It would have been the perfect, utterly romantic moment. Except he had a blueberry muffin crumb on his nose.
“Um….” I said.
“What?”
I shook my head, then reached out and grabbed the crumb. “Blueberry,” I said.
And then we were both laughing. He pulled me to him and we kissed, hard, and he said, “Let’s take a walk. And ... I can tell you some of it.”
And so we walked, holding hands, toward the park. He let go of my hand and put his arm around my waist, pulling me closer to him. I leaned my head close, and Ray started to talk.
“So ... let me ask you this ... how much do you know about the war?”
“Basically nothing.”
“Read any books about … wars in general? Fiction? War movies?”
I shook my head. “Don’t laugh. I mostly read contemporary romance. It’s got to have a happy ending.”
He nodded, seriously, and said, “I’d never laugh at that. Real life should be that way.”
I smiled and squeezed his hand. Maybe our life could be like that. But I didn’t say it out loud.
“Anyway,” he said. “What about ... you’ve probably studied group dynamics? Mob behavior, that sort of thing?”
“Um, hello, that’s what I do. Sort of.”
“Right. Sorry ... I guess I’m avoiding the issue.” He sighed, then said, “Look ... things got ... savage over there. We had a lot of casualties, very quickly. My whole fire team was decimated ... two guys killed, and Dylan wounded. And it just got ... worse and worse.”
I just held his hand as we walked. I knew this couldn’t be easy to talk about. All I could do was listen, I guess, and be there.
“Anyway ... the thing is. I saw something. A…”
He stopped again. He was struggling to talk, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, his jaw so tight with anger I was shocked. He stopped walking and faced me, and said, “I witnessed ... a war crime.”
He looked me in the eye and exhaled as he said the words. I took his other hand in mine. What did he mean? What war crime? What had he seen?
He looked at me and said, “Carrie. You need to know ... I’m falling for you. Hard and fast. But the possibility exists….”
His face twisted, and he stopped talking again. I lost patience and said, “What? What is it?”
He squeezed my hands, closed his eyes and whispered, “Before I left the Army, I ... I put together evidence. Photographs. Notes. And I wrote a report about what happened. And I dropped it in a mailbox addressed to the Inspector General’s office in Washington.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Carrie ... what I’m telling you is ... eventually someone’s going to do an investigation. And I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“But ... you did the right thing. You reported it.”
“I didn’t stop it.”
“Could you have?”
He looked away from me, his jaw tight, his expression almost tortured, and he said, “I don’t know. I just ... I don’t know. I wish I’d tried.”
And then he shook. Just once. Like ... an eruption. The emotion that was running through him was suppressed, raw, bitter. So I did the only thing I could. I wrapped my arms around him, and I whispered in his ear, “We’ll get through this together.”
No respect at all (Ray)
It was silent in the waiting room, except for the occasional quiet talk at the nurses’ station and echoes down the hall of people walking, talking. But in here? Nothing.
Sarah sat in the corner. She had her knees pulled up, feet resting on the edge of her seat, arms wrapped around her legs, chin resting on her knees. She stared off into space, not moving. She hadn’t spoken since the doctor left, forty-five minutes before. Every once in a while, she’d look around the room, glance over toward me, then go back to staring into space.
I couldn’t help but wonder what was going through her head, what she was thinking and feeling. I tried to imagine myself, at seventeen, knowing that they might have to amputate my leg in order to keep me alive.
I’d be pretty screwed up too.
In the meantime, I sat next to Carrie, opposite where Jessica leaned against her. Jessica had her phone out. She was online, and as best as I could tell, she was messaging with friends about the accident. Carrie was slumped back in her seat, her head resting against the wall, mouth slightly open, eyes closed. She wasn’t asleep. I knew that because every time we heard footsteps approaching or near the room, her eyes would open, searching out the sound. She was waiting for further word from the doctors.
I rested my hand on hers. Actually, when I wasn’t paying attention, it was in hers. I don’t know if it helped. I don’t know if it made any difference at all, if she had even the vaguest sense that I was there, that I was thinking about her and hurting for her and praying for her. All I could do was try. All I could do was be here. All I could give her was my love, even if she never knew.
I guess there was one other thing I could do. I could fight. I could fight to survive. I just didn’t know how. I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t change anything. How the hell do you fight to survive when you’re nothing but a ghost?
She looked so tired. We’d had ... a not very easy time. Was it just two weeks ago she’d come into the condo and collapsed on the couch next to me, and said, “Let’s just run away?”
I hugged her and said, “Okay. How about the circus.”
She nodded, her face serious. “Okay. But why the circus?”
I shrugged. “You’ll be the lion tamer. I’ll be your sexy assistant. They’ll never find us.”
She had laughed, hard. It was
