Max sat beside her, hovered as if he didn’t know what he should do. “Kellen, what’s wrong?”
“Rae... She used the last little square of her blankie to bandage my arm.” Why that came out first, Kellen couldn’t say. Why did that make her feel more guilty than all the other horrible things that had occurred on their journey?
Zone didn’t care what her reasoning was. He said, “Fuck me a-runnin’,” went into his workshop and shut the door. Hard.
Max gathered Kellen in his arms. “Shhh! Don’t cry so loud. She’ll hear you!”
Kellen totally agreed, but she couldn’t stop. “It’s all bloody and crusty and the rest of her blankie is nothing but a ball of yarn and I promised to crochet it again and I don’t know how!” Kellen was wailing now, feeling absurd and trying to muffle her sobs in her robe.
Max pulled her toward the corner, behind the easy chair. “Rae is fine.”
“Rae almost died!” Kellen turned on him, shouted in a whisper. “She almost died. She almost froze to death. She... They shot at her. She knows that the sound of a man screaming can muffle a retreat.” She inhaled deeply and stared up at Max.
“It’s unfortunate that all happened. I wish she could be the same child she was before she joined you in the hopes of bonding.”
“I wish that, too.” With all her heart.
He picked his words carefully, as if he desperately wanted to say the right thing. “She shouldn’t have stowed away, but in all fairness to her, even if she had understood what true danger was, and she didn’t, this trip shouldn’t have been quite as harrowing as it turned out.”
“No.” Kellen sniveled, dug around in the pockets of the robe and finally dabbed her nose on a sleeve.
He didn’t seem to be judging her, but then, it didn’t matter.
She was judging herself.
He stood up and left her.
She didn’t blame him.
But he came back with a roll of toilet paper, sat beside her again and handed it over. “How long’s it been since you cried?”
She didn’t want to tell him. He would despise her. He would see her as the irresponsible know-it-all that she was. He would realize she shouldn’t be trusted with their daughter. Yet she couldn’t stop the words, and they spilled out. “It was another life. In Afghanistan. When I killed a woman and her two daughters.”
“Not on purpose.” But he frowned, as if he couldn’t imagine she might have made a mistake as a warrior.
“I didn’t shoot them. It was worse than that. I was responsible.” She unrolled a wad of toilet paper and blew her nose. Thankfully, there was a wastebasket beside the chair, and she tossed the wad into it and unrolled some more. And shredded it between her fingers, because she had to have something to do. Anything to take her attention off these horrible memories.
“In Afghanistan, in some of the rural areas, in the mountains, it’s difficult to live. War. Constant war. Famine, all the time. For a woman, a widow with no relatives, it’s not...good. Men control that world. More than this one. They’re not always kind, and Ghazal had two children, two girl children.”
“Ghazal was a friend?”
“Not a friend, no. She and the children lived on the edge of the poor village. A village filled with thin, pitiful people who paid both the government and the insurgents. In a hard, cold land, only the strong survive. Maybe. When our convoy went by, the eight-year-old stood out there and begged. Those big brown eyes, so sad and...old.”
That face. Kellen needed to remember that face. She was the only person alive who did.
“Madeena said she had a mother and a little sister. I followed her home. That mother and her kids lived in a hovel. I’ve seen shacks in Wyoming that had been abandoned for a hundred years in better shape. It was freezing. The children were emaciated. The mother was skeletal.” Kellen’s heart still hurt as she remembered, and she shredded more toilet paper. “I gave them everything I had. Food. Blankets. I was cold and hungry that night, but—poor me.” She had mocked her own hunger then. She mocked it now.
“Still you did help them.” Max sounded strong, encouraging. “Did no one else take pity on them? Their own people?”
“Winter lasts for months. Crops fail. Food is scarce for everyone. No one could explain all the ins and outs to my satisfaction, but because men make the deals, and because Ghazal had no relatives, she couldn’t remarry. Or wouldn’t because of what would happen to her daughters in a family where they were not blood kin. She didn’t conform, and in her part of the world, she and her girls were easy to forget.”
He sighed. “I’m so sorry. But you helped.”
“Stop using that word. It only makes it worse.” She put down the toilet paper, straightened away from him, leaned against the wall, crossed her legs. She needed to be apart from him to tell this story. “I got them stuff online, went back a couple of times. Gave them picture books. A couple of toys. A Slinky, one of the good metal ones.” She half laughed. “I’ve never seen children so fascinated and enthralled by one cheap little...” She caught her breath on a sob. “I did wrong.”
“You shouldn’t have...helped them?”
“The guys at the base, the ones who’d been there awhile, said, Don’t do this. Don’t interfere. Never never. It won’t turn out well.” She saw her hands; she was wringing them, and it took an effort to stop. “I didn’t listen. I told them I was sneaking in. I said no one would see me.”
“You were risking your life.”
“What would you have done?” She was fierce. “They were going to starve to death. I was afraid no matter what I did, that would be their fate.” Don’t tell the story. It hurts too much. “But they didn’t starve.”
“What happened?” Max put his hands over hers.
She had been wringing them again. Now she bunched them into fists. “I went to visit. Like I said, sneaking in. As soon as I got close I could smell that stench.” She could smell it now, curling like bitter smoke through her memories. “I knew what it was. I recognized it from other missions. Char, desperation, death. The house was rubble and still smoldering.”
“Did a mortar hit the house?” he asked calmly, as if by being composed he could make things better.
Never never. “That would have been too easy. No. They killed them.” Looking back, Kellen didn’t remember falling to her knees. She only remembered being on the cold barren ground, staring at the pyre where three innocent lives had ended.
A burned-out house. A melted coil of metal. The stench of desperation and death. Why was it always the innocents who paid?
Max slid his fingers between hers, loosened her fists. “Who’s they?”
“I don’t know.” She looked up, racked by guilt. “Maybe the insurgents. But probably their neighbors.”
“Why would they do that?” He didn’t sound as calm now.
“They had reason. The insurgents would burn down a whole village if one person was believed to be an American informant. So when the villagers killed a widow, an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old girl for consorting with an American, they were protecting themselves and their families.” Sometime in the telling of the story, she had stopped crying. Now the tears came again, fewer, hotter, more painful. She pulled her hands away from his and used toilet paper to keep the tears under control. “Ghazal and her children died because they were desperate enough to consort with...me.”
Max watched her... Oh, he watched her kindly. But he knew now what she was. A fool and a butcher. “You didn’t kill them.”
“No. They would have probably died anyway or been forced into...” She shook her head. “There are so many sides there. There’s no way to tell an enemy from a friend. I don’t know who saw me, who told on me and Ghazal and her children. But when I saw Rae, and she said she was mine—” her own child, and she never knew “—all I could think of was that Slinky, stretched, melted, blackened, and the girls who, for one moment, had played with it and been happy.” She looked Max right in the eye. “No matter where I went, no matter what I did, I never helped anyone again. I never looked at another child. I kept to my own kind, to my comrades who would fight and maybe die but not helplessly. Not hopelessly.”
“That’s why you were always running away from Rae.” Max nodded. He got it now. “You were afraid you were going to love her, and disaster would follow.”
“Disaster arrived. I came on this mission. She came along.” Kellen leaned forward and in a voice that shook with intensity, she said, “I swear to you I didn’t know she was there until it was too late.”
“I know.”
“Earlier you said that I—”
“I know she sneaked away to be with you. I know you would never have deliberately brought her along.” He sounded disgusted—with himself. “I yelled because I wanted to blame someone besides myself.”
“Why would you be to blame?”
“Because I’m her father and I know how that devious little brain works. I should have seen this coming. As soon as I read her note...” His voice rose again. “Do you know how scared I’ve been?”
She just didn’t care. “Do you know how scared I’ve been? Those men murdered a helpless man for that head. They tried to kill us. What they would have done to a child—” Kellen’s throat closed. Pure panic pumped through her veins. Everything she hadn’t allowed herself to feel during the trek up the mountain, she felt now.
Max pulled her into himself as if he wanted to be part of her skin, her muscle, her bone. He hugged her, and he held her, and he must have done something special because slowly, ever so slowly, the terrible sense of being broken began to heal. After a long time, he whispered, “You brought her back to me. That’s all that matters. You had a second chance to save a child, your child, and you did it.”
“I never want to do anything like that again.”
“Ha! Have you met Rae?”
She pulled away, incredulous at his lack of sympathy. “Could I spend five minutes basking in relief?”
“Sure. Bask.” With finely tuned humor, he said, “She’s still asleep.”
Kellen wiped her face and blew her nose. “Thanks,” she muttered. She looked up.
Max was smiling as if he saw something wonderful in her; in snotty, blubbering little ol’ her.
She tossed the tissues into the wastebasket.
He took the roll of toilet paper out of her hand and put it to one side. “Done with that?”
“Um, sure.” Her voice quavered a little.
He stroked her cheek, pushed her hair behind her ear, cupped his hand behind her neck.
Together, they leaned toward each other. Their lips almost touched, and—
The workroom door slammed open.
They jumped apart.
Zone couldn’t see them, but he announced, “The Triple Goddess is real. She’s real. This is the discovery of a lifetime!”
“Um. Great, Zone,” Max said. “That’s just dandy.”
Kellen leaned around the back of the recliner and viewed Zone, standing there with his glasses in his hand, his eyes shining with excitement. “Whoop.”
“Yes!” Zone punched the air, went back into the workshop and slammed the door.
“Where were we?” Max asked.
“I think we were going to, um, kiss. But the moment is gone. Right?”
“No, it’s not. I could kiss you every moment of every day, no matter who stops us.”
They leaned together again.
“Mommy! Daddy!” Rae’s cranky sleepy voice halted their advance. “I want a drink of water.”
Kellen looked deep into Max’s eyes. “No matter who stops us?”
“Except her.” Max stood. “I’ll do it. My butt hurts from sitting on the floor anyway.” He looked her over. “You need to go back to bed.” Which was a tactful way of saying she’d been upset and crying, was tired and injured and in general looked like hell. He offered his hand.
She let him pull her to her feet. Come to think of it, her butt hurt, too.
Rae was sitting up, rubbing her eyes. “What were you doing back there?”
“Not kissing, that’s for sure,” Max muttered.
“I was telling your daddy about some little girls I used to know,” Kellen said. “Some little girls I met from when I was a soldier.”
“I’m not sleepy.” Rae could hardly hold her head up. “Tell me.”
“Someday I will. They deserve to be remembered.”