The Missionary

Nightmares hounded her. She had to have lights on, all the time. She’d tried sleeping with the lights off the first night she’d been home. She’d spent the first few days back Stateside with her parents, and she’d woken up screaming, thrashing, sobbing. The darkness had been alive. Waiting. Hungry. The darkness had been waiting to take her back, to drag her into the hole with the scratching, crawling things and the beatings and the needles.

She hadn’t been able to sleep again that night at all. Even with the light on, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Even after being taken to the doctor and prescribed sleeping pills, she couldn’t find any rest. The sleeping pills were worse, really. They would trap her in the nightmares, keep her under so she couldn’t escape them by waking up. She’d be trapped in that black pit, waiting to be punched and kicked, waiting for the needle in her vein. She would start to drift off, and then she would jerk awake, hand clapped over her forearm, huddled against the headboard.

Her parents hadn’t known how to cope, how to help. Therapy, talking through it, only forced her to relive the horror. She’d stopped going, against her parents’ insistence. So, she’d taken a bus back to her dorm room, to hide. The start of the semester helped, nominally. Going to classes let her pretend she was fine. She could forget while listening to an anthropology lecture, or while doing calculus.

It hadn’t been an easy transition back home. There had been news stories, interview requests—which she’d turned down—reunions with her friends and family. She’d spent days in the hospital in Manila, and then more in a hospital Stateside. Psychological evaluations, police reports. Follow-up appointments with her family’s doctor. Visits from just about everyone from LifeBride. Apologies from Nick and Pastor Len and the staff. She accepted the apologies, but didn’t think she’d be going back to LifeBridge any time soon.

She’d had visits from just about everyone.

Except the one person she wanted to see: Stone.

She hadn’t seen or heard from Stone since they’d parted at the airport. He’d hugged her, kissed her, promised he come see her, and now a week had passed, and she hadn’t heard a word.

Until today. He’d called her, asked her if she wanted to have dinner with him. Like, on a date. It seemed strange, unnecessary. They’d witnessed death together. They’d run for their lives together. They’d had mind- blowing sex together. And now he wanted to sit in some noisy restaurant and chat about…what? The weather? Sports? The latest episode of The Big Bang Theory?

He knew where she lived; why hadn’t he come to see her? Did he regret sleeping with her? Did he just want to forget everything?

Wren shuddered, let the blouse she’d just pulled off the hanger slip through her fingers as she slumped to the floor, choking on sobs that wouldn’t come out. She gasped, dry-heaving as the sobs caught in her throat. She hadn’t cried. Not once. Not alone, not in therapy, not with her Mom. She wasn’t okay, and she knew it, but she couldn’t cry. She wished she could. She felt the sobs pent up inside her, pressure building within like a shaken bottle of soda with the lid screwed on tight.

A soft knock on her door startled her, but she couldn’t get to her feet. She tried, but she couldn’t. Everything was spinning, but she was weighed down by the hundred tons of nightmare-memories and lack of sleep and shock she couldn’t deal with. And she missed Stone—she missed him so bad she couldn’t breathe. He’d rescued her and fought for her and killed for her and bled for her and comforted her without having to speak and he was gone, he wasn’t here and she missed him.

She was huddled on the floor of her bedroom, in the corner by her dresser, wearing nothing but a pair of barely-there lacy panties.

And then he was in front of her, huge and warm and comforting.

“Someone let me in when I told them I was picking you up,” he said by way of explanation. “Hey. Talk to me, babe.”

Wren didn’t have any words. She blinked, peered up at him, saw his tan face and rugged features, close- cropped dark blond hair, soft brown eyes tender with compassion.

“I—” What was she supposed to say?

Stone seemed to understand. He scooped her up, one arm beneath her knees, the other around her shoulders, and lifted her as if she weighed nothing. He favored his leg a little, but that was the only sign of having two bullet holes in his body. He slid onto the bed, his long legs crumpling her discarded clothes.

He smelled clean, like soap and faint, spicy cologne. His shirt smelled like fabric softener, warm and soft. She burrowed against his hard chest, wrapped her arms around his neck and held on.

“I can’t—can’t sleep. Can’t eat. I still feel the craving for that drug. I can’t even say the word. Heroin. Part of me wants, needs the heroin, and it’s eating me up inside. Not all the time. The dreams. Stone, the dreams…they—they’re inside me. Like, I held it together when I was going through it. I just wanted to live, to not be sold. You rescued me. Saved me. Stayed with me. And now I’m back home and it’s all wrong. I’m wrong. It’s like I’m not here.” She was speaking in a stumbling rush, the words suddenly pouring out, because it was Stone, and he knew. “I’m not here. Does that sound crazy? Like I got left behind, somehow. Part of me is still over there. Still in Manila, in that hole, that fucking black hole with the bugs and the drugs and the darkness and him, Cervantes, hitting me. Holding me down and sticking that needle into me. I’m still there, and this…this body, this me is some other Wren. Who am I, now, Stone? How am I supposed to be here? Those other girls? What happens to them? They don’t get to go home. They didn’t have Stone to rescue them.”

Stone grimaced. “That’s what I have nightmares about. Those other girls. After that first mission, the one that went wrong? It was Cervantes then, too. The innocent girls, no more than children. They haunted my dreams for…months. And now they’re back, with different faces. The same faces. I see Lisa, too. Over and over again. Lisa Johnson, naked and starving, track marks on her skin, bruises and scabs and matted hair and eyes that said she’d never really be whole again. And I see you, in that room.” His voice was low, a murmur like thunder rolling somewhere beyond a midnight horizon.

“I pray…” Wren wiped at her eye with a thumb, at the wetness leaking down that still refused to be the tears she needed to shed. “I pray, Stone. But God doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t take away the memories.”

“You know how many nights I laid awake in bed, unable to sleep for the dreams? Unable to focus on anything because the nightmares didn’t stop when I was awake. They didn’t stop, you know? They just became memories. I’d lay in bed and watch the moon move over the horizon, praying, begging to God to take the memories and give me five fucking seconds of peace. Sometimes I think I believe in God because I’ve seen His presence, but I don’t always believe like other people at church, like Nick believes. I’ve seen good things. I’ve seen the sunrise on the wide open ocean from the deck of an aircraft carrier, and that…that’s glorious. Sunsets in the Alps. A full moon on fresh snow. People banding together to help each other, doing selfless things, acts of courage and heroism. I’ve seen men who should be dead get up and walk away and kiss their wives and kids, and the only explanation is that God protected them. I’m still alive, and I’ve had some ridiculously close calls. Felt like God protected me when I should have died. So I believe in God, I believe in His existence. He’s real. That’s a fact as immutable as sunrise and sunset and the basic physics of the universe. But sometimes, I don’t understand Him. I don’t get why He lets such horrible shit go on in this world He created. Why good things happen to bad people, and vice-versa. Those questions people struggle with all the time, you know? I struggle with them, too, just like everyone else.

“Except…for guys like me, who’ve seen the most vile things humanity can offer…those questions are worse. And I don’t have any answers, Wren. I’ve never found any answers. I learned to sleep at night, over time. I try to accept that what happened, happened, and nothing I do can change it. I accept that I saw what I saw. I did what I did. I pulled the trigger. I have to own that. I have blood on my hands, Wren. So much. I can’t ever escape that. Even though the men I killed were all awful, evil men, drug dealers and killers and rapists—bad guys—they were still people. They may have had wives or kids, a mother. A father. Someone who would miss them. I ended them, ended that. And I have to live with it. The times I failed, the missions we fucked up, the bad guys who got away, I have to live with that too.” Stone’s voice quavered, and Wren didn’t dare look at him. The torment in his voice was too raw and personal. “I helped people. That leavens the guilt. I saved people. I saved entire fucking villages. Towns. Killed the cartel kingpin and freed them from his tyranny. Stopped the terrorist from making more car- bombs and killing innocent people. But…it’s all there. And you have to get up every day and live your life and not let it define you, not let it drag you down.

“Does belief in God help, all the time? No. Not really. He won’t take the memories away, in my experience. But it helps to believe that there’s a plan I’m too small to see. A plan I can’t understand. A purpose to things.