A Missing Peace (12 page)

The narrator mentioned that five thousand U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan—that was way less than the number of civilians who had died—and a significant number of those were killed by friendly fire. The documentary didn't seem to think it was a big number, but to me that meant a lot of guys were killed like Caleb's father. Not terrorism at all.

Then I learned friendly fire victims might be entitled to pay-outs beyond their life insurance, especially if there was negligence involved. Caleb's words, “I don't have another option,” echoed in my head.

Once he knew the truth, he would never talk to me again, true. But five thousand soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thirty thousand plus were injured. If the military owed him money, he had another option. I was willing to let Caleb hate me to keep him from becoming a statistic.

Both
Ommy
and Abrahem were asleep in their rooms, but if I waited until they were gone, I might not have the courage to do what I needed to do. I took the risk and walked across the street in broad daylight. I knocked on the door, sucked in air, and prayed it was enough to get me through what I had to do.

Caleb didn't answer, but I knew he was there, so I pushed the door open. He stood in front of the couch. “I was coming to the door,” he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest. His tone surprised me—stern and harsh.

“You didn't have to get up.”
In fact, it's probably better if you're sitting down.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“That's a good idea. It might even have been a good idea four days ago when you fell off my couch and lay on the floor for ten minutes before ignoring me for days.”

“I—”

“Mirriam, you've scraped me off the ground more than once. If you can't let me do the same for you, we don't have much to talk about.”

That stung. Caleb had never talked to me like this before, and it seemed to be what I needed to pull myself out of this emotional chaos I was in and take control.

“Sit down, Caleb. We need to talk.”

“Are you going to acknowledge what I said?”

“After what I have to tell you, you won't want to talk to me anymore. Okay?”

His brows knit in confusion. “What are you talking about? I love you. There isn't much you could do to change that.”

An easy smile spread across my face and I sighed as my heart fluttered. I knew it. I knew it from the first time he kissed me, but hearing him say it made it real. The smile disappeared, and it took everything I had not to cry, because now I had a crystal clear image of what I was about to lose.

His eyes went soft, and he held his arms out for me. “What's wrong?”

“Sit down. Really.” He obeyed, and I sat on the armchair beside the couch instead of the seat next to him.

He eyed the distance between us and then asked, “Are you breaking up with me?”

I laughed.
If it were only that simple.
I shook my head and blurted it out. “You shouldn't join the army. You can still go to college. Someone owes you money, lots of it.” That was the reason I was here. Because telling him could help one thing: Caleb's future.

“Who owes me money?”

Oh God! I forgot one really important detail.
I forced myself to slow down. “Someone owes you money, but before I tell you who, you have to promise to find out another way. You can't let anyone know I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“What I'm about to tell you. I'm serious, Caleb. It's not just me I'm worried about. I can't let anything happen to
Ommy
or Abrahem.”

“I have no idea what we're talking about, but I won't let anything happen to you.”

“I don't care about me. It's—”

“Mirriam, I won't let anything happen to your family, because that would hurt you. What are we talking about? Who owes me money?”

“The army.”

“What? Do you mean the pay out? I hate it when people think the government gives money to fallen soldiers. It's not true. That money was my dad's insurance policy. He paid for it, and mom used it to pay off the mortgage.”

I shook my head. I knew what I needed to say when I knocked on the door, but now my thoughts whirled around my brain. The words escaped me, but I tried to tell him. “I saw it on TV. They called it something—I don't remember. I saw it last night.” I moved my hand around in circles as I tried to remember the phrase. “Friendly fire.”

“Mirriam, my dad wasn't killed by friendly fire. He was shot by terrorists.”

My eyes bulged as anger shot through me like venom. We were talking about his father, and I was the one irate. But it wasn't true. “No, he was not.”

“I'm not going to argue with you about this. I'm sorry that you think there are no terrorists in Iraq or that it's okay to be a terrorist, or whatever it is that you think, but you need to drop this. What did you need to talk about?”

“Miller.”

“What?”

“No, that's what I wanted to talk about.”

Caleb groaned. “M, if this is some kind of game, it's not funny.”

“I wish. Do you think it's easy for me to be here talking about this?”

“I haven't figured out what we're talking about yet.”

Blurting it out was a horrible idea. I couldn't figure out how to lead into the, ‘I snuck out of the house and now our dads are dead' story.

I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with air. I blew it out slowly and hugged my knees to my chest. I fixed my eyes straight ahead on the white wall—I didn't dare meet Caleb's eyes—and started from the beginning.

“The first day I saw you, you looked so familiar. I couldn't figure out where I knew you from, but I'd seen your face before. I decided you were the typical All-American heartthrob, so you probably looked like a movie star.”

Caleb grinned. “Oh really?”

“Caleb, this is no time for your conceit. I thought it again that night you got hit by the car, because your expression looked so familiar. But you've lived here most of your life, and I was in Iraq and then Maryland. I didn't think there was any way I could have seen you before. When I saw the picture of your father, I knew I had seen
him
before, and I knew where. You said he probably looked familiar, because you have the same features, but you were wrong.
You
looked familiar for that reason.”

“You met my dad in Iraq?”

“Only once.”

“I don't understand. Why would that freak you out?”

I told him the whole story without leaving out any details.

In the four days we hadn't talked, I'd alternated between crying, eating pistachio ice cream, and watching bad TV to cover up the fact that I couldn't sleep and shouldn't be eating pistachio ice cream. As I recanted this story, I wanted to cry again. I didn't let myself. Instead, I sat, waiting for Caleb's reaction.

Caleb looked through me, not at me. Finally, he said, “I need some time to process this.”

I nodded, because I knew this would happen. I knew before I came.

He sat a foot away from me, but we weren't touching or talking—too much space between us, but that was what he'd asked for.

Caleb didn't utter a single word as I walked to the door. Not even goodbye.

Caleb

There it was—the missing piece. The chunk of the story I knew wasn't being told two years ago, when dress greens showed up at the door. This was more than a missing piece, though. This was a whole new story.

A lump gathered in my throat when Mirriam was talking, and I couldn't breathe past it. She was calm as she spoke. The color drained from her face. She went as white as my walls, but she never cried. When she finished, she looked at me gauging—waiting for a reaction—but I was numb.

My dad was shot by his friend with a government issued weapon. While he was dying, they were fighting with each other, not trying to help him. And Mirriam ran away.

I looked at this innocent girl—the only girl I'd ever loved. I fixated on her, hoping it would come to me. The answer. Something that said this didn't change anything. She was still Mirriam. America was still the best place on Earth. My dad died for a reason. Uncle Sam was still the good guy, and defending your country was the right thing to do.

I came up blank. There was no answer.

All of this time, I thought he had been gunned down by a terrorist. The day they handed my mom the folded flag, I decided to enlist. I would find the terrorist clan responsible and kill them off one by one. An eye for an eye. Being killed by someone he knew—someone
we
knew, who probably still lived on the base—made it worse.

I pushed out enough breath to form words. “I need some time to process this.”

Moments turned to minutes and slipped through the silence.

I stared at Mirriam until I couldn't see her anymore.

Finally, she stood. “I should go.” And she did.

The door swung open and closed. Mirriam was gone.

I was left in an empty house with the new knowledge my dad was killed by one of his own. Anger consumed me. I needed to kick someone's ass. Now. Not later. But who? I didn't know who had fired the shot. Although, I assumed Collins had barked the order. He had been the commanding officer, and no one would have followed that order coming from anyone else.

I wanted to break Collins' neck.

I swatted my hand in front of me, pushing the crystal vase and glass candle set from the coffee table to the floor. It crashed into a million bits of broken glass. I knew Mom would kill me when she came home, but I didn't care.

I always wondered how Mirriam could hate it here the way she did, since the Middle East was supposed to be so much worse, especially for women. And Mirriam wasn't the kind of girl to keep quiet. Now I knew. For the first time in my life, I hated America, too.

Dad hadn't died protecting his country, or his family, or his friends. He was killed protecting an innocent girl they called a terrorist.

“Oooww!” I screamed out in pain as I forced myself to my feet. I took a thick book from Mom's shelf and threw it in the fireplace. I waddled to the kitchen, turned on a burner on the stovetop, and stuck the cardboard center of a roll of paper towels in it. I returned to the living room and threw it against the book. We only kept firewood around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It had been 99 degrees for three weeks. No chance of finding firewood here.

I was moving too fast. Each step hurt. Every time I pushed my legs forward, it didn't matter which one, I wanted to scream. I fought through the pain and made it outside. Unable to pivot my body in an angle so I could remove the flagpole from its holder, I broke the pole off. Red and white striped cloth swept the concrete porch as I crossed through the door again.

Every soldier's kid knew what you had to do with a flag that touched the ground, but it didn't matter. Old Glory's life was over anyway. My fire had nearly died in the time it took me to collect the flag. I removed another book and tossed it in the flames. Orange and blue tongues leapt up from the remnants of that first book and blazed.

I tossed the American flag in the flames and watched them dance across it. Uncle Sam, you killed my dad, you bastard. Rot in hell!

There was only one thing left to do. One piece of satisfaction left to be had. Anger still consumed me, but now it mingled with adrenaline. My legs didn't hurt anymore. Hell, I couldn't feel my body.

I walked through the dining room, through the kitchen, through the small hall to Mom's room, opened her closet door, and felt around the top shelf until my hand landed on a thick piece of folded cloth. I pulled it toward me. The flag. The one that had hugged the top of a slick black coffin through a twenty-one gun goodbye.

Clutching it, I remembered an officer in dress greens handing it to my mom two feet from the casket. We walked away from the cemetery after the funeral, and the same officer caught us. “Thank you for your sacrifice,” he said.

That day, Mom hugged him, still sobbing. Not knowing what to say, I just nodded. It was a common thing to hear at military funerals, but it sounded hollow. Today, I knew what to say. “No problem. My dad didn't mind dying because Collins and some grunt are cold-blooded murderers.”

With the folded flag in my hand, I returned to my pathetic fire. I tossed the triangle at it. The fire was almost dead, so no blaze welcomed this one. That was okay. It would be slowly eaten. A blue patch of fabric dotted with tiny white stars stuck up from the flames, when Mom walked through the door. I was leaning against the couch, staring at the fireplace, watching red and yellow flames beat across the bottom of the flag.

“Caleb, you know you shouldn't be on your legs. Lie down. Isn't it a little warm for a fire?” Her eyes moved to the spot where mine were fixed. Her mouth dropped in horror. “Oh my God! What have you done?” She rushed to the fireplace, pulling the flag out by its untouched corner. She dropped it against the floor. The wood immediately caught the flames. The living room floor burnt too now. She picked up the rug by the front door and beat it across the flag. She saved the half gone flag, but marred the hardwood floor.

“Are you crazy? Why would you burn your father's flag? Caleb, how many of those pills did you take?”

Another first. I heard the ridiculousness that you would have to be drugged to burn a flag. That a woman who lost her husband—best friend and high school sweetheart as the story went—for that flag would think you had to be high to burn a flag.

“What do you think about what the military told us?”

“What the military told us? You mean about his death?” She wasn't screaming. That question had caught her off guard.

“Yeah.”

“I don't know.” Her tone got harder. “Did that little Iraqi girl say somethin' that caused this?”

Mirriam had disappeared after she said what she had to say. It pissed me off, but I wasn't going to let anyone trash her, either. “Don't bring her into this.”