“Fabulous!”
Alina gets settled in while I start making one of Lele’s pasta sauce recipes. If I’m going to make an impression, it’s going to be a good one. The smell of basil and oregano has filled the kitchen by the time Alina finishes unpacking.
“That smells incredible.”
“Old family secret,” I say with a wink.
“Hmm…will you have to kill me if I figure it out?”
I glance over to her, surprised she’d make such a joke, but she’s smiling, so I smile back.
“Something like that.”
“I’ll set the table.”
We eat. We chat about nothing in particular. We do the dishes, and we go to bed. I consider bringing up the picture about a hundred times during the course of the evening, but I don’t. I want to make sure the timing is right. I don’t want to push my luck. I hold her and slowly fuck her, taking my time and making sure she’s well satisfied before I enjoy my own release. When we’re done, I hold on to her and inhale the sweet scent of lavender.
The next day is Sunday, and we sleep in.
It’s not like I keep any kind of regular work hours—quite the contrary—but there must be some Catholic boy thing left inside of me that’s always reserved Sundays for relaxing and doing nothing. Alina seems to be of a similar mindset and isn’t bothered by my lack of motivation. We discuss the possibility of going out later in the week but spend the morning and afternoon just watching romantic comedies on Netflix and eating leftover pasta.
She’s been here a full twenty-four hours, and I can’t wait any longer.
Excusing myself for a moment, I go into the bedroom and get the pictures. I stare at them for a moment before returning to the couch. I place the picture of Zach and me together on the coffee table in front of her and sit back as she picks it up and looks at it. She presses her lips together, and there’s a tear in the corner of her eye.
There is no surprise in her expression. This isn’t the first time she’s seen the picture.
“Where did you find this?” she asks quietly.
“The question is, where did you find it?”
Tracing the edge of the picture with the tip of her finger, she takes a deep breath and lets it out again.
“Zach was my neighbor.”
I blink a couple of times as Alina looks off into the distance. Zach was from Harwood Heights, not Oak Park. Of course, her father could have moved during that time.
“He was a few years older than me,” she says, “but he was always really nice to me. He talked to me about school and how important getting an education was. He planned to go to college for engineering so he could take care of his parents and never have to worry about money again. I think he was the only boy I knew who wasn’t paying my father…”
Her voice trails off and she clears her throat.
“I guess I had a crush on him.” She chuckles softly. “I don’t know if he realized that or not, but I did. I think he was seventeen when I was eleven. He left for the Marines right out of high school, and I was really upset that he was going. When he left, he promised to write to me all the time, and he did.”
“You knew me,” I say, suddenly putting it together. “That very first time I picked you up, you already knew who I was and not because of my reputation on the street.”
“I did.” She nods. “Zach told me everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t see any reason to,” she says as she leans back on the cushions. “I understand why you don’t want to talk about what happened over there, and I didn’t want you to feel like I was pushing you to give me information. I already knew enough.”
“What did you know?”
“Zach told me about a lot of the guys in his unit but mostly about you,” Alina says. “He told me you were the best marksman he’d ever seen in his life and how proud he was to be your spotter. He talked about how protective you were of your unit and how often you were there helping out the other guys when they needed it. He said everyone looked up to you, even the officers, and you were just a corporal.”
I swallow hard. She’s talking about times I just barely remember. As often as I think about all the horrible things I’ve done and seen, I rarely consider some of the other times.
“I remember one of his letters where a new guy had just been sent over there to join you. He was a radio operator or something like that. He was only eighteen and really scared to be deployed in the middle of everything. He’d only enlisted to pay for college and never thought he’d be sent overseas. Zach said you found him in the middle of the night, crying, and you stayed up with him and talked him through it. You gave him the confidence and courage to keep going and that you always protected him.”
She’s talking about Eddie-boy, and I close my eyes as I remember that night. The temperature had gone from about a hundred and ten that afternoon to fifty at nightfall, and all those insanely huge spiders had looked for heat inside our barracks. Eddie-boy had stepped on one coming out of the shower and had completely freaked out. We talked for hours about his childhood and why he joined the Marines. His family went camping a lot, and he’d come across critters in his tent before but never something that looked quite like those spiders.
We had a big discussion about size ratio and how he was a lot bigger than a fucking spider. Then we’d gone searching for more of them, learning how to trap them and kill them. Eddie-boy became the unit’s exterminator after that.
“What else did Zach say?” I ask quietly.
“That you were incredibly brave, even when you had to do something you didn’t want to do. He said you always did what was necessary and that sometimes he didn’t know how you managed it. When things got bad, he said you were always there for everyone, saying and doing things to make life over there a bit more bearable. He kept saying they needed to promote you—make you an officer—since all of the officers listened to you anyway. Zach said he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if you hadn’t been at his side.”
“He was hit right beside me,” I tell her. “He died in my arms. We were under heavy fire, and I tried to stop the bleeding, but by the time the medic got there, it was too late.”
“His mom told me,” Alina says as she squeezes my hand. “I didn’t know how. I just knew he was killed in the line of duty. It was right after his funeral that I left home.”
I do the math in my head. Zach and I were the same age, and he died when he was twenty-one. If she was fourteen when she left home, it means Alina is now twenty-three years old—the same age I was when they pulled me out of that pit.
“Before then, I was actually considering enlisting,” Alina says. “Zach knew my home life sucked, and he was always encouraging me to do it. Probably the Army, not Marines, or maybe even the Navy. I thought it would be a good way to get money for college, just like Zach was doing. Once he was gone…well, I guess the motivation wasn’t there anymore.”
“And then you were living on the streets.”
“For a while, yes. I didn’t have any other family and didn’t think it all through when I left. I had maybe five hundred dollars at the time. I thought that was a lot of money.”
“That won’t get you far.”
“Lasted about two weeks.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Made a living the only way I knew how.” Her voice is low, almost monotone. As she speaks the words, her tone becomes more and more detached. “What else was I going to do? I turned tricks and made enough to get a shitty apartment. Got beat up and raped a lot, but that’s how it goes.”
I bristle at the words and the casual way she says them.
“Eventually, I hooked up with a pimp who wasn’t too bad. He took most of the money but got me into a better apartment with a couple of roommates who worked for him, too. He disappeared off the streets one weekend, and we assumed he was dead somewhere. That’s when Teto came and took us in. He worked for Greco then.”
&n
bsp; She looks at me, waiting for my reaction, but this isn’t new information. I nod for her to go on.
“I never met the guy, just like I’ve never met your boss. I just followed Teto after that, and I’ve been with him for over two years.”
“Did you ever see Zach’s family again?”
“No,” Alina says. “I heard they moved out of state not too long after he died. I never saw them again.”
I close my eyes for a minute, realizing how far my mistakes have reached.
“If Zach had come home, you might not have had to live like that.”
“There’s no way of knowing that.” Alina turns toward me and grabs one of my hands. “You aren’t responsible for Zach. He knew what he was signing up for, and he accepted that. He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself.”
“Well, I do.” I try to pull my hand back, but she holds on tight, and I relent. “If we had been two feet to the left, he wouldn’t have been hit.”
“You had no way of knowing that.”
“The cover wasn’t good enough. I should have set up somewhere else.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it, Evan.”
“I fucked it up, and he paid for it.”
“You listen to me, Evan Arden.” Alina sits up a little more and takes my face in her hands. “You are not responsible for that. From what Zach told me, you are the only reason any of you survived as long as you did.”
I can’t agree.
“You were his hero, Evan.”
“Me, a hero? Hardly.” I pull back from her and stand up. I start to pace a little as my stomach gets tied up in knots. “And what about now, huh? How would he feel about me now? Zach was a good guy. He even fucking prayed every night. Why the hell did he get hit and I come back just to kill some more?”
Alina stands and approaches me, grabbing both of my hands this time. She pulls me back to the couch and straddles my lap. She places her hands on my shoulders and moves close enough that our noses are almost touching.
“That man,” she says and then pauses and collects her thoughts before continuing, “that man Zach told me about—that brave, heroic man that he admired so much—that’s you, Evan. It’s you. You were and you are that same man.”
“Everything I’ve done since then…” I close my eyes and shake my head.
“None of that takes away from what you did before. It doesn’t stop you from being that same person. You are still him. You still did all those admirable things that made Zach so proud to be your spotter. He loved you like you were his own brother.”
Brothers in arms.
I glance down at the bullet and letters tattooed on my wrist. I remember the day Zach and I went to the tattoo shop and got the same tat—mine with his initials, his with mine.
Alina must notice where I’m looking because she reaches down and rubs at the letters—ZTM. Zachary Thomas Marshall. She wraps her fingers around my wrist and brings it up to her lips. She kisses each letter in turn.
“I still miss his smile,” she says softly, “and that goofy laugh.”
“He did have a goofy laugh.”
“And he was so loud!” Alina smiles. “He would laugh at the dumbest jokes, too.”
“He couldn’t tell one, either.” I smiled as well, remembering all the stupid one-liners Zach would come up with, claiming they were puns. They never made any sense. “He had the worst sense of humor, but you had to laugh whenever he did.”
“Exactly! Then you would wonder what the hell you were laughing at.”
Vivid memories flood my head, memories filled with beer and stupid jokes.
“Is that why you’re here now?” I ask. “Because of some debt you think you owe Zach for being nice to you?”
Alina stares at me for a long time, reaching up to stroke the side of my face.
“At first,” she says quietly. “It’s different now.”
“How so?”
“Because before, I only had Zach’s letters to go by. I only knew your character through him. Now I know you for real.”
“And you haven’t run away, screaming?”
“You don’t scare me, Evan.”
“Maybe I should.”
“You’re sad,” she whispers. “Sad and lonely. You blame yourself for things you couldn’t control. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
I laugh out loud.
“There are a thousand other things that make me a bad person.”
“That’s not you,” Alina says. “That may be what you do now, but that’s still not you.”
“There are a lot of dead people who would disagree.”
“You need a place to belong, Evan. You need someone to belong to. The fact that you happened to find that in a man who asks you to do such things is just circumstance. It’s the same reason I ended up a street whore.”
“I don’t see how you can compare the two. You give people something they want and need. I take away their lives.”
Alina doesn’t answer. She just looks over her shoulder at the picture where it sits on the coffee table. I wonder if I should show her the other two I grabbed. I’m still debating that when she speaks up.
“Evan—where did you get that picture?”
Ah, shit!
With all the discussion of Zach and what happened to us both, I had just about forgotten how I came across the picture in the first place. She’d told me to stay out of it, and I’d gone behind her back and had taken care of things my way.
“Your father’s apartment.” There’s no reason to lie at this point. She’s going to figure it out soon enough.
She closes her eyes and looks away as she tightens her fingers around my shoulders. I don’t move, just watch her as she tries to control her breath and bites into her lip.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
I don’t answer. When she turns to meet my eyes again, I’m sure she can see the answer, but I won’t say the words.
“You did it for me, didn’t you?”
Again, I don’t respond. My silence will have to be enough for her.
Alina leans back on my thighs and places her hands on her knees. She looks toward the door as she balances herself there, and I tense. This could be it. She could decide enough is enough, get up, and pack her things. The new apartment and dinner aren’t enough to counter this.
I can’t regret what I’ve done. Not this time.
Alina shifts, and I prepare myself for her to depart, but she doesn’t. Instead, she leans into my chest and places her head on my shoulder. I wrap my arms around her back. I can feel the tears soaking into my shirt, but her cries are silent.
I hold her for several minutes, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When she does finally wipe at her eyes and speak, her words surprise me.
“He’s really gone?”
“He’s gone.”
She reaches her arms around my shoulders and hugs me tightly.
“Thank you, Evan.”
I hold her against me and close my eyes.
Maybe for once, I did do something right.
Alina wipes her eyes again and stands. She takes me by the hand and pulls me into the bathroom and starts the shower. She lathers me everywhere, her fingers pressing into the muscles in my back, chest, and arms. We take turns toweling each other off, and I help her apply a generous amount of lavender lotion to her skin before we climb into bed.
She wraps her arms around me, and I wrap mine around her. In silence, we hold each other. I wonder if she is thinking of her father or if she has memories of Zach running through her head like I do.
I feel her grip on me lessen, and she tilts her head into the space between my neck and shoulder. She sighs deeply, and I kiss the top of her head as I relax against the pillow.
“They did promote me,” I whisper into the darkness. “In the field, when our lieutenant was killed. I took command of the unit, and then they all got killed.”
Alina tightens her arms around me.
“It was my fault,” I tell
her. “They never should have promoted me.”
Alina strokes the back of my head for a few moments before she responds.
“Tell me something, Evan.”
“Okay.”
“With only the knowledge you had at the time, tell me what order you could have given that would have saved them.”
I lick my lips and think about it. I’d never really approached it in such a way. All my “what ifs” included knowledge that they were about to attack.
“We were ambushed. They’d captured someone from the unit, and he’d given up our position.”
“Did you have any way of knowing that?”
“I didn’t figure that out for a long time. I knew he had been captured—I’d seen him. He was in the video when they executed the journalist.”
Alina nods. It’s obvious she knows exactly what I am talking about. The whole world saw that footage.
“So, I’ll ask again—what order could you have given that would have saved them?”
I don’t have an answer.
“I got to know you through the eyes of someone in your unit,” Alina says as she strokes the side of my face. “I felt like I was right there beside you when I read his letters. You were a model soldier, Evan. You were smart, you were dedicated to your unit, and you did everything you could to keep them safe. Even now, after years of thinking about it, you know there is nothing you could have done to change the outcome.”
I want to argue with her. I had been in command, and they all died while I was off taking a piss. Their lives were my responsibility, and I had failed them. There are so many things I could have done differently if I had known.
If I had known. That’s the key though, isn’t it? I didn’t know. I didn’t know that our location had been given up. I had no idea they were going to show up right at that moment. We were surprised and outnumbered. We had no warning, and there was no defense.
There’s nothing I could have done.
For the first time since it happened, I believe it.
Chapter 18—Uncovered Betrayal
This can’t be happening.
“They said six to eight weeks! That was ten days ago!”
The doctor’s words flow in and out of my head. Blood clots near Rinaldo’s heart. Surgery is risky. They’ve never seen such rapid growth. A few days at best…