Page 56 of Hold on Tight

He imagined building a sand castle with Sam, with buckets and an army-issue shovel and a small U.S. flag to fly from the ramparts the way they had when they’d visited the Oregon coast as kids. He imagined walking on the beach with Mira at night while his mother kept watch over a sleeping Sam. Tending a bonfire on the beach, his arm tight around her, her face lit by the flickering flames, eyes aglow.

“We’d have to tell him the truth, though, right?” Her expression was deeply wary.

“Yeah. When we’re ready.”

Mira pulled the beer mug up to her breasts, where he wanted to bury his face, and regarded him for a moment. He felt the question before it came, a rush of dread in his stomach.

“I don’t know if it’s a really bad question, and you don’t have to answer it, but will you tell me what happened to your leg?”

He wanted not to answer at all. He wanted to shake his head, reject the question like a pitcher brushing off a catcher’s signals.Damn straight it’s a really bad question.

“I don’t tell this story much.”

“You don’t have to,” she said again.

But they both knew he’d tell it. She was leading him along, tugging him deeper. One bargain with the devil after another, each feeling negotiable because it was only a baby step, until he would realize that the hillside had slid out from under him, that there was no terra firma left.

Of course there had never been terra firma. Notsince. There were only these baby steps—somewhere. Into the dark.

“We were on our way to a training exercise. We were supposed to teach some Afghani soldiers how to storm an empty building. That’s mostly what we were doing there, trying to train the Afghanis to fight their own war. We were heading north toward Kandahar. A bunch of kids blocked our progress. Blocked the road.”

He couldn’t tell the story without seeing it. The rough surface you could barely call a road, the skinny kids in their motley mix of traditional and Western clothes, the movie advancing, herky-jerky, slow mo, then in a vivid forward rush, the mind’s collection of images before trauma. Dust on everything, in everything, all the time, the scent of that dust, like ash and metal, mingling with diesel exhaust. The silence that fell in the truck, five men collectively registering danger.

“My gut was screaming at me that it was an ambush, that something was wrong. I wasn’t driving. One of my guys was driving.”

Mike had been driving. Mike, who should have been on a plane home. Who would have been on a plane home if Jake had been able to do what needed to be done, if he’d been able to man up.

Mike’s home was barely an hour from here, in DuPont. Mike’s wife lived there, still.

“You talk to any guy who’s fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, he’s learned toreadkids. Kids are a barometer in unconventional warfare. Like if you’re in a village, and it’s totally deserted of all kid life, you know something’s wrong. Probably an attack coming. The villagers know, because they’ve heard it through the grapevine, because someone’s got ties to the Taliban, so they make all the kids come inside, out of danger. The kids vanish, and it’s like when the birds stop singing before a storm. Too quiet.”

Like the inside of the truck. The only sound Mike’s breathing, too fast. Jake had willed it to slow down.You’re okay, dude. You told me you were okay.

Even now he was doing it. Willing Mike to calm down, to focus, to hang in. As if he could change the past.

He was getting too far inside his head. He was supposed to be telling Mira his story. He made himself come back out again, made himself see her, the beer mug snuggled to her chest, her eyes big, hair a little wild, something he could smooth down. Something he could make wilder.

The thought was steadying. An anchor to the here and now.

“Plus you have to be careful not to get suckered by kids. Because the other side will use them as bait, use them to trigger IEDs.

“These kids, they blocked the road. I told my guys it felt wrong. They agreed. I told one of my guys to get out of the truck and get them out of the way, that we needed to move and we needed to move fast. He started to scatter the kids. I saw one had a cell phone, which is how they detonate IEDs usually. I screamed at Mike, who was driving, to go, go, go—and that was the last thing I remember.”

Her eyes were big. The softness in them was killing him, splitting his tough skin like gutting a fish. “Other guys were injured?”

“Some. Percussion injuries—busted eardrums, a lot of shrapnel. The driver was killed.”

The driver, he’d said. Michael J. Watson. He’d given his full name, like that, before he’d shaken Jake’s hand on the first day of Ranger training.

“God.”

That was all. Just “God.” If he were the kind of guy to see stuff this way, he’d have said it was almost like a single-word prayer. And she was clutching that beer so hard that her fingers were white against the glass.

It hadn’t been as hard to tell her as he’d expected it to be. Of course, he hadn’t told her the whole story. But he couldn’t go any further. Down this path were the mistakes that had gotten Mike killed and cost Jake a leg, a calling, a life. Down this path was self-flagellation and a dark night, and he was pretty sure that wasn’t where either of them wanted this to go. He was pretty sure both of them had better ideas for how to spend this evening.

He sure as hell did. He wanted to kiss her stupid again. He wanted to find out if all her skin tasted the same as her throat and her cleavage. He wanted to find out if her noises would get deeper and more guttural when she was splayed out under him on a couch, on a bed. What she would cry out when she came.

“Put the beer down,” he said.

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