You Can't Catch Me(73)

We’re both whispering, but our voices seem loud to me. There’s no one around to hear us, but we can’t take the risk our voices carry.

“One of us will come back for hers, I guess,” I say.

“If you take my paddle, I can carry both.”

We climb out of the water. I help JJ put a board under each arm, then pick up my own board and our paddles. I can barely carry one board; I don’t know how she handles two.

“You got all that?” she asks. “We can make two trips.”

“I think I’m okay.”

I start to walk up the hill. This is the worst part, but I grit it out. I get to the top and find the path as my eyes adjust to the dark. I can see lights up ahead: car headlights, or maybe it’s from camper vans. I can smell the smoke from a campfire and the most amazing smell of frying meat. It makes me woozy, but I keep walking. It’s about five hundred steps, and I start counting down— five hundred steps. I can do this.

I get to the first felled tree and almost start to weep. I forgot about the trees. I cut into the woods to get around it and get snagged on a branch. I tug myself free and find the path again. 450 steps now. 449. 448. 447 . . . My foot snags on a root, and I fall to the ground with a great clatter. Equipment splays out around me. I can’t even tell if I’m injured. I simply feel broken.

“You okay?” JJ asks quietly.

“I’m okay,” I say, but I’m not. The day has finally caught up to me. Everything that happened. Everything we did.

Jessie is dead, she’s dead, and I killed her.

My God, I actually killed her.

I let out a great choking sob, and I hear a clatter and JJ’s on the ground next to me, her arms around me, one warm and one steel. I sob into her shoulder.

“We did it,” I say. “We did it.”

“Shhh, come on, don’t lose the plot now.”

“It feels like I’m falling apart.”

She leans back and looks me in the eye. “That’s a normal reaction. But we’ve got a long way to go yet tonight. So, I’m going to need you to buck up, take a deep breath, and dig in.”

“Does that work in combat situations?” I say through something between a sob and a laugh.

“Sometimes. A lot of people in my unit have some pretty serious problems.”

“PTSD?”

“For starters. I lost an arm, but they’ve never gotten back to normal.”

I almost sob again. “What’s normal?”

“Fuck if I know. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got to get up and get back to camp.” She stands but I don’t move. She reaches out a hand to me. “On your feet, soldier.”

I slap my hand into hers, and together we get me up to a standing position.

“I think you might want to take less equipment this time,” JJ says. “And come back for the rest.”

“Good idea.”

I reach down and pick up the paddles. There’s blood oozing from the wounds on my knees.

“Don’t look,” JJ says. “Eyes front.”

I obey.

“Now, march!”





Chapter 34

The Greatest Sin

Tanya didn’t take the news of Kiki’s death well. They’d kept in touch sporadically since Kiki had left the LOT. I hadn’t realized, but that wasn’t the biggest secret I’d learn that day.

I told them all in the kitchen. My parents, my aunt and uncle, the other adults who’d joined them in this splinter cell, and Serene. The kitchen was painted a faded yellow, and the white paint on the ceiling was peeling and cracked. This was quite some paradise they’d built for themselves.

Before I spoke, the kitchen was full of buzzy energy, everyone talking and asking questions and muttering. Everyone except for Serene. Like her name, she was a calm little girl; she might’ve looked like me, but she resembled Kiki in temperament.

After I gave them the news, Tanya sat there in shock, her face white, then buried her head in her hands on the battered kitchen table. My uncle Tom placed his hand on her back, rubbing at her neck while large tears ran slowly down his face. No one else said anything. They all just stared at me as if keeping silent would contain the truth to that room and make it reversible. Then I realized that they were simply reverting to their original programming, performing the Silence Ritual, which was how you honored the dead, according to Todd. You didn’t speak about them or remember their life or toast and tell stories. You held your tongue, sometimes for days, and when you could speak again it was as if they were never there. Only Todd got the special treatment of a funeral, I realized.

Only Todd was allowed to be treated like a regular human being.

“What’s wrong with you people?” I yelled. “Todd’s been dead for years, and you’re still, what? Living the life? This is so pathetic. I mean, how many days of silence is Kiki going to get? Or will it only be hours? And then it’ll be lunchtime, and someone will be hungry, and you’ll make a sandwich, right, Tom? That was always your job, and you’ll ask about wheat or rye and that will be it. She’ll be gone. She’ll be gone forever.”

I broke down then. I didn’t want these people to see my weakness, but there wasn’t any helping it. Kiki was dead and it was my fault, and sitting there in that small re-creation of the LOT was my punishment for all of it. How long was I going to have to sit there, I wanted to know, until it was okay for me to leave and never look back?