“They’re already dead,” I whisper. “They were dead the moment I stepped out of the car.”
But I know that’s not true.
For those two kids—for little Casey and David—they were dead the instant they met me.
Fifty
I wake to darkness. I’m lying in my bed. The fan in the corner is blowing, set to low. I rub my eyes, start to sit up, but stop when I see that I’m not alone.
Nova sits in a chair beside the door. He has it tipped back on two legs, leaning against the wall. My eyes are adjusted enough to the dark that I can see his eyes are closed.
I sit up straight. I do it slow enough that the frame doesn’t squeak. I swing my feet out. I start to stand.
“Who’s Karen?”
Nova opens his eyes, stares straight back at me.
I reach out, turn on the lamp beside the bed, sit back down. The frame squeaks loudly like it always does.
“What?”
“You talked in your sleep. You mentioned the name Karen a couple times.”
“She’s my lesbian lover. There, I’m out of the closet. Happy now?”
His face remains impassive. His gaze stays steady with mine.
I glance at the alarm clock. Almost ten o’clock. I’ve been asleep for over four hours.
“Do you really want to know who Karen is?”
“Do you really want to tell me?”
I don’t answer right away. I’d never planned on telling Nova about Karen. The only two people in the world who knew about her besides Walter were Zane and my father. Are Zane and my father, I have to remind myself.
“It has to do with the first person I ever killed.”
He leans forward, drops the chair back down on four legs.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” he says.
“No, I want to.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
But it does matter. It matters because right now Nova is the only person in the world I trust. He is always there, no matter how much I treat him like shit. I never had an older brother, someone to look out for me, to stand up for me. Nova, despite his arrogance, makes the perfect substitute.
So I tell him about Karen. A shy twenty-one-year-old girl out of Topeka, Kansas. A girl who had blond hair and blue eyes and an accent that grated on your nerves after five seconds. But she had a good heart. She was sweet. She entered the Army because she didn’t do well in school. She tried, but no matter how hard she studied, she always received poor grades. The only places that would hire her were fast-food restaurants and the local mom-and-pop grocery store.
But Karen didn’t want that. She wanted to make a difference.
We came to Iraq around the same time. We were assigned the same barracks.
Within a minute of arriving Karen introduced herself to me and the rest of the girls. She told each of us her life story. She told us about her boyfriend back home who was a mechanic. She told us about how he had promised they would get married after her tour of duty. She told us about the house they would buy, the small yard, the back porch, the children they would have (one boy and one girl) and how during the summers they would rent an RV and one year travel to the Atlantic, the next year to the Pacific.
None of the other girls cared much for Karen. They especially hated her accent. She would even say things like “y’all” and “how do.” I seemed to be the only one who could stomach her, and because of this we became fast friends.
Karen wasn’t afraid of danger. She knew how to handle her weapon. She knew how to fight. She could run a mile in under five minutes. She could do fifty pushups without breaking a sweat. For a small, petite girl out of Topeka, Kansas, she was a true spitfire.
Why I got along with Karen, I still don’t know. Sometimes I thought it was because I was so exotic to her. I couldn’t imagine there being many Asian Americans in Topeka. And if there were, I couldn’t imagine many of them wasting their time with a girl like Karen. But she had her surprises.
At nights I would lie in my bunk and turn on my iPod and listen to music. Tool, Sublime, Radiohead, Linkin Park, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots. Karen asked me once if she could listen. I gave her my earbuds, thinking she wouldn’t care for any of the songs. But she closed her eyes and smiled and started bouncing her head to the music. When she took the earbuds out, she asked me what my favorite band was.
I told her it was a toss-up between Tool and Alice in Chains.
“Both are great,” she said. “I do love Maynard. He’s just so mysterious, you know?”
And she smiled mischievously, something I hadn’t expected from this girl who I thought only listened to Dolly Parton and Travis Tritt and Garth Brooks.
I asked her what her favorite band was. She said she didn’t know, she had so many.
“But do you wanna know what my favorite song is? Lemme see your iPod again.”
She scrolled through the list and selected a song, handed me the earbuds.
I put them in. There was a moment of silence, and then I heard the pulsing bass and then the heavy guitars and then Zack De La Rocha started up about how the main attraction is distraction. The song was “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine.
I asked Karen why she liked it so much. She said she loved that one line, the one about the front line being everywhere and there being no shelter anywhere. She said
