by KG MacGregor
His incredulous expression gave way to a broad grin. “Well, ho-o-ly shit! Why didn’t you say so, Cap’n?”
She reluctantly grinned at his mock salute and shook his other hand. “At ease, Sergeant. And call me Zann.”
The colonel continued, “All right, we have a few items up for discussion. First is an update from Kenny, who followed up with Senator Sanders’s office on the status of the bill to…”
Zann chided herself for not paying more attention to issues that affected her and other veterans. In addition to her modest pension, there were plenty of programs that provided benefits she might have used had she not landed a job so quickly with the town, such as business and home loans, continuing education and employment opportunities. Marleigh was right—the fact that she’d landed on her feet meant she might be able to help others who weren’t so fortunate.
That sentiment grew even more apparent once they got through the business meeting and started sharing war experiences.
“I was standing there like a zombie trying to figure out how bad I was hit. I was scared to reach up…scared the whole side of my head would be gone. It just about was.” The speaker was TJ Harding, a guardsman whose checkpoint was hit by a suicide bomber. His injury was starkly visible as a deep red gouge running from his jaw to his hairline, and it had cost him both sight and hearing on one side.
Zann knew his feeling exactly, the surreal moment during which her brain sorted threat from relief. Adrenaline still surging and no one left to shoot, blood gushing painlessly from her mangled arm. And her gunnery sergeant sprawled on the dirt floor with eyes eerily fixed.
“Now I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. I can’t draw enough disability to live on, but I can’t get hired if I’m standing there next to somebody with two good eyes and ears. I worked construction for six years…had all the contracts I could handle. Now I’m lucky if I can get day labor.”
Since losing out on the Senior Inspector’s job to Gil Kirby, she’d admittedly been feeling sorry for herself for the modest struggles with her left hand. Now TJ’s injuries, plainly disfiguring and limiting in his line of work, put hers in perspective.
When they took a break for more donuts, she pulled him aside and handed him a business card. “Hey, I work for the town in the planning department. Nothing fancy, just a building code inspector. I can’t promise anything, but if you’re interested in getting on with maintenance or at the water treatment plant, I might be able to put in a good word. I know pretty much everybody.”
“Are you kidding! That’d be fantastic.”
When TJ left to call his wife with the hopeful news, she was approached again by Wes. “You still mad at me? I’ve been known to step in dog shit a time or two.”
“It’s all right. I learned not to expect much from army.”
“Come on, Airborne’s not just army.”
“True…it takes a special kind of crazy to jump out of airplanes.” She couldn’t help but like him. “So how did a guy that talks as slow as you do end up in Vermont?”
“Damn, you’re cold, Cap’n. The company I work for bought the quarry in Ripton. Made me a site foreman. ’Course, I didn’t know y’all were gonna dump ten feet of snow on me my first winter. Not very neighborly.”
“It’s definitely not Baghdad.”
“You’re telling me. So what’d you do in the Three-Two? I know them jarheads wouldn’t let soldiers of the female persuasion work the front lines.”
“I was the OIC for a Female Engagement Team.” He’d get her abbreviation for the officer in charge.
“Man, that took some chops. My hat’s off to you.” He literally removed his cap and ruffled his own shaggy hair. It was a compliment coming from a guy whose work to train security forces was the centerpiece of the whole Afghan operation. Arguably, his job was more dangerous than going on patrol, since local forces working with Americans were targeted daily by suicide bombers determined to wipe out dozens of recruits at a time.
Despite their bungled introduction, she owed him a compliment. “Without what you guys were doing in Airborne, we wouldn’t have made a difference at all. What’s this Black Slate you were talking about?”
“Private security in Baghdad…making sure diplomats and CEOs didn’t get their asses blown off by some innocent-looking kid begging for candy. I only worked there a few months. You know how it is when you first get out—gotta save up some dough.”
“Like Cerberus?”
“Not like Cerberus. It was Cerberus. Except they used to be called Black Slate. They had to change their name after a couple of low-level State Department officials they were supposed to be protecting went missing along with three millions dollars in cash. It was all hush-hush. The Pentagon yanked their funding and they had to regroup.”
“I considered a job with them. I never could figure out if they were on the up and up.”
“I don’t know about the up and up but some of those boys are goddamn crazy. If I were a betting fool, I’d lay odds they took that money and those officials ended up in a shallow grave somewhere in the desert.”
She shuddered to realize how close she’d come to signing on with an outfit so corrupt. “Sounds like I dodged a bullet.”
“If I can get you all back to your seats,” the colonel said.
They spent the next hour sharing more personal stories, some of the moments during deployment that were forever burned into their DNA. Fears of ambush, harrowing brushes with the enemy. The guard unit had lost a soldier, a young man several of them had known all their lives.
“It’s not something you forget.” The speaker had introduced himself earlier as Eugene, who worked as a butcher at Hannaford’s. “His name was Will Maynard…we all called him Maynard. He hated that.”
A round of soft chuckles followed as the others remembered and nodded along.
“Not the brightest bulb in the pack, if you know what I mean.”
“But he had a good heart,” one of the women added. This was Angie, a mother of two who now sorted donated goods at a local thrift store. She’d described her stint with the Guard as a weekend gig meant to bring the family a few extra bucks. Never had she dreamed their unit would end up being deployed. “He got picked on a lot but he was good-natured about it, never got mad over anything.”
Maynard’s story unfolded bit by bit as Guardsmen recalled their unique perspective of his tragic death. Their unit was transporting supplies in a convoy and stopped to inspect a suspicious segment of the road for IEDs. As Maynard stood guard in front of the column, the unattended fuel truck behind him slipped its gear and crushed him.
“It was horrible,” Angie said. “One minute we were all laughing in the back of the APC over who had the worst BO. Then just like that Maynard was dead. I’ll never forget what it felt like having to ride four hours back to Baghdad with his body zipped up in a bag right under my seat. I still get nightmares about it, like it’s a big joke and all I have to do is unzip him and let him out.”
A shattering vision pierced Zann’s consciousness, triggering the dusty odor of gunpowder and sweat. Dazed by a loss of blood and the disorienting horizontal perspective, she was trying to make sense of the lumbering gait as they evacuated her from Dahaneh. At one point her fellow Marines brought her stretcher even with the black body bag and wrapped her good hand around one of the grips so that she could share in the honor of carrying a fallen solder on the first leg of her final journey home.
How on earth had she managed to bury a memory so vivid and profound?
Wes leaned toward her ear and whispered, “You all right, Cap’n?”
Zann suddenly felt her tears and hurriedly wiped her cheeks with her sleeve. “Just thinking how hard that must’ve been on their unit.”
“Yeah, the Guard doesn’t exactly prepare you for shit like that.”
It didn’t matter what branch of service you were in. There was no preparation for losing someone in war and having to live with knowing it could just as easily have been
you. Far from feeling supported by this circle of fellow veterans, she wanted to bury her pain even deeper. As the meeting broke up, she told herself she wouldn’t be back.
“Hey, Zann.” Angie caught up to her at the door. Up close the corporal was painfully thin with a tattoo that crept from her hand and disappeared under her sleeve. Her eyes were ringed in dark mascara, an odd look for someone with her fair coloring.
“Angie, right? How’s it going?”
“I was just talking to Reese and we wanted to ask you something.” She buried her hands in the pockets of her ragged jeans and swiveled from side to side without making eye contact. “Colonel Grant keeps telling us we should talk about our feelings now that we’re home, how being over there affected us. If me and Reese tell what happened to us all hell’s going to break loose. You know what I’m saying?”
It took a few seconds for Zann to realize what she was talking about—women who’d been sexually assaulted during deployment. As the OIC of an all-female unit, she’d laid down strict rules to limit their vulnerability, rules that held everyone responsible for the safety of the others. “There wasn’t anything like that in our unit. We always hung together during down time. Buddies, teams…nobody went anywhere alone.”
“Okay, never mind.”
Zann caught her arm as she started to walk away. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk about it. We all took an oath to serve with honor under the law. Anyone who didn’t live up to that deserves to be called out. And that also goes for whoever stood by and let it happen.”
Angie tipped her head in a gesture to have Reese join them. “So you’ll back us up if we say something?”
“Of course.”
Reese added, “Like she said, it could get messy.” Unlike Angie, Reese was heavyset, but she too wore an abundance of black eye makeup. Obviously, it was the fashion of the day, one that had escaped Zann’s notice until now. “Nothing like having your rapist sitting two chairs down and pretending he didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe you can sit with us next time. You’re a captain, plus you got that valor medal. They’ll have to take us serious.”
Walking back to her Jeep Zann acknowledged that her promise to Angie and Reese meant she had to return. No matter that she’d already convinced herself this fraternity of soldiers could stir more harm than good, especially when it came to her own memories of what happened to Whit. But when faced with adversity, Marines were programmed to run toward it—never away. And she would always be a Marine.
Chapter Twelve
Bridget hissed as the icepack made contact with the cut above her brow. “Easy…fucking hell, that hurts like a son of a bitch.”
“I know. You just need to lie back and let it work. It’ll keep the swelling down and numb the pain.” Marleigh switched off the bedside lamp, glad she no longer had to look at the swollen, purple eye. “The doctor said for you to rest. That means no TV, no texting…nothing that uses your brain.”
“That should be a piece of cake for me, huh?” Bridget was settled into the bottom bunk of Zann and Marleigh’s guest room, the one they’d set up for when Zann’s nephews stayed over. “At least now I have an excuse every time I screw up the copy. I can honestly tell Clay I may have brain damage.”
Not to mention a broken wrist, twenty stitches and a raw patch on her scalp from where her hair had been pulled out. Rocky had yanked her out of the bathroom after breaking down the locked door, causing her to hit her head against the vanity. Because of all the blood, she’d been forced to go to the hospital this time, and in a rare moment of courage and candor, had called Marleigh to pick her up and drive her there. Maybe this time she’d finally had enough.
“I don’t feel like joking around about this, Bridget. He’s gone too far this time.”
“I know,” she said, all traces of humor gone. “He had a bee up his ass because I bought those Audrey Brookes without asking him. Do you realize I haven’t had a new pair of shoes in over a year? It’s fine for him to spend eight hundred dollars a month on ammo and cigarettes, but I can’t have one goddamned pair of shoes without him going fucking ballistic.”
Marleigh couldn’t bear to think what it would be like to live with someone so selfish, so controlling. She and Zann shared everything, and there was nothing they couldn’t talk about.
“So I thought if I stayed in the bathroom awhile, he’d eventually cool off. It might’ve worked if he hadn’t come around and jiggled the door. I shouldn’t have locked it. He went apeshit and tore it off with a crowbar.”
It was at least a blessing he hadn’t taken the crowbar to her. “So how come you didn’t tell the cops any of this? They can help, you know.”
“They haven’t helped Kayla Matthews. She called them twice on Mick and all they did was talk to him. By the time they left, he was even more pissed off than before.”
Kayla was a woman from their Pilates class. She’d confided in Bridget that their fights had turned physical, that the neighbors had called the police because they were making so much noise.
“Forget Kayla. She’s not my best friend—you are. Rocky broke your wrist and nearly put your eye out. If you’d told the cops that, you know as well as I do they’d have picked him up and thrown his ass in jail.” There was still time to change her mind, but Bridget had taken a huge step tonight by having Marleigh call him from the hospital to say she wasn’t coming home. “Tonight needs to be the beginning of the end, Bridget. This is your life we’re talking about. You don’t have to go back ever again. Stay here with us for as long as you need to.”
Bridget scoffed. “I bet you a thousand dollars he’ll be over here tomorrow telling me it’s time to come home.”
“If he gets any closer than the curb, he’ll be trespassing. And you know I won’t hesitate to call the cops. Zann already said she’d take off a couple of hours on Monday while he’s at work. You guys can go over there with the Jeep and bring all your stuff back here.”
She groaned but didn’t otherwise put up a fight. It was a good sign.
Marleigh opened the window to let the June breeze filter in. Their house didn’t have central air-conditioning. “Want me to turn the fan on? You won’t get much of a cross breeze with the door closed.”
“The window should be enough.” She’d peeled back all but the cotton sheet. “Rocky runs his mouth all the time about heading out to North Dakota where his brother is. Says he’d make good money working the oil fields. I wish he’d just shut up and go already.”
That would be the ideal solution, since Rocky wasn’t going to learn all of a sudden how to manage his temper or curb his controlling impulses.
Marleigh sat by the bed on a trunk filled with linens until Bridget grew quiet and began to breathe evenly. Then she tiptoed out to find Zann hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table.
“She’s finally asleep. I gotta say, this one really threw me. I had a feeling he’d started smacking her around again, but I had no idea it was this bad. Thank God she called me this time.”
“She needs to file for divorce first thing Monday morning.”
“He’s never going to agree to that. I can predict exactly what he’ll do next. Flowers, dinner. He’ll say he’s sorry and swear it’ll never happen again. Then she’ll start making excuses for him…him being under pressure, her pushing his buttons, whatever. And she’ll probably end up going back.”
“Come look at this,” she said, waving Marleigh over to the table. “This is all you need to file for divorce in Vermont. They don’t have kids, don’t own a house. All it takes is one simple form. If Rocky signs it—boom—divorce is final in six months. And if he doesn’t, she can still put it through by herself but it takes a year. The only catch is they have to live apart for six months before she can file.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. The problem is that Bridget’s singing out of a different book. Nothing changes until she decides to stand up for herself.” She couldn’t count the number of times she and Zann had talked about Bridget this w
ay, always ending with the same conclusions. “For the life of me, I can’t understand why someone as sweet as her thinks she can’t do better than an asshole like Rocky Goodson. She’s got so much to offer.”
“Maybe this time it’ll be different. It already is—she called you.”
“I wish you’d been there to talk some sense into her. The ER doctor took one look at her and called the cops, but when they got there she wouldn’t even tell them what happened.”
“I wouldn’t read too much into that.” Zann closed her laptop and stretched her arms high above her head. “She might just want to handle it her own way where it’s not out there for everybody to see. I wouldn’t want people to know I’d put up with crap like that.”
Abusers counted on that. In fact, Marleigh had argued with Clay about his policy of listing all the domestic disputes in the crime section, thinking it might keep some women from speaking up.
“She thinks Rocky will show up here tomorrow. I guess we have to be ready for that.”
Zann pushed her chair back from the table and tugged Marleigh into her lap. “I guarantee that’s not going to happen.”
* * *
Wes Jackson sat beside her in the front seat of the Jeep, fidgeting with the scratchy seat belt but apparently too polite to complain. Atop his head was a deep red beret, the official cover of the 82nd Airborne. “What’d you say this scumbag’s name was?”
“Rocky Goodson.”
“You’ll recognize him when you see him,” Kenny Wales interjected from the backseat. “He’s here every weekend. Drives that black Ford pickup with one of those idiot bumper stickers that says this truck’s insured by Smith and Wesson, or some such bullshit.”
Moe Morgan was the third passenger. Behind them in another vehicle were Leon, TJ and Brandon. It was a show of force, all recruited the night before with a mass email sent to everyone in the veterans group.
Zann turned onto Horse Trail Road. At the end they spotted Rocky’s truck, the only vehicle in sight. “I appreciate you guys doing this for me. Sorry to get you up so early on a Saturday. This is when he likes to come.”