by Ninie Hammon
Piper pried the child’s arms away from her neck, set her down on the floor and leaned back.
“You’re fine.” She reached out and wiped a tear off the child’s left cheek with her thumb. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.” She made her voice sound relaxed and confident. “Now, go on and play.”
Sadie’s breathing still hitched in and out in the aftermath of the crying jag, and when Piper stood, the toddler lifted her arms and wailed, “Hold you!”
“I’m not going to hold you,” Piper said firmly, whereupon Sadie grabbed her mother’s leg with her left arm and popped her right thumb into her mouth.
“And get that thumb out of your mouth,” Piper said out of habit, knowing the child would keep the thumb right where it was, snug as a cork in a bottle of white lightning, until she calmed down, and nothing short of an amputation could remove it. “Let go of my leg and scat. Go on now, shoo.”
Grudgingly, Sadie released her grip on Piper’s leg and wandered over to a metal stove and miniature refrigerator Carter’d brought to her a couple of weeks ago. She removed the thumb from her mouth only long enough to tell her mother, “I make fri chicklin for Rasmus,” then popped it back in. A small smile skittered so fast across the lips wrapped around her thumb that it was hard to tell if it’d ever really been there at all. She picked up a small plastic frying pan and placed it on the fake burner and began to stir make-believe food with her left hand.
Piper watched her for a moment. Thought again as she had countless times before that the little girl bore little resemblance to either of her parents. Both she and Grayson were dark. Her own hair was, in fact, as black as the coal they dug out of the mountain, her eyes twin chocolate drops. But Sadie was as fair as her Uncle Carter.
Which likely didn’t please Grayson.
Piper sighed.
She suspected there might be quite a few things that wouldn’t please her husband when he got home in October. The last time Piper and Grayson had been together had been in April—a week to the day before the deadly ambush at Fire Base Eagle’s Nest—and even then he’d been somebody she didn’t know. It had been just the two of them in Hawaii for a week of R&R, and it’d been R&R all right. Ranting and Raving. No, that wasn’t fair. Most of the time it’d been Restrained and Reserved. They’d hardly talked at all. He had hardly talked at all—which had made his shouting tirade after she accidentally slammed a door so dramatic. And what would he be like now, after he’d had to send thirty-nine of the boys he’d ministered to for four years to hospitals in the United States and eighteen more back home to Kentucky in body bags?
“Y-y-you all right?” Marian asked. Her voice, soft and airless, shook in rhythm with the random tremor. The intermittent palsy that gripped her whole body in an involuntary vibration sometimes rocked her so violently that she sounded like a little kid who’d just come in the house with teeth chattering after playing outside in the snow. “I heard you up last night with the l-l-littl’un. You gonna g-g-get big ole dark circles underneath your eyes.”
Marian Addington leaned against the frame of the door leading into the kitchen, tried to make it look casual, not like she’d have fallen down if the jam hadn’t been there to hold her up. Her thick, coarse hair, the dark gray of a ten-penny nail, was pulled back into a tight bun at the base of her neck with a spiderweb hairnet to corral any stragglers. In the loose-fitting green print dress cinched with her ever-present apron, her bones stuck out at harsh angles. Flesh hung loose on her face, and her cornflower blue eyes were sunk in deep hollows. But the eyes were alive! Sharp and quick as they had ever been. Constant agony hadn’t dulled them. Yet.
“I’m fine,” Piper said, “but you’re not! You go sit down and let me bring you—”
“Don’t you be fussin’—”
“I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“I can get tea my own self. I’m not—”
There was a knock at the front door.
Sadie let out a startled little cry, dropped the plastic bowl full of blocks she was stirring with a big wooden spoon, raced toward the closest adult—Marian—and tried to bury herself in her grandmother’s aproned skirt. If the old woman hadn’t held fast to the door frame, the toddler would have knocked her off her feet like a tackle diving for a receiver.
Piper turned toward the door. Her heart began to knock so hard that her vision pulsed with every beat. She hadn’t noticed that Marian had pushed the door closed after Sadie’d come unglued over the mailman. Piper always kept the door open, only the screen shut, so she could see if a black car pulled up out front, see if two unsmiling soldiers in dress uniforms got out. So she’d know before they even stepped up on the porch. For some reason, that didn’t seem as horrible as opening the door and finding them there, eyes full of the nightmare truth their words had not yet spoken.
Piper’s mouth went as dry as a dust bunny. She’d dreamed it again last night, awakened in the midnight dark in sweat-tangled sheets. Maybe she’d cried out and that’s what Marian had heard.
The dream never varied. Instead of a black car and soldiers walking slowly, solemnly up the walk to the porch, it is Grayson himself. In the evening shadows, the gray half-light of dusk, Grayson walks silently up the road, dressed in his combat uniform, a duffle bag slung over one shoulder. His face is unsmiling, his skin bleached the kind of white moonlight imparts to fair skin, bloodless skin. And there’s no moon. His clunky boots don’t disturb the dust in the road, and in that perfectly normal way of dreams, she can see him, but she can also see through him, can see the trees behind him as if he were a glass holding dirty water. The whole front part of his shirt is black in the dim light, but she knows its real color is red. His shirt is soaked in black-red blood. He doesn’t speak, just stands there, staring at her with dead eyes. That’s when she starts to scream, a wail as haunting as the lonely cry of children lost in the dark. That cry always awakens her.
She could hear a faint echo of it now.
“It’s only Stella, bringing over some squash out of her garden,” she told Sadie, but her voice wavered. “Or Digger with that chain he borrowed.”
She crossed to the door and stood in front of it, willing herself to reach out. But her trembling hand refused to obey.
Chapter 3
The sudden thunk of a bullet sent splinters from the wall he was leaning against into Grayson’s hair. He cringed back, hunkered down lower, jerked his gaze away from the little girl in the road and followed the line of fire to the trees where the sniper was hidden. When the gooks pulled back, they always left snipers behind to pick off as many as they could to keep you from following them.
Haystack wouldn’t be following. He wouldn’t be going home to that girl he said had eyes the blue-green of Kentucky bluegrass. The gawky blond farm boy would never again sound that braying laugh, either, like he’d done from the doorway of the hut that day after Nguyen saved Grayson’s life.
A flare catapults Grayson from an uneasy sleep. Advancing gooks have tripped a wire that sent the torch high into the black sky, and the whole world instantly turns an odd florescent white.
Whap!
The bullet flies by so close to Grayson’s right cheek that he can actually feel the air rearrange itself in its wake. Grayson had hunkered down the best he could in his hole, tried to fold his lanky frame in tight enough to completely fit under his poncho in the drenching rain, and now he has to struggle to sit up.
Still he manages to level his rifle a full second before his mind tells him to, and the rest of what happens lags behind, too. Like when the lips of the people on the black-and-white screen of the Magnavox television in the PX at Fort Bragg moved but were out of sync with the sound, the words delayed by a beat or two. Reality is like that now. Gunshots slam into their targets a beat behind the splat sound. Men fall, their death screams a full second after blood spews out of their mouths in their final breaths.
Claymores rip through the gooks’ ranks, mowing them down like a scythe, but more spring up to take their
place. Again and again he fires, each retort a beat behind the recoil.
Then he pulls the trigger, and there is no recoil. Even the silence of an empty magazine is delayed a second.
The gook he is trying to shoot is forty feet away. And then he is right in front of Grayson. One, two. There is no time that Grayson is aware of in between.
It seems to take a hundred years to leap to his feet and slam the butt of his rifle into the gook’s weapon, knocking it aside. Then Grayson jumps out of the hole, bends low and starts to run toward the only available cover—bushes next to the latrines.
He’s almost there when something slams into his side—a boot—and all the air explodes out of his lungs. He sees a flash of brown coming at his face, like the gook has swung the butt of his own rifle around at Grayson. Then the world goes black.
The stench awakens him. The overpowering, putrid smell of excrement—human, not animal—is so strong it burns his nostrils when he inhales. Grayson opens his eyes, sees a green blur and closes them again. But he can’t breathe. He starts to cough and feels a small hand clamp firmly over his mouth. Lips next to his ear whisper a soft but harsh, “Shhhh.”
He manages to choke off the cough but is certain he will not be able to hold onto the vomit that is rising in his throat at the stench. He opens his eyes, tries to focus, to hold on.
All he can see is dirt in front of his face. He is jammed into some tight space with a weight on top of him, and he can barely move his diaphragm to get a breath. And the stink!
Involuntary heaving starts in his gut. The hand clamps tighter over his mouth. Whoever is on top of him can feel the spasms. Gray can’t move, and with that hand over his face, when he starts to vomit, he’ll choke. All at once, he feels horrifically claustrophobic.
Penned in. Can’t breathe. About to—
“Swallow it or die!”
The whisper is so soft, it is like he thought it instead of heard it. And so harsh it is like a slap in the face.
The accent is unmistakable. Vietnamese.
One of the AVRN—South Vietnamese Army soldiers who followed along behind the GIs, watching what they did and nodding their heads up and down as if they understood what was going on? No, whoever is draped over his back is as small as a child.
Grayson summons every ounce of strength he possesses. One beat. Two. The reflexive heaving batters against his rigid diaphragm like waves in a storm hammering the rocks on the shore. Again and again.
He clamps his jaws together so tightly pain shoots up the muscles in the side of his face and into his ears.
He holds his breath…and then the world begins to go dim and is no more.
Grayson held his breath now, too. His heart hammered in the big vein in his neck as he swept his gaze in a wide arc across the trees, searching for a deeper shadow in the shade, a length of limb too straight. He examined every leaf, every twig. Life and death dangled by a bright, slender thread—the glint of sunlight on metal.
He saw nothing, though. He scanned the mottled, shadowy jungle a second time, then slowly sighed out his breath and allowed his gaze to settle on Nguyen.
* * *
Marian Addington felt Sadie crash into her legs, and the jarring impact set the soup of razor blades, nails and shards of broken glass—that’s how she pictured it—in her belly to slosh around, slicing her open in half a dozen different places.
The sudden agony in her gut didn’t hurt near as bad as the sudden terror in her heart, though. She knew just like Piper did who might well be standing on the porch, understood why she raised her hand so slowly to open the door. That mutual dread was part of the bond the two women shared, which was much deeper than standard mother-in-law/daughter-in-law fare. Marian often thought of Ruth and Naomi from scripture: “Whether thou goest, I will go, whether thou dwellest, I will dwell. Your people shall be my people and your God my God.”
Please, Lord, don’t let it be no soldiers out there. Don’t take my Grayson…our Grayson.
The only woman either of her sons—Grayson or Carter—had ever taken a shine to still hesitated, her hand frozen in the air inches from the knob. Another beat, then Piper reached out and pulled the door open. Marian tensed, wanting to look away but couldn’t.
Piper blocked her view, and the old woman’s vision had gotten so bad lately that when she read her Bible at night, she had to use a flashlight, squeeze up her eyes all squinty and get down so close the pages fluttered when she breathed. She didn’t mind that, of course. A body had ought to get up close to the word of God and breathe it down deep into their soul.
Right now though, Marian wanted to see clear! Almost as bad as she wanted the good Lord to strike her blind so she wouldn’t have to look.
Piper shifted position then, moved out of her line of sight to reveal…not soldiers. A child. A little girl. And even from where she stood—even with her old blind eyes—Marian could see that the poor little thing’d been beat up something fierce.
*
Piper was too shocked, too relieved, to think, and couldn’t seem to get her wits about her to say anything at all to the life-sized Raggedy Ann doll on the other side of the screen.
And that’s what the little girl looked like, with hair the multicolored hues of the flames that licked up off the logs in the fireplace on a winter’s night—shades of bright-red with streaks of yellow, copper and burnt orange. It lay in thick braids on her shoulders and was tied at the ends with pieces of twine.
Though her shiny hair was obviously clean, you could see dirt and little pieces of…something, little rocks, maybe, on her head and braids. Her shirtwaist dress was made of some threadbare fabric that might once have been pale blue. It was too filthy now to tell for sure, with a tear in the right sleeve and being smeared with dirt. Her feet were bare and scratched up, as were her legs and arms.
Bright-red freckles stuck out like sequins on her alabaster skin—but only a spray of them on her nose, nowhere else. The rest of her face was flawless—well, except for the ugly bruise that colored her right cheek greenish-purple.
And the split lip.
And the black eye.
Piper sucked in a breath. The sense of déjà vu so strong it almost made her dizzy. She had looked like that—exactly like that—when she was about this little girl’s age, except her hair had been black instead of red. But the similarity wasn’t about braids and freckles. It was about bruises, blood and fear. And whoever had blacked this little girl’s right eye was likely left-handed. Piper’s father had been left-handed, too.
“I’m thirsty,” the little girl said simply, her voice emotionless. She stared straight ahead but didn’t really seem to be looking at Piper at all. What she said next finally broke the spell and set Piper free. “If you’ve a mind, a glass of water and I’ll be on my way.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Piper said, swinging the screen door open wide. “You’ll come on in this house and sit down, and I’ll get you something to drink. And something to eat, too. I’ll bet you’re hungry, and I’ve got…”
Her voice trailed off. What did she have?
“Why, we’ve g-g-got fried bread, that’s what.” Marian’s spoke from behind her. She was still standing in the kitchen doorway with Sadie wrapped like a coiled rope around her legs. “Least we will have soon’s I f-f-fix it. With my tomato jelly.”
The two women exchanged a look that said everything that needed to be said.
“Come on, now,” Piper said, and gestured in the open door. “I got lemonade…”
The little girl advanced slowly. She didn’t look so much frightened as disoriented and confused, looking around her like she’d just awakened from a dream and wasn’t quite sure yet where she was. She stepped in off the rough board porch to the polished board floor only far enough so the screen would close behind her. Then she stood, looking around.
Piper felt a surge of emotions as tangled as last year’s Christmas lights. She wanted to wrap her arms around the poor little girl and reassure her tha
t everything would be all right now, that no one would hurt her anymore. She couldn’t do that, of course, because clearly it would spook the child and because it wasn’t necessarily true.
Get her some lemonade. Make her something to eat. Worry about the rest of it later.
“You sit down here on the couch and I’ll—”
“A drink is all I’m needing. Just some water. Don’t trouble yourself over me.” She stood resolutely where she was.
“All right. You stay there, and I’ll get you some lemonade—or juice. Would you like some—?”
“Just water.”
“Water it is, then.”
Piper turned and started for the kitchen. She saw Sadie peak out of the folds of her grandmother’s dress at the older child standing in the doorway
If Sadie started to wail…
But that, of course, was exactly what she did.
She pulled her head out of the folds of fabric until one whole eye was clear, and she got a good look at the little girl standing in the doorway.
Sadie let out a shriek, then an inarticulate cry that almost seemed to have a word in it somewhere. She let go of her grandmother’s legs, slipped out of the folds of fabric and raced across the room…toward the little girl. When she got there, she grabbed the child around the knees, looked up into her face and began chattering in the nonsense babble that always replaced speech when she was excited.