Article 5

you’d be hurt. So I cut a deal. No more fights. No more you. And they’d promote me to show the others that the system always wins. I did whatever they said. I thought it would work, that they’d leave you alone, but it didn’t matter.

“It was the final test. Your extraction. They used you to break me.

“We took your mom to a base in Lexington, with all the other Article 5s in the state. She was put in a detention cell. My unit leader, Bateman—he was pissed off by what happened at your house. That I didn’t follow orders and stay in the car. He said I was out of line. I was a failure as a soldier. He reported me to command.”

He stopped there and leaned over his knees like he might vomit.

“Finish,” I demanded. I could barely hear him over the screaming in my brain.

“They brought me in front of the board for discipline. My CO was there. He told me that it was time to put my training into effect. That I could still make captain someday. He told me I could redeem myself by… by executing the detainees, starting with your mother. I told him no. I’m just a driver. I just transport. I told him to kick me out. Give me a dishonorable discharge.”

Chase punched his thigh again. I wept softly.

“He told me to follow orders. That if I didn’t do what he said, someone else would. That they’d pull you from school and do the same. I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I knew, Tucker was escorting me to her detention cell, and I had a gun in my hand.”

I wanted to scream at Chase to stop. But I had to hear. I had to know. The tears ran from his eyes freely now.

“Your mom. God. She had been crying. Her shirt was all wet. She saw me and she smiled, and she ran over to me and grabbed my jacket in her hands and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Chase.’ And I was there to kill her.

“I held the gun up, and she backed into a chair and sat there, watching me. Just watching me. I thought for a second I was going to do it. That I had to. But nothing happened. My CO was behind us. He told me to pull the damn trigger or I’d watch them murder you. Your mom heard him. She grabbed the gun in my hand, and she leaned in close and told me to find you, wherever you were, and take care of you. ‘My baby,’ she called you. She told me not to be scared. She told me not to be scared.

“And then he shot her. And… she died. A foot away from me. I don’t even know what happened afterward. I ended up in a holding cell for a week.”

Silence. Long, suffocating silence.

I felt my brain twisting, trying to understand, even as it was trying to erase the last thirty minutes.

“Maybe if you would have talked to your officer. Maybe if you had tried to tell him that she didn’t deserve this….” My voice sounded small.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You don’t know that! You didn’t even try! You could have talked to them and… and… you could have never come home…. In training you could have not been so… you! You could have told us to run!”

I felt as crazy as I sounded.

“I know.” He had no conclusion to this statement.

A frozen hammer against my skull. I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to.

“She’s dead,” I realized.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“You lied to me. You let me believe she was alive. In some safe house!” I screamed suddenly. Now there was anger. Hot and vicious and poisonous within me.

“I know.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“I would have, once you were away from all this. Maybe not all of it. I didn’t want you to know all of it. No one should have to hear all that.”

“So you can take it but I can’t? She’s my mother, Chase!”

“I didn’t mean you can’t handle it. I just mean… I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“You’d rather me believe a lie than be hurt? Who the hell gave you that authority?”

“I don’t know.” He was honest. He didn’t know what he was doing. His hands lay open on his knees before him, begging for some shred of direction to which he could cling.

I was rolling now. A snowball plunging down a hill. Knowing that at the bottom there was a brick wall that would smash me. That would break me into a million pieces.

“You knew all this from the very beginning. From the day you got me at school. You knew she was dead. You’d seen her dead. And you kept that from me.”

“Yes.”

Faster, I rolled on.

“How could you do that?”

He shook his head.

Twisting inside of me. Nothing is real.

“You said… you said all those things… and… I believed you.”

“Wait. Please. That was the truth,” he was pleading now.

I shook my head. There was no truth.

“Ember, I love you.”

His words hacked a bright new pain into me. I stared at him for a full second, horrified, recognizing that this was the first time he’d said these words. Thinking maybe the opposite was true. That Chase might actually hate me. That was why he lied about everything. That was why he kept hurting me. How could someone be so cruel?

His eyes were filled with what I’d once thought was honesty.

“I shouldn’t have said that now. It’s too much. I’m putting too much on you. But… Christ. I mean it, I—”

“No! I trusted you, and I thought it was right and it wasn’t right. It was a lie.” I felt ill then, disgusted by my own self. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to leave it in this dirty room with its ugly truths.

“It wasn’t like that. You know. Please know.”

His reached out to touch my hand.

“No!” I bawled. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me. Not ever again.”

I struck the wall. My world was crashing down. Everything I believed was scattered. False.

I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I rocked forward and hit him as hard as I could. My hand seized with pain from where it had connected to his jaw. I hit him again. Again. He didn’t try to stop me. He placed his hand beneath my elbow, giving me the strength to hit him harder.

When I had no punches left, I folded over my reeling stomach. I was no better than Roy, hitting my mother. I wanted violence to resolve my anguish. To show Chase how wrong he was. The parallel made my reality infinitely more devastating.

“It’s okay. Hit me. I deserve it.”

As though that would make it better. As though that would fix anything.

“No more,” I moaned.

He lifted his hands in surrender. “Ember, I’ll do whatever you want. Just please let me get you somewhere safe. That was the whole point in this. I knew that once you found out, you’d want to get as far away from me as possible, and if you believed your mom was in South Carolina, you’d let me take you there. I told you in the beginning, if you want me gone after that, I’m gone.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“Please. Just let me get you somewhere safe.”

All the slashes of pain inside. All the losses. My mother. Chase. Beth. Rebecca. Trust. Love. I had nothing left but the skeleton of integrity.

“No.”

“If you won’t listen to me, do it for her. Lori wanted you away from all this.”