Beneath Wandering Stars (2 page)

A giant cargo plane soars overhead, pulling my eyes to the overcast sky. The wall of gray clouds battles with the green backdrop of the German Rhineland, colliding like the camouflage pattern of the U.S. Army's uniforms. As the roar of the plane fades, an unfamiliar sound on this post of strangers puts a stop to my forward-march.

“
Gabi!
Wait up!”

Oh no. I recognize that overly enthusiastic voice. A quick glance back confirms my suspicions. It's Chloe Ross, my soccer team's goalie and a girl so nice she doesn't mind that I scored on her during our scrimmage in front of the boys' entire starting lineup.

I'm tempted to avoid small talk by hiding out in the mailroom, but a relentless bugle starts blaring on loudspeakers across the post, sabotaging that strategy.
Fan
tastic. It's 1700 hours. How do I know? It's called the retreat ceremony, and when the music plays and the flag is lowered, you
stop
. It wouldn't matter if you were giving an unconscious person CPR; for forty-five seconds no one moves a muscle.

A woman leaving the post office slows her stroller, the toddler inside already trained to stay silent. Cars pull off to the side of the road and any soldiers inside get out, raising hands to temples in a statuesque salute. I stand still, too, since this ritual is all about respect, though it also means I'll never escape chatty Chloe now. Normally I wouldn't blow her off like this, but I want to get home to see if Lucas called.

The bugle music stops, the frozen toy soldiers return to life, and Chloe rushes towards me, gasping for breath. “Gabi, I just had to tell you, that was an amazing goal today! I'm
so
glad Coach made you captain and moved you to center-mid before tomorrow's game.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

Another lie. Sure, my soccer-fanatic father will be thrilled at the news, but team captain isn't a responsibility I wanted, especially when I hardly know anyone at this school.

Still smiling like she has a pantheon of gods on her side, Chloe pulls a pack of Lucky Strikes out of her pocket and lights one up. The cigarette she waves around brazenly tells me that even though this warrant officer's daughter looks like she should be on a box of Swiss Miss, there's another story beneath her squeaky clean exterior.

“Geez, Chloe. Wait until we're off post, will you?” I glance around for personnel garbed in the ciphers of governmental authority, which on a military installation is pretty much everyone.

“Aye, aye, captain.” Chloe drops her cigarette and stamps it out with her cleat. Grass and clumps of dirt cake her knees from diving for shots, most of them mine. “I know, I know, it's stupid. Not to mention the reason my asthmatic grandmother can outrun me, hence why you're team captain and I, the least coordinated person on the planet, got stuck in the goal. Hey, my apartment building is across from yours. Want to walk the rest of the way together?”

“Sure,” I lie again, seeing how this girl's cherub face won't take no for an answer. Unlike me, Chloe has blond hair and blue eyes that enable her to blend in with the German population beyond our post's walls. Not to mention weasel her way into people's affections. For some reason, my corkscrew curls and tan skin do not have the same effect.

“You sure? You don't sound too enthusiastic about having company.”

“Yeah, I'm sure,” I say with a little more gusto. To be fair, Chloe is a nice person. It's not her fault I despise everything about this place. She isn't really someone I can picture myself being friends with, but at least she'll distract me from the questions crouched down in the back of my mind, waiting to launch their assault. No matter how hard I try, I can't shake the disturbing hunch that Lucas's book is a message.

But a message about
what
?

My phone vibrates in my pocket. I forgot to turn the ringer back on after school, so I've missed a lot of calls. Common sense assures me they're from Brent, though he rarely calls my cell phone since talking online is so much cheaper.

There it is again. That feeling. The gnawing sensation that things are about to get flipped upside down and turned inside out. My fingers chart the familiar territory of the touch screen as the pounding behind my temples smothers all sounds, including Chloe's inquiries into why I'm acting like an antisocial psycho. The calls are from my parents. There are texts, too. My father
never
sends texts. He's a total Luddite and doesn't believe in them.

“Gabi?” Chloe's shrill voice, like an echo racing down a subway tunnel, pulls me back to the solid earth. “You look like you're going to be sick.”

That's because the worst tragedies are the ones you anticipate in advance. When Fate is out for blood, she'll cut you to the bone and you'll know she's coming—the same way you know you've nicked your finger while chopping vegetables, because you can feel the sharp sting long before red starts welling up in the clean white slice.

I open Dad's text.

Chloe rests her hand on my trembling arm and looks down over my shoulder. “What does WIA mean again? I can't keep all the Army acronyms straight.”

“Wounded in Action.” I stare at the screen until it becomes a bright blue blur.

My legs buckle and I meet the pavement. There's no surge of adrenaline, no merciful detachment, just stabbing pain and a crimson smear as my knees kiss the white cement.

Chloe walks with me to the front gate of the U.S. Army Garrison Kaiserslautern, known to us Americans as K-Town. A petite woman in blue Air Force fatigues waits for us.

No, no, no.
A chaplaincy escort means Lucas is already dead, or he's dying.

“Gabriela Santiago? I'm Sergeant Doyle. I'll accompany you to the hospital. If you'll follow me?” The woman's red hair is secured in a bun so tight, it stretches the pale skin around her eyes. But with one sympathetic smile, her severity melts. Sergeant Doyle's freckled cheeks make her look like a little kid, yet the steely glint in her eyes assures me she's as tough as they come. She has to be. Her job is to tell people the worst possible news.

What's strange is that my dad is also a chaplain's assistant—the perfect job for him, since he's uber Catholic and probably thinks serving as the priest's bodyguard is a direct pass to skip through purgatory. Only this time, he isn't the one comforting the family members of a wounded soldier. He's the one being comforted.

I shake the woman's hand, unable to find words. All I can focus on is the raspberry burn above my right shin guard. The rest of my body is numb, but the raw, stinging flesh assures me this is real, no matter how fake my surroundings now seem.

“He's, he's going to make it, right?” I stutter as we climb into a black car with government plates.
Crap, Chloe.
In my daze, I forgot to thank her for waiting with me.

“Last I heard, Private Santiago is stable,” Sergeant Doyle replies. “But I'll let the doctors explain his . . . condition. Your brother is a hell of a fighter. That's for sure.”

Thank God. Lucas is still in the game. I want to press Doyle for details, but the woman's direct manner means she's told me everything she knows.

Time to get a grip.

Even if Lucas is badly injured, he's always lived by the “push through pain” philosophy our father instilled in us through extra soccer drills and summer hiking trips. If anyone can pull off a mind-over-matter maneuver, it's Lucas.

But if I'm so sure, then why won't my hands stop shaking?

“Food is probably the last thing on your mind, but help yourself if you're hungry.” Sergeant Doyle nods towards a gooey
käse
-brezel
in the car's cup holder, wrapped in an oily napkin.

Under any other circumstance, I would never turn down a German baked good, but my stomach can't handle a cheesy pretzel at a time like this. I focus on the airfield runway strip outside the window instead, where a C-17—the Pacific gray whale of military aircraft—takes off, likely on its way to pick up the next batch of wounded men. A train of Blue Bird buses marked with red crosses speeds across the tarmac, looking like toy Matchbox cars next to the enormous planes. It's crazy to think that Landstuhl Regional Medical Center—about twenty minutes from K-Town—is the first stop for injured soldiers coming back from the front lines. After all, it's not like Germany is in Iraq or Afghanistan's backyard.

How much agony did Lucas experience in the back of that dark, noisy cargo hold? Was it an IED or a bullet? Oh God, what if he lost a limb?

I roll down the window for some fresh air. Smells of hot asphalt, jet fuel, and damp canvas sail in with the cool breeze. I picture a much younger Lucas, running through the airplane hangar where soldiers and their families had gathered for a Thanksgiving feast. While the adults set up long tables among the metal beasts, Lucas and I played hide-and-seek in a maze of Huey helicopters.

This smells the same, minus the turkey. But the memory only makes things worse.

There's no time to cry. And as soon as we enter the hospital, I know I have no right to. Not when I'm walking around just fine. Not after seeing all the soldiers covered in bandages, the amputees limping through the halls on crutches, the grief-stricken faces of the spouses and children filling the waiting rooms.
These
are my neighbors, my extended family. Over fifty thousand U.S. citizens live in this American corner of the Rhine river valley, but I've never visited this hospital before. I've never had a reason to, never had to
see
where so many of the men and women missing from our post wound up.

I follow Sergeant Doyle to the security checkpoint and hand over my military ID card. Over the guard's shoulder, I see Mom in a waiting area dominated by a gigantic television airing an old rerun of
General Hospital
(seriously,
in
a hospital?). Only this woman looks nothing like my mom. My mother is charming and perfectly put together—the model military wife—but the woman sitting in that orange plastic chair has her shoulders hunched forward like she's carrying the weight of the world. Which makes sense, since Mom's kids
are
her world.

My father stands erect by her side, rubbing Mom's neck beneath her strawberry-blond ponytail. She looks up at me with the hazel gaze we share—the one fair feature all her kids inherited despite the dominance of Dad's Latino coloring. The afterglow of weeping makes her irises pop bright green. When Dad's eyes find mine, I see that his are also wet with tears.

My breath catches in my chest. I have never—and I mean
never
—seen my father cry. Not a single solitary tear. The thin stream sliding down his cheek slices into my heart as deeply as the image of Lucas lying bloodied on some foreign battlefield, far from home. And by “home” I mean
us
, his family.

People are the only home the Army issues.

“Gabi,” Dad croaks in a hoarse voice, hauling me into a hug more heartfelt than his signature back tap. “I'm glad you got here so quickly,
mija
.”

Mom's body shudders as I embrace her next. She doesn't speak. This is a woman who is never short on words, which is how I know that what happened to Lucas is bad. Change-your-life-forever bad.

I turn back to my father as he gently pulls my five-year-old brother (another of life's unplanned surprises) off of his leg. The poor kid has wrapped his entire body around Dad's army boot like it's a lone tree in the midst of a tsunami flood. Matteo stares at me with eyes as round as bottle caps. He idolizes his big brother, and I hate seeing his innocence obliterated by life's dirty little secret: In the real world, no one is dipped in the River Styx and made practically invincible like Achilles. In the real world, heroes can be stripped down to nothing, just like everyone else.

I turn from Matteo's confused little face and cut to the chase. “How bad is it?”

My parents exchange tense glances, but neither responds. A switch flips inside me, igniting enough fuel to power ten fighter jets back across the Black Sea. “How
is
he, Dad?”

Normally I would never speak to my father in this tone, and normally he would never take it. Paternal respect is a big deal in Latino culture, and an even bigger deal when that
padre
is a soldier who lives and breathes hierarchy. Too bad “normal” no longer exists and hierarchies no longer matter.

Dad's sigh tells me he's too sad to be angry, which makes me feel a million times worse. He grabs my hand and pulls me towards a small window on the door of what must be Lucas's room. Except that when I peer inside, I do not see my athletic, almost nineteen-year-old brother. I see a little boy, shrunken by bandages that make him seem more like a mummy than a soldier. His right leg—the rocket launcher that earned him the soccer scholarship to UT-Austin I
really
wish he'd taken—hangs in a sling. Behind all the wires and tubes, a small portion of his face is visible. It's purple and bruised, like an overripe eggplant.

I press a hand to my mouth, but the sob still escapes my throat. “What happened?”

My body goes to jelly. I reach for a concrete wall, but it feels like it's made of foam. The entire waiting area turns to stare at me. I don't care. I need answers, and my parents are treating me like a crystal bowl they must handle with care. Matteo starts crying, so I resist the urge to rant and rave. But once Mom quiets him, the full-on body ache turns to rage.

I will
kill
the person who did this. And I don't mean the insurgent; I mean Seth, the moron who got Lucas to enlist and go infantry in the first place.

“Come on,
mija
.” Dad takes my arm and pulls me away from the view of my brother's dim room, which already looks more like a tomb. “Let's go grab a
café con leche.
”