Wanted (13 page)

He nodded toward Jessie’s room. “She’s been making noises. Sometimes words, but I can’t make ‘em out.”

“
You check on her?” she asked in a concerned voice. She stared at Jessie’s door, wondering what was going on.

He shook his head. Tanya frowned, then turned and started towards it. “Be careful,” he warned her.

Tanya nodded stiffly, then stopped. She turned back to him. “Careful? Of what? She’s a wreck.”

“
Yeah, be careful of that.”

“
What do you mean?”

He stayed silent for a long moment, long enough that Tanya began to think she’d never get an answer out of him. A few seconds before she would have either asked again or turned away he spoke. “She’s fucked up in ways none of us know about, not even her. Might be better to send her out into the desert and let her find her own place.”

“
I thought you were the hero? You can take out four armed men without breaking a sweat, what’s a screwed up woman like her going to do to you?” Tanya challenged.

“
I ain’t no hero,” he growled at her.

Tanya withered a little under his glare, but it only took her a moment to find her steel and blow it off. “Where I come from, if something needs to be done it gets done,” she said. “That means if someone needs help, I guess she’d best be helped.”

He grunted - it was either a chuckle, an acknowledgement, or a scowl, Tanya could not tell. “What she needs I ain’t got enough left to spare. Them that’s got it, you and your brother maybe, she’ll suck it out of you and then maybe that ain’t enough for her,” he told her.

Tanya frowned. She could not imagine running out of compassion. Oh sure, she hadn’t liked Jessie from the start, but the woman had a way of getting under her skin and growing on her. Especially now that she was showing signs of regretting some of the things she’d done.

“
Maybe I’m still a stupid kid,” Tanya said, “but if it’s as bad out here as you guys keeping telling me, shouldn’t we do whatever we can to help her? How do expect people to change if you don’t help them?”

He snorted this time, and she was sure it was a derisive laugh. “Change? If you ain’t holding a gun, then you ain’t changing nothing.”

“
You been out here a long time, Carl,” Tanya said after a long silent moment. “Maybe too long. I appreciate you taking us in, you probably saved us as much or more than Jessie did.”

Carl grunted again. She was becoming a master of his monosyllabic language. “I know, she was helping herself first, not us, but it all worked out. My point is… well…”

Tanya trailed off thoughtfully. What was her point? Her mom always knew what to do. She wished she were there to offer some advice. Her eyes burned at the thought of it. She turned away, sniffing at the tears that came out of nowhere and threatened to overwhelm her.

Carl stayed silent behind her, not understanding and not wanting to be drawn into whatever it was that was bothering her.

Tanya closed her eyes and focused her breathing. Just like before she performed she figured. She centered herself. “My mom would know what to do,” she said, turning back to face him. “She’s gone though, and since she’s gone I had to take care of things. I guess that’s true now.”

Again Carl said nothing. If she was expecting a challenge from him, she was disappointed. He shrugged, at least, and for her that was good enough.

She turned her back on him and went to Jessie’s door. She almost knocked, then heard her whimpering on the other side. She turned the knob and went in quietly, shutting the door behind her. Tanya had to wait a few moments for her eyes to adjust in the even darker closet. She moved forward and stood over Jessie as she watched her head roll back and forth on the pillow. Her lips moved, whispering silent words.

Tanya leaned down next to her cot, dropping to her knees to listen. She heard Jessie then, feeling the breath of her words even as she managed to make them out. Jessie kept saying over and over a single word, “Please!”

“
Jessie,” Tanya said softly, reaching out to touch her shoulder. She said it again, gently shaking her.

Jessie’s eyes snapped open and she gasped as she stared at Tanya. She scrambled to get away, and Tanya recoiled a little bit from her instinctively. Then Jessie calmed down, or at least stopped moving. “Tanya?” she whispered.

Tanya nodded. “I’m here,” she said. “It’s me, Jessie. Are you okay?”

“
You’re alive?” she asked, staring at her with her chin trembling.

Tanya smiled. “Yeah, I’m okay. All of us, we’re okay.” As okay as we’re going to get, at least, she thought.

Jessie’s arms wrapped around the gymnast before she could react. She pulled her close and made Jessie’s back twinge. Out of fear of re-injuring it, she did not resist, and quickly found herself smashed against Jessie’s chest. She carefully moved her head out of the older woman’s cleavage and let her hug her, confused as to just what the latest issue that was bothering her was.

“
Jessie?” Tanya asked, her voice muffled by the blankets and the woman holding her captive. “You’re kind of scaring me.”

Jessie let go, a little. She loosened her grip and let one arm fall away but kept her other hand on Tanya’s upper arm. Jessie looked at her and smiled. “Sorry… I just…”

“
Bad dream?” Tanya asked her after it was obvious the older woman was having trouble finding proper words to use.

She nodded, smiling faintly. “Yeah, something like that.”

Tanya gently pulled Jessie’s hand off her arm then moved so she could sit on the edge of the cot. “Want to talk about it?” she asked her, reaching out and holding the disturbed woman’s hand in her own in a show of empathy. It caused a tremor in her stomach, what she was doing. It was a scene she’d been on the other end of a few times with her mom trying to help her.

Jessie’s gaze shifted. She looked up at the metal rafters and the roof beyond them, but her eyes got blurry as she pondered Tanya’s question. Tanya wondered what could be so bad that even thinking about it forced her to run and hide. She knew her own troubles had only made her stronger, but she had to face them to get there. Sure, there were times when she thought there was no coming back. She could remember lying in the hospital bed, unable to feel anything except the tears running down her face. Those same tears that only caused more to follow them since she could not wipe them off.

“
It gets better,” Tanya said, giving her hand a squeeze. “I don’t know what’s bothering you, but it does get better.”

“
Yeah,” Jessie said dully. “Time heals all wounds, right?”

Tanya smiled sadly. “I don’t know about that, but I think we learn how to deal with them.”

Jessie just stared at the roof, or maybe beyond it, from the unfocused look in her eyes. Tanya frowned a little, wondering how she could help the woman. Then she wondered why she was trying so hard, especially given Carl’s pearls of wisdom he had just shared.

Tanya’s thoughts were disrupted when Jessie suddenly spoke. “I dropped out of high school at 17, but stopped going around 16. Got my GED, so I got something that says I’m not a total dumbass.”

Tanya smiled and gave her hand an encouraging squeeze. “You are kind of dumb,” she said with a smile, “but you’re not stupid.”

“
Yeah…thanks, I think,” Jessie said, smiling back in spite of herself. It helped her break the ice a little though, because she was able to continue a little easier.

“
I had to get out. Get away from…” Jessie hesitated, then went on, “I enlisted and shipped out… Never looked back. Ended up serving six years and it changed my life, mostly for the good till the end.”

“
What happened?” Tanya asked, interrupting the cathartic spell Jessie was putting herself under. Tanya couldn’t help it, she knew she should let her go on, but her curiosity was beginning to eat at her. Besides, as selfish as she’d thought Jessie to be, whining about her problems when Tanya and her brother clearly had just went through a lot more, at least this helped distract her from the grief that kept trying to overwhelm her.

“
I interviewed people. Soldiers, civilians, officers. I wanted to get into doing real stories, reporting news, you know? I kept getting stuck on recruiting videos though, it sucked. That was my last assignment, interviewing a lieutenant who had spent three months on border garrison duty between Iraq and Iran.” Jessie’s eyes shifted from the ceiling to Tanya. Tanya could see something in them, even with the lack of any proper light. She saw fear and pain, the kind that sticks deep in the soul and doesn’t come out.

“
I had this kid that followed me around, Khaled. He was an Iraqi and a good kid. He helped me out, anxious to spend time with Americans. I think he had a crush on me,” Jessie said with a faint smile as she thought of more pleasant memories. “He was there at the interview. I brought him with me because he helped out. He was cute, he made me feel good. I just didn’t think.”

Jessie paused, collecting herself. Tanya waited, understanding this time that no amount of curiosity on her part would do any good. It was maddening, having to wait. Tanya was accustomed to being able to have her way simply because she refused to accept anything else. Some of it was her being spoiled and she knew it, but she also had achieved a lot of things just because she expected to achieve them. Even a crippling spinal injury hadn’t held her down, but dealing with another person with a troubled past? That was giving her an ulcer.

“
A suicide bomber came at us,” Jessie continued, rousing Tanya from her musings. “He… I saw him coming. I knew something was wrong. I knew he was wrong… but I just watched. I wanted the story. I wanted to be able to write about it, to tell what happened. I had no idea what it was like.”

“
What it was like?” Tanya half asked, half prompted when Jessie paused for a long time again.

“
I was non-combat. Most women were still,” she explained. “I’d never seen any action up close. So loud, so scary…”

Tanya squeezed her hand again. She couldn’t think of what to do to help other than just to be there. Her mom had known her well enough to do just what to do.

“
Do you remember the plane crash at all?” Jessie asked her, changing the topic.

Tanya shook her head. “Not really. We heard and felt a bang. Then there was this whistling noise. An engine was on fire, we could see it out the windows. The plane started to shake and nobody had any time to tell us what to do. I grabbed Dusty and my mom grabbed us. It was shaking bad then. Somebody was crying, I remember hearing it… and that’s it. Next thing I know you were there.”

Jessie nodded. “Yeah, shaking, noise… that’s right. It’s scary – you don’t know what’s happening. You’re lucky though, you don’t remember it.”

“
I wish I did, I hate not knowing what happened.” Tanya smiled in the quarter light and offered an explanation, “Control freak.”

Jessie shook her head, “I wish I couldn’t remember. I did everything I could to forget.”

Tanya knew she meant drugs and alcohol. Probably a few other things as well, but what they were, Tanya was afraid to imagine. “So what happened to Khaled?” she asked, bringing Jessie back to her story.

“
Killed,” Jessie said. Then she paused. “Lieutenant Thelen too. He threw himself on me to protect me. He died on top of me. Khaled, Brian – that was the specialist who was my cameraman, and another eight or nine people. All dead, blown up and mangled.”

Tanya squeezed her hand, bringing her out of her fugue. “I don’t see how that’s your fault?”

Jessie shrugged. “That’s what the army doctors told me too. Survivor syndrome, they called it. I feel guilty because everyone else died and I lived, they say.”

“
I’ve heard of that before,” Tanya said, trying to add some credence to it.

“
Maybe it’s true,” Jessie said, looking away at the wall. She turned back and shrugged again. “I live through it again in my dreams. Doesn’t matter how much I drink or smoke or snort. Doesn’t matter how much sex I have, or who it’s with, or how it happens. The dreams always come.”

“
Maybe there’s another way,” Tanya suggested, unable to fathom letting go of herself so much. The thought of intentionally losing control the way Jessie did sent shivers down her arms.

“
Maybe,” Jessie said, looking back at her.

Tanya watched her, seeing a look on her face that she couldn’t figure out. Jessie looked like she wanted to say something, to tell her more. She couldn’t bring herself to do it though, and Tanya wondered how she could help her. “What is it?” she asked her, at a loss for how to figure it out.

“
What?” Jessie asked her.

“
There’s more, I just don’t know what.”

Jessie nodded, looking away then looking back at her. She sighed, reaching a decision within herself. “Don’t fuck with me, okay?”

Tanya nodded, “I promise.”

“
This time after the bomb went off I saw Dusty and you – with the plane behind you. You told me… you told me I killed you. You asked me why I didn’t save you.”

Jessie stared at Tanya, daring her to react. She ignored the trembling in her chin and waited for the wide eyed teenager to respond.

“
Jessie, you saved us,” she told her. Her voice was soft and quiet, but laced with the steel of seriousness. “Maybe for the wrong reasons, but you saved us. I have to think that somewhere in there, as screwed up as you might have been, you were doing it for the right reasons too.”