Her features were the opposite: cinnamon-brown complexion, silky black hair, eyes brown and bottomless, skin the texture of a ripened peach.
They were an odd couple-the thirty-year-old white war veteran and the slightly older black nurse. At least it looked odd from the outside. But Richard never found it to be strange. They’d clicked the first time they met, when he saw her working in the physical therapy unit at the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center.
He’d asked her out for coffee after finishing his appointment and they went to the hospital cafeteria to drink cappuccino and speak of their pasts. He told her that he was a Special Forces soldier whose third tour in Afghanistan had been cut short by a roadside bomb. She told him that her only brother-a twenty-one-year-old grunt who was barely out of boot camp-had been killed by a grenade in Iraq.
As the few minutes they’d intended to spend together stretched to hours, she told him that she hated working at the V.A. because of the misery and apathy she often found there. But she stayed in the hopes of helping other soldiers the way she wished she could’ve helped her brother. While doing a job she despised, she hid her pain from everyone around her; everyone, that is, except Richard.
He instantly recognized her grief because it mirrored his own. It was the same emotional pain he’d hidden when he’d seen his comrades gunned down near Kabul. It was identical to the pain he’d suppressed when he returned home and found himself isolated. It matched the grief he felt whenever he thought of his past. That’s why it was so easy for him to see Corrine’s hurt crouching behind forced smiles. He knew he had to make her pain go away.
For months, Richard and Corinne comforted each other, slowly drawing out bits and pieces of the things war had taken from them. Corrine told him that she’d lost her joy. Richard admitted that he’d lost his compassion. They both said they’d lost opportunities to love, and vowed not to lose one more.
Slowly they began to leave war behind. Richard allowed his military high and tight to grow out until his hair reached his shoulders. Corrine’s sad demeanor gave way to an easy smile. Their whirlwind courtship led to marriage, and when they bought the house on the corner of 33rd and Cecil B. Moore, rehabbing it with their own hands, the imperfect neighborhood was just like their lives. It was somewhere between the horrors of war and the safety of peace. The direction they took from there would be up to them, or so they hoped.
On this night, as they lay in each other’s arms, waiting for the blackout to end, they both realized that some things were beyond their control. These things included the scars they’d suffered in the past. They’d already dealt with the emotional ones, but for Richard, especially, some physical scars remained.
As Corrine lay in his arms, she reached for one such scar. It was ugly and purple, and it knifed down the left side of his powerful chest. When her slender fingers touched it and lingered there, Richard braced himself for the inevitable question.
“Where did this come from?”
“We’ve been over this, Corrine,” he said, gently moving her hand away from the old wound. “It happened in the war.”
“I know that, but-”
“Look,” he said with an edge to his voice. “I told you about every fight we won, every guy we lost, and every civilian who died. The truth is, I don’t remember where this scar came from and I don’t know if I want to. But I do know I love you, and that should be the only thing that matters.”
“You’re right Richard. It’s just that…”
“What? You think I’m hiding something from you?”
She lay back and ran her palm along his face, searching in the darkness until she found his eyes.
“Yes, I do,” she whispered playfully as she wrapped herself around him. “And you’re going to make me use everything I’ve got to get it out of you.”
Richard leaned back and looked at her, trying to see her face beyond the shadows. Then lightning flashed, filling the room with brilliant blue-white light. She smiled and he buried his face in her hair, whispering her name as only he could.
“Corrine.”
She giggled and reached for him as the rain smacked against the windows. But just as their lips were about to touch, the soothing sound of the downpour was interrupted by shattering glass.
Corrine sat up in bed. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Richard answered, reaching down to grab his pants from the floor. “Stay here.”
He got up and walked briskly down the hall. Then he descended the steps two at a time, his feet padding silently on the hardwood floor. When he entered the kitchen, he saw that one of the windows over the sink was broken.
“Probably the wind,” he said to himself, and reached up into a cabinet for a candle.
He lit it and searched the cabinet. When he found the roll of duct tape he was searching for, a shadow crept across the wall. The shape of it was unmistakable. It was a man.
Richard didn’t look up. Instead, he reached down into a drawer as his eyes darted back and forth across the room. He released the tape, wrapped his fingers around a kitchen knife, and hoped that he’d imagined what he’d seen. But when he turned around, he knew that it was real.
The man crashed through the kitchen door, lunging as Richard brought the knife down with all the force he could muster. The man yelped, like a dog, and stumbled back onto the counter as the blood from his wounded arm soaked through his shirt.
“Richard!” Corrine yelled from the bedroom.
“Stay there,” Richard managed to bark out as he slashed the man’s cheek with a sideways stroke of the knife.
The man ducked when Richard swung the knife back in the other direction. His fist pounded Richard’s kidney, knocking the breath from his body and forcing him back into a cabinet. The man rushed toward him. Richard gripped the knife with both hands and swung upward. The man grunted, and warm blood flowed from the ragged gash that extended the length of his stomach.
A second passed, then two. Richard’s heart beat wildly. The weight of the dead man pressed against him, pushing him into the cabinet as the blood saturated his clothes. The wind moaned and whisked through the broken glass in the kitchen. The rain fell in a thousand tiny drumbeats, tapping out its own timeless percussion.
As Richard pushed the man’s body to the floor, another sound tore through the house, biting into him like nails against a blackboard. The sound was Corrine. She was screaming.
“Help me!” she shrieked, and the wind seemed to fade into the echo of her voice.
Richard turned and ran toward the bedroom, slipping on the blood-soaked linoleum of the kitchen floor. He ran, pushing himself toward the sound of his wife screaming. He ran, forgetting the body that lay in his kitchen, the pain shooting from his side, the blood covering his hands. He had only to get to Corrine. And when he did-when his feet had carried him up the steps and into the bedroom-all he could see was a shadow in the darkness, straddling his wife as she struggled to free herself from its grip.
Richard charged into the room, slashing into the back of Corrine’s assailant with the knife. The man rolled onto the floor, arching his back against the pain when Richard brought the knife down again. Corrine joined the fray, her tiny fists striking the man’s head angrily. Richard pushed her away and raised the knife high into the air-a madness playing in his eyes as he delivered the killing blow.
A split second passed. Then something whistled through the air. Richard was momentarily blinded by a white flash of light as a burning sensation gripped the back of his leg. He dropped the knife and grabbed at the bullet wound, then turned around to see yet another shadow coming toward him.
Corrine screamed when the shadowy figure aimed a gun with a silencer. There was another whistling sound. This time, the heat glanced Richard’s shoulder. He reached for Corrine. There was a final silenced shot, and as the shooter lowered his weapon and retreated down the stairs and into the windswept rain, Corrine’s blood spilled onto Richard.
He wrapped his arms around his wife, and as her eyes went vacant, Richard’s mind went to a place he thought he’d forgotten. It was a place with bullets flying, people running, tires screeching, and a hell-bound cloud of black smoke filling the air.
He winced, not at the pain he was now experiencing from the wound in his leg, but at the pain he had once caused. Then he pulled a T-shirt from his drawer and wrapped the wound tightly, clenching his jaw while he tried to ignore the pain of the present and the past.
