by Kelli Estes
Grams shook her head. “I’m glad I didn’t know any details of your job when you were over there. I was worried as it was.”
Larkin smiled at Grams, grateful that she cared.
Kaia got up to refill her coffee mug. “So, interacting with the locals was part of your daily routine? Did any of them cook for you?”
Larkin smiled. Her cousin was so predictable. “Yes, a few times I was invited to share a meal with them and often with the Afghan police. There was a group of boys who played soccer in the street outside Sarah’s police station, and it was only boys. Girls aren’t allowed the freedom to run, laugh, and play in public. But anyway, I visited there periodically and befriended the leader of the group, a boy named Nahid. He started bringing naan from his mother’s kitchen to me whenever he knew I would be there.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” said Kaia, ever the tender-heart. “Tell us more about Nahid.”
Larkin felt everything inside her freeze. Why had she said his name? The one topic, the one person, she could not discuss.
She jumped up to refill her coffee, cringing as she moved too quickly and the scar tissue in her knee and back pulled painfully. “I, uh…” She hid her face by turning her back to the others. “I think I’d rather get back to playing cards.” Plastering on a smile, she faced them. “Shall we switch to Uno?”
They played and talked for several hours until Grams took herself off to bed with Bowie trotting up the stairs alongside her.
The cousins lingered at the table. None of them were ready to call it a night, so Larkin suggested, “There’s an unopened bottle of Jameson in Gramps’s liquor cabinet. What do you say we take it out and go for a walk? I’ve been wondering if our old fort is still there.”
They found the Jameson and flashlights, then tugged on boots and raincoats and headed out the sliding back door to the deck. With the door closed firmly behind them, they felt like teenagers again, sneaking out of Grams’s house. Larkin twisted off the bottle cap and took a slug. She handed it to Kaia, who did the same. “Hoo, that burns!”
That set Jenna and Kaia to giggling, but, to Larkin, it triggered echoes of her Army days. Hoo-ah! Her heart felt like lead in her chest. She took the bottle back and drank an extra-long gulp.
“Give me some.” Jenna took the bottle from her and clicked on her flashlight before drinking. Her slug was followed by a moan of appreciation. Then, twining her arm through Larkin’s, she said, “Let’s go.”
They made their way, arm in arm, across the darkened yard and into the forest that edged Grams’s property.
Larkin led the way past dripping wet ferns, salal, and Oregon grape bushes, being careful to avoid blackberry thorns. They nearly missed the fort because a thick layer of debris and moss had covered the roof and walls. From behind, it looked like a large boulder tucked between the trees.
As they rounded to the front, their flashlight beams playing over the forest around them, Larkin was battered by competing memories. First, there was the summer when Gramps had let them take whatever they wanted from a pile of scrap wood he had in the garage and they’d constructed the three-walled shelter. They’d wanted a tree house, but the tall trunks of the evergreens would not support one, and no hardwoods on the property were strong enough. So, a lean-to in the forest it was.
But then her next memory shoved that one out of her head. It was of a night raid on a compound on the outskirts of Kandahar. The night had been dark and cold, like this one except there was no rain, and they’d thought the compound was abandoned until a rocket-propelled grenade blasted out of the darkened mud building and nearly took out the vehicle she was riding in.
She shook her head and took another long swig of the whiskey. Their fort looked nothing like that compound. Why did Afghanistan have to intrude on everything in her life?
“Wow, that was close,” Kaia said, her words slurring slightly, referring to a toppled cedar lying only a couple of feet in front of the fort.
“It got the firepit,” Jenna added, shining her light on the massive tree lying where their ring of rocks used to be.
Larkin shined her flashlight into the fort and saw that years of dead leaves had collected inside. “I’m not going in there,” she announced and climbed onto the fallen tree. It was so big that her feet didn’t touch the ground. She drank again and tilted over until she was lying on her back, staring at the black sky. Her cousins settled beside her.
The whiskey had left a burning sensation in her chest, and she welcomed it. Maybe it would burn away the emotions there that kept bubbling up into memories she’d rather forget.
She knew her family had probably looked up PTSD on the internet and felt they now knew all about what she was going through, but they didn’t know shit. Not even Grams and Kaia, who had witnessed her flashback that first night.
The fact was, her trauma was controlling her, and it felt like it always would.
She closed her eyes and tried to think about something else. Anything else.
The forest was silent. No birds sang. Birds should be here singing and calling to each other. This quiet felt like death. Was this what it felt like to be dead? Nothing else around but silence and decay. Molding leaves, decaying logs, shriveled-up ferns. Nothing sprouting from the soil. Nothing warming the leaves. Only death and dying.
And cold. She was cold. Too bad they didn’t have matches, or she’d rebuild their fire ring and start a fire. She could stay out here all night. Maybe out here her ghosts wouldn’t find her.
Larkin opened her eyes and stared at the patch of sky encircled by treetops. It was so dark that she couldn’t tell if there were clouds or not. She couldn’t see stars, but that might be because she couldn’t quite focus. The night was too quiet. The trees needed music. The birds were gone, and the trees needed music. She could sing for them, she decided, and opened her mouth to belt out the first lines that came to mind, which ended up being from David Bowie’s “Starman.”
She fell quiet, wondering if her mind would be blown if a space person appeared.
Kaia sang the next line, before Larkin was ready to sing it herself, and Jenna joined in. She’d forgotten her cousins were there.
They fell silent again. The song had been one Gramps used to play on his CD player in the family room, and the girls had taken up singing it together. They would often sing together out here in their fort, but that was a long time ago.
To break the silence, Larkin said what had been weighing on her mind all night. “I’m sorry I’m not good company lately. I’m kind of messed up right now.”
“That’s okay, Lark.” Kaia patted her forehead. “We still love you.” For some reason, that made her start giggling, and soon Larkin and Jenna were laughing with her.
Suddenly, an important thought came to Larkin’s mind and she sat up, swinging her legs toward the fort. “Do you guys know it was only the two of you and Grams who ever sent me care packages and regular emails when I was deployed? My mother couldn’t be bothered, of course, and the idea probably never entered my dad’s head. But you guys… Did you work out a schedule between you or something? I got something every couple of weeks from one of you. I really appreciated it.”
“It was Kaia’s idea.” Jenna shifted so she was sitting cross-legged facing Larkin. “And sometimes we’d go shopping together for things to send to you.”
Larkin shot Kaia a smile of gratitude. “Thank you. It meant a lot to me to know you were thinking of me.”
Fat drops of rain started landing all around them. The forest filled with the tinkling sound of drops hitting leaves and bare branches. “Um.” Kaia held her hands out to catch the drops. “Maybe we should go inside?”
Larkin and Jenna pointed their flashlights at her and laughed at the hair being plastered to her face, even as the rain did the same to them. In unison, they shook their heads. “Nah.”
* * *
L
arkin rolled over, even before she’d opened her eyes, and bumped into another body. Her first thought was that she’d done it again. She’d drunk so much she’d ended up sleeping with a stranger.
Afraid to look, but knowing she didn’t have a choice, she peeled open one eye and was swamped with relief. Jenna lay beside her, still asleep, with drool darkening the pillow under her cheek. They were on the pullout couch in the family room where they’d fallen asleep after stumbling back to the house, drunk and soaking wet.
Larkin rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, thinking through the night before. She’d actually talked to them about Afghanistan. And it hadn’t sent her into a fit of rage or despair like it usually did when her therapist forced her to talk about it. But still, she hoped no one asked her follow-up questions today. She’d opened up a lot, and that left her feeling exposed and raw, as though her skin had been flayed open.
But she had slept like a normal person. That was something.
“Oh good, you’re awake.”
Larkin rolled onto her stomach and peered over the back of the couch. The eastern sky was starting to lighten. Kaia sat at the end of the table with a steaming mug of coffee and a laptop, her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. “Morning.”
Kaia nodded, distracted by what she was reading on the screen. “I had an idea last night when you were talking about Afghanistan, so I got up and started doing some research.” She turned and looked at Larkin. “Did you ever eat mantoo?”
Larkin thought. “Is that a rice dish?”
“No, it’s a sort of meat dumpling served with split pea sauce and garlic yogurt.”
“Yeah, it sounds familiar.” Larkin sat up and rubbed her hands over her face to wake up.
“What about a lamb and rice dish called Kabuli pilau?”
Larkin’s stomach dropped, remembering the last day she had eaten that dish. She answered vaguely, “Yes, I ate it. It’s good.”
Kaia’s head bobbed. “It’s decided. I’ll make you an Afghan meal soon.”
“You don’t have to go to all the trouble,” Larkin said, racking her brain for a way to get out of it without hurting Kaia’s feelings or revealing too much. “I’m sure it’s a lot of work, and the food was just okay.” A lie, of course.
Kaia had already dived deep back into research. She waved a hand toward Larkin. “No, no trouble. I’ll make it into a blog post, too. It looks fascinating.”
Once she’d settled on a food project, there was no talking Kaia out of it. She’d always been interested in the stories associated with foods. What parts of the world they came from, who discovered the ingredient or brought it to the attention of the rest of the world. Who got rich off of it, and who was exploited in its production.
Accepting defeat, Larkin untangled herself from the blankets and went upstairs to take a shower. The emotional walls that usually protected her were badly in need of repair, and solitude was the only way she knew to accomplish that.
Chapter Eight
October 6, 1861: Washington, DC
“David!” Emily yelled. She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Wake up, David!”
His head flopped with the force of her shakes, and the sight unnerved her. She laid him back against the pillow and grabbed his hand in hers, squeezing tightly. “Come on, David. We need you. Wake up.”
But he did not respond. His eyes did not open, and his chest did not rise. As Emily watched, the fever-bright spots on his cheeks drained away and his face was left a repugnant gray color. “Come back,” she sobbed.
“Emily!” Ben’s voice held a note of warning. He had a grim look on his face, and when she met his gaze, he nodded toward the other patients in the room.
She looked around and saw that her grief was upsetting the other sick men, and she knew her tears were reminding them of their own fragility. Worse, her tears probably reminded them that, should they die, no loved ones would be at their bedsides. They would die alone.
The young man in the next bed had his eyes closed, and tears ran down his cheeks. Emily felt ashamed that in the four days she’d been here, she’d never asked his name.
She looked one last time at David, who wasn’t David anymore. As she pushed to her feet and forced her spine to stiffen, she said, “Please excuse me.”
With her chin lifted and her teeth clenched together, she made her way down the stairs, through the ever-present throng of people, out the back door, and into the stables. She would have locked herself in a privy where no one could bother her, but the smell was too horrible. In the stable she hoped she could have a few minutes by herself. The first stall was empty, and the hay smelled fresh. Grateful for that small blessing, she sank to her knees.
Finally, with no one there to witness it, she let herself cry.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Pa and David were supposed to have come home to them after three months. When that changed with Pa’s death—the thought sent another wave of agony through Emily, and she doubled over—the three siblings were supposed to be together. That’s why she and Ben had traveled all this way. Now David had been taken from them, too.
This rebellion was supposed to be over by now. The Southern states were supposed to have given up their ridiculous demand for autonomy and rejoined the Union. Not only had that not happened, but they seemed to be more determined than ever. Evidence lay in all the newspapers reporting on skirmishes and battles and troop movements, but Emily had enough evidence right in front of her. The secesh took Pa from her, and now they’d taken David. If not for this war the secesh had started, David would not have been in that military camp where he’d contracted his illness.
Anger burned through her.
Part of her wished she had stayed home where she and Ben were far away from all this death and disease. But even there they would not have been safe from sorrow. Sorrow would have found them either way. She was not sorry they had come because they had been with David when he died. That was a small blessing, at least.
“Emily, are you in there?”
Quickly, she wiped her tears with her sleeves. “I’m here.”
Ben appeared in the open stall door. Sorrow dragged on his face. “They want to take David’s body, but I told them to wait. I thought you might want to say goodbye.”
The words felt like a stake being rammed through her heart. She rubbed at her chest with the heel of one hand. “No, that’s all right. I’ve said my goodbyes.”
Ben was silent for a long moment. “Are you sure?”
She was crying again and could only nod in answer.
She could hear Ben’s feet crunching over dead leaves as he walked away from her. A terrible thought came to her, and she jumped to her feet to run after him. “Ben, wait!”
He turned around, and raw pain flashed across his face. He’d lost his only brother, and she’d been too wrapped up in her own pain to help him. She opened her arms to him. “Come here.”
Ben stepped into her embrace, and his body shuddered with silent sobs. The pain in her own chest grew even larger, and she tightened her jaw to keep from crying out.
“All that matters now is that we have each other,” she said to Ben when she felt his body stop trembling. “I’ll never leave you. I love you, little brother.”
“Yeah, me too,” he mumbled against her shoulder.
She knew that was the best she’d get from him, and she smiled, grateful that something was constant.
She took a deep breath and asked the question that had loomed over them these last few days, though she made sure to ask while Ben was still against her so he couldn’t see her face. “What now, Ben? Do we go home?”
She felt him stiffen before he abruptly stepped back, his face a careful mask that showed no emotion. “I can’t go home, Em. Don’t you see?” His eyes slid away from her, and he kicked at a stone with his boot. “Pa wanted me to enlist. Yo
u heard him. And even seeing all the horror that this war inflicts on a man, I still want to go. I want to fight so that Pa and David did not lose their lives for nothing. Surely you understand?”
Emily studied her little brother and saw the man that he had become. “I do understand,” she told him and, just in time, managed to hold back her next words. She understood, and she would be going with him. There was no way she would allow him to leave her. Too many had left already.
“So, uh.” Ben glanced toward the hospital. “We’ll talk more later. Right now, I need to get back. Do you want to be there when they prepare the…um…the body?”
She definitely did not. “No. Do you?”
Raw pain flittered across his face, but his nod was confident. “Yes. I think I need to be there.”
Emily’s heart thumped painfully. She swallowed. “I’m proud of you.”
Ben dipped his head.
“I’m going to go find us a room to rent for tonight. Somewhere with a bath.” Emily looked at the sky and saw the sun was low on the horizon. It must already be time for supper. “I’ll send word so you can meet me there when you finish here.”
Ben went back into the hospital, and Emily skirted the building to the street in front. She didn’t want to think about what Ben would witness this evening as their brother’s body was prepared for burial. Nor did she want to think about David’s death, or Pa’s death, or the fact that home would never be home again without them. She planned to distract herself from all this by taking the necessary steps toward her new identity. If everything worked out right, she would look very different to Ben when he walked into their rented room later.