Page 46 of The Burning
I looked at him. “Yeah?”
“Your hair looks really good like that,” he said, pointing toward my head. Self-consciously, I ran my hands over my hair.
He grabbed the old chair he was taking by one arm and wrapped his other one around the back of it. I stood there, not sure what to say outside of a mumbled “Thank you.”
He carried the chair out of the living room without looking back. I left the door unlocked so he could bring the plants in and waited in the kitchen until I heard the door close again. I was all over the place and he was confusing me more than ever. I was supposed to hate him, to never even consider speaking to him again, yet the smile on my face wouldn’t fade. I pulled the door shut tighter and locked both locks. I put the TV on and turned the volume up so I couldn’t hear Kael’s truck roar away from the curb. Now that I was in my little house again, alone, the plants were way less exciting than they had seemed earlier, most of their magic lost.
The chair was still as beautiful as ever, at least. I sat down on it, touching the fabric as I tried to relax and not think about the baby shower, and Kael, and how damn weird the day had been.
Chapter Nineteen
Kael
The baby shower turned out to be more beer bottle than baby bottle vibe. Essentially, it was a backyard barbecue with a few baby-themed decorations here and there. Which was fine, but it hardly differed from the typicalGood Luck!theme of an on-post BBQ.
When I first pulled up to the house, I wished that Karina would have agreed to come with me. Or that I would have stayed at her place just a little longer or talked to her more, asked her more questions about how she was and what she’d been up to. Part of me liked to have her as my little secret, but that was selfish; I hadn’t introduced her to the guys’ wives, but I knew the women would like her attitude and maybe even be inspired by her independence. I knew these wives weren’t her crowd, but they weren’t that bad, and at least Mendoza and Gloria would be around. If Karina would at least try to be friends with people, she would actually like Gloria. Their van was parked in front of the house, right next to Lawson’s green Mustang. Lawson was that kind of fucking guy: patriotic Army stickers decorated his bumper like he bought them in bulk and a pair of fuzzy dice from the whack era of the 2000s hung from the rearview.
I rang the doorbell and Tharpe’s wife, Toni, answered immediately. She was a tall woman, mostly legs and a big smile. Her cheekbones were harsh but pretty and her eyes were blanketed with lack of sleep, or too much to drink; I couldn’t tell just yet.
“Martin! I can’t believe you actually came!” she said, hugging me. She smelled like a keg of beer and the glittery body spray my sister used to wear when she was in middle school.
I pulled away, but with a smile. “Thanks for inviting me.”
Toni’s brown eyes were pretty bloodshot, as were those of the other women on the back porch standing with Elodie. I walked by their separate clusters, waving, and stopped to double-kiss Elodie, who was describing to Fischer her love for American television. They were having the classicFriends-versus-Seinfelddebate. I shook Fischer’s hand and looked around the yard, wondering if his sister would tell him I had been with her today. Everyone else was huddled in different pockets on the sloping grass. The food table, the grill, the sitting table. About twenty-five people in all, though I would have thought it would have thinned out more by this time. The yard smelled like tobacco and gristle from the grill.
“We have plenty of food left,” Toni told me. “And drinks. Beers are here.” She pointed to a blue plastic cooler on the ground.
“Thanks, I just ate,” I lied. I wasn’t hungry. I was fuckingworn outand wanted to lay my ass in my bed at the soonest possible convenience. My leg was throbbing as I stepped off the deck and started walking down the hill. I was driving so I declined the beer too.
“Martin.” Mendoza patted my back with a beer bottle in his hand—the one that wasn’t fucked up.
He was leaning against the wooden fence and Gloria was sitting a few feet away in a chair, a can of Coke in her hand and her eyes on the kids playing in the yard as I walked over to say hi. They were running around with a bunch of bubbles and through a sprinkler with some other kids I didn’t recognize. When Mendoza’s kids saw me, two out of three came across the yard to say hi. Viviana, the middle one, ran up and wrapped her arms around my legs. My right leg ached when her bony arm pressed against it, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to her. She was just so cute, so I smiled down and tried to keep a straight face.
I had been painless until a few minutes ago, when the rush of adrenaline from seeing Karina had faded away and the ache popped back up and the burning crept into every thread of my muscle.
I looked up to move my focus to anything else. I had plenty of experience avoiding pain. That’s what war was: finding ways to not acknowledge the pain you were experiencing. You couldn’t focus your brain on anything but Army-taught instincts and the gruesome art of war. If I thought about that, even for longer than a few seconds, I would remember the young girl in her hijab carrying a little boy’s dead body in her arms . . . his face covered in dirt and blood. There were so many casualties every day that the boy could have been her brother, or she could have just found him on the street. I blinked to get that shit out of my mind. The pain, it was the pain that I associated every war memory with and sometimes when I wasn’t paying attention, it would hit me. I’d been having these flashes more often the last few days. Maybe it was the freshness of the encounter with Karina’s dad, or Mendoza yelling about the unfairness of it all as he punched his hand through the glass of his back door.
It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the overwhelming, crushing guilt of war, but I could rationalize my choices for the most part. I didn’t know how, or why, I was so lucky to not completely snap like some did.Not yet, at least. I didn’t understand what I was doing, while I was doing it. That’s what I told myself. I was back in the tent again; I could almost taste the salt on my sweaty lips and smell the thick smoke in the air from the latest IED explosion. My skin started to prickle as I traveled back and forth between reality and my trauma.
I’m here, at Benning. Home. A drive from my ma and sister. A drive from Karina. I’m not there anymore.
I thought about what I was told in group therapy, to breathe. To count and breathe and look down at my feet, grounded to the green grass here at Fort Benning, not the dirt in Afghanistan.
“Martin! Hi! We were waiting on you so long! My daddy said you weren’t coming, but I knew you would!” Viviana practically shouted, wagging her little finger in disapproval. She stood in front of me and lifted her arms into the air. Her face was morphing into the little girl from my memory in front of me.
I had to snap out of it.
Fuck.
“Hey, Daddy! I told you he would come! I’m always right!” she yelled across the lawn. Her voice was right below me, but sounded like she was talking through a tunnel.
I thought about today’s events as a way to bring me back to the real world. The hours I spent polishing wood for Elodie’s crib, the surprise of seeing Karina, how she looked going from stall to stall with no idea I was following her. I could feel her calmness as she browsed through the market. I missed the energy she brought to me.
The pull back to reality wasn’t instant or easy, but it was close enough to come back to the present as I had to once again step over my past.
“Helloooo!” An impatient Vivi jumped in front of me, and I tried to play it off like I’d ignored her as a joke as the feeling came back to my legs, my grounded boots on the grass.
I laughed, and looked ahead, purposely ignoring her for a second, then stuck my tongue out. I lifted her into my arms and pushed the pain back into the past. I was stronger than it was. Holding her right now proved it.
