A Million Miles Away(51)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT


The next day, Peter woke Kelsey by kissing her at dawn. She snuck out to the polyester couch.

They drove alone in the overcast morning to the hospital, where they found Cathy so medicated that she didn’t wake when Peter shook her and said her name.

The nurse tried to calm Peter’s panic, assuring him that his mother was just sleeping. He had only a short time to see her before he had to ship out again, and most of the time she wasn’t able to say a word.

They sat as he held Cathy’s hand, her breaths steady against the beep of her heart monitor.

After three hours, Cathy emerged out of sleep to say a slurred “hello” to her son, and then sank back into slumber. Peter stood up, brushed his mother’s hair aside to kiss her forehead, and told Kelsey it was time to go.

“I want to show you something,” he told her.

They drove back to his house, but when Kelsey started to walk to the front door, he motioned her away.

“Back here,” he said, and they went around the house.

Peter’s backyard extended far past where she thought it would, past the mowed lawn and down a hill covered in wild grasses and weeds, to a clump of trees and bushes lining a small creek that seemed to connect all the houses on their block.

They hopped over the creek and ventured into the woods until all they could see were trees behind them, in front of them, to the right and left.

Then Peter led them farther, until the trees broke.

They stood at the edge of what appeared to be a wheat field, golden stalks reaching to Kelsey’s shins, hitting nothing but big gray sky for miles and miles. It was beautiful and still and clear. Everything a person could love about Kansas.

“Is this someone’s land?” Kelsey asked.

“Probably,” Peter said, looking around. “They don’t use it, though. I think it used to be wheat, but now it’s just a bunch of dried-up grass. It was like this when I was a kid. Which reminds me…” He snapped off a stick from one of the surrounding trees. “You’re going to want a stick.”

Kelsey found a relatively stiff, skinny branch and snapped it. “Why?” she asked.

Peter looked at her with a sly smile. “You want to know what I call this place?”

“What?”

He whipped his stick through the grass, stirring it. “Snake Country.”

Kelsey clenched her stick, trying not to show that she was afraid, and whipped it through the grass around her.

“Don’t worry too much,” Peter said, feeling the ground for a dry place to sit.

Kelsey let out a “ha!” and sat down next to him, running her stick over the bending blades.

“I played all sorts of games here,” he said. “Just a lonely little kid, talking to himself about ninjas and dragons.”

Kelsey smiled at the thought, picturing him leaping through the grass, wielding his stick as a sword. “I’m sure you were a great fighter.”

“Against all things imaginary, yes.” He laughed shortly. “I was undefeated.”

They were quiet, listening to the wind rustle the new leaves.

“I’m not a fighter, though,” Peter said, looking out. “I wasn’t built to be over there.”

“I don’t think many people are,” Kelsey said.

“No, but they can adjust to it. They trained us well. They make everything you ever thought you couldn’t do, like—” He swallowed. “Just brutal stuff. They make that stuff into a habit. Into a reaction. And then it becomes necessary, in your mind. My whole world is flipped. Last night, while you were getting the groceries from the car, my sister dropped one of her textbooks on the floor by accident, and it made a banging sound, and do you know what my hands did?”

Kelsey was silent. This was not a question she was supposed to answer.

“They clutched the air for a gun, Michelle. As if I was going to disarm my goddamn sister.” He shook his head. “I can’t even believe I’m back here, racing with Meg at the supermarket and, you know, kissing you, after I’ve seen what I saw. After I’ve done what I did.”

When he was finished speaking, Peter shut his mouth quickly, as if he said something he shouldn’t, and looked at her, trying to measure her thoughts.

She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what he meant. She would try to understand someday. She put her arm around him, and he sank into her.

She laid his head on her lap and stretched out in the grass, hands folded over his chest.

“I don’t want to go back there,” he said, hard, quiet, his eyes collecting the gray of the sky. “Not after I’ve been home.”

I don’t want you to go, either, she almost said, but that wouldn’t help him. That wouldn’t help anyone. She pushed herself to say what she was supposed to say.

“You have to. Here is here, and over there is over there, and there, you’ve got an obligation to your country.”

“It’s not that simple,” he replied.

Her fear was now heavy inside her, weighed down by guilt, by sadness at his leaving. Believe me, Kelsey thought, I know how not simple things are.

She bent her head to kiss him, her hand running across his shorn head, savoring the proximity of his smell, his breath, his warmth in the middle of all this vacant prairie.