The Way Home (36 page)

“Sounds like I was a candidate for juvie hall.”

“Nah. You were never mean-spirited. Besides, Brad never let you get too far out of line.”

“What happened to my mother?” he asked abruptly.

She looked at him sharply. “You . . . you remember about your mother?”

He lifted a shoulder, then pulled a kitchen chair out and sat down. “I know she wasn’t around. That’s the one thing that came to me over there. That I hadn’t had a mother.”

She touched a hand to his shoulder, and for once, he didn’t feel like shrugging it off.

“She left. I won’t defend her, but your father was an alcoholic. I guess she couldn’t take it. Why she left you boys with him, I’ll never know.”

“How old was I?”

“When she left? You were five, I think. Brad was ten. Your dad tucked into the bottle even deeper then. You were fifteen when he wrapped his truck around a tree one night.”

“So Brad . . .” He let the thought trail off.

“Pretty much raised you.”

They talked then for the better part of an hour about his
high school days, sports, and dating, and for once, he asked the questions instead of relying on her to offer information.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff  ?” he asked when he’d absorbed as much as he could about the boy who had become the man he didn’t remember.

“Hang it on the tree . . . as soon as I get one.”

He glanced out a window. The sky was brilliant blue, but the indoor/outdoor thermometer by the sink said it was twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit outside.

“Do you want to go with me?” she asked, with a hesitance he completely understood. He’d been back three weeks, and he hadn’t once left the apartment. “There’s a tree farm between here and the Falls. I usually go cut my own.”

She’d been trying so hard. His brother had been trying so hard. Maybe it was time
he
tried. “Maybe we should call Brad,” he said. “See if he wants to go with us.”

Her smile was too happy, too bright, for such a small concession on his part. “Great idea. We’ll go as soon as I close the store at five.”

“I
DON
’
T HAVE
a wife.”

A fist hit him in the gut, doubling him over. Another slammed into his kidney. His knees buckled, and he fell on the dirt floor, covered in mud from the water they threw on him to revive him. Mud mixed with his blood.

Every day for longer than he could remember, they had dragged him in here, threatened him, and beat him, and when they were through with him, they dumped him back into the box. Four feet by four feet by six feet. Too many marks on the earth walls.

“Tell us her name. Tell us her name so we can find her and tell her what a hero you are.”

“I don’t have a wife.” Through the pain, he felt himself being hoisted by pulleys attached to the ropes that were tied around his bleeding wrists.

“Tell us what Americans were doing in Pakistan.”

“We got lost.”

Pain exploded through his jaw, and his knees buckled again. Only the ropes held him upright. He couldn’t see out of his right eye. Blood burned his pupil and dripped onto the dirt.

“Tell us about the Americans’ latest weapons system.”

“Rock . . . slingshot.”

Another blow to his head.

Another round of questions.

Over and over and over.

“What is your wife’s name? Tell us, and we will stop. We will feed you. You don’t have to hurt anymore.”

“I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a wife!”. . .

“I don’t have a wife!”

“J.R. Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

“I don’t have a wife!” he yelled again, as hands held him down.

He reared up swinging . . . connected with flesh . . . heard a cry.

Not his.

A woman’s.

“Rabia? Oh, God, Rabia.”

He frantically looked around. He wasn’t in an interrogation shed. He wasn’t in a box.

He wasn’t on a roof under an Afghan moon.

Rabia.

He was in a room. With soft light. A soft bed.

A dog whined and scratched at the door from the other side.

Another muffled cry.

Not a dream.

Jess
.

“Oh, God. Jess.”

“I’m OK,” she whispered from the far side of the bed.

“Did I hit you?”

“It’s OK. I’m OK. I’ll . . . I’ll be right back.”

The door opened, and she hurried out.

And all he could do was sit there in the bed, his hands braced behind him, his heart pounding wildly . . . and relive the nightmare that had been his life in captivity.

J
ESS RUSHED INTO
the bathroom, flipped on the light switch, and walked directly to the vanity. One look at her mouth, and she turned on the cold-water faucet. Blood pooled between her teeth and her split lower lip and trickled down her chin.

She groped for a washcloth with a shaking hand, wet it under the stream of water, then winced when she pressed it to her swollen lip.

Oh, God
. She breathed deep to steady herself.

“Jess.”

Her head snapped up. She met J.R.’s eyes in the mirror.

He stood in the doorway behind her, his eyes filled with anguish.

“It’s OK,” she reassured him.

“It’s
not
OK. You’re bleeding.”

“It looks worse than it is.”

“I hit you. I hurt you.” If pain was a sound, it came out in his voice.

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have woken you like that.
But you were having a nightmare. I . . . I don’t know. I wanted to wake you. To get you away from wherever you were.”

It all crashed down on her then. From hearing the news that he was alive. To telling Ty good-bye. To seeing J.R. in the hospital, broken and defeated. To bringing him home and trying so hard to give him his space and hoping so, so hard that he would remember . . .

A sob wrenched out unbidden, and then the floodgates broke.

She sank to the floor, helpless to pull herself together. All the years without him, all the pain of adjusting, and now, less than a month with him, and she’d hit the wall.

She’d thought she could help him.

She’d thought she could heal him.

She’d thought they could begin again.

For him, she
needed
to begin again.

But it was never going to happen. She couldn’t reach him. She couldn’t have Ty. She couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest hurt. And still she cried, her tears mixing with her blood and her helplessness and her shame.

She felt his hands grip her shoulders. Felt him lift her, wrap her in his arms, and hold her as she unraveled.

After several long minutes, he walked her into the living room. He sat down with her on the sofa and wrapped them together in a big soft comforter, with Bear anxious and confused at their feet, the soft lights from their new Christmas tree gently twinkling.

And despair crowded around them like darkness crowded in on dusk.

S
unday morning, Jess woke up
on the sofa, the comforter still tucked around her, her head on J.R.’s lap. Bear, curled up in a tight ball, slept soundly at her feet.

Her head hurt. Her eyes and throat burned from crying, and her lip felt as if it had swollen to the size of a basketball.

Then J.R. finally started talking, and none of that mattered anymore.

“During the beatings,” he said hesitantly, “they used to tell me they would find my family and kill them if I didn’t talk.”

She didn’t speak. She couldn’t speak.

“So I told them I didn’t have a family. I told them I didn’t have a wife.”

She sat up slowly and found him looking at her.

“I didn’t remember . . . until last night. Maybe . . . maybe that’s why I don’t remember you . . . maybe I said it so often to protect you my mind made it true.”

She hadn’t thought there were any more tears left inside her. “I am so, so sorry for what they did to you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.” His brows furrowed, and he took her hand. “Was I a good husband, Jess?”

“You were a good man, J.R. You’re still a good man.”

He grunted. “Tell that to your lip. And do
not
say that you’re OK one more time.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Was I a good husband?” he persisted.

She stretched to cover her discomfort over broaching this subject, then got up and walked to the kitchen to make coffee, put on water for his tea, and figure out what she was going to say.

He was still on the sofa when she came back. And he was still waiting for an answer.

“You were as good as you were capable of being.” She sat down beside him again and gathered the quilt over her, tucking it around her bare feet.

“What does that mean?”

They’d gone past the point of whitewashing and tiptoeing around each other’s feelings last night. When the dam had broken on her tears, so had her ability to cushion the truth. “It means we were kids when we started dating. It means we fell in love and became a couple before we figured out what it was like to be friends. It means,” she went on gently, “that when you enlisted, I suddenly had competition. You loved me, but you loved the Army more. Everything about it. Were you good to me? Yes. But the Army came first. I knew that when I married you. I figured at some point . . . I don’t know . . . I guess I figured you’d eventually decide you’d had enough, and then we could be one of those couples who came first in each other’s life.”

“Sounds like I was a jerk.”

“No. Not a jerk. A very principled man with a very big passion and sense of patriotism.”

“At your expense.”

“Nothing’s ever perfect.”

He stared straight ahead for a long moment. “Did you ever think of leaving me?”

“Yes,” she said honestly. “Right before your last deployment. I begged you to promise me it would be your last, that you’d put in for an instructor position here in the States. We fought about it. You left without saying good-bye.” The next word she’d heard was of his death.

He looked sideways at her. “Would you have left? If I’d come back then, would you have left?”

“I honestly don’t know. I loved you. But the deployments, the danger, being alone all the time . . . it wasn’t easy for me.” She pressed a palm to her forehead. “God, that sounded horrible. All you’ve been through, and I’m complaining because I had it bad.”

She got up suddenly and headed back to the kitchen to check on the coffee. When she returned with her mug and tea for him, she decided to risk asking him a question.

“Is Rabia the woman who helped you?”

He stopped with his tea halfway to his mouth.

“You said her name. Last night. When you woke up from the nightmare.”

He exhaled heavily. “Yes. Rabia and her father. He was the village
malik
. The liaison between the people and the
jurga
, the religious and governmental council.”

She hesitated only briefly. “Can I ask how you ended up with them?”