Jenna pulled in behind the unfamiliar vehicle in the driveway. “Who’s that?” she asked.
Kitty gave the shiny new truck the once-over. A bumper sticker on the back proclaimed the owner liked to ski Colorado. “Don’t know. Nobody from Oakmont.”
“Somebody’s home, right? Or do you want me to stay?” Jenna made a half-hearted grab for the keys.
Kitty waved at her. Jenna didn’t want to stay; she had a webinar in an hour for prospective students of the Bradley nursing program. Jenna would go home and jump in front of the computer and talk about her future with forty-two other cute giggly girls who loved working with sick kids—only they would all pronounce it “luv” and then they would giggle some more.
Kitty would go inside and peel potatoes and throw chicken in the oven before starting on her homework in a vain attempt to halt the slide of her grades toward the range of seriously average. Maybe if luck was on her side and she could hold the distraction of Kevin and Sam at bay, she wouldn’t slice off her finger or write something truly stupid. All the while her dad would sit unmoving by the window. Oh boy. So much to look forward to.
“No…it’s fine…Dad’s home.” Still ensconced in that wingback. For all she knew, he’d grown into the stupid thing, shoulders and butt melting into the nasty greenish-yellow fabric. That weird ivy pattern of the chair would cross his forehead, slowly sucking him in, converting him to some human-chair hybrid with plant leanings. A lot of help he’d be in a crisis. If the truck owner turned out to be a nut job, Kitty was on her own. Again.
Kitty picked up her bag and opened her door. “Thanks for the ride.” She paused with one leg out. “Has Joe made a decision on Bradley yet?”
Jenna’s brow furrowed. “Shouldn’t you be asking him?”
Of course she should. Kitty regretted the slip. “Right, sorry. Let me know how the webinar goes.” She waggled her fingers in Jenna’s direction as she walked toward the house. She should be attending a webinar on teaching…or something. She should be doing anything other than what she was doing, which was the same thing for the last year. Chasing after Sam, hunting werewolves, supporting her mother—it was all supposed to end when her dad came back, not amp up into something even worse than before. The only thing that had changed is she’d gotten a whole lot better at cooking, cleaning, and killing, and a lot less sure she knew how to proceed.
She smacked the door open harder than she’d planned but there was something satisfying in the bang. The low murmur of voices from the dining room stopped. Her father’s voice rose. “Kit?”
“Yeah, it’s me,” she said, dropping her bag on the floor and yanking her sweater off. Slinging her bag back over her shoulder, she stalked into the dining room.
A big guy—more of a kid, actually—sat on the far end of the room near her father. He’d pulled one of the chairs from the dining room table over. In the cramped space by the window, they were jammed in knee to knee. He looked young and huge and healthy next to her still-skinny and pale father.
Nate pointed at her. “Pete, this is my daughter, Kitty. Singlehandedly kept the place in one piece while I was gone.”
You have no idea, Daddy.
Pete raised a hand and nodded. He looked so young, like Joe with a crew cut. “You must be a lot like your old man.”
Kitty bit back what she really wanted to say, which was mean and horrible and utterly fit her bad mood. Instead she said, “He raised me right,” and threw in a coy smile.
She felt like an imposter. Next thing she knew she’d be saying something with the word “luv” in it. She let her bag slide off her shoulder onto the table. Gesturing toward the kitchen, she said, “Going to start dinner.” She knew what her mother would have done if she’d been home. “Will you be staying, Pete? There’s plenty.”
“No thanks. I need to move on down the road.” But Pete put his elbows on his knees, bent forward, and the hum started all over again, too low for Kitty to distinguish individual words.
In the kitchen, she turned the oven dial to preheat and pulled out the plastic mesh bag of potatoes from the pantry. Tossing it on the counter, she filled a pan with water and set it on the burner. She hated potatoes. Not the eating part of potatoes but the making part. She hated the dry dusty feel of their little brown skins, the dry dusty smell of them. She hated how she could cut one open that looked perfectly fine on the outside and find a nasty black rotten hole in the middle. Potatoes sucked.
An irregular clumping on the floor alerted Kitty and she spun around, veggie peeler in hand. “Dad?”
It wasn’t Nate behind her though, or his walker. Pete stood there and his prosthetic leg and foot hit the ground harder than his other shoe. Kitty closed her eyes and swallowed hard. For today, she wanted to wallow. Roll around in her lack of webinars and her dusty black-holed potatoes and feel utterly miserable. But then Pete showed up—young Pete who liked to ski Colorado, although she didn’t know if that was before or after the prosthesis—and her little pity party was over. She had two legs, even if one of them was forever tattooed with werewolf scars.
“Hey. Change your mind about dinner? Mashed potatoes and chicken.”
Pete shook his head. “Just wanted to let you know I was on my way.” He took two more steps toward her, and his replacement foot clomped down. When he spoke again, his voice was low, confidential. “Your dad, man, he’s like the best. Saved us all.”
Kitty nodded. I just want him to save me, that’s all.
“We’d be in a world of hurt without him. Take good care of him.”
Kitty nodded again. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to take care of him. Both she and her father had been fighting a war, but even with him back home, they were still half a world apart. She didn’t even know what she wanted—to be his brother in arms? To hand him the job and run and never look back? To have him wake up and save Sam so she didn’t have to?
She walked Pete through the dining room to the door, waving as he drove away. As she cut back through to the kitchen, she checked on Nate. He was usually alert, head up, checking the scene outside the window. After the visit, his head slumped against the wing that fanned out on the side. Maybe he was asleep—tired by the reminiscing. As she watched, his hand swiped at his cheeks under both eyes. Feeling like she had intruded, Kitty bolted the three steps into the sanctuary of the kitchen.
Picking the peeler back up and grabbing a potato, she slashed at it. Had her father really been crying? No sound came from the other room. After three chunks of peel, she gave up and put supper down and went to him.
Pete’s chair still sat in front of Nate, and Kitty sat down. A few red blotches dotted Nate’s face, but otherwise he gave nothing away. The position felt strange, and she realized she hadn’t sat with her father since he’d been home. She was always doing something and leaving him alone. Her eyes flicked away, and she noticed the copy of Catch-22 tucked in between the chair and his leg. “That was nice,” she said. “Of Pete to come and visit.”
“Yeah. He lost his leg at the same time I got hurt. We went to Walter Reed together, so he’s back home too. Most of the other guys are still over there.”
“He says you’re a hero.”
The corner of Nate’s mouth twitched downward. “No, not so much.” Something outside the window caught his attention and he trained his gaze far away on the trees, squinting in concentration.
“Dad. You saved all of them from a suicide bomber. That’s a lot of lives.” Kitty wanted to grab her dad’s chin, make him turn away from the window and the forest and face her so she could tell him how special he was.
“There’s one life I didn’t save.” Nate’s head rolled against the back of the chair.
Kitty wracked her brains. Sure, people had gotten hurt in the retaliation after her father killed the bomber but nobody died. Not one. Except…. “He was going to kill you. That’s what he was there for.”
Kitty had hit a bull’s-eye of some sort. Her father propelled himself forward in an instant, his voice almost vicious. His eyes caught hers and pinned her like a butterfly to a specimen board. “He was a child, Kit. A child.” A drop of spit flew from his mouth and landed on her chin.
“What?” Kitty sat upright, away from the onslaught. She tried to wrap her head around the thought, around the words.
Nate went on, angrier than she’d ever seen him. “He was no older than Sam and strapped with enough explosives to blow us all to hell.”
The bomber had been a kid? Kitty still wasn’t sure she understood. She reached out a hand but Nate jerked out of reach.
“Pete can say what he wants but I killed a little boy.” Each syllable of the last two words became its own word. “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is this kid. But in place of his face, I see Sam’s.” His hands covered his face, and his fingers hooked into claws, digging into his skin. “I can’t remember what that boy looked like. I keep trying, but I can’t.”
Her father holding Sam at arm’s length. The sharp words driving a wedge between father and son. The chair by the window occupied all night long. The pieces dropped into place in front of a different lens, and Kitty saw it all with sudden clarity. Nate couldn’t touch a boy he saw in his nightmares. And the only way to keep the nightmares away was to never sleep.
Kitty’s dad stared at her but she could tell he didn’t really see her. “Kit, have you ever had to do something completely against the grain of your soul? It was the right thing, and you knew it, but it was so horrible that when it was over, you didn’t know if you could ever pick back up and keep going?”
Kitty thought of sitting face to face with Phinney in his living room waiting for the stroke of midnight. Oh, she knew exactly what her father meant. She could still feel the pain in her knees as she crawled on the floorboards of the cabin trying to collect the dust of her friend’s body. At that moment, she thought she’d never function again. But she had stood up and burned the cabin and buried the duffle and learned that Austin Harris died because she wasn’t out hunting. She put her hand on his arm. “Sometimes, you don’t have any choice but to keep going.”
Nate’s mouth twisted, and Kitty could hear the retort before he said it. What do you know about it?
Kitty cut him off. “You need to get over it.” Her little brother’s backpack was full of gifts from another man because this one couldn’t move on. If they weren’t careful, it would be his suitcase. “Sam needs you to get over it.”
Nate’s eyes darkened, and Kitty saw Kevin in the action—the brothers so alike even after all the space and time. Her father homed in on her. He saw her—way deep down, he saw her. “I need to know something, Kit.”
No, don’t ask me. Because I will tell you something you don’t want to hear and then you won’t love me anymore.
“Why do you have a dead man’s unit insignia in your drawer?”
Kitty shook her head. He knew. He just wanted her to say it out loud. Her bad mood came roaring back, because those were accusations, not comfort. Like he didn’t know. Like he thought she was going to stand still for a year. Instead, she focused on the easiest thing to fight about. “You went into my drawer?”
Nate waved a hand at her objection, his anger matching hers. “You want to tell me why an old man who didn’t have a pot to piss in can leave you enough money to pay for your college expenses? What did you do for him?”
Kitty stood up, her chair upending and catching against the wall. “You went into my stuff? It’s none of your business.”
“Oh, it is my business. I’m your father.”
“Then act like it,” she snapped, pushing past the protruding chair legs.
Nate’s hand shot out and curled around her arm, pinching down. “Why don’t you let me?”
Kitty gazed pointedly down at the skin of her arm, whitening at the edge of his grasp. She couldn’t tell him because she was afraid. Not afraid. Terrified. All-out terrified with the entire core of her being that he couldn’t handle it. Because if he couldn’t handle it, she had no one left.
She yanked hard, her arm slipping through his fingers. Staring at him, she said, “Why won’t you walk? Because you’re afraid you might have to do something else that’s hard? I wish I’d had a cushy chair to curl up in when all my crap hit the fan.”
They stared at each other across a space that felt a hundred miles wide, but either one of them could reach out and touch the other. Kitty made the first move. “When you’re ready, let me know.”
She fled for the stairs. She took the corner at close to a run and bounced off the staircase wall. Her shoulder ached and she sank down on the steps, rubbing at it. She was horrible. Why had she said those things to him? He was hurting, and God knew, she knew what that felt like.
The angry half of her pushed back, not ready to forgive yet. He went into my room and went through my stuff.
Kitty leaned her face against the wall. The rough plaster, even though it scratched, cooled her hot skin. Stretching out her arm, she wiggled her sore shoulder. Her fingers hit the opposite wall. It was so narrow in this staircase. So narrow. Kitty tried to calm the roar in her brain long enough to think. She held her arms out to either side until the backs of her hands bumped against the walls.
Nate slept downstairs for a reason. It was so narrow here that a walker wouldn’t fit.