‘Gotta shove off zero six hundred hours tomorrow.’
‘So soon? But you just got here.’ The disappointment in my voice was hard to cover.
‘I know. But just got my marching orders a couple of hours ago. You know, duty calls.’
I knew all about duty, but it didn’t keep my heart from aching at the thought my brother was leaving already. It had been nice to have someone else around for a while, even if it was only a couple of days. My house would feel lonely without Toby.
Town was crowded, the streets packed with seasonal traffic and tourists out in search of a meal. After parking in my secret spot, we walked over to the best sushi place in town. It was stratospherically expensive, but was well worth it, and besides Toby was buying. I’m not sure what his pay grade was, but I figured he couldn’t have too many expenses since he was fed, housed and clothed by the government. The restaurant was jammed and there was a waiting list about as long as the gondola line on a powder day, but I knew the manager, Jimmy Finkle, and he somehow squeezed us in. In fact, he gave us a prime booth that was probably reserved for some hedge-fund manager. But the hedge-fund manager hadn’t brought Jimmy Finkle down Aspen Mountain in a sled after a torn Achilles tendon, so he was SOL.
‘You sure?’ I asked Jimmy as he lay the menus down in front of us.
‘Nothing too good for you, Greta. Not compared to what you do for all of us.’
‘Wow, sister. You are quite the hero,’ Toby said after Jimmy had taken his leave.
‘All in a day’s work,’ I said, turning my eyes toward the menu.
A waiter came over and we ordered beers and a couple of handrolls to start. I drank nearly half my beer in one gulp. The long day of skiing had left me thirsty. Skiing does that to me, leaves me with the kind of thirst that takes more than water to quench. Toby had slowed down and sipped at his beer. Evidently he had quenched his thirst back at the A-frame.
Sitting across from my brother, it would be hard to not appreciate how good looking he was, his chiseled jaw dusted with a couple of days’ blond stubble, his dark eyes intense in a tired face, his thick blond hair mussed in a stylish manner. I must have been staring at him so hard, I missed him visually dissecting me at the same time.
‘What’s eating you?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ I fibbed. ‘Why you asking me that?’
‘You just don’t seem yourself. You don’t seem like you’re happy.’
‘Huh? Of course I’m happy. How can I help but be happy? Look at my life. Where I live. What I do.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ he countered. ‘Maybe we haven’t seen each other for a while, but last time I visited here you radiated happiness. That “joy de viver” or whatever it’s called. Your obstinate way of just daring someone to try and take you down. I’m not seeing it, Grets.’
‘It’s been a rough month,’ I admitted. ‘Having to put down Kayla. The avalanche. The carbon monoxide thing.’
‘Is that all?’ he pressed.
‘Is that all? That’s a lot to have happen in a short period of time.’ He stared at me unblinking and I knew he had me. After sharing our first ten years together in the same bedroom and the next ten in the same house, more or less looking after our mother in drunkenness or sickness, my brother knew me better than anyone. ‘Someone very special to me died in that avalanche last week.’
‘See, I knew it. I knew it. What kind of special?’
‘Special-special.’
‘A lover?’
‘No,’ I huffed. ‘He was married. He was just a great guy and a ski buddy and he shouldn’t be dead.’
I recalled the snow encasing my body in an icy cast. My inability to move a muscle. Neverman’s face peeking at me through the snow. ‘And I have no idea why he was there.’ My eyes teared up and I fought against crying. Toby handed me a handkerchief and I dabbed it against my eyes, grateful for the privacy of the booth. I almost never cried and the fact that I was near tears again bothered me. ‘In fact, as things figure I might be responsible for his death.’
‘What?’
I told him what had happened that day, of not remembering much of anything except the white wall of snow bearing down on me.
‘Wow, sis. That really sucks. I’m really sorry to hear about it. So you were in love with him?’
‘I told you, no. He was just a friend. A close friend.’
‘Right.’ He let it drop without pushing any further. ‘What about the guy you skied with today? Any possibilities there?’
‘Absolutely not,’ I shot back. Though the day had been a pleasant break from perseverating over the loss of Warren, it didn’t make him any less dead. ‘What’s with the sudden interest in my love life?’
‘Actually, because I’m thinking of getting married.’
‘You are?’ A pang of possessive jealousy shot through me. If my twin were to get married, he’d be a couple, and he’d be closer to her than to me. I forced myself to let go of that thought.
‘Yep. Met her in Afghanistan. She reminds me of you with her fearlessness. She’s special ops too. Well, was. Was in a vehicle that hit a mine and lost her right leg. She was lucky though. She got hit just below the knee.’
I didn’t see how losing a leg was lucky, above or below the knee.
‘She lose her leg before or after you met her?’
‘After. But it doesn’t change a thing.’
When the initial shock of his announcement passed, I found myself gracing my brother with a smile. A bit forced maybe, but who was I to infringe on his happiness? Then I realized the forced smile was the same forced smile I used to sprout while having drinks with Warren and Zuzana at the end of the ski day.
I studied my brother’s face and saw in it a new dimension, an underlying sense of belonging I’d never seen before. I probed him about the woman he was thinking of marrying and he shared some more information about her, that her name was Fenicia and she was black. That took me by surprise at first, even more than the missing leg. I mean, we were raised in a working-class community where that kind of mixing was frowned upon. Not that I was ever in that camp, but it came from so far out of nowhere, I must have appeared astonished at first.
He took a picture from his wallet and handed it to me. I suppose I was surprised that he didn’t have the picture on his phone, but then I realized his phone probably didn’t always work in combat. He kept the hard copy picture with him always. She was a beautiful brown woman with even features and hair divided into neat rows of braids close to her head. I found it unusual that her eyes were green and gave Toby a puzzled look. ‘Her mother was gang-raped by a bunch of crackers. She doesn’t know who her father is either. Something we have in common.’
I cupped my hand over my brother’s paw resting on the table and squeezed it. ‘I’m so happy for you,’ I said.
Before we could say anything more, I became aware of another person approaching the table. Thinking it was the waiter, I looked up and was taken aback to see Zuzana standing over us. You could say she was dressed in widow’s black if a low-cut black leather dress and black fringed cowboy boots qualified. Her pregnancy was not yet visible in the tight sheath of a dress, but the press of her cleavage into the V of the dress sure was, making her look more like a cougar than a grieving widow. Her eyes were glued to my hand resting atop my brother’s.
‘I didn’t know you were dating anyone, Greta.’
The comment would have been uncalled for in any case, certainly nothing you would say to two people sitting together in a restaurant when you only know one half of the duo. ‘This is no date, he’s my brother,’ was the best I could manage. ‘I’m sure I’ve told you guys about my Army Ranger brother, Toby.’ Too late, I realized the error of my wording since one half of the ‘guys’ was no longer around to be counted.
‘Yes, you sure did,’ she said, smiling at Toby with the sort of bewitching smile that I assume makes men do a lot of the nasty things they do. The sort of smile I couldn’t pull off even for free airfare t
o Nepal. My brother smiled back in a way that made me question his commitment to his one-legged bride-to-be. Zuzana had that kind of effect on men. She’d met Warren at an art gallery opening in the mall not even a year ago and, well, we all know the end result of that meeting.
Then as quickly as the smile came on it faded and she turned her attention back to me. ‘We really need to talk about something regarding Warren. Are you free for lunch tomorrow?’
Her melted smile had morphed into a needy look that owned her face, her eyes those of an orphaned child on a street corner begging for sustenance. As much as I didn’t want to sit alone through a lunch with Zuzana, it just so happened that Monday was my other day off, and she knew it since Warren and I skied most Mondays. Not to mention I was still feeling somehow responsible for Warren’s death, which left me indebted to his widow. I swallowed the ‘no’ that wanted to come out of my mouth and told her I’d be happy to have lunch with her.
‘I’ll make reservations at the Jerome then.’ She turned her face towards my brother and the smile grew back. ‘Nice to meet you, Toby. It’s reassuring to know we have people out there like you protecting our country.’
As if it was her country. Her Czech accent lingered behind her as she crossed the room to rejoin a table of women friends. I resented that she had seen fit to go out to dinner so soon after her husband’s death. Or maybe my resentment had more to do with the way she was dressed. Zuzana’s clothes always bordered on flamboyant, so she was within her rights to dress the same way she always had, but with her husband dead it seemed in bad taste. I told myself to stop being judgmental.
‘What was that?’ Toby asked, his eyes riveted to her leather-clad bottom until it was settled back in her seat.
‘Warren’s widow. And don’t go there. She’s pregnant,’ I said, choking on the words. It also hurt that there would be a piece of Warren on this planet that had nothing to do with me. ‘Besides, you’re engaged.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not married yet,’ he said, only half kidding as he turned back to his sushi.
The rest of the meal was uneventful except for the check. I thought Toby was going to pop a blood vessel when he saw the total.
‘Three hundred and thirty dollars and twenty-two cents. What the fuck is this? I didn’t think you could spend that much on fish.’
‘That’s Aspen for you. And that’s before tip,’ I added – insult to injury. I pulled out my wallet and threw my credit card on the table. ‘We’ll split.’
Toby pushed my card back at me and reached into his pocket for his wallet. ‘No, sis. This is mine.’ He put his card in the folder and the server swooped it up before he could even lay it back down on the table. I looked back to the mobbed bar area. Evidently there were people waiting for the table.
Back at the A-frame, Toby raided the refrigerator for another beer and plopped himself into the Barca. ‘This thing is really comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to think about getting me one.’
‘That mean you’re thinking of leaving the army?’ I pressed.
‘Don’t think I’ll ever leave the army. But I’m actually noodling on getting out of Special Forces. You know, Fenicia will have to be Stateside.’ I held my breath, not wanting to risk saying one word that might change his mind about taking himself out of that hellhole. ‘Then again, as nice as it is being here with you in the mountains, in this oasis from evil, there’s something about my job that keeps me going back. After fifteen years, I think I’d die of boredom if I went back to civvy life.’
Words I didn’t really want to hear. Naturally, I worried about him being in such a dangerous place, but kept it parked somewhere in the back of my mind so it wouldn’t ruin my waking hours. Toby was so important to me I didn’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to him. A sick part of me hoped he’d lose a leg too, below the knee, so he’d be relegated to a desk job like his soon-to-be wife. That was the only thing other than the final battle that would stop him from chasing adventure. He was an action junkie. Just like me. It was clearly in our DNA. Only the kinds of action we chose were worlds apart.
NINETEEN
I was in the loft, trying to do my reading for the next day’s Mythology class after a few glasses of wine, nodding in and out as Circe turned Ulysses’ men into pigs. I was dozing with the book parked on my chest when the sound of howling woke me with a start. I was used to howls from animals in the night, especially coyotes, but this howl wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from inside the house. From downstairs. It didn’t take much to figure out where the ungodly sound originated. It was coming from my brother.
I scrambled down the stairs and flung open the door to Sam’s former room. Toby’s eyes were closed, but he was thrashing about in the bed, the sheets and blankets thrown to the side, his muscled body taut and lean in his boxer shorts. His convulsive movements reminded me of playing dodge ball as a child, standing against a wall trying not to get hit. He was shouting something that didn’t make any sense. Then I realized he was screaming in Arabic.
‘Toby!’ I yelled. ‘Toby!’
His eyes sprang open. He glared at me standing in the open door as if I had just interrupted him in a private act. ‘What?’
‘You were having a bad dream. You were howling like a banshee. And shouting gibberish.’
‘I was?’ He sat up and rubbed his eyes and I could tell he was revisiting what nightmare had prompted the outburst. ‘Oh, yeah. I was having a bad dream. I was working out in the camp gym and some guy wearing Arab robes came in with an AK forty-seven and opened up on us.’
‘Oh my God, that’s horrible,’ I said. ‘Could something like that really happen?’
‘Already did,’ he said, laying back down in the bed and pulling the blankets back to his chin. ‘Nighty-night, sis,’ he said, closing his eyes. It wasn’t long before he was snoring.
I climbed back into the loft, wide awake now, and looked out the window to the bright night, the whole of my yard and driveway lit by a full moon. The deciduous trees like the Aspens were bare of course, but the pine branches sported a frosting of snow so thick it was a wonder it hadn’t fallen to the ground. I studied the tranquil scene and thought about my brother. The idea of him committing to Fenicia was growing on me. Maybe having some nieces and nephews, so our minuscule family wasn’t just him and me.
Then I thought about him working in an arena so close to death. I wondered how he could think of getting married and having kids. Would his wife move to some base in the US where she didn’t have to worry about being shot? A place Toby might come home to some day sooner or later? Then I thought about the terrorist shooting up the gym. Mom never really taught us to be religious, but I did believe in a higher power and found myself praying that nothing bad would happen to Toby. Right now, he was the person I loved most in this world.
I woke at five a.m. to make him breakfast. I wasn’t about to let my only sibling leave hungry. He had showered and dressed and was clean-shaven for the first time since he’d arrived. His packed duffel bag waited at the door. Just seeing it made me lonely.
‘Hi Grets,’ he said, greeting me with a brotherly kiss. ‘You didn’t have to get up.’
‘Right. Like I’m not going to get up to say goodbye to the brother I only see every blue moon or so.’ I recalled how he had howled in his sleep. It had happened again a couple of hours later, but the second time I hadn’t bothered to check on him. ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Like a rock. Must be the elevation.’
‘I thought Afghanistan was high.’
‘It is now that you mention it.’
I made coffee and gave him a mug. I didn’t even bother to ask how he took it. A soldier would take it black, of course. There probably wasn’t a lot of milk in the Afghan mountains unless you wanted it from a goat. I scrambled some eggs and toasted him an English muffin. Bays from the refrigerated section. I knew they were his favorite. He ate like a soldier, head down, no talking. When he came up for air, I resumed conversation.
‘So what now?’
He looked at his watch. It was a thick, tough-looking model. A soldier’s watch. ‘Garrett’s picking me up in fifteen. Back to the Springs where we’ll catch transport back overseas.’
Overseas. He made it sound like a vacation. ‘Will you be married the next time I see you?’
‘Hope so. I really do. She’s amazing. When I’m with her, it’s like something indescribable. Gives meaning to life. But makes me feel out of control too, like the most out of control I’ve ever been. It’s a good out of control though. Not like out of control trying to herd Mom’s boyfriends out the door.’ He laughed, but it was an ironic laugh. ‘That was a bad out of control. This out of control is like driving as fast as you can in a good car – like there are no speed limits in sight. But there’s another person sharing the controls with you.’
‘Please, y’all are going make me vomit,’ I said, imitating a southern dialect. ‘Was that supposed to be poetic?’
‘As close as I come.’ A pair of headlights appeared down the road and stopped in front of the A-frame. He gave me a big hug, picked up his duffel bag, and headed out the door. ‘Love you, sis,’ were his last words. As I watched the red tail lights recede, they reminded me of an animal peering out from the brush.
A vacuum of loss fell over me, and I pushed it back with a second cup of coffee. Then I did what I always do when I’m feeling poorly. I put on my ski gear. I may have had that lunch date with Zuzana, but that wasn’t until one o’clock and I wasn’t going to let the day be entirely ruined.
I was on the bucket the minute it started.
TWENTY
I sat in the lobby of the Jerome trying not to squirm out of my seat. The hotel was the grande dame of Aspen, one of the few places in town that retained much of its vintage character from the mining days. The furniture was heavy, the sofas velvet-fringed, and a grandfather clock ticked out the time. It was one of my favorite venues in town, and I should have been able to appreciate the grandeur of my surroundings, but for the fact that I was going to be dining with Zuzana McGovern when that clock struck one.
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