by Naomi Niles
The mention of his time in the service brought back to mind the injunction Evan had laid on me the day before, to find out about the book he was writing and to ask if he would let me write a piece on it. Maybe tomorrow, I decided as I watched him sweating in the intense heat. I didn’t want to ruin this moment, not when it was so perfect.
“It’s a bit late in the day,” said Zack as he stroked Bessie, his favorite horse, “but tomorrow, you and I’ll go out riding. Have you ever ridden a horse before?”
“No, never,” I said, my eyes shining.
“You’ll love it,” he said. “It’s easy. In the meantime, let me show you where you’ll be staying for the night.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Zack
Curtis had agreed to let me stay at his house for the week. But before I went over that night, I showed Kelli the room where she would be sleeping at the back of the house. It was my old room and, to my shame, hadn’t been redecorated since I was a senior in high school. The walls were still hung with posters from bands like Skillet and Linkin Park. A basketball jersey was draped over one chair, and my letter jacket was hanging up in the closet, smelling of mothballs.
“This is amazing,” said Kelli, gazing around the room in awe. “I had no idea you were such a dork.”
“Just be glad we didn’t know each other in high school,” I assured her. “You’d have found me insufferable.”
Kelli threw herself down on my bed, and for a moment it was all I could do not to join her there, but I knew how pissed Mom would be if she thought we were sleeping together. “That’s the one downside of spending the week here,” I said sadly. “That we have to resist our baser impulses for a bit.”
“Shame,” said Kelli, taking one of my old blankets and wrapping it around her face like a sari. “I bet your high school self would have killed for this.”
“To have a world-class, hot reporter in my bed? Yeah, that was the dream.”
When I went over to Curtis’s an hour or so later, he told me he was impressed by how well she seemed to be fitting in with the rest of the family. He had been a little worried when he first heard I was dating a journalist for a major website because he didn’t know how well she would adapt to our country lifestyle, but she took to it as easily as if she had lived here all her life. “She didn’t always live in New York,” I reminded him. “She spent her teen years in rural Ohio.”
“Where’d she live before that?”
“Somalia. But it’s weird. Every time I’ve tried to bring that up, she finds a way of changing the subject.”
“You ought to try asking her about it,” said Curtis.
“Yeah. Maybe I will.”
When I awoke the next morning, and went over to Mama’s house, I found Kelli and Mama standing over the skillet. Mama was teaching her how to make chicken crepes that didn’t fall apart in the pan. “Every time I try to make them on my own, they end up shredded,” said Kelli.
“That’s because you’re not taking your time,” said Mama, pouring olive oil into the pan. “You have to let it sit for at least five to seven minutes before you turn it over.”
“But that takes so much time,” Kelli whined. “And a lot of times I’m already late for work or yoga class.”
But under Mom’s guidance, the crepes turned out crisp and perfect. In addition to those, we ate buttered biscuits, hash browns, and leftover green bean casserole. Kelli finished her first plate with remarkable zeal and immediately went back for seconds. Meanwhile Darren and I fought over who was going to drink the last of the orange juice in the pitcher. “You ought to let Kelli have it,” said Mama, when Darren tried to grab the pitcher out of my hands and nearly sent the juice flying.
“Is there pulp in it?” Kelli asked, grimacing. “I don’t usually drink orange juice with pulp in it.”
“There’s some pulp, yeah,” said Darren. “But it’s still the best damned orange juice you’ve ever had.” He poured the last of it into her glass. Kelli stared down at it for a second with a distasteful look, then took a cautious sip. After letting it linger in her mouth for a moment, she downed the rest of the glass in one gulp.
“It’s miraculous,” she said, sounding puzzled. “And you made that yourself?”
“Squeezed the oranges and everything,” said Mama proudly.
“I’m gonna need to find a way to bring some of that home with me,” said Kelli. “Do you think they allow O. J. on planes?”
After breakfast, the two of us went out riding. Swirling gray and purple storm clouds hung low over the trail, and a cool wind whistled ominously as we rode toward the ledge overlooking Sulphur Springs. Although Kelli professed never to have ridden a horse in her life, she trotted along beside me with the confidence and ease of a woman who had been riding since she was old enough to walk.
“We’re getting close to the point where my brother’s first wife fell off her horse and died a few years back,” I told her after we had been riding together in silence for about ten minutes.
“Which one?” she asked, glancing up in surprise. “Curtis?”
“Yeah, they had just gotten married a year or two before. She was an accomplished rider, too, so it just goes to show. He wasn’t himself for a long time after that, and we started to worry that he was never gonna get over it.”
“I’d never have guessed that from looking at him last night,” said Kelli. “He seems so alive and vibrant.”
“I think there are things in everyone’s past we’d prefer not to talk about. Things that continue to affect us long after the rest of the world has moved on and forgotten about them.”
“Yes,” said Kelli, and a cloud fell over her face for a moment. “I think I know just what you mean.”
I could sense she was thinking of her own past, and I knew if I let it go now, there might not be another chance to bring it up. “What exactly happened to you when you were growing up?” I asked. “In Somalia?”
Kelli made a pained expression and drew in her breath sharply. She laughed in that way people laugh when they’re nervous and scared. “I guess I haven’t been very good at hiding the fact that something happened, have I?”
I shook my head. “No, and I can tell it continues to affect you. There’s not an hour goes by that it doesn’t.”
“Well, if you must know,” said Kelli. “I’ve never talked about this before, and I trust you to keep it a secret, especially from the other guys. I don’t want them to know.”
“Not a word,” I replied.
“When I was eleven we were still living in Mogadishu, and I was just discovering boys for the first time. There was a boy living on the naval base with us, whose name was Jeremy. He had the most beautiful wrists, and his hair…”
She sighed. “Jeremy’s father was in my dad’s platoon. He was a SEAL, like my dad. And he’d always been quite friendly with me and the other children. He was a gifted mimic who could do the most amazing impersonations, and made balloon animals, and sang songs. The kids all thought he was the funniest person, and, being kids, it never occurred to us that there might be something wrong with him.
“Anyway, one morning I was woken by the sounds of a gun firing, over and over again. Right away, I grabbed Renee and we hid under our beds because we thought we were being attacked. But then my dad came in and told us not to get up until he came to get us, and not to open the door for anyone else, not even another SEAL. Renee asked him if we were being attacked by terrorists. But it wasn’t terrorists.
“Apparently what had happened was that overnight Jeremy’s dad had just snapped. He couldn’t handle the stress of living there while trying to raise a family, couldn’t handle the constant threat of losing his wife or son. So that morning just before sunrise he got up, grabbed his sniper rifle, climbed into the lookout tower and just started mowing down Somalian children. These kids hadn’t even done anything to him, they weren’t terrorists or even the family of terrorists. They were just—they were there, and they were brown, and he thought they w
ere a threat. So he started gunning them down, one by one.
“It took two hours before the other SEALs managed to subdue him. I thought he would go back to the States and go to prison for what he had done, but—it may surprise you to learn—he was never punished. The military covered it up. My dad was so disgusted, he resigned from the Navy and took us home. I never saw Jeremy again.”
I was quiet for a long moment as I pondered Kelli’s story. I don’t guess I could ever blame her again for being afraid of the other SEALs or not wanting to be left alone in a room with them. She had shown remarkable bravery in even wanting to visit the Congo in the first place.
“It’s pretty horrifying, what you just said,” I said finally. “And I’m sorry you had to see that, but it don’t surprise me. Not even a little. Not after some of the things I’ve seen.”
Kelli bit down on her lip and looked hard at me for a moment as though struggling to make a decision. Finally, she said, “Look, I know you’re writing a book. And together, I think we could expose this. Between your firsthand knowledge of the military and my journalistic experience, we could really drag the evils that they’re hiding into the light.”
For a moment,, an odd feeling like vertigo came over me, and I swayed in my saddle. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had this been Kelli’s plan the whole time, to get close to me just so she could exploit my knowledge of the Navy to advance her own career? Was that why she had come home with me? Was that why she had shared my bed?
“I think,” I said at last in a voice of deadly calm, “we need to go back to the house.”
“Wait.” Kelli steered the horse around and turned to face me, looking lost and frightened. “Are you upset with me?”
I was so mad just then I could have run her down with no compunction. But I only said, “I think you’d better start packing your things. You’ll be on the next flight out of here.” And I turned and began trotting back to the house, not even waiting for her to catch up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kelli
It was happening again.
Just like it had happened before, in Somalia. And every few years since.
After Jeremy’s dad shot those kids, my dad had raised hell about it. He wanted the man to be disciplined, to face some sort of accountability for what he had done. To his horror, he soon realized that there were men who were more upset with him for talking about it, than they were with the murderer for committing those crimes in the first place. “Son, you best keep your head down and stay quiet,” a corporal had warned him. “You’re messing with things that you ought not be messing with.”
“But he murdered multiple children in cold blood,” Dad protested. “We need to be talking about this.”
“I don’t think it’s up to you to determine what we do and don’t need,” the corporal said. “If I was you I’d leave it alone, before you land yourself in real trouble.”
Dad found the hypocrisy of this immensely frustrating. Night after night, he paced the kitchen while my mom cooked beet kavass and rice, fuming over the inability or unwillingness of the military to discipline their own. Like the corporal, Mom urged him to let it go before he drew the wrath of his commanding officers.
But Dad wouldn’t let it go, and eventually he was shunned by the rest of his platoon. They refused to be in the same room with him unless they were required to be as part of their exercises. If he sat down to eat with them at lunch, they would get up and walk away. If he found himself in the dorm alone with an old friend, the friend would turn and leave without saying a word.
And basically, the same thing happened to me and Renee. We’d grown up with these kids, had spent years together playing bocce and soccer and jaggi jaggi, years wondering which of them we were going to fall in love with and marry. And then one day seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly and mysteriously, they all decided to stop talking to us. Renee and I no longer had a single friend on base—not even Jeremy, Jeremy with the wrists and the wide eyes and the hair that was just slightly too long. One time, I found him alone by the fountain and cornered him, demanding to know what was going on, but he turned in terror and ran. I had never seen him so scared before, not even on the night when the compound was rocked by gun blasts.
The memory of that event stayed with me always; it was never very far from my mind. And it had instilled in me a certain fear and distrust of others, a sense that no matter how close we were and no matter how much they might claim to love me, they were only ever a moment away from turning against me, without warning and without explanation. It hadn’t been so bad for Renee; she had been younger and could barely remember the shunning. But I remembered, and it seemed like every day, in one way or another, I was reliving it.
So of course when Zack turned in the saddle and told me to pack my bags, my immediate thought was that it was happening all over again. No matter that we had just finished eating breakfast; that we had been laughing together around the kitchen table; that I had just shared my unhappiest memory, the one that I never spoke of. Soon, I would be on a plane back to New York City with only a vague knowledge of how I had gotten there. I would try to text him and find he had blocked my number. We would never see or speak to one another again.
On the way back to the house, I found myself worrying how the family would react. If the past was any guide, they would follow his lead and refuse to speak to me. I would try to make polite conversation with his mother as I packed and she would turn away in disgust. His brothers would talk over me as though I wasn’t even there. It was like a horror movie every time it happened, the way they acted in concert like a single person to pretend I didn’t exist.
“Be ready in twenty minutes,” said Zack in a low growl as we reached the front yard. “I’ll have Darren take you to the airport.”
I tried to imagine Darren sitting silently beside me in the front seat of his pickup, refusing to speak to me and turning up the music to full volume when I tried to talk. “No thanks,” I said, “I’ll just call a cab.”
Zack shrugged and continued on his way toward the barn.
***
But those last moments in the house weren’t as awkward as I had feared they would be. His mother could sense that there was discord between us and kept trying to ask him why he seemed so upset, but he just stalked past her without offering a response. When I told her I was leaving, she must have known then that we had fought while out riding, but rather than choosing sides she poured me a glass of her famous blue lemonade and played a video of Zack rocking out to Nirvana when he was all of about six years old. I pretended to be entertained, grateful for the distraction.
I called Renee in the cab on the way to the airport and told her I was coming home. “What?” she balked. “Already?”
“Zach and I had a pretty nasty fight,” I explained. “I’ll tell you all about it when you pick me up.”
As much as Renee and I had been fighting lately, and as moody as she had been ever since it became clear Max was about to break up with her, there was no one else in the world I would rather have seen waiting for me when I stepped off the plane at JFK at around sundown. The moment she spotted me in baggage claim, she ran up and threw her arms around me, and we stood together like that for a long moment, neither one wanting to be the first to break away.
“So,” she said as I followed her through the parking garage, “what happened?”
“Can we, like, not talk about it just yet?” I replied. “I just want to go home and get into my pajamas and sit on the couch with you watching every Colin Firth movie in chronological order.”
“Fair enough,” said Renee. “But you know Pride and Prejudice alone is going to take, like, six hours.”
“I don’t care; I’m supposed to be out of town for the next week, and as long as we don’t tell my boss I’m back early, I don’t think he’ll mind. I’m supposed to be putting in some hours while I’m gone, but I just want to watch every movie.”
“Okay,” said Renee, “but after we
finish Kingsman you’ll have to tell me what happened between you and Zack. You can’t keep me in suspense like this indefinitely.”
“Fine,” I replied. “But not until then.”
As we sat on the couch that night watching Dutch Girls, I checked my phone periodically, half-expecting to find Zack had texted me and apologized for the way he had behaved that morning in throwing me out of the house and humiliating me in front of his family. But he never texted, and I went to bed still waiting.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Zack
It was my dad’s birthday, the reason I had gone home in the first place. And Kelli wasn’t even here.
I wasn’t sorry for what I had done. It’s hard to explain the sense of betrayal I felt when she offered to help me write an exposé on the Navy. She wanted to turn me against my own buddies. I wondered if her boss had put her up to this or if she was driven by some longstanding grudge against the military because of what had happened to her in Somalia. Maybe she had been planning her revenge for the last twenty years and she saw in me, finally, a chance to get even.
It wasn’t how I had expected this relationship to end. She had played her role so convincingly, had almost made me believe she really loved me. But then there at the end she had finally tipped her hand. Dad always used to say you could pretend to be someone else for a while, but in the end the truth would come out, so it was better to be who you were. Kelli had proven the truth of that. If she had really believed she could keep up the charade all the way to the altar, she was a bigger fool than I thought.
When I woke up the next morning, I found Dad seated at the dining-room table wearing one of them red pointed hats looking slightly embarrassed. Curtis and Darren sat on either side of him, dressed in their Sunday finest, and even Gandalf the dog wore a red bow. Mama was making French toast, maple-roasted bacon, smoked sausages and banana pudding, and had brewed a fresh pitcher of orange juice to replace the one we had drunk yesterday.