The Ones We Trust

by Kimberly Belle

  I love you,

  R

  My vision blurs, and I draw a shaky breath. “They knew. Everyone knew.” There’s a hitch in my voice I don’t bother disguising. “That very same day, they knew.”

  Gabe’s jaw clenches. “And they tried to conceal it.”

  Another person chooses a table too close for comfort, this time a slender blonde in her midforties. She throws more than one glance in our direction as she pretends to read the menu, and that’s all I need to know. We need more privacy than the IHOP can afford. I write HOTEL? in big, block letters on my notepad, and Gabe nods his agreement. While he pays the bill, I gather up the stacks of papers and our things, and we meet at the door.

  It doesn’t take us long to find an ancient motel on a cross street, but Gabe nixes it. “Those places are crawling with bedbugs,” he declares, so I drive on. A little farther up the road, we find a newer-looking chain hotel, and I pull into the lot. A disinterested night clerk checks us in and hands us two keys, pointing us to the elevator that will take us to room 213.

  “Very romantic,” I say, taking in the worn carpeting, cheap wall unit and two double beds.

  Behind me, Gabe activates the double lock and straps the chain across the door.

  With my thumb and forefinger, I remove the ratty bedspread and synthetic blanket from both beds, dumping them in a pile in the corner. When he gives me a look, I say a little defensively, “I watch CSI. I know what’s on those things.”

  We spread our papers out over the stiff cotton sheets of the beds and get to work, each reclining on a headboard. We reread every entry in the Zach pile, and when we don’t find anything more than what was in Ricky’s letter, we reread the other pile, as well. When we don’t find anything after that, we start all over again. I read until my eyes burn. I read until the letters blur and the lines run together on the page, and then I read some more. If there is something else there, something beyond what we already know from the letter, I’m too tired to see it. And from the bleak look that has swallowed Gabe’s face, he’s not seeing it, either.

  Finally, at somewhere around four in the morning, I collapse onto the pillows behind me. “What are we missing?”

  On the next bed, Gabe drops the paper he was holding, and it skates to the floor. “Maybe the letter is all there is.”

  “There’s got to be more.” My voice is boiling with desperation. “Why else would the blog just disappear? There’s got to be more.”

  “There’s not. Goddammit all to hell.” Gabe slumps onto the pillows, draping an arm over his face. The past forty-eight hours have been such a roller-coaster ride of emotions for me, I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for him. I go to him, gingerly moving the papers onto the other bed and curling up at his side. I kiss his temple, his scruffy cheek, his clenched jaw. Except for his quiet breathing, Gabe doesn’t move at all.

  “I just hoped...” His voice breaks and then falls still.

  In my time as a journalist, I covered more tragedies than I can count. I’ve stood among hysterical parents and shocked survivors outside schools and malls and fast-food restaurants while a gunman wreaked havoc inside. I’ve interviewed weeping mothers who’ve lost a child to an inner-city gang or a serial killer or a lunatic with a semiautomatic rifle. I’ve questioned rape survivors and tsunami survivors and every other survivor you can come up with, but never, never have their emotions touched me as deeply as Gabe’s does now.

  I scoot even closer and bury my face in his neck. My voice is barely a whisper. “I know. I’m so sorry.”

  “I still call him,” he says, and the words reach into my chest and put a choke hold on my heart. “I still pay for his cell phone service, just so I can still feel like I’m talking to him. I don’t ever want to stop...” He wipes his eyes on his sleeve and turns to me, and what I see in his face breaks my heart. “Stupid, right?”

  “No.” My eyes fill with tears for Gabe, and for a man I never really knew. I wrap myself around him until not even a whisper of air can make its way between our bodies. “No. It’s not stupid. It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I told him about you.”

  His words hit me like a lightning strike, blowing me apart with a billion volts. Gabe called his dead brother, the one he spent his entire life worshipping, the one he looked up to and sought approval from, and told him about me. It takes me a couple of tries to find my voice.

  “What did you tell him?” I whisper into his chest.

  “That I’ve found someone who softens that constant ache in my chest. Someone who makes me smile again.” He rolls onto his side to face me, pushing the hair back off my temple, tucking it behind my ear. “It’s true, you know. You’re that person.”

  I lie here for an endless moment, unable to breathe, thinking back to the last time anyone said something so beautiful to me. My high school boyfriend, the first to tell me he loved me. Rose this past February, when she asked me to be her Valentine. My grandmother’s whispered words before she took her last breath. None of them comes even close.

  I soften the ache. I make him smile. I’m that person for him.

  I do the only thing I can think of to show him what his words mean to me. I undress him. I start with his boots and socks and work my way up. I let him help only when absolutely necessary, whispering for him to lift up his hips or sit up enough for me to peel him out of his sweater. This isn’t about sex or physical release. This is about me helping him forget his brothers even if only for a minute. This is about me loving away his pain.

  I kiss every inch of him. His forehead, his cheeks, his earlobe, the scruffy spot at the hinge of his jaw. Gabe doesn’t move other than to bunch up the sheets in two tight fists. I kiss his Adam’s apple, the hollow of his neck, the center of his chest, holding there until I feel it, his heart beating steady and sure underneath. Gabe’s big, beautiful body hums like a high-voltage electrical wire, and I am the lightning rod. I kiss every inch of him, licking down one side and up the other, nipping with my teeth and soothing with my tongue, lingering on places that provoke a gasp or a sigh or a groan.

  And then without warning, he flips me. “My turn,” he says, his voice low and rough.

  His hands are licks of fire as he slides them across my body, peeling off my clothes with burning, urgent fingers, an inferno boiling my blood and consuming me with heat. Every nerve ending in my body springs to attention. I arch up to meet him and moan. He answers it with one of his own.

  He makes love to me then, and it’s as if he is searching for something in me, some way to fill him up and make him complete again, and maybe I’m doing the same with him. It is so different from the last time, more bittersweet maybe, and far more powerful. I watch him above me, my heart pounding in my chest as if it’s trying to break free, and something inside of me is breaking open, spilling out everywhere. At the last moment, right as I’m about to cry out his name, he pushes the hair off my brow and holds my gaze until both of us fall off the edge and into each other’s arms.

  Afterward, he holds me as if he will never let me go, and I do the same with him. As I’m drifting off, three little words bubble up in my throat but go unsaid, the dizzying realization I’m in love with the man next to me almost floating me back to consciousness, but the pull of exhaustion is too great.

  By the time I reach the far side of a sigh, I’m asleep.

  * * *

  Sometime after dawn, I wake in his arms.

  I know what we missed. What we read over and over and over and missed. Our minds got so hung up on Ricky that we didn’t see Nick, sitting in the seat right beside him. All this time, the answer was right there in front of us. We just didn’t see it.

  Gently, I lift Gabe’s arm from my hip and slip out of bed. He stirs under the crumpled sheets, but his eyes remain closed, his breathing slow and steady.

  I
n the dim morning sunlight poking through the curtains, I scramble around until I find my T-shirt and panties on the floor and noiselessly pull them on, and then I begin sorting through the papers on the bed. Within less than a minute, I find the blog entry I’m looking for, the one dated just two days after Zach’s death. My eyes skip down to the last paragraph.

  On the drive back to base, I could feel the weight of Nick’s empty seat beside me. He was in whatever truck had the gruesome task of carrying back the body of his brother. I thought of all the things I should have said to him as they were loading what was left of Zach into a body bag, the things I will surely tell Nick the next time I see him. That I will miss Zach, that I was blessed to have known him, that I will never forget him. But mostly I will say that Zach was my brother, too. He was my brother.

  I reach for my computer and turn it on. As I wait for it to power up, I reread that paragraph again and again, rolling the words around in my brain. No matter how hard I try, I can’t figure any other way around it. According to Ricky, Nick rode out on the seat beside him, which means Nick was in the second convoy, not the first.

  Then why do all the official army reports state Nick was in the first convoy with his brother Zach?

  I pull up the reports on my screen and start scrolling. In every account, on almost every page, there is some mention of both Armstrong brothers in the first convoy. It’s as if the army bent over backward to make certain this point was clear, stating and restating this detail more often than necessary.

  I check the blog entry again and there it is: Nick’s empty seat beside me. But why would the army want to bury the fact that Nick was in the second convoy, unless...

  My father’s voice slices through the confusion in my head. Do not open that Pandora’s box, Abigail.

  Something inside me splits open, letting in light, filling me with understanding I don’t want to grasp, dropping the bottom out of my world.

  “Oh. My. God.”

  On the next bed, Gabe awakens at the sound of my voice.

  23

  It takes Gabe’s sleep-befuddled brain a few beats to register the look on my face. When it does, he shoots straight up in bed, the thin sheet pooling around his waist. “What’s wrong?”

  I have no fucking idea how to answer that question. The only thing I do know is that I can’t speak the words I think to be true. If neither of us says those awful words out loud, then maybe they won’t be true. I’m having a nightmare. I’m being punked. I’m waiting for the punch line.

  Yet slicing through the steady hum of the room’s air-conditioning unit, I hear my own voice, high and hysterical, already believing.

  I shake my head, stare at the veins pulsing on the back of my hands. “Nothing.”

  One hand still clutches the blog entry like a crumpled bouquet, and my mind searches for a way to release it without Gabe noticing, to slip it under my thigh maybe, or let it slide from my hands onto the floor. I can feel Gabe’s eyes sliding over me, looking for clues, and I sit here frozen. I can’t seem to look up, to meet his gaze head-on. The room is stuffed full of silence.

  He snatches his jeans off the floor and thrusts his legs in, pulling them up over his bare ass. “Please, Abigail. You’re scaring me. What?”

  “Nothing.” I try to smile, but dread swirls inside my chest until I think I’ll drown. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Really.”

  Bile touches the back of my throat at the lie, and I swallow down a thick, burning ball of it.

  Gabe shoves aside the mountain of papers in front of me, wraps his big palms around both my biceps and shakes. “Tell me.”

  The shoulder he sets behind the words rattles me to the innermost point in my belly, or maybe he was trying to shake the answer out of me, I don’t know. Either way, in all the commotion, Gabe notices Ricky’s blog entry in my fist.

  He snatches the paper up, gaze flashing over the words.

  I can’t watch. I don’t want to see the moment when realization hits his face. I launch myself off the bed and run to the sink by the bathroom, burying my face in a hand towel. I hear him come around the corner, picture his big body filling up the tiny hallway, the paper still in his hand, and I don’t dare look. Is his face bathed in confusion, or horror?

  “What am I not seeing?” He pulls the towel from my hands and tosses it onto the floor, tipping my face up to his. His eyes brim with tears, ones I can barely see through my own. “Please. Just tell me.”

  But I can’t. My lips won’t form the words, my tongue won’t push them out. It’s bad enough that I was the one to work it out in the first place, I cannot, no, will not say what I think I know out loud. This is math Gabe is going to have to figure out on his own.

  He looks back to the paper. “But what... I don’t...”

  There’s a long silence, one that expands and fills the room until it becomes almost tangible. A silence that presses down on my skin and fills my lungs with cotton. That it’s taking Gabe longer to fully comprehend is something I don’t fault him for, will never fault him for, given the circumstances.

  “But that’s not right.” He shakes his head, hard, like a dog choking on a bone, and the paper floats to the floor. “That’s not fucking right. Nick was with Zach. He was—”

  I look away, but by now it’s too late. I’ve already seen it, those beautiful, horrified eyes, that angular, trembling jaw. Gabe did the math, and he came to the same sickening conclusion I just did.

  “Maybe we’re wrong.” I’m surprised I can even speak, as thick and rubbery as my tongue feels. The words come out slow and slurred. “We can’t possibly know for sure.”

  “We know.”

  “Maybe we don’t.”

  “We know, Abigail. We fucking know! Jesus. Mom kept telling me to let it go, that Zach was gone and nothing could bring him back, but I wouldn’t listen. I had to have someone to blame. I had to know, and now...” The snag in his voice tells me he’s barely holding it together, as does the way his hands are shaking. He shoves both of them in his hair and pulls, his face twisting into a tight wad, his bare chest heaving. “I’m such a shit! Why didn’t I listen to her?”

  “Gabe.” I reach out for him, sliding a hand onto his waist, and he flinches. My hand drops back to my side. “None of this is your fault.”

  Gabe turns and stalks back into the room. Halfway there he freezes, blinking around at the rumpled sheets and papers and pens, the empty water bottles strewn among our clothes on the floor, the piled-up bedspreads in the corner, taking everything in as if he’s seeing it for the first time. His breathing has calmed somewhat, and I might think he’s okay, were it not for his clenched fists and the muscles across his back, standing up under his skin like rope.

  And then his shoulders broaden, his back expands and his lungs fill with air. He’s bracing for a fresh gale of grief, I think, and then it comes, folding him double and pushing an awful, keening howl up his throat that knifes me in the center of the heart, a direct hit. And then before I can take even a step in his direction, he straightens, brings an arm back and punches the wall with his fist.

  “Gabe!” I run to him, reaching for his injured hand, but he yanks it away, only to beat the wall again and again and again. “Gabe, stop. Stop!”

  Gabe doesn’t stop. He keeps going until the wall crumples and bloody streaks coat the striped vinyl wallpaper.

  On one of his backward swings, I latch on to his arm by the elbow, throwing all my weight and strength into the effort. It’s like dragging an oar upstream, sluggish and heavy, and it lifts me clear off the carpet. I clench down, hold on tight. The action whirls his big body around, and his expression is so downright terrifying I have to remind myself his fury is not aimed at me.

  “Gabe, it’s okay,” I say, even though it’s not. Even though it’s the opposite of okay. I press both hands to his bearded cheeks
, force his gaze to mine. A drop of something splats on my foot, and I know without looking that it’s blood. “I’ll help you. It’ll be okay.”

  He hauls a hitching breath, and he nods, quick and eager as if he believes me. A jagged pain ripples up my throat, aching with tears I can no longer hold back, not for Nick or for Zach but for Gabe. For the man who so desperately wants me to make it okay, and for the knowledge that I can’t. I can’t make any of this okay.

  He collapses into me, and we fall back onto the bed, on top of the papers and trash and wrecked sheets, his body pressing down on top of mine like a deadweight. My face is mashed into his shoulder and my ribs are creaking under his mass, but I don’t push him off or complain, because that’s when I feel it.

  It starts slowly, silently, like a hurricane rolling in off the ocean. His chest jerks once, twice, again. The movements tear up his torso and throat, building in strength and speed, churning into sharp and violent sobs. Gabe is sobbing on top of me, and with a force that threatens to break my bones. His skin is damp and salty, his entire body heaving, and I would stay here under him forever, not moving, barely breathing, if I have to.

  Because though I can’t do anything to take away his pain, the least I can do is bear the weight of it.

  * * *

  Bright November sunshine streams through the windshield in slices of gold, lighting up Gabe slumped in my passenger’s seat. His eyes are dull and lifeless, but his cheeks glint with silver tracks of dried tears, disappearing into the dark scruff of his beard. He hasn’t said a word for the past hour, and though I’m trying to be supportive and give him some space, his silence is eating away at me. I don’t know what to do, what to say, how to help. I’m way out of my league here.

  I toss my bag onto the floor behind my seat and climb behind the wheel. “What now?”

  Gabe stares out the side window, onto a row of scraggly bushes at the edge of the hotel lot.

  “Gabe.” I touch a finger to his arm, and his skin flinches like a horse’s hide swatting away flies. “What now? Do you want to go home?”