by Mila Gray
I scan the man. He’s stopped walking towards the gate and is now placing his hands on top of his head as per Riley’s barked orders. I can hear Riley now yelling at him to lie face down on the ground with his arms and legs spread. The man doesn’t appear to be listening, or maybe he just doesn’t understand English. He takes his eyes off Riley for a moment and his gaze drifts towards me. For an instant that seems to stretch into infinity, we lock eyes. A smile appears on his face and then his eyes lift to the sky. Just then his coat flaps open and I catch a glimpse of the blocks of explosives strapped to his chest and the spaghetti tangle of wires before the coat falls closed again.
Fuck. Riley doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s squinting against the glare of floodlights.
Radio static bursts in my ears. ‘Interrogative. Do they have weapons?’
I don’t answer. I’m running to the door, my gun already at my shoulder, my finger halfway depressed on the trigger.
‘Riley!’ I yell.
I’m running straight towards him now. He turns. Just a heartbeat. That’s how long the pause is between Riley turning at the sound of his name and the blast that comes, but it’s long enough for me to see the realization flare across his face, long enough for me to read the terror and disbelief that chases it, long enough for the image to imprint itself on my retina like a branding iron on skin.
‘Bomb!’ I shout, but the word is sucked away in the roar of the explosion. I’m picked up, thrown backwards, blinded by a flash of white light. I’m hurled against the side of the gate post. A wave of heat surges overhead and everything fades to black.
40
Jessa
I missed two calls from Kit before the performance and I’ve heard nothing from him since. As soon as I wake, I reach for my phone to see if he’s replied to any of my messages or left a voicemail or email, but there’s nothing, just a blank screen, reminding me unnervingly of that moment at the end of a movie just before the credits roll. There’s nothing from Riley either, though maybe that’s not so surprising as Riley’s always been useless at staying in touch. I sit up and dial Kit’s number. It rings straight through to his voicemail, and at the sound of his voice telling me to leave a message, I close my eyes, feeling a stab of pain spear me between my ribs.
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘It’s me. Call me back. I love you.’
I hang up and put the phone down, staring at it. Something doesn’t feel right, something’s niggling at me, but I push the thought away with a shake of the head and get out of bed. It’s just before seven and I’m due at the hospital to help out Didi’s father in less than an hour.
I fumble for my clothes, my legs a little shaky. I blame it on the adrenaline from last night that’s still pumping through my body. It was such a rush being on stage again, seeing my name in the programme, hearing the applause at the end – I can’t wait to tell Kit all about it. But more than that I can’t wait to tell him about the shock of looking up and seeing not only Kit’s dad and sister in the front row but, seated two rows behind them, my parents too.
For one heart-stopping moment as I took my bow I’d thought my dad was going to storm the stage and drag me off it. I waited backstage too nervous to show my face until Kit’s dad came and got me and convinced me it was safe. And there they were, my mom and dad, waiting for me outside the back door of the theatre with a bunch of flowers, all smiles, telling me how proud they were of me. My dad even hugged me.
We haven’t spoken much since I moved back home, but my mom was right, my dad is definitely calmer. If I didn’t know better I’d think the doctors had prescribed Zoloft or something, he’s that mellow, but my dad has always been anti-drugs – any kind of drugs, not just the class A kind. I guess therapy with Didi’s dad must be working. I’m glad. I am. But there’s a long way to go before I forgive him for everything. A very long way. One day soon I’m going to have to talk to him about Kit and also tell him that I’ve decided not to go to USD – but I’m waiting until I know for sure he’s not going to go postal. I don’t want to cause a relapse or anything.
Once I’m dressed, I pick up my phone and slip it into my back pocket. Why hasn’t Kit called? The nagging feeling is back, more insistent now; it feels as though someone is behind me, tapping me angrily on the shoulder trying to force me to turn around. Once again I shrug it off. I’m being stupid and paranoid, that’s all. He’s fine. Of course he’s fine.
I’m halfway down the stairs, gathering my hair into a ponytail, thoughts a million miles away, when a blur outside the window pulls me up short.
I take another step, the view clears, and when I realize what I’m seeing, who I’m seeing, my stomach plummets and the air leaves my lungs like a final exhalation. My arms fall slowly to my sides. My body’s instinct is to turn and run back upstairs, to tear into the bathroom and lock the door, but I’m frozen.
Time seems to have slowed. Kit’s father hasn’t moved. He’s standing at the end of the driveway staring up at the house, squinting against the early morning glare. He takes a step down the driveway towards the house, and that’s when I know for certain that either Kit or Riley is dead.
I grab for the banister to stay upright. Memories, images, words, flicker through my mind like scratched fragments of film: Kit’s arms around my waist drawing me closer, our first kiss under the cover of darkness just by the back door, the smile on his face the first time we slept together, the blue of his eyes lit up by the sparks from a Chinese lantern, the fierceness in his voice when he told me he was going to love me forever.
Come back to me. That was the very last thing I said to him. Come back to me.
Always. The very last thing he said to me.
Then I see Riley as a kid throwing a toy train down the stairs, dive-bombing into the pool, holding my hand at our grandfather’s funeral, grinning and high-fiving Kit after they’d enlisted. The snapshot of him in his uniform on graduation day. The circles under his eyes the last time I saw him. The grin on his face when he told me he was going to be a dad.
The door buzzes. I jump. But I stay where I am, frozen halfway up the stairs. If I don’t answer the door, maybe he’ll go away. Maybe this won’t be happening. But the doorbell sounds again. And then I hear footsteps on the landing above me. My mother’s voice, sleepy and confused. ‘Jessa? Who is it? Why are you just standing there?’
I turn to her. Her hand is pressed to her mouth. Standing in her nightdress, her hair unbrushed, the blood rushing from her face, she looks like she’s seen a ghost. No. That’s wrong. She looks like she is a ghost.
The bell buzzes for a third time.
‘Get the door, Jessa,’ my mother says in a strange voice I don’t recognize. It startles me enough that I start to walk down the stairs. I feel calmer all of a sudden, like I’m floating outside my body. This can’t be happening. It’s not real. It’s just a dream.
I find myself standing somehow in front of the door. I unlock it. I open it. Kit. Riley. Kit. Riley. Which is it?
Kit’s father blinks at me. He’s been crying. His eyes are red, his cheeks wet. He’s still crying in fact.
‘Jessa,’ Kit’s father says in a husky voice, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Who?’ I hear myself ask. ‘Who is it?’
‘Can I come in?’ he asks, his attention now fixed on my mom.
‘Who? Who is it?’ I repeat.
My mom’s hands are on my shoulders. She’s trying to pull me away from the doorway, but I refuse to budge. I’m distantly aware that I’ve started crying and a voice in my head is snapping at me to pull it together, but I can’t. ‘Who?’ I yell.
He closes his eyes as though praying, and when he opens them it’s disorientating because I see Kit – the same cobalt blue eyes rimmed at the edges with black.
The blood is pounding in my ears is so loudly I barely hear the name.
I fall away from the door, reeling backwards as though he’s slapped me, my brain whirring, struggling to process what he’s just said. The room spins like a carnival r
ide and I find myself on my knees. In the background someone is crying. A rough, keening sound as though they’re being hollowed out with some medieval torture device.
41
Kit
When I come to, it takes me a few seconds to piece together where I am. I stagger blindly to my feet, confused and lurching like a drunk, aware only distantly of a stinging sharp pain drilling through my side and that my brain feels like a ten tonne weight rattling loose inside my skull. An explosion. The pieces start to come together, fragments of memory jarring loose. A bomb. Oh shit. Riley!
My ears are ringing, the roar of the blast still echoing through me. I cough my way through a cloud of dust and debris towards the door. Riley. Fuck. Where is he? I stumble frantically towards the gate but nothing remains of it, only rubble and thick black smoke eerily lit from behind by the floodlights. For several seconds I just stand there, coughing, my eyes streaming, trying to understand. Where’s the gate gone? Where’s Riley gone?
I turn in a circle on the spot. Where the hell is he?
‘Riley?’ I yell.
Flames lick at the sky and an orange haze mushrooms over the compound. Suddenly the alarm cuts through the ringing in my ears, a siren blare that sounds as if it’s coming from some place deep inside me. And then I hear the sound of boots stampeding, people yelling over me. I hear my name, but it sounds as if someone is calling to me from down a long, dark tunnel.
I’m dragged to my feet and someone tries to pull me away from the gate post, but I wrench myself free and start running – a limping half-jog, the pain in my side slowing me down.
‘Riley,’ I yell again, spinning in a circle. Swallowed by the dust and dirt that have blanketed out the floodlights and the stars, it feels as though I’m standing in a choking hot cave. ‘Riley!’ I shout until my throat is hoarse.
But he doesn’t answer.
42
Jessa
Riley. No. No.
A sharp hook snags behind my rib cage, ripping upwards, tearing a path through my heart, puncturing my lungs, rasping up my throat. The room spins even more violently. Faces lunge past me – my mother, Kit’s father.
Kit! What about Kit?
With both hands on the floor, I steady myself and take a deep breath in. My lungs are on fire. ‘Kit. What about Kit?’ I manage to gasp.
‘He’s OK. A slight injury, but OK.’
He’s OK. An intense burst of relief douses the pain momentarily, like water being thrown on a fire. I can breathe again. But it lasts for only a moment before the blackness rushes back in, threatening to suffocate me, and the pain returns – a razor-sharp blade slicing again and again between my ribs. Riley. How can he be dead?
Somehow I’m in the living room, sitting on the sofa, with no knowledge of how I got there. My mother is sitting beside me. She’s not speaking. She’s staring straight ahead at the wall, at the photograph of Riley in his uniform on graduation day. I shake my head, looking at Kit’s father Ben standing in the middle of the room. This can’t be happening. This isn’t real. Riley can’t be dead. They must have made a mistake.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I say, hearing the note of defiance in my voice. I pull out my phone. ‘I’m going to call him.’
Kit’s father kneels down in front of me. His hands – calloused and warm – close over mine. ‘Jessa,’ he says softly, ‘it’s not a mistake. We’ve had confirmation.’
I jump to my feet. I have no idea where I’m going. I only know one thing; that I need to get away. I need air. I need to find someone who’ll tell me this is all a joke. I need to outrun this.
I make it to the door and slam straight into my dad. He catches me by the shoulders. I try to push past him. I shove with all my might, but he doesn’t budge. I look up at him angrily and suddenly stop shoving as it dawns on me that he doesn’t know – he doesn’t yet know that his son is dead, that Riley is gone. And I feel a sharp stab of envy. I envy him the fact that he still exists in the before, in the place where Riley is still alive. And I hate him for it, while also pitying him for the blow that’s about to fall which he has no clue is coming.
He’s looking at me confused and blurry eyed, still wearing his pyjamas. I note the grey hair peeking out the top of his shirt and the fact that he hasn’t shaved yet. I see for the first time the thick, raised veins snaking over his hands. I take in all of these details with furious concentration, as if my brain has decided that if it focuses on the minutiae it won’t have to contemplate the bigger picture. My dad looks over my shoulder and his face drains of blood as he sees Kit’s dad and my mom in the living room.
‘What is it?’ he asks, his fingers digging into my arms hard.
‘Riley’s dead,’ I tell him in a voice so calm that it rattles me. Why am I so calm? How can I sound so matter-of-fact when inside it feels as if a storm is raging? How can I announce something so momentous as though I’m talking about the weather?
My father’s face turns ashen. He releases me and walks unsteadily towards my mother. I watch him pull her into his arms. I see her knuckles bleach white as she grips him around the waist, her mouth pulled down into a silent scream of agony. My dad turns towards Kit’s dad and a half-formed thought careers through my mind: He needs to leave. Kit’s dad can’t be here. They hate each other. But then I see that they’re talking. My father is asking questions; Kit’s father is answering calmly, quietly.
It sounds as if they’re underwater, but I make out the words suicide bomber then car bomb then body home for burial before I cover my ears and collapse once more to the floor, the screams inside my head growing so loud that eventually they drown out everything.
43
Kit
If I concentrate with all my might on the little things – on straightening my cuffs, on polishing my boots until I can see my face in them, on picking every piece of lint off the sleeves of my uniform – I’ve found it helps keep the dark thoughts and the images at bay. I can still sense them there, lurking in the darkness like a pack of hyenas scrapping for my attention, but at least they’re not right there in my face.
I had thought it might be better once I was back on US soil, that putting a distance between myself and what happened would make it somehow easier to deal with, but it hasn’t. Sleep is the worst – one non-stop nightmare in which I’m paralysed, watching the man in the coat approach Riley who’s standing sentry at the gate, trying to scream at Riley to run but not able to make a sound. But even during the day, if I let my concentration slip for even a millisecond then the memories rush in like a tidal wave dragging me under. And each time it’s getting harder and harder to fight my way back to the surface. They’re sharp-edged, 3D – images that burst with gory, technicolour detail. Sounds too – the blast still echoes in my head five days on, the back of my throat is still raw from yelling Riley’s name, and the acrid smell of smoke still lingers on my skin despite the number of times I’ve tried to scrub it off. My muscles won’t quit trembling either, and my hands shake even now as I try to do up the buttons on my shirt.
I glance at the bottle of painkillers on the side and think about taking one, or maybe even two or three to kill the pain. But I’m not sure even a whole bottle would be enough to numb this, and besides, I’m not even sure I want to numb it. The constant burning ache in my side just beneath my ribs where some shrapnel from the bomb blast struck me gives me something to focus on other than the voice in my head that’s striving to be heard over the ringing in my ears – the voice that hasn’t let up for a single second since it happened; the voice telling me it should have been you.
I pull open the dresser drawer to look for my cufflinks and the room tips sideways with a lurch. Jessa’s clothes fill the drawer, neatly folded as if just put there. My chest constricts at the sight. I stare at the pile of underwear – delicate lace, pastel colours – fighting the urge to sink my hands into it, lift it to my face and inhale deeply. I draw a sharp breath and manage to get a hit of her perfume, the first thing other than smoke I’v
e managed to smell in five days. It sends my head spinning. Shit. I ram the drawer shut making the whole dresser shake, then, resting my palms on the top to stop my arms from trembling, I squeeze my eyes shut.
Instantly I’m overcome by a fast-flowing stream of images: Riley turning towards me, the flash of comprehension on his face in the split second before the blast, the white sheet lightning that swallowed him whole, the whooshing roar of the flame that knocked me backwards. The smoking darkness, the void-like sense of something being fundamentally wrong with the world that rippled through me straight afterwards as though someone had switched off gravity.
It should have been me.
My phone buzzes and my heart explodes like a bomb in my chest. I spin around, disorientated. Breathe, breathe, I order myself as the room starts to spin. The slightest noise keeps setting me off, throwing me right back to the moment the bomb went off. The phone is still buzzing. Dizzily, I cross to the bedside table, where it sits vibrating, and grab for it.
It’s Jessa. I stare at her name, my heart now trying to hammer its way clean out of my chest. Fuck. I jab at the cancel button. And then for good measure I turn the damn thing off. In a fit of desperation I try to find somewhere I can hide it.
I don’t hear my dad knock, and when he comes into the room I’m still pacing anxiously back and forth, looking for somewhere to hide my phone. I’m aware I probably look like someone trying to hide a bloody murder weapon.
‘Have you spoken to her yet?’ my dad asks, nodding at the phone in my hand.
I turn my back and pulling out the top drawer of the bedside table drop my phone into it before slamming it shut.
‘You need to speak to her. She needs you.’
He drops his hand on my shoulder and I stiffen automatically.
‘Kit. You need to talk to someone. You need to take them up on that offer of counselling.’