw. The first, last, and only time Miller had been up close with a woman who looked like her had been that night at the Bellagio. Still the only time he’d had sex. There was a secretary at the VA in Lewiston who’d asked him to a movie. But she weighed two hundred pounds. Miller thought sometimes he’d made a mistake losing his virginity to Chloe. Tough for a regular girl to compete. Anyway, sex—the act itself—had seemed like work since that second IED. Even when he was taking care of business himself, he lost the thread sometimes, couldn’t focus long enough to finish.
The blonde sat down by herself two tables over. Every guy in the room looked her over like she was the daily special. Miller saw the wariness in her eyes: Leave me alone, okay? She looked up at the door like she was waiting for someone. Miller knew she wasn’t. Up close, he saw the hints of wear and tear. A faded thumbprint bruise on her cheek. A tiny pimple from too much makeup on her chin. Suddenly he thought he could help her, if she’d let him close enough to try. He wanted to help her. The first time since that second bomb that he’d cared about anything.
Urquhart gave up looking after a minute. “Chicks like that, forget it,” he muttered. “Waste of time.”
“Yeah.” But Miller already knew he wasn’t leaving until she did. Even if he couldn’t imagine working up the nerve to talk to her. He drank slow and careful and peeked at her while she nursed a Jack-and-Coke and a basket of fries. Then, at halftime, two guys came over to her table.
Miller knew them from high school. Their names, anyway. Don and Rob. They’d been seniors when he was a sophomore. The kinda guys who had parties Miller didn’t hear about until a week later. Don’s dad owned the biggest dairy in the county, if Miller remembered right. They wore purple University of Washington caps. Heresy around here, and a status symbol. Washington State was in Pullman, fifteen miles away. UW was in Seattle.
She shook her head.
“Come on, babe,” Don said. “We don’t bite.”
“I’m waiting for somebody.”
“I’m Don.” Don reached for his wallet, tilted it toward the woman so she couldn’t avoid noticing that it was thick with bills. “What’s your name?”
“Allie.”
“Tell you what, Allie. I’ll buy you a drink, tell you a joke. You don’t think it’s funny, we go back to the bar, you can drink alone. Until your friend comes, I mean.”
“All right.” Her voice small. Like she didn’t have the energy to argue.
“Knock, knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Dwayne.”
“Dwayne who?”
“Dwayne the bathtub! I’m dw-owning!”
Rob chortled. The dutiful wingman. They pulled up chairs and spent the next two hours pushing drinks on her, patient and skillful as wolves separating a lame deer from the herd.
One shot. One won’t hurt. How about Jäger? That goes down smooth—
You’re from L.A.? Cool, a buddy of mine from Seattle’s an actor there. He’s been in commercials, wants me to move down, but I tell him this is God’s country—
Yeah, I was dating someone for a while, but she just wasn’t the one. I mean, she was pretty, but I didn’t think she understood me. In fact, I feel more connected to you already. Believe it, ’cause it’s true—
All the old, tired crap, like if Don kept shoveling, he’d build a pile high enough to jump over her walls. Allie laughed dutifully. A few times, Miller thought she was trying to catch his eye.
As the Falcons game ended, she went to the bathroom. She took mincing steps between the tables, the way Miller had in the first weeks at Walter Reed. She came back with her face still wet from the water she’d splashed on it to sober herself up.
“I gotta go.”
“We’ll take you.”
“It’s okay. Few blocks.”
“No trouble, really. Wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble.” Don showed her his milk-white teeth.
Miller had seen enough. Why did rich people always think they could have whatever they wanted? They were going to wheedle her until she gave in or exhausted herself saying no.
Suddenly he was next to her. He hadn’t moved that fast since Ranger School.
“She said no.”
Don looked up with genuine shock. Like a beer bottle had started talking. “The fuck are you.” Not a question, because Don’s tone made clear he couldn’t have cared less.
“You don’t have to do this,” she muttered.
“You want them, I’ll go.”
She laughed, a flash of the cool girl she’d once been. “Do I want them? What do you think?”
“Tell you what she doesn’t want,” Don said. “A little brown man with holes in his face.”
Miller flashed back to Kandahar, sighting on a Talib and squeezing the trigger, the guy spinning sideways, legs splayed, gray-brown jacket flaring out as he fell.
He stepped around the table, stood over Don. Every conversation in the bar shut down at once.
Don’s lips twitched in an I can’t believe this smile. He pushed himself up. He was six inches taller than Miller, broad-shouldered, stinking of aftershave. “Three seconds, amigo, two, one—”
Don swung his meaty fist in a looping roundhouse. He was big and strong, but alcohol had dulled his reflexes. Miller remembered the sergeants at Basic: Get in close and end it. If you’re not winning, you’re losing. He ducked, shoved Don against the wall, wrapped his right hand around the bigger man’s neck, squeezed the thick flesh there, feeling the Adam’s apple beneath his palm.
Don grabbed for Miller’s wrist, but now being smaller helped. Miller held on as Don flailed. After five long seconds, Miller twisted away, wrapped his left arm around Don’s shoulders, wrenched him off the wall, stuck out a leg to trip him. Don fell on all fours, his breathing shallow and ragged. Miller needed every bit of the discipline the Army had taught not to kick him in the ribs and do real damage, the kind that would get him arrested. Urquhart shadowed Rob on the other side of the table. Miller had known Urquhart would have his back.
Don pushed himself to his feet, rubbing his throat, coughing wetly.
“Want her that bad, Romeo? Go for it. Take it from me, get her tested first.”
Miller had kept his trailer tidy even in the worst of his depression. Some remnant of military discipline. He was glad now. Allie slept on his couch. But just before dawn, she slipped into his bed. Still dressed. He didn’t know what she wanted. And he was afraid to betray his ignorance. She smelled of sweet, cheap shampoo. He wanted to bury his face in her hair, but he couldn’t move.
A little brown man with holes in his face. And he thought he deserved her?
“Tom Miller. Real name?” Her voice was low. With a hint of a European accent, though Miller couldn’t be sure. Like she’d been born here but her parents somewhere else.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She was silent for a minute that felt like an hour. “Thank you, Tom Miller.”
“Got tired of the way they were looking at you.”
She took his hand, wrapped her long fingers around his. “I’m so tired.” Her breathing softened, and she was asleep. As sudden as an infant. And he slept, too.
When he woke, he half expected her to be gone. Maybe the truck, too. But she sat at the trailer’s kitchen table, drinking apple juice. She’d taken off her sweater. Her bra wasn’t fancy. It didn’t need to be. She had the most beautiful breasts Miller had ever seen. Not too-round, like Chloe’s, but full and real. A faded yellow bruise stretched down her right bicep.
She’d opened the trailer’s back windows. Miller heard the stream rushing, the jays outside.
“I think I’d like to stay a while.”
She could have told him that she was a murderer who had just escaped from death row and he would have said yes.
They moved her stuff from the motel that morning. She didn’t have much. A backpack and a little roller bag. She’d told him she’d gone from L.A. to Seattle and then realized Seattle was the same. Too many bars, too many nights she couldn’t remember. Or wished she couldn’t. She’d picked Colfax for its name; she’d lived in Denver, once upon a time, and remembered a bar she liked on Colfax Avenue there.
“Back then, I was beautiful. I thought I’d make it. There’s five thousand girls in L.A. just like me.”
“Shut up.”
“More. So I left. Guess what? I get here and I can’t even sit and watch the game without the whole thing starting again. What is it about me? I would have let them, you know. It’s like—”
She went silent. He was already used to her silences. He liked them.
“Like I forgot I even had a choice.”
He offered her his bed. She insisted on the couch. On her fifth night, she crept in with him, as she had the first morning. “You don’t like me, Tom.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Then why don’t you try?” She leaned in, kissed him.
The thought of being with her panicked him. Like looking into the sun. “You don’t have to.”
She kissed him again, her tongue darting into his mouth. “Let me.”
So he did. She was gentle with him. Kind, even when the first time ended almost before it started.
“I’m not much of a lover.” He couldn’t remember ever saying the word before.
“You’ll get better.”
“What about—” He had a box of condoms in his bathroom cabinet. He hadn’t even thought about them. “You know.” Crazy for him to be shy, considering how many guys she must have been with, but he couldn’t help himself.
She touched his fingers to her bicep so he could feel the capsule inside. “Norplant.”
Miller felt a tinge of disappointment that he couldn’t make her pregnant. And, naïve as he was, he knew he was lost.
She smoked pot every afternoon. The only thing he would have changed about her. He couldn’t tell her. Instead, he smoked with her. She had her own stash. When it was gone, they bought more from a head shop in Pullman. She liked the high-THC stuff, a brand called Mind Eraser. Truth in advertising. They’d light up around 2, sit on the couch, watch soap operas. Try to watch them, anyway. The afternoon would vanish. Around 5 or 6, they’d come down. She’d snuggle in his arms until he microwaved some pizza.
Until the night he felt her hot tears on his arm. Her face was pale. Despairing.
He stroked her hair. Thought of the newborn mice who lived under this trailer, tiny and mewling. He feared she’d vanish if he said the wrong words, whatever spell keeping her here would end.
“I’m dirty inside,” she said.
“You’re the most perfect person I’ve ever met.”
“Do you ever think they used up all the good in you?”
Miller didn’t need to ask who they were. “You’re safe now.”
“What if I’m not? What if they’re watching?”
“No one’s watching.”
“They don’t even have to. You know what I mean?”
He did. They were always watching. Waiting to see how much more they could take from him. He wondered what they’d taken from this woman.
They weren’t the police. They owned the police.
“Maybe.”
“Like wanting to punish God,” she said. “No point even thinking about it.”
“Forget it, then.”
But she shook her head.
To balance the afternoon munchies, he started exercising hard in the morning, running and push-ups and sit-ups—simple stuff. He couldn’t fix his skin, but he could get himself in shape. He bought her boots, and they went for easy hikes near Spokane, around the Columbia River.
He bought one of those Be a better lover pornos, too. One night she said, Yes, that’s it. Yes, please. She wrapped her arms around him and moaned, and he thought, If I die right now, it’s okay. Better than okay.
He kept waiting for her to ask for money, but she didn’t. Still, he knew the bill was coming due.
Winter now. A new year. They were each other’s whole world. They hardly went anywhere. He’d never seen Urquhart after that night at the Hyde Out. Allie didn’t want him to tell Urquhart that she was still in Colfax. I want to vanish for a while. Be nobody. Nowhere. So he was nobody, too.
They were in bed. Wednesday night. One week after those terrible attacks in Dallas. She put a hand on his stomach, tracing the new muscle there.
“If I leave, Tom—”
“What?” He was out of the bed on his feet. Watching. Hyperaware.
“If I leave, I want you to know it’s not you.”
He wanted to tell her, You can’t, never. But he’d imagined this conversation before, the way he’d imagined his own death. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t beg. Or threaten. Wouldn’t join the endless ranks of men telling her what to do.
“Baby.” All he could think to say.
“What if it’s not safe here either?”
“We’ll find someplace.”
“You don’t know what I’m talking about, Tom. You think you do, but you don’t. If I go—”
“Don’t say that, Allie, please—”
“Promise you won’t try to find me.”
He lay back beside her, but he couldn’t sleep.
In the morning, he went for a run. When he came back, the truck was gone. The note on the counter said he could find it on Main Street, outside the hardware store where the Greyhounds stopped.
Remember what I said. Don’t try to find me. There are things I haven’t told you, things I can’t tell anyone. They make me too angry. They make me dangerous.
These months have been the best of my life, Tom. I can’t forget you, and staying away will be the hardest thing in the world, but I want you to forget me.
Always yours, always faithful, always love,
Allie
He was dizzy, and the words danced the way they had when he’d tried to read after the IED. He tore the note to pieces. He wanted to do the same to the trailer. He would never hurt her, but right then he wanted to kill her. How could she take herself from him? The cruelest of the world’s tricks. He’d been furious when his mother died. Now he wanted to lie on his bed and close his eyes and will his heart to stop.
In the bathroom, he checked the little orange bottles. Fifty Klonopin. A good start. About twenty Ambien. Plus the liter of Smirnoff in the freezer. Yeah, that would do—
Then he thought of what she’d written . . . staying away will be the hardest thing in the world . . .
No. He wasn’t taking the easy way out. The coward’s way. He would wait for her. Even if he had to wait his whole life. Because she was coming back.
When she did, he would do what he needed to make sure they were together. Forever.