Carmen arrived home from her first tour in Afghanistan at the beginning of June. During the three-hour bus ride from the airport, she tried to focus on the familiar landscape hurtling by: tall trees nestled against the sun, pockets of deep blue water catching the light, the rusted shine of the scrap metal yards, softly ribbed soil of farmers’ fields, the empty factories with their broken windows and walls tattooed with graffiti. They all bled together.
When she closed her eyes, she saw clouds of flame and heard the sound of gunfire.
Her older brother Aaron was parked outside the station in his dark grey pickup truck when the bus pulled in. His face lit up when he saw her. Carmen approached slowly, waved a hand, and tried to smile. She climbed in beside him with her single bag, and wiped at her eyes with the tattered sleeve of her old army coat.
“That’s all you got?” he asked her.
“Yeah.”
“They don’t leave you with much, eh?”
“I travel light.”
“Good to have you home,” he said.
His face, in profile, seemed a little older. The faint sketches of lines across his temple and in the corners of his eyes made him look like their father. Carmen wondered if she should have been in touch more often while she was away. But he hadn’t written to her either. Maybe they had nothing to say to each other.
“Thanks for picking me up,” she said, keeping her voice strong. She ran a hand over her closely cropped hair.
Carmen sensed he had questions about why she was home, why she’d come back early. But he only spoke of the heavy rains. She turned to stare out the window.
“Worst flood in years,” he said. He was talking about the river, around which their town was built. “Wrecked a lot of the places along the shore. I’m glad Mom sold her house and moved to the city before the latest storm happened. I drove by yesterday. Part of the roof came down with the force of the floodwater. We were okay though. Just a little got in downstairs. Mopped up the basement right away so it should be fine for you.”
Carmen nodded. She gripped the strap of the duffel bag in her lap like it was a climbing rope and she was going up a cliff.
There were piles of ruined furniture and other flood-damaged household belongings at the end of every block as they drove along the river, heaps that her brother said just kept growing as people went about the gradual work of clearing out their property. The town didn’t provide disposal bins for everyone. Empty houses lined the neighbourhood where damage from the flood was too expensive to repair.
When they arrived, her brother’s wife, Melissa, wasn’t there. She was on the night shift at the hospital, where she worked as a nurse.
“She’s looking forward to seeing you tomorrow,” Aaron said. Then he got quiet, and looked nervous, which was rare for him. “We’re expecting a baby in a couple of months.”
Carmen congratulated him. A new life, a way to begin again.
He offered her dinner, but she told him she was exhausted and should probably get some sleep.
Alone in the basement of her brother’s house, she glanced around her new apartment. The kitchen was connected to the bedroom by a long hallway with a little bathroom at the end of it. Only two small windows, but four closets. At least there was some privacy, furniture, a door she could lock. A place to rest.
As she got ready for bed, Carmen noticed something in the air. At first, she thought the smell came from the flood damage, or maybe the mop in an empty bucket standing in the corner. But the more she breathed it in, the more she sensed it under every surface. The thin scent of burning, an aching mustiness of smoke. It clung to her body, through her clothes, on her skin, no matter how she washed. It
covered her like a sheet as she lay awake in her new bed.
◊
Carmen could hardly remember life before the military. The only thing that stood out was her father’s illness. He was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was seventeen.
Her father was a vet. He told her once, from his hospital bed, that he thought she’d make a good soldier. It didn’t matter what else she did later on, he said—the Canadian Armed Forces was a free education and a foot in the door.
She told him she would look into it after she graduated from high school. He seemed pleased.
“I know you’ll make me proud,” he’d said, his eyes still bright, as he reached up to squeeze her shoulder.
When Carmen started training the next year, she felt like she belonged. She could channel her will into being a soldier, into acting the part. She wrapped herself in camouflage and grew accustomed to the genderless feeling that filled her when she wore the heavy uniform, held the weapons in her hands.
Later, she wondered if it had been a way for her to hide. In the army, there were fewer ways to meet women—there were far fewer women than men on base to begin with—and the opportunities she had, she didn’t take, though they occupied her mind. The guys mostly left her alone. A couple of times, she’d needed to defend herself, in another form of combat, being on the offensive and defensive at the same time.
Soldiers are told that death is a possibility one has to accept. But as Carmen went through the months of training, she didn’t think about being shot, or shooting other people. She thought only of shooting the gun. She focused only on the weapon in her hand, the targets on the range, on the movement of gear and supplies, on the presence of her fellow soldiers.
Training, for her, was about repetition and obedience, and following orders meticulously. But it was also about pushing her body as far as it would go, and discovering it could go farther. She watched action movies and imagined that she was in them, that she was becoming indestructible. Not Carmen in the uniform, but Carmen as uniform, as soldier.
In time, she came to feel that there was nothing underneath.
◊
Now that she was home, Carmen felt separate from the slow-motion routines of civilian life.
She had to force herself to leave the apartment. Every couple of days, she would go for groceries, so she could have something of her own to eat. During the warm summer evenings, while her brother was doing shift work at the factory, she would sit on the front porch with Melissa and talk about the pregnancy—Melissa was seven months along—or chat about the changes in town over the past few years.
One evening, Melissa suggested she check out the local community centre, to do something again. “Aren’t sports your thing?” she asked, like she already knew the answer.
Carmen nodded, grateful for this moment of calm, as though everything was ordinary. “I guess it would be good to get out of the house,” she answered.
All around them, the dusk welcomed the darkness.
“Sure,” Melissa said, taking a sip of tea, watching her.
“I wonder if there’s a running group,” Carmen continued. “I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate lately, but running helps.” She glanced at Melissa quickly. Had she said too much?
But no, her sister-in-law was listening to something else, laughing quietly with her head tilted to one side. “Feels like the baby is wide awake and kicking,” she replied.
They sat there for a while longer, their palms against the taut skin of Melissa’s round belly.
◊
Carmen’s artillery unit was flying to Kandahar. Before they left, their commander told them that what they did with their time on Earth was of greater importance than how long they spent on it, that the world was watching, that their actions could change history. Carmen felt more powerful than she ever had before in her life.
“Think about where you place your trust, and pay attention to your conscience,” their commander said. “Know that you are experts on the use of force and violence when necessary.”
No one had addressed Carmen as an expert before. No one had spoken to her about such large responsibilities.
There was only one other woman in her platoon. The two of them tried to stick together. Jessie was a woman who came on strong in conversation, both impulsive and direct, often tripping over Carmen’s shy, sly delivery. She had a buzz cut, one she’d given herself, and she convinced Carmen to do the same. Her face was small and expressive. Emotions moved like lightning across it.
One day, shortly after they met, Jessie said, “You know those fucking military ads at the bus stop and on TV, with the girls in army fatigues holding wrenches, or getting out of military helicopters? That’s what brought me here.”
“Did you find them?” Carmen asked her.
“Who?”
“The girls.” She was half joking, half serious—maybe even flirting, if she was honest.
Jessie didn’t get it, just kept icing her knee. She’d busted it earlier in the day, when one of the guys shoved her down during the outdoor drills. “I have no idea now what I would’ve been if I’d stayed away from this,” she replied, eventually.
◊
The running group at the community centre met each morning at eight, Monday to Friday. Despite being weary from lack of sleep, Carmen tried to show up every day of the week. One of the first mornings, as she was glancing around at the small crowd, she saw a girl bending down to tighten the laces of her sneakers, her short dark hair falling across her face. When the girl stood up, Carmen noticed that she didn’t make eye contact with any of the others in the group.
The dark-haired girl was there most mornings. Her name, Carmen discovered, was Aurora. Carmen thought of talking to her every morning thereafter. But running didn’t exactly invite conversation. Plus, Aurora seemed to be on her own page, seemed like someone who was used to being alone and didn’t mind it. She was faster than Carmen, usually at the front of the pack, her long legs kicking up and down at the earth, as if with every stride she found more reason to run, more untapped energy.
What was someone like her doing in this town?
◊
Carmen had no idea what it was like to call Afghanistan home. To grow up there, to know it intimately, the way a person knows the place of their birth even after it has been stolen from them. Packing up her old bedroom in her mother’s
house before leaving for her deployment, she’d found pictures of Afghanistan in old issues of National Geographic collected when she was a kid. Taken more than two decades ago, they depicted mountain ranges, valleys, deserts and dunes, lush orchards, rivers, jungle-like fields of wheat, opium, and marijuana. As she looked at those photos, she fantasized about learning Pashto. She wanted to understand what the people were saying to her, thought it would somehow make her less complicit in the cruelties of war.
But when she came to know the country, it was only as a soldier carrying a gun.
She kept her head down when she heard the racism directed toward Afghan people by other soldiers, pretended
to ignore what they said, the same way she did when she heard them talking about queers. She was accustomed to hiding in order to get by, knew how to turn away and shrug off the words, the derision, knew how to keep her expression controlled and flat. She hoped she could rise above it—without standing up or speaking out—if she was a good enough soldier.
After a few weeks, Carmen and the other soldiers were ordered to engage in routine patrols around the villages, outside the wire, which meant going beyond the borders of the large basecamp and into areas where they would need to be prepared for potential combat.
Real combat, when it happened, was nothing like she’d imagined. It always happened so fast, without a chance to adjust or to reflect. Anything could happen in a breath: on the inhale, bullets fired; on the exhale, someone wounded, someone dying.
Carmen would find herself lying in the sand or behind buildings along with the other soldiers, waiting to attack invisible enemies. They would press themselves to the ground under the heavy weight of their gear, strung out with nervous energy. Some of the guys smoked, some would dry heave into the sand, some cried to themselves, the sobs digging deep in their throats, and some even started firing their weapons crazily at their own dread.
How she survived, she did not understand.
◊
Carmen finally caught up to Aurora about two weeks after finding out her name. It was near the end of a run, when they were both breathing hard, and looking ahead instead of at each other.
She only learned later that Aurora had slowed down on purpose, and had done so against her better judgment.
As they headed together along the battered shore, Carmen mumbled an introduction that was both a little out of breath and jumbled by her feet hitting the ground. She was really starting to feel the hunch of her shoulders, her upper body boxed tightly, wound up like a spring, as if she were getting ready to throw a punch.
Aurora spoke to her then. There was barely a question uttered between them—and barely an answer—but somehow they made a decision to meet, and in the brief euphoria following the run, they set up a place and time.
They’d go for drinks. That was all.
Afterwards, despite the fact that it had gone so easily, Carmen thought she had been too forward. Too obviously out of practice. Also, maybe, that she was finally losing her mind.
◊
Some of the Afghan elders who Carmen met during the combat mission insisted through their interpreters—terps, the soldiers called them—that the Canadian and American soldiers were as much the enemy as the Taliban. That it was their presence that caused the killing, the vandalizing of their homes, the disruption of their lives. That it was the soldiers from the West who were trapping them in the middle of a conflict in which the price even of speaking out was terrible.
The longer Carmen spent in Afghanistan, the more this reality began to crowd her thoughts. It threatened to break through the surface of what she had accepted as truth, until every step she took felt false, and every command she took direction from felt like a lie.
◊
For the first time since she’d come home, Carmen found herself sitting in a crowded bar. She pulled at the pale fabric sticking to her neck in the summer heat. She knew her T-shirt hardly fit her, but she’d rushed to get ready and the shirt was the only clean thing she could find to put on.
Carmen tried to remember where it had come from. She must have gotten it when she was smaller, maybe as far back as high school. It had been in one of the boxes her mother had left with Carmen’s brother when she moved to the city. Most of what Carmen found in those boxes, she didn’t recognize at first. But because she didn’t have many civilian clothes left, and had no money to spend on a new wardrobe, she wore whatever she could find.
The bar continued to fill up while Carmen waited for Aurora. A group of girls sat down at a table next to hers. She hoped she didn’t know any of them. Luckily, most of the people she’d gone to high school with had moved away to find work. The older folks, on the other hand, she was especially wary of. They always felt they had the right to ask questions about what had happened to her, the soldier’s daughter, the fighter.
Carmen and Aurora had agreed to meet here, as opposed to any other bar in town, because it was the biggest one, and because Aurora had heard from her cousin that it was a more open kind of place.
Aaron agreed, when she’d mentioned to him that she was meeting someone there. “That’s a good choice,” he said, looking up from the kitchen table where he was sitting, going through the household bills. “Of the four in town, it’s probably the best one. It had one of those rainbow flags in the window for a weekend in June, last year. I mean up on the Friday evening, and down by Sunday night, but still.” Aaron lifted his hands, which were a lot like her own, and smiled, like he wished he could give her more.
Carmen didn’t know what to say. So she waited, because it seemed like he was going to ask her a question.
“Have a good night,” Aaron said, turning back to the bills on the table.
Despite all the assurances, she found she was getting some hostile second glances at the bar. She guessed it was because of her buzz cut. And this shirt—what had she been thinking when she put it on? There was a printed colour photograph on the front, of two tigers facing each other in profile, nose to nose. Below the picture were the words Wild Cats scrawled in a jagged black font. The sleeves were especially small at her shoulders, showing off muscles still thick from training.
Carmen tried to remember the way lifting weights made her feel: like they could prepare her for anything.
◊
One morning, Carmen and the thirty other soldiers in her platoon entered a village on foot. The sun was already tearing brightly into the sky. As she squinted through the lenses of her ballistic eyewear, she pictured herself lumbering along like a moving target, pounds of kit and a heavy net of weapons slung around her. She felt moisture on her skin, under the layers of clothing and her frag vest. Sweat dripped from her forehead and ran down her cheek like tears. Her helmet gripped her head tightly. She thought maybe she had put on the wrong one, and suddenly felt the urge to loosen it. But there was no time. She could feel her heart beating as though this was goodbye.
They had not been told the name of the village by their commander. They had not been told about the people who lived there. All they knew was that Taliban were suspected to be hiding somewhere in the village, and they were being deployed on foot to find them. If the Taliban were already gone, the task would then be to show some force.
“We’re going to turn up there without warning. Your responsibility is to let the civilians know we’re here now that the Americans have moved on,” the commander said.
The soldiers around her were jittery and anxious in the heat, high on adrenaline and worn out from lack of sleep. They moved through the town toward its centre, then split into smaller groups of four or five, heading down the narrow streets past white and brown buildings. Some of the houses had been bombed by American forces and remained deserted. The unpaved streets were empty except for rubble.
Carmen closed her eyes for a moment, dizzy in the blanketing quiet and the riot of heat.
She was glad Jessie was there with her. They always looked out for each other, covertly, because anything that made you stand out from the guys could make you a target. But she was uneasy about the small group she was with. Especially Smith, who was now positioned right beside her. He was someone she avoided. He made a game of taking jabs at her that were both aggressive and explicit, and she never knew what he would do next.
About a block away, a man stepped out of a doorway, his back to them, holding something at his side, swinging it a little as he began to walk.
“What’s he got?” one soldier demanded.
“Hard to say,” Smith answered. He lifted his gun. “Get his attention.”
The first soldier called out, and the man on the street spun around to face them. He was too far away to make out the details of his body language or for any of them to see what he was carrying.
Smith fired a shot. The man stumbled backwards a few feet with his arms up. Then Smith shot again, and the man folded over and fell to the ground. Smith fired again. And again. And again.
Carmen flinched with each shot. She bit her bottom lip to stop herself from calling out, so hard that blood dripped down her chin and pooled under her tongue. But it was nothing like the blood the man was losing now as he lay in the street.
The rest of the group had also lifted their guns, ready for an exchange of fire. They looked from Smith to the street where the man lay and back again. No more fire came. It was quiet.
Carmen ran forward, thinking she could save the man on the ground. As she approached, a woman’s screams rose up from inside the house he had come from. Someone yelled at her to get back, but she kept moving forward, and then she was close enough to see the man’s eyes open, as if to watch her approach. They were brown, like her father’s. Beside him was the object he had been holding. A walking stick.
There were more gunshots. Were they shooting at her now? She bent down to begin administering first aid.
Someone else called her name, a woman’s voice this time, but she didn’t turn around. Bandages. She needed to stop all this blood.
Suddenly, there was a heavy thud against her shoulders, knocking her off balance. She was wrestled to the ground from behind, and she fell hard with the weight of all her gear, her cheek against the dirt. She heard the woman’s voice again, this time from above, pressing her into the earth.
“You better stop, Carmen.” It was Jessie. She held Carmen’s arms folded back behind her in a twisted embrace, and was leaning forward to speak into her ear.
“Get off of me! I’m trying to help him. He’s losing so much blood,” Carmen stuttered, anger threatening to split her apart.
“We’re retreating.” Jessie’s breath was hot and fast on Carmen’s face.
“What about this civilian?”
“We’ve got to get out of here.” All of Jessie’s weight pressed Carmen’s shaking body down, and she held Carmen tighter. “Follow me back. If you don’t, I’ll lose you.”
The gunfire began moving away.
“What about him?” Carmen repeated, trying to turn under Jessie’s weight to look at the man where he lay silent on the ground.
“Someone’ll kill you if you stay here. The other guys are losing it. I swear one of them will shoot you.”
Then, without another word, she sat up, and hoisted herself off Carmen’s back. On their knees and breathing heavily, they faced each other for a moment, the dust rising from their scuffle. They each stood slowly.
Carmen turned to look at the man. His eyes were still open, his face motionless.
The woman inside the house began screaming again, her voice climbing and falling in grief. As if it were a signal to retreat, Jessie and Carmen began making their way quickly back down the streets the way they’d come, until they reached a half-blasted compound on the edge of the town.
The other groups of soldiers were already there, leaning exhaustedly, cradling their guns. Carmen wiped the blood from her mouth. Her bottom lip was swelling where she’d cut it with her teeth.
The commander was telling them that they were going to head to a village farther north.
Smith caught her eye, stared at her, as if daring her to say something. He seemed angry, not afraid.
That was when Carmen started to realize that it was the beginning of the end for her. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the civilian’s eyes watching as he lay bleeding on the ground. She couldn’t shake the thought that the blood drying on her hands, where she’d tried to wipe it off her mouth, was his.
◊
The shriek of a girl with long, shiny hair at the next table brought Carmen’s mind back to the bar. Her body, she realized, had tensed. She tried to open her fists and loosen her shoulders. As she did so, she heard the rattle of a semi-automatic rifle behind her. Carmen spun around and nearly knocked her beer off the table.
Nothing. Just another table, collapsed into laughter.
Carmen saw that the woman tending bar was studying her, so she turned away.
She looked down at the T-shirt pulled tight across her chest and stomach, and remembered where she originally got it from. A bargain rack at the mall in the mid-nineties. It was like every part of her life had suddenly looped backwards in time. Here she was, wearing this old T-shirt, waiting nervously to meet a girl, acting as though she’d never been a soldier, never shot a gun, never watched a bomb explode or seen dead bodies, hadn’t watched her father die of an unstoppable disease.
Stop it, Carmen thought to herself. You’re just mixed up from coming home after being away for so long. You don’t actually get your life back. You don’t get to rewind. Don’t get carried away.
She went back to waiting, and watching.
When Aurora finally arrived, Carmen noticed a scent with a hint of flowers as she walked toward the table. It wasn’t strong but it stood out from the stale, leathery smell of the bar.
Aurora was wearing something dark green and sleeveless that scooped down a little bit from her shoulders. Her arms and her neck were bare, no jewelry, no makeup it seemed.
Beautiful, Carmen thought.
Aurora slipped her hair behind her ears, but it slid back across her face again. She said hello and apologized for being a little late, to which Carmen replied instinctively, as though in greeting, that she’d just arrived herself. They paused. Then, laughing quick, Aurora apologized again, and went to order a drink at the bar.
Carmen was caught by the back of Aurora’s body moving away. She looked down as if to study the amber of her beer, waiting, thinking about what she’d just seen.
Aurora returned a few minutes later, sticking her change into the pocket of her jeans, her glass clinking with ice cubes and already dripping with condensation. The ceiling fans spun fast above them, but hardly brought relief from the heat.
“Cheers,” she said, raising the glass. “What a warm night. I mean I love it, but this is definitely a hot one.”
Carmen nodded. Don’t talk about the weather, she thought to herself. Don’t say any more about the weather because then it’ll seem like you don’t know what to say. “So how long have you been running?” she asked, realizing how abrupt the question sounded. She tried again. “I mean, have you been running for a while?” Aurora nodded, and that question led to another, and another.
They discussed the routes the running group took, how they had changed since they first started. Carmen then mentioned that jogging had been part of her training, but that it had been on a track at the military base, all level, asphalted terrain, the route directed and prescribed between thick white lines. Nothing like the paths along the river. Those rose and fell, and you needed to really pay attention to them if you didn’t want to trip yourself.
She left out all the running she had done in Afghanistan.
Aurora was staring at her, so she got quiet for a minute and decided maybe she had been talking too long. She asked about Aurora’s job at the grocery store, taking another swallow of her beer.
It had progressed, Aurora told her. They’d moved her up from cashier to working behind the meat counter. She’d agreed to it because she could make a few extra dollars an hour, and because the health and safety training was free, and was something she could add to her resume. As it turned out, Aurora was pretty good at remembering her customers by first name, usually women who came in to buy for their families. They’d ask her opinion on the ground beef or pork or chicken cutlets, even though the prepared meats hardly changed from week to week. Which one did she think would be good for dinner that night? Often, they’d tell her what else they were making to go with it. And sometimes she wondered if maybe one of them would have another, better job they could offer her.
“Like what?” Carmen asked. Her first drink was done and the room was growing louder.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Aurora said, smiling in a way that was starting to seem recognizable to Carmen. It was the kind of smile Carmen used to see from girls who were trying to figure her out a little, and enjoying the effort—somewhere between a grin and a light invitation. Not exactly relaxed, but not fake either.
“Can I get you another one?” Carmen asked, pointing to Aurora’s glass.
“Oh, sure. Thanks.”
Second drinks in hand, the conversation between them continued to dance along under the pulse of the music. Carmen had to lean toward Aurora’s voice. Her hearing had changed since Afghanistan. Soft sounds and anything in a higher register were muted—birdsong, for example, the rush of water, violin or saxophone. Carmen remembered how those sounds could be ecstatic and smooth at the same time, like different ways the light could shine, but they were only a lingering memory now.
She ordered a third drink, then a fourth. She rarely let herself drink too much these days, because she couldn’t predict what the alcohol would trigger. But Aurora was something else—someone she never expected to find here, back home—and Carmen was desperate for something to give her a little ease, to soften her edges.
As evening pitched into the deep humidity of a July night, Carmen became more aware of the agitated tics that worried her face. Since Afghanistan, her face twitched sometimes like it belonged to someone else, and a slight stutter would seize her tongue, cutting up her words like gunfire. She ran her hands along her lips and across her eyes, trying to hide the many small spasms lurking there. But she could still feel them under her fingertips as she spoke vaguely of her time in Afghanistan.
“How’re you finding it being back?” Aurora asked, watching Carmen trail her fingers across her face.
“I’m keeping myself busy. Hard to do here. As you probably know.” She smiled through the tiny jerks at the edges of her mouth and eyes, wanting to distract from the lack of detail she was providing. “How do you do it?”
“All this is temporary,” Aurora explained. “I needed work for the summer and my cousin has a spare room. So I’m just here for now, building a small fortune.”
“Oh.” Carmen said, though she meant to reply with something more, to show she was listening.
“That was a joke. Almost every cent I make is paying for my last year of school. I basically failed, spent the whole time fooling around, ran my grades into the ground. It’s okay. I needed a new start. A new plan. And I like the way it is here. Pretty calm. I can lose track of myself and my bad habits here, get into the rhythm of days that don’t seem to change. I can just focus on getting up and going to work. Maybe this is what I need to find some direction.”
Carmen thought about how fast Aurora was able to run. She wondered if it was because Aurora had a clear picture of where she was going and where the routes ended, or if it was because she finally had the space she needed.
The DJ was starting a set. Tables and chairs were pulled aside, and Carmen and Aurora moved to the dance floor. Carmen found she could not stop blinking. She blushed in the heat, unable to think clearly, consumed with wanting to touch Aurora under the blurry lights.
“What’s your name about?” Carmen asked, drunk enough now to not consider her questions before she spoke. “I mean, where did you get it?”
Aurora laughed, her eyes on Carmen the whole time. “Well, it’s literally from the northern lights. You know, the aurora borealis. My parents loved them, used to go watch them when they were younger.”
Carmen pictured the horizon, imagined the rippling lights’ approach, and then the sound of them too, growing more powerful, deafening.
Stop, she thought to herself. Don’t lose yourself here. Don’t lose what you’ve found now.
“I haven’t seen them,” she said. “The northern lights.”
She fell into the music, which replaced all other sounds. Her mind returned to feeling like it was cocooned. She was drunk, but it was okay, this muffling rescue from her thoughts.
Now, the small temporary dance floor was packed and there was so little room to move. Carmen put her hands on Aurora, lightly, because she couldn’t figure out where else to put them. She touched her arms, which felt as soft as she had imagined. Aurora lifted her arms a little and stepped in as near as she could. Carmen reached around to touch her back, which was as warm as the air pressing in around them, and rested her palms just above Aurora’s hips.
“Your name is beautiful,” Carmen said, relieved to finally find a word for the thought that kept coming to her mind all evening. “It’s really beautiful.”
When the bar closed, they went back to Carmen’s basement apartment, letting themselves in the door at the side of the house so as not to wake Aaron and Melissa.
Quietly, under the dim light of an old lamp, they reached for each other, drunk on the push and pull of lust as much as on alcohol, and slipped into sex that was both furious and tender. They rolled off the old couch onto the floor, Aurora laughing a little as they hit the ground, and didn’t fall asleep for hours.
A nightmare woke Carmen in the early morning. She began to weep quietly, burying her face to muffle the sound.
◊
The road mine exploded in the middle of her platoon. Carmen was thrown backward, off her feet, immersed in intense light and heat, the sound shattering inside her ears. When she opened her eyes, it felt as if she were coming up from being underwater. The air was full of smoke. She looked around slowly and saw Jessie lying on her back. One of her arms was bent underneath her body, like it no longer belonged to her. Carmen got closer, crawling on all fours in case there were more bombs, and saw that Jessie had lost consciousness and was bleeding. She pulled bandages from her bag and wrapped them around Jessie’s shoulder to stop the blood. She saw another soldier moving behind the grey curtain of air, and waved him over. Together, they got Jessie across the sand, toward another soldier with a radio, who was contacting the medics located farther down the road. Then they went back for more of the injured, and for the dead.
The platoon was sent back to the temporary base. Carmen had by then lost the ability to make any sound. Her jaw was locked. She could hardly move her mouth to drink or to eat. Her tongue felt thick enough to fill up her throat.
She was given pills, but she hid them away because she knew the drugs would keep her in a haze. She’d seen that happen with other soldiers, and she wanted to stay awake and alert. Carmen didn’t trust what she was doing in Afghanistan anymore, and she didn’t trust anyone around her.
She decided that when her voice came back, if it ever did, she’d say something about Smith. What she’d seen him do. She knew it happened all the time in war, but to see a civilian needlessly shot right in front of her, when she could have stopped it, was unbearable. She wanted Smith to be confronted for what he had done. As if that could make up for all the wrong.
◊
Soon after her first date with Aurora, Carmen began running on her own. Every day she headed up one of the few main roads to the outskirts of town, dodging the explosions in her head. She’d scale the hills a little harder every time, maneuvering her effort into upward force. The familiar sense of speed, the jostle of her body through space, soothed her like a temporary balm.
One morning, she crouched down at the top of a hill. She was breathing hard, feeling the strain of the climb in the muscles of her legs and shoulders. Her hometown lay curled on its back in the summer heat of the valley. She pictured Aurora down there, her long hands sheathed in latex gloves, working behind the meat counter in the grocery store, tying up roasts, or preparing marinades and stuffing for the small display of take-home dinners.
Without warning, fragments of memory cut in at the edges of her mind, looping out of sequence. She couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Her heart pounded like she was still climbing the hill. Sweat dampened the back of her neck, her hands wrapped into fists so tight the bones of her knuckles showed through her skin.
Carmen concentrated on breathing deeply to slow her heart rate. She blinked hard in the middle of the sleepy summer afternoon.
The birds and cicadas grew louder.
She stood up and swallowed gulp after gulp of cool water from the bottle she carried at her waist. Then, she walked slowly down the hill and through the streets back to the shelter of her apartment in her brother’s house.
◊
Carmen’s voice eventually returned. It scratched and wheezed and vibrated in her throat, but it was back.
She met with the commander and described what had happened. He did not take notes. He just looked at her.
“Why did you wait two weeks to bring this to my attention?” he asked, after a pause.
“Sir, it’s been on my mind and I realized I needed to say something.”
“The language you’re using to describe what happened is irresponsible.”
She waited for him to explain further.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked her.
She shook her head, barely.
He looked down at his desk for a moment, then back at her. “You are oversimplifying what was a complicated series of events in a high-pressure situation.”
Carmen breathed deep. “No, sir, I saw what happened. There was no reason to shoot that civilian.”
“But we can’t know that for certain.”
“Sir, I was right beside Smith. I saw and heard the same things he did. I would not have shot my gun at an unarmed civilian.”
“You should understand by now that a so-called civilian doesn’t equal an innocent. Not here, not at this stage.”
Carmen took another deep breath. “That man should not have been killed,” she told the commander. “Not that way. Not at all.”
“Smith is an excellent soldier, in everyone’s estimation.”
“He’s a killer, sir.”
“Your language is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable. There were numerous factors in play, some of them certainly outside your understanding or control. This is the kind of urgent situation that requires firm and immediate decision making. Smith did that. He used his judgement as a soldier to quickly assess and respond to danger. He may have saved your life in the process.”
“I don’t think so, sir. I mean, I don’t think that’s true. I believe he should be held accountable for what he did, for the wrong he has done.” Her voice stuttered. “That’s why I’m talking to you about this. And—and that’s why I refuse to work with him anymore.”
The commander told her the meeting was over.
The next day, she was given a letter stating that, based on her recent behaviour, and complaints about how she’d acted in a recent deployment—specifically, her being distracted from duty during an exchange of gunfire, and resisting orders, thereby putting other soldiers’ lives at risk—she was being discharged, and sent home immediately.
No longer fit to serve.
She’d failed as a soldier.
That evening, she slammed around the barracks in frustration, avoiding eye contact with her fellow soldiers. She knew she was being dismissed because they felt she might sabotage the morale of the unit. Disagreements among
soldiers could cause tension and interfere with accomplishing the mission.
But what was the mission? she asked herself.
She had no answer anymore.
◊
The passage of time wasn’t helping or healing her. Things seemed to be getting worse, not better. But whenever Aurora tried to ask about it, Carmen wanted only to shrug her off.
Aurora thought it might help if they got away from everything, so she suggested they go camping, at a site she’d heard about from her cousin. She would take a few days off work and they could go during the week, when there would be fewer people around.
They arrived at the site after half a day of driving, with the car stereo turned up the whole way so conversation wasn’t necessary. There was a sudden new space between them that was hard to fill with small talk, even while putting up the tent together, building a campfire. Carmen moved tentatively and deliberately, the way she did any time she wasn’t running, as if her body were bruised and tender.
That first evening, they mostly watched the water, getting used to each other’s company, resting in the silence that comes with intimacy. Eventually they crawled into the tent together and made long, slow love, turning each other over and inside out, whispering single words again and again like prayers in the dark.
The next night, when Carmen lay down to sleep, she began to shiver uncontrollably, rattling herself loose from the darkness. Aurora held her until something opened inside Carmen, and with that release, she could act again. She reached for Aurora, tearing into her where every breath was pleasure. Their bodies led them blindly, playing each other with mercy.
Carmen slept in. She spent the afternoon on the beach, sitting on a towel, studying her hands. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and stared ahead. Her eyes fluttered quickly open and shut, and her lips quivered like she anticipated getting stuck on words, had forgotten how to pronounce them, was afraid of choking on them. She felt like her heart was in her mouth, and she wanted to spit it out.
Aurora, who sat next to her on the warm sand, stood up nervously and said she was going for a swim.
Carmen nodded, swallowed hard, and turned away. But then she watched Aurora strip down to her shorts, watched her wade into the water, stepping deeper until her feet couldn’t touch the bottom, watched her float on her back. She watched Aurora as long as she could, and pretended the world had disappeared.
◊
They found traces of shrapnel in Jessie’s chest, so she was to be evacuated to the hospital at Kandahar Airfield.
Carmen asked to see her, despite the growing scrutiny she felt from the other soldiers. Word had spread about her own imminent departure.
Jessie lay on the bed with bandages covering her upper body from waist to neck. Her voice sounded like a rustling in the dark, requiring a huge effort to be heard above the low-level beeps and electronic pulses of the heart machine monitors, IV drips, and the muted voices of other wounded soldiers, separated only by curtains.
“They told me I have to leave,” Carmen said quietly, studying her friend’s face for signs of distress and finding the fear in her eyes.
Jessie didn’t say anything for a minute. She struggled to clear her throat, so Carmen held a cup of water with a plastic straw to her mouth.
Jessie took a sip, then whispered, “Fine, Carmen. So leave.”
“I’ll write to you,” Carmen said. “And we’ll see each other back home.”
But Jessie had fallen silent and closed her eyes. Carmen waited for her to open them again, but she didn’t.
Eventually, a nurse walked by, looking at her critically.
Carmen got up and left the room.
◊
At the end of the summer, Carmen asked Aurora to move in with her. Aurora said yes.
She was fond of coming across Aurora reading in their apartment, or out in the backyard, which was finally dry enough after the flood for grass to grow again. Carmen loved the way Aurora peered at a book like it held a mystery, like it gave her some comfort. Carmen missed that for herself. She missed being able to concentrate on words and a make-believe world without the memories pummelling down, without images leaping in her mind, scrambling her vision and making her forget what she’d just read. Books and reading were a luxury, gifts she wanted back. She wanted her life back.
Carmen began going out on her dad’s old motorcycle, one he’d left her. Whenever she did, Aurora asked her to wear her helmet, but Carmen always ignored the request. She’d ride around in the wind for a while, without any destination in mind, gripping the handlebars as if she could leave and just keep going. As if it could give her escape. Ride it into nothingness.
One day, Aurora followed Carmen into the front hallway. “You can use the car if you want. I’m not going anywhere while you’re out,” she said to Carmen.
“Nah, it’s okay.”
Aurora asked her again to wear the helmet. She bent down to pick it up from where it lay on the floor underneath the coat stand, and her loose shirt fell halfway down her back.
Carmen watched Aurora’s body bending, the glimpse of bare skin. Her eyes measured Aurora’s shape, as if searching for toeholds and grips to ease her body into the branches of a tree. It seemed to her that Aurora was always escaping her clothes, always slipping out of them.
Aurora brushed her hair away from her eyes and held the helmet toward Carmen. “Please?” she said. “You know the cops will pull you over if they see you riding around here without one.”
Where they stood in the middle of the hallway, the odour of mold still lingered faintly. The heat of summer paradoxically seemed to make the dampness worse.
“Please,” Aurora said again, the helmet in her outstretched hands, the scent of the river rising in the silent space between them.
Carmen shook her head, the tiniest gesture.
“Why not?” Aurora asked.
Carmen closed her eyes, squeezing them shut. “Right before the explosion, I was wearing a helmet about the same size. I was tightening the strap.”
And then she was back there in the middle of it. She felt the helmet on her head, the sensation of the strap underneath her chin.
Stop this. You have to make it stop.
She felt nauseous. She pushed past Aurora and stumbled down the hall to the bathroom, retched painfully until it was finished, then washed out her mouth in the sink.
When she came back out, Aurora was sitting on the couch with her head in her hands. Carmen didn’t know what to do, so she began to hum. She rocked on her feet for a long minute. Then she went into their bedroom and lay back on the bed, looking up at the low ceiling. She let the air whistle and hiss out of her mouth, a long, low exhalation. Just release. Her body tense and aching all over.
Aurora came in then. She sat down shakily on the bed and asked, “What happened?”
I can’t make it stop, thought Carmen. What words are there for this?
“Carmen?” Aurora said her name like a wish.
Carmen decided she had to try again. “Sometimes it feels like everything happened there, and now I’m gone. I’ve disappeared.”
Aurora was quiet. Two fine lines ran down the centre of her forehead, finer than the ones on the palm of her hands. Carmen had noticed them before, when Aurora was concentrating hard, or when she didn’t understand something.
The last thing Carmen wanted to be was someone Aurora couldn’t understand.
She looked up at the ceiling again, squinting her eyes hard to squeeze out the tears. “Everything is still happening to me, all at once, and it’s still as bad as it was then, and it feels like it could end up killing me.”
She shut her eyes, and she bit her lip, and there was that scar inside her mouth from when she’d cut it with her own teeth while watching Smith kill the civilian.
Aurora moved closer to her and when she spoke her voice was gentle and steady. “We need—we’re going to figure this out, okay? Because this can’t be—we’re going to do something to help you.” She reached over and touched Carmen’s face gently, sliding her thumb across the wet surface of her cheeks, her temples, wherever the tears had gone. “But I need you to keep telling me about what you’re going through. You can’t just hold it in. That won’t work.”
She leaned forward over Carmen, bringing her body so near, the way she knew Carmen loved. They stayed this way for what seemed like a long time, in each other’s arms, falling into their separate dreams. Outside, the streetlights came on, pouring weak pools of illumination onto the scattered piles of fallen leaves lining the road.
Later, Carmen woke from another nightmare, and heard the baby crying in the room above them. Soon, she could hear footsteps going to the crib. The sounds from above were strangely comforting to her, and she grew calmer. In a few minutes, the baby’s cries quieted and then stopped, and it was silent again. Carmen’s fear resurfaced, her mind dragging up images and sounds she was afraid would swallow her if she closed her eyes. Starting to panic, she turned to see that Aurora was still right next to her, fast asleep, and thought about waking her. But Carmen didn’t know what to ask for, or what to tell.
Instead, she lay there in the dark with her eyes open, shaking. When she finally fell asleep it was into a dream of Aurora running beside her.