Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(51)

A heavy sigh escaped between my teeth.

“I thought you said Tucker wasn’t drafted. That he enlisted.”

Chase’s eyes were dark and indecipherable. He looked right at me, but he wasn’t seeing me.

“Right … he enlisted.… I only meant that he didn’t adjust well.”

I lowered my eyes to the fist that had banged the table. I watched the way the gnarled knuckles couldn’t quite straighten.

His hands hadn’t been like that last year, had they? I would have remembered. They’d been calloused but still soft when he’d touched my face, gentle when they’d run through my hair. They were rough now. Fighter’s hands.

And just like that, all the mixed emotions I’d felt for the two soldiers during this story—the pity, shame, and anger—were tossed into the air like bingo balls, jumbled chaotically, and then suddenly reassigned to their rightful places.

Tucker, the career soldier. Chase, the broken rebel.

Once, soon after Roy had left, my mother and I had gotten into a horrible fight; the worst we’d ever had. It was about the same thing. How I’d made him leave after he’d hit her, how I should have minded my own business.

I hadn’t known what to do. I’d hated her for saying those things, for blaming me for Roy leaving, even though she was right: I’d made him go. I hated that she couldn’t see how terrible he had been and how I’d saved her—us—from more of the same danger. But when I looked at her red, swollen eyes, all of that fury burned into something different. I just felt terribly sorry for her. So I’d gathered her in my arms and squeezed her as tightly as I could and told her that we were both going to be okay. She fell apart, but I was right. We were both okay.

I had the overwhelming urge to do the same for Chase now. To hold him so tightly his ribs hurt. To tell him we’d both be okay. I didn’t though. Maybe because I still didn’t trust him. Maybe because I didn’t trust myself. The truth was, even if I held him now, even if he’d let me and he did fall to pieces, I would have no idea how to put him back together. I had no idea if any of us, my mother included, would be okay.

“You were right about the double bind,” I said softly.

He stood too quickly, the chair tipping and cracking against the floor behind him.

“No, wait.” I didn’t want him to leave, but I didn’t know what else to say.

And just like that, the gate closed. His eyes dulled, his mouth relaxed, and the connection that had just threatened to build between us disappeared.

Without another word, he grabbed his coat off the chair and was out the door.

“Chase,” I called, but my voice had little volume.

I sat down at the kitchen table and clicked off the static hum from the radio. Absently, I traced the thin, raised welts on the backs of my hands and I thought about his hands, and how deeply the wounds beneath some scars ran.

*



“DO you miss them?”

I regretted asking when he hesitated.

“Yes.”

“It was really awful, wasn’t it? The accident I mean. I-I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing to say.” I chewed my fingernails.

“No, not terrible. I just…” He scratched his head. “I’ve never actually talked about it.”

I remembered the police knocking on our door. Telling my mother what had happened. They had needed someone familiar to wait with Chase until his uncle arrived from Chicago. I remembered the tears that had stained his innocent face.

At fourteen, Chase had lost everything.

“I was so sad for you,” I told him. I thought of how his mother would let me braid her thick, black hair. How it stayed in place even without a tie. His father used to pat my head and call me “kiddo.”

“My sister was a nightmare,” Chase said, and laughed a little. “She was a little better after she went to college. She was on winter break when the accident happened, did you know that? They were going out to get dinner.”

I remembered. It had been the first freeze of the season. The other car hadn’t been able to stop.

“I was mad at Rachel because she’d taken my bed and I had to sleep on the floor. I stayed home that night because we’d been fighting. It was so stupid.” He scowled. “The last things I said to her weren’t nice things.”

“But if you hadn’t fought, you’d have been with them,” I pointed out. It hurt, hearing that guilt in his voice.

He sensed my sorrow and turned to face me.

“You know what I remember after the police came?”

“What’s that?”

“You sitting on the couch with me. You didn’t say anything. You just sat with me.”

*



THAT accident had taken Chase away from me. Had led him to Chicago, where his sorry excuse for an uncle had abandoned him in the wreckage of the War. Three years later Chase had come back home, a sturdier, more intense version of the boy he’d been, and my joy at his survival had led to something different, something deeper than I’d thought was possible. Something I’d only just discovered before he was drafted and had to leave again.

Of all the things he’d lived through, it was becoming a soldier that had torn him apart.

After a while I stood, leaving the pot still half full on the table, and went to rinse off the spoon. Still distracted and confused, I forgot my task as the water ran over my fingers. Slowly, a very different realization crept into my brain.