A Spark of Light(36)

She looked down at the soggy mess of toilet paper in her hand. The phone had dripped on it, and the marker had bled illegibly. Wren tossed it into the toilet and then wrote on the roll, succinctly, what Izzy would need to know. She and the doctor were the only ones who hadn’t gone to the bathroom yet, and the doctor probably couldn’t even get to his feet. We can take him down. Trip him. Go for the gun. Everyone’s in.

She rolled the words back up, flushed the toilet, rinsed her hands, and stepped outside.

George was waiting, tapping the gun against his thigh. She felt lost without her phone. Untethered.

She could remember asking her dad once what happened during a spacewalk if an astronaut became untethered from the spacecraft. He explained that they wore backpacks they could fire up, with jets to propel them back to the vehicle. They were called Simplifed Aid for EVA Rescue. SAFER.

She took a step toward the couch, feeling the shooter’s eyes on her.

“Did you forget something?” he said.

Wren drew in her breath and shook her head. Had he seen her holding the phone?

George grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her toward the others. “Tape her up,” he ordered Izzy.

“I’m sorry,” Izzy said. The tape roll went around twice, three times. Then Izzy tried to tear it. When that didn’t work, she leaned forward, her hair falling over her face and Wren’s wrists as she bit the edge of the tape with her teeth.

Izzy looked up, catching Wren’s eye for a moment. Then she turned to George. “I believe it’s my turn?”

Wren stumbled back to the couch, gingerly sitting down beside Olive again. She gently settled her bound hands in her lap and looked down at them. Clasped between her palms was a scalpel Izzy had managed to pass to her, with a tiny, lethal blade.

—


DISHONORABLY DISCHARGED. THE WORDS CHASED themselves around George’s mind. What if Lil had heard that? She knew that he had been in the army—and she also knew that he didn’t like to talk about his time there. But shit, neither did anyone who had seen combat.

He had been in Bosnia, stationed in a hellhole where he was supposed to be keeping the peace but even he knew, early days as it was, that there was no way they could win this one. It had been the end of a long day at the end of a long week and he was drinking at a bar. He’d gone outside to take a piss and had heard a woman’s scream.

He should have ignored it. But he thought about his wife, back home, and instead rounded the corner to find two men holding down a Muslim woman. No, make that a girl, a Muslim girl. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. He assumed, given the ethnic conflict, that the men were Serbs, but they all looked alike. One held his hand over her mouth and pinned her shoulders, the other was vigorously pumping between her thighs.

George pulled him off, sending him sprawling into the dust. His friend came after George, who landed a solid punch. The man staggered and fell, his head smacking against the curb. George was dimly aware that the girl had scrambled off. The rapist got to his feet and came toward George, who leveled his weapon. By then, the commotion had drawn a crowd. What they saw was an American soldier holding a Croatian civilian at gunpoint, while a second civilian bled to death at his feet.

He was court-martialed. He explained that he had interrupted a rape, but the girl’s family insisted that she had not been sexually assaulted. And why would they admit she had, since it would make her forever unmarriageable in their culture? Instead, there was testimony from the bystanders who had seen George pointing a gun wildly at a man who had fallen to the ground with his hands up.

George was convicted of manslaughter, and dishonorably discharged, goddammit, for doing the right thing.

When he came home he had a wife who didn’t understand his anger and a baby who screamed all the time, and he couldn’t get any sleep. He got fired from his job and maybe drank more than he should. One night, when he fell asleep on the couch, Greta had leaned over him to wake him up but he had been dreaming and saw instead that girl, the Muslim girl, and he grabbed her by the throat with all his frustration. Why didn’t you tell them the truth? I saved you. Why didn’t you save me?

It wasn’t until Greta started to go slack beneath him that he realized where he was, who he was. When he let her go, she ran to the bedroom and locked the door. He begged for forgiveness. He promised he’d go to counseling. She didn’t answer, just stayed away from him, wearing a necklace of bruises. When he called her name the next day, she jumped in fear. She did everything she could to avoid him. George took to sleeping in the baby’s room, because he knew Greta wouldn’t leave without Lil.

Until one night she did.

He glanced up at the television screen. It was dark now, turned off at his command—but he could still hear the words of the reporter ringing in his head. Dishonorable discharge is reserved for the military’s most reprehensible conduct, the man had said. Desertion, sexual assault, murder … egregious violence.

Egregious violence.

George felt sweat trickle down his back. He pulled at his collar. Egregious fucking violence. There was nothing egregious about it. They didn’t know what went down in Bosnia. They didn’t realize it hadn’t been Greta’s face he saw that night, when he tried to strangle her. They didn’t understand what had happened to Lil that had led him here.

He could not hear anything except that reporter’s voice, ringing in his ears. “Egregious violence,” George muttered. “This is egregious violence,” he said, and he slammed his boot into the injured leg of the doctor.