The Alliance (19 page)

I divert my gaze from Moses’s. Then I release my fingers, letting the strands of my hair fall where they will. I begin to laugh as they cavort around me, and I feel such a mixture of sadness and relief, I know I’ve needed to let go of my death grip on life for quite some time.

“You a good swimmer?” Moses asks.

Rather than give him a response, I stretch out my crossed arms and dive under, sliding through the water with ease.
I don’t rise to the surface, but allow the surface to close over me—swimming with my hair streaking out behind until I can hear the pounding falls above. I allow myself to come up inside the pocket of turbulence, effervescent with bubbles created as the cascade plunges into the pool. Moses swims over and continues treading the current, inches away. I can almost feel the warmth of him radiating through the water. His feet touch mine.

“How come you came into my life at the moment our world fell apart?” My words are distorted by my body’s trembling.

“Maybe I came to show you there’s more to this world than your community.”

“Maybe you came here to lead me astray.”

At this, Moses’s playful smile evaporates. He tucks a wet hank of hair away from my face. “Or maybe,” he murmurs, ‘the God of your fathers hath sent me unto you.’”

I jerk back, alarmed by the intimacy of his hand touching my cheek, of his bare feet touching mine. I don’t know if these gestures—these quoted words—are confirmation of my theory or denial. Either way, they are more intimate than the first kiss that I have imagined all my life and yet, at nineteen years old, have never actually known. The twilight magic turns to mist, and the preternatural warmth insulating my body grows cold. I stare at Moses, memorizing his water-colored eyes, before allowing my cape dress to pull me
back down into the current, until the carefree woman I have allowed to come to the surface also disappears.

Moses

Leora’s breathing quickens as she leads me up the side of the mountain to the neglected fire tower. Most of the wooden steps are rotted and needed replaced years ago. I take care to place my weight toward the edge of each step and not in the middle, keeping a firm hold on the metal railing that follows the steps as they switchback toward the top. Although Leora is taking the same precautions as I, the height and safety of the tower does not seem to bother her, so I am not about to let her know how much it bothers me.

By the time we reach the tower’s pinnacle, we are both out of breath. The sun has made its way over the distant skyline, filling the valleys and fields below with its welcomed light and warmth. We stop and stand at the very last row of steps, just below the small—maybe 8’×8’—boxlike structure that is perched on the very top. It is a sight to behold. The black asphalt road is clearly the main highway coming from the north. Wisps of smoke periodically dot the grass alongside it, which I am guessing are campfires built by the refugees—the smoke rising a hundred feet or so, and then going in horizontal lines, streaking across the valleys below us.

“How far is it out there?” I ask, pointing to the highway disappearing around a bend and then reappearing up ahead as an even thinner black line.

“Not sure,” Leora replies. “Probably farther than it looks.”

A wooden trapdoor is at the top of the steps above us. I lean around Leora to jiggle the padlock, making sure not to brush against her. I can see her start shivering as the wind picks up. Her cape dress looks mostly dry by now, but her hair—more than likely never cut—tapers to a steady drip down her lower back.

“You warming up?” I ask.

Leora nods, her mouth sealed like that padlocked door. Having nothing to offer her but my shirt, which I know she wouldn’t take, I turn and peek through the door’s cracks. I see a small desk, a folding chair, a potbelly stove with a pile of logs beside it. I guess this is where rangers once sat for hours on end, scouting the forest for signs of smoke.

Taking the pack off my shoulders, I set it in front of me, open the top zipper, and dig for the spotting scope that I swiped from Charlie. I use the clamp on the bottom of the scope to secure it to the metal framework of the tower. Leaning down, I peer through the lens, which makes the highway’s yellow lines miles away seem close enough to touch. I study the area, but there’s not a whole lot to see other than the expected abandoned vehicles and junk that
was also scattered along the road by travelers. I can easily make out random small groups of people, but most of these seem to be camped. I direct the spotting scope to the farthest point, where the highway goes out of sight, and try to bring it into focus. Finally, getting it just right, I sweep the area again.

“Wow.” I glance at Leora standing beside me, squinting against the light, her glasses back in place, along with that endless storehouse of her reserve. “You wanna look?” I ask. She nods, and I step back, giving her room to kneel in front of the scope. “Can you see that?”

“See what?”

Reaching over, I adjust the scope for her, trying to align it with the group that I saw in the distance.

“Wait,” she says. “I see them.” She studies the people for what seems like minutes before looking up at me, concern etched across her features. “Do you think they’re more refugees on the move, or that they’re the gang my—my
vadder
was talking about?”

I bring my own eye back to the scope. “Hard to tell,” I say. “One thing’s for sure, though: there’s a large group coming this way.”

“Even if that’s not a gang, it’s only a matter of time until one
does
come. And we wouldn’t stand much of a chance, would we?” Leora’s voice shakes.

Unable to give her an honest answer, I reach out and
put my arm around her narrow shoulders, feeling the goose bumps rise on her flesh. My breath is warm against her damp hair. Leora raises her head, and I see a level of fear in her eyes that was not there before.

“Sometimes . . . sometimes I feel I’m living in a dream. Or a nightmare. No matter what I do,” she whispers, “no matter how hard I try, everything still keeps falling apart.”

“Maybe it’s not your job to keep it together.”

“You keep saying that. But if I don’t, who will?”

“Why don’t you trust God to do it for you?”

“Because I have a hard time trusting anyone. Even him.”

That day we met, Leora spoke with such conviction about her faith, I believed it wasn’t like everyone else’s: a talisman clutched to ward off inconvenience or pain. I assumed her faith was
real
and have since used it as a template by which I can look back and judge the journey of my own. Now I know she struggles the same as I do, the same as everyone does. The reality is harsh, reminding me of the time I went into the garage to find my father sobbing.

I recall how he lifted his gaze and saw me standing there, the keys to my Ford Ranger dangling from my hand. I was sixteen years old and so eager for an excuse to drive that I was going to travel fifteen miles to the grocery store to buy my mom half-and-half for her morning coffee. My father’s face was so twisted with sorrow, so red with embarrassment, I stepped back into the laundry room—knocking over the
cat’s water bowl—and pulled the door between us, relieved to block that image of him staring at the picture of our family, tacked to the corkboard with a finishing nail, from my mind. But he showed up for supper that night, more cheerful than he’d been since he came home. He never explained to me why he’d been crying, and I never asked. Two months later, after he left, Aaron and I learned about our father’s illegitimate son.

I didn’t want to hear it, to accept that my war-hero father was fallible, human; and now I know that Leora is human as well. Am I drawn to her because she fulfills my idea of perfection, or am I drawn to her
despite
the reality that she is as human as I?

“Is it because you don’t trust God?” I ask. “Or because you don’t trust yourself?”

Leora frowns. “Neither . . . both. I don’t know, Moses. I let someone down. I let someone get hurt. I promised myself I would never let her get hurt again.”

Then, so slowly I almost believe I’m imagining it, Leora turns and rests her head against me. I don’t look at her, in case that would make her feel self-conscious and pull away, but reach out and trace a set of initials and dates gouged in the fire tower:
DT loves JH 4-ever, 11/21/12
. Looking at those initials, I wonder if any of us left on this planet have time to leave such a meaningless mark behind. But unlike the wise Solomon once declared, nothing is meaningless. I bet even
he
would have started to see the meaning of life if he could see the end of time.

I tell her, “You asked me once if I knew about revenge. Well, Leora, I know far more about guilt. I wake up with it. Go to sleep with it.”

She says against my chest, “What happened?”

“My brother died. In the war.”

“It can’t have been your fault. Why do you feel guilty?”

It sounds like such a simple question, but I’m not sure I can explain it. “We were in Afghanistan. There was this kid . . .” I remember the boy’s blameless guise, which lured us to him, giving way to anger as he yelled in Pashto and opened his hand, revealing wires and a trigger mechanism.

“He was all wired up, so we knew he had a bomb strapped to his body under his jacket. My brother had no choice but to shoot the kid before he could detonate the bomb. But it went off anyway. My men—and my brother—were all killed.”

“I’m so sorry,” Leora says. “But I don’t see why you think it’s your fault.”

“It’s my fault because
I
should have been the one to pull the trigger. I had a better angle, and I probably could have disarmed him without setting off the bomb. All those men died because I couldn’t do my duty.”

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to shoot a little boy, even if he was trying to kill you.”

“It wasn’t that,” I say, wishing my motives were as much like hers as she would like to believe. “Somehow, in that instant, I imagined my father’s Afghan son. He would have been about that age. I wanted to save him from himself. But all I did was kill everyone there, while I was forced to watch it all in what seemed like—and seems like—slow motion.”

Honorable discharge for what amounts to killing my flesh and blood: there has never been such a contradiction of terms.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Leora stubbornly insists.

“Maybe it wasn’t and maybe it was. Either way, I know my brother wouldn’t want me wasting my life feeling guilty, wishing he was here instead.”

Without disturbing Leora, I reach into my pocket for my knife. I flip the blade open and carve her initials into the tower, then my own. “What’s the date?” I ask.

“August 27,” she says. I scratch a circle around our two names, not a heart and certainly no mention of love. But I can feel a shift taking place on that tower as I stare at our initials,
LE
and
MH
. I know Leora feels it too. Have I been brought here to save her and myself from the bondage of our culpability, as we struggle to understand the one who is without fault?

As in anything taking place right now, only time will tell the future. But I can’t resist wrapping my arms around Leora—anchoring her physical form against me—before
the two of us descend the fire tower to, once again, stand on the unsteady touchstone of the earth.

Leora

The two of us are in midstride when Moses reaches out and seizes my hand. I follow the direction of his eyes and see the community’s nondescript headstones shielded inside the fence. But I can tell these are not what has captured his attention.

“Come over here,” he says, the words more mouthed than spoken. I move closer to him, and he jumps in place. “Hear that?”

I do. There is a hollowness beneath our feet incompatible with the rest of the surroundings. Having asked a rhetorical question, he does not wait for my answer. Just kneels and begins scraping away the soil. Soon, I can see blond plywood patches showing through the thin potpourri of pine needles and leaves.

I kneel beside him, and together we push up the board, which is heavier than it appears. Moses shoves it back, and the board collapses, spraying dirt. Someone has chipped a crude cellar out of the earth that’s about three feet deep and four feet wide. Inside it, a grocery sack is filled with cans of corn, carrots, and beans, each bearing the orange price stickers from Field to Table. Beside the grocery sack, packets
of powdered milk and dehydrated eggs, along with sealed clear bags of what appears to be loose flour, are stored in two snap-lid plastic containers.

“Recognize anything?” Moses says, his tone rife with sarcasm.

I cannot reply. I am struck dumb by shock. Our supplies have been dwindling fast enough through normal use, and now to think someone has been stealing our rations. My mind’s eye scrolls through the faces of the community, trying to recall a cunning expression that would make the Judas obvious: the person outwardly agreeing to the community’s edict while inwardly making other plans; maybe the same heartless person who attacked my sister and left her to wander alone in the field.

“Who would do this?” I hiss. “Charlie? Sean?”

“Don’t know about Sean. But Charlie would know better than to store food like this. Those containers aren’t watertight. All of it—” Moses gestures in frustration—“would be ruined in no time.”

“They had to have access to Field to Table.”

“Which eliminates no one in the community.”

We look at each other, each of us drawing our own conclusions, and none of them are good. I am thinking of the
Englischers
as our main suspects. Moses, no doubt, is thinking of my own people as well as his.

“Let’s go,” he sighs, putting the board back in place and
scraping the leaves and dirt over it. “We don’t want anybody seeing we’ve been here.”

“We can’t just leave everything. That food could feed a family for a week!”

Moses pivots, jabbing a finger toward the camouflaged cellar. “We have to find the culprit, Leora. Whoever’s done this is going to come back. It’s only a matter of time.”

“How do I know
you
won’t just come back?” I say, only half kidding, for I’m once again trying to deflect my attraction. To protect myself, and him.