Beyond the Point(72)
“London?” Locke repeated. “Like, England? Dude, I’m coming to visit.”
Amanda looked at him as if this international visit was news to her but smiled and grabbed his hand, as if to say she was fine with it.
“That’s crazy!” Tim said. “I’m not surprised. You were always the smartest one of all of us. Way to go, D.”
Dominic started laughing. “You’re gonna do it, right? You’ve got to do it. Charles, tell her she has to do it.”
While Dani rapidly described all of her moving plans, Avery tried not to let her jealousy show on her face. She wanted to be happy for Dani—she really did. But how could you celebrate someone else’s successes when your life felt completely stalled? In just a few short months, Hannah would be in Afghanistan, Dani would be in London, and Avery would still be stuck in Fort fucking Bragg. Her friends were moving on to bigger and better things: marriage, deployments, promotions. And she was . . . what? Here? In love? She looked outside at Noah, who had finished his second cigarette but was still on the phone.
“You all better come visit,” said Dani. “Oh, Avery, why are you crying?”
“I don’t know,” she lied. The truth was, she felt like she was being left behind. And unfortunately, all the questions they’d brought up about Noah hadn’t rolled off her shoulders like she’d hoped, but were sinking into the pit of her stomach. Everything suddenly felt very out of control. She had no idea how to express any of that except to say, “I’m going to miss you guys. That’s all.”
Hands damp from washing dishes, they stood in the kitchen in a small semicircle with their arms wrapped around each other’s backs. If time could stop, Avery would have pressed pause right then and there. Before Hannah packed her trunk and put it on the back of a cargo ship headed to the Middle East. Before the movers arrived in Boston to pull down all the art from Dani’s walls and wrap it in paper. Before Avery put her purse over her shoulder, said goodbye to her friends, and walked out the door under Noah’s heavy arm, smelling the stale odor of cigarette smoke, masked by mint gum.
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty. But what good is hindsight when all you want to do is look through the glass and shout at your old self to not take one more step?
“Stop that,” said Dani. “We’ll be together again before you know it.”
18
March 2006 // Camp Buehring, Kuwait
Prayer flags waved at the front of the bus, flapping against the air-conditioning vents. The driver, a bearded man wearing a tunic, turned up the volume on a recorded track of Arabic prayers, loud enough to drown out the sound of the engine. To Hannah, who sat in the third row behind the driver, staring out the window to the right, the prayers sounded ghostly, more like chants than prayers. Tim was the one who’d taken Arabic at West Point. When they’d said goodbye a few weeks earlier, he’d given her a phrasebook that he’d marked up and tagged, sticking little pink Post-it notes on the pages he thought would be most helpful. Now, staring out the window at an entirely new world, Hannah wished she’d memorized some of the phrases. At least then, the prayers coming from the speakers wouldn’t sound so foreign. She imagined that Muslims asked God for the same things she wanted: Help. Protection. Peace. They said there was nothing more genuine than the prayer of a man in a foxhole. And this whole country was one big foxhole.
Hannah’s parents and her sister, Emily, all understood that this deployment wasn’t a disruption to her life. It wasn’t something that scared her or made her feel anxious. The night before she left Fort Bragg for the airport, Hannah didn’t worry any more than a child frets knowing they’re leaving in the morning for Disney World. To say she was excited would be wrong—because this was a war zone—but she felt ready. After years of anticipation, Hannah wanted to get started and get it over with. She kept a pocket calendar and had already marked off two days. Four hundred and forty-eight to go.
The bus barreled down an unpaved road toward the entrance to Camp Buehring, where her unit would spend two weeks acclimating to the heat and recovering from jet lag, before their final flight into Afghanistan. Her silver cross rested between Hannah’s thumb and forefinger and she slid the charm right and left on the delicate chain, before hiding it away again under her uniform. The air inside the bus smelled stale and brimmed with the quiet tension of fifty soldiers on board, each one staring out their own window at the same merciless view. Sand stretched for miles in every direction. A woman in a long black cloak with only slits for eyes—a burqa—walked along the road in the dust. Where she was going, Hannah had no idea. And for the first time, she felt a jolt of fear. From this point forward, it was going to be nearly impossible to tell friend from enemy.
Soon, the line of buses reached a security checkpoint and a crew of Army soldiers dressed in desert fatigues checked the buses for explosives, then waved them through.
That was all it took to get to war. Five years of training and a wave.
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, Hannah’s unit conducted a series of training events. They were instructed to drink a gallon of water a day to hydrate, and at night, Hannah fought to stay awake until it was time to go to sleep in Kuwaiti time. Each morning, she woke up before the sun, not because she was forced to, but because her mind hadn’t caught up to her body’s geography. Despite her surroundings, everything in her heart and mind believed she was still in North Carolina. One morning, she woke up in the darkness of her tent completely confused about where she was and why the air smelled like burning trash.