hurts so much. Maybe we could go for a walk once a day, huh? Just up and down the street a little. Loosen you up.”
“With you pregnant out to here.”
“Ah, so what. I could use the exercise, too. I’m sick of not being able to run.” I kneaded his muscles, first one side and then the other, working my hands in tandem. He rolled his neck, then took a final drag of his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. The sallow light from the lamp beside him illuminated only one side of his face, leaving the other in shadow. The memory of him lying on his back on Stan’s futon came back to me just then. He had seemed like a stone wall, nothing but muscles and uniform and an elaborate set of fighting reflexes ready to go. Now it seemed as though all of that had pulled inward, like blood retreating toward the heart when one is in danger of freezing. But pride still guarded the perimeter of his mind from invaders like me.
“We’ll go,” I affirmed, letting his silence be his answer. “You and me.”
“Sure.” He let his head drop back against the easy chair. “You always smell like Starbursts.”
I laughed and scratched gently along his hairline, and he cocked his head like a dog getting its ears scratched. Candy had cut his hair in the kitchen the other day, buzzing him with the clippers after she’d trimmed each of her boys. The white of his scalp showed through clearly beneath his dark brown hair. He smiled, and I rested my hands on his shoulders. Eyes closed, he crossed his arms over his chest and laid his big hands over mine. “You kill me, Jill,” he said. “You really do.”
I headed upstairs to my bedroom and curled up around Cade, who had propped himself up on the pillows to work on his laptop. He draped his arm lazily across my back and continued to peck at the keyboard with his left hand.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Okay. He said he’d go.”
“That’s good. You must be persuasive.”
I burrowed my head beneath his arm and breathed out a sigh against his chest. Guilt gnawed deep in my belly, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I thought back to the evenings I had spent with Stan, and how even as his arms had comforted me, I knew where the boundaries lay—where I belonged, and with whom. I had felt so lonely then, but my kind of loneliness was nothing more than physical separation from the one I loved. It was nothing next to Elias’s kind—to be broken and sick, shell-shocked, lost inside his own mind that could never quite come home.
I told myself I meant no harm by it. That I carried no intention of touching him in any way that wasn’t chaste. And if he liked it a little more than he should, then perhaps he would remember that he was a twenty-four-year-old man, and he would get up from his easy chair and go out in search of a woman who could offer him more. One who wasn’t pregnant with his brother’s child.
If it had worked even a little, then it would have been worth the world.
Instead, it didn’t work at all.
The following Wednesday morning Elias climbed into the Jeep without any apparent nervousness. He said almost nothing for the long drive, taking charge of changing out the CDs at intervals, and that was all. At home he never listened to music, but on the floor behind the passenger seat he had a padded black case packed full of CDs arranged in little plastic sleeves, and his taste in music disarmed me. All of his selections were women with sweet soprano voices—Alison Krauss and Faith Hill and Kate Bush. It was a world apart from the music that blasted from the stereo at gun-club meetings. But it seemed to soothe him, and he gazed out at the scenery the whole way, chain-smoking with the window rolled down.
At the VA hospital we settled into the waiting room for a little while, and when they took him back I opened a magazine and prepared for a long wait. But within fifteen minutes he was back again, a pink form and a prescription in one hand, looking satisfied.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. They’re taking me off the Prozac and putting me on something else.” He held up the paperwork. “I told them I just wanted something to calm me down, and didn’t need all this antidepressant shit that screws with my body. So that’s that.”
“So what they gave you isn’t an antidepressant?”
“No, it’s just some sort of anti-anxiety medication. Pretty cool. It sounds a lot simpler. And they gave me better pain meds, too. You were right.”
“What about counseling or support groups or anything like that?”
He shook his head. “I don’t need any of that. Sit around with a bunch of other loads and talk about the past? No thanks.”
I got up from the chair, accepting the hand he offered to help pull me to standing. “It’s not like that, though. I’m telling you, those groups can make all the difference in the world. My mom swore by them.” I glanced at the pamphlet display on the wall. “They must have
“Don’t worry about it, Jill. This’ll do me. Come on.”
He started out the door, and I followed him. I wished Cade were here with me, able to back me up, because Cade believed as much as I did that Elias needed to reconnect with people—old friends, other soldiers, anybody who didn’t live in our one little household. Elias had lived in this town all his life—surely those people were all around us, the friends he had grown up with, the women he must have loved. And yet he seemed like someone lingering just outside the doorway of a school dance, unsure how to make his entrance, or if stepping into the crowd would only amplify the loneliness inside him.
As we climbed into the Jeep he didn’t say anything more, and I turned my attention to the drive. Partway back, as Alison Krauss sang “
Chapter 13
The little girl always unnerved him. She lived in the mud hut at the end of the road, a dust-caked old crapheap not fit to store a broken lawn mower, but her eyes were green. Green, like a regular person’s; faceted, luminous and edged all around with deep black kohl, even though she was only seven or eight years old. A tiny whore. Elias knew it was normal, all that eyeliner, that Pashtun kids wore it all the time. Many of the men in their families, heterosexual or so they claimed, used it, too. More than three years in the country, in and out, living in the grit and smelling their sweat and eating some of the shit they called food, and he still didn’t get these people. Savages all. Scrabbling to survive, living in the Stone Age. The children wore rags and threw rocks at dogs. They had their strange and vengeful God, their mothers whose hands fluttered to cover their faces with swaths of black, like caped vampires. More than anything, Elias wanted to get the fuck out of there. More than anything, he believed he had fallen through the quicksand of Pashtun country and into some sort of nightmare gnome hole where the bright upper world would never look the same again.
The green-eyed girl wore bracelets—bangles that clinked when she played—and a ratty teal skirt too short by half a foot. Her auburn hair had a blaring reddish sheen that he would have thought was fake if he hadn’t known better, too rock-and-roll to be real, but nevertheless it was hers. It was thick and longish and blunt cut above those eyes. There was a permanent crust under the girl’s nose. She ran back and forth from her family’s place to the market, or to her aunt’s or cousins’, because everybody here was related to everybody else and deep in the night on patrol it made your skin crawl to think of all those ancient people plotting against you, jabber-whispering in their strange language, and all those relatives fucking.
The problem with intel was that everybody knew things and nobody could document a single one of them. In the military there were the intel people, those whose job it was to fish for information and get it all square and pass it up to the right people, and then there were the guys on the ground, the ones in Elias’s unit, who saw things and heard them but whose knowledge was met with shrugs. Little crumbs of intelligence. Piled up together, they meant
