The Way Home

Unknown faces, unknown names, far from home on Christmas Day, protect us with unwavering vigilance so we can gather with our families around tables laden with holiday goodness and hearths warming us in the chill of winter.

This book is dedicated to them and to the families who miss them. And to the ones who return the same yet forever changed. You have my unending gratitude.

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

—S
IEGFRIED
S
ASSOON

Afghanistan, July

I
t wasn’t the memory he
would have chosen—not when he couldn’t even remember his own name—but he knew that he used to have nightmares about vampires. Hiding under his bed and in the dark closet. Swooping down on their Dracula wings, sinking their fangs into his neck, and sucking out his blood.

How ironic, then, that he’d become a vampire of sorts: a creature who lived in the night, hid from the light, and sucked sustenance as if it were blood from a young Afghan woman, who despised him but wouldn’t let him die. She brought him food, water, and medicine. And opiates that she liberally laced in all three.

He watched her now through a drug-induced haze, physically incapacitated and totally dependent on her. He knew that her name was Rabia and that she could ill afford the things she brought for him. He also knew that if he were caught while she harbored the escaped American soldier a horde of Taliban warlords were searching for, not only would he be tortured, interrogated, and finally executed, but so would she.

So he didn’t know why she continued to help him, but he had no option but to accept it. Just as he had no choice but to believe what she’d told him in heavily accented English about who he was . . . because he didn’t remember. He didn’t remember being an American soldier, or what had happened to him, or how he’d escaped from the Taliban and ended up here.

The panic and anguish that stalked him whenever the opiates wore off were as huge and dark as the cave where she hid him. So he gladly relinquished both to the apathy induced by the poppy. Apathy was painless. Apathy made it tolerable to know that weeks, maybe months, of his life were gone. His memories . . . gone.

Only the vampire dreams remained of who he’d been. And only the woman kept him alive.

He studied her now as she prepared his meal in the dim light of an oil lamp, in a silence that embodied their uneasy and unnatural bond, as shadows danced along the curved rock wall and dust swept into the cave on a wind that never quit blowing. He knew scattered words in Pashtu but didn’t know why he knew them. She had a passing command of English but rarely chose to use it. She was the only constant in a life that had been reduced to pain, fear, and the vertigo that crippled him even more than the opiates. And he didn’t know whether to thank her for keeping him alive or hate her as she hated him.

Moving his head slowly to avoid triggering another vertigo attack, he pulled the ragged blanket around him against the chill of the cave floor.

Because he was so weak, she had to feed him the lukewarm soup that kept him alive. He could never see her features beneath the burqa covering her face. He could only see those eyes, onyx black, winter cold, and void of any emotion but weary disdain.

It had been the same thing every day for twenty-three days. He’d used a small pebble to scratch a mark on the rock wall each day since he’d regained consciousness. She would appear wearing dark, baggy trousers beneath the black burqa that covered her from head to knees, hiding her body beneath yards of coarse cotton. The scent of the summer heat and the scorch of the sun that she brought with her were reminders that a world existed outside this cave. A world that wasn’t dank and dark and cold. A world that was hostile and foreign and where, she told him, he was not safe.

For twenty-three days, she had been the only soul he’d seen, and she had yet to look him directly in the eye. He wouldn’t recognize her if he saw her on the street. Not that he would ever leave here. If the pain and the vertigo didn’t keep him flat on his back, the ankle shackle that chained him to the rock wall would. And then there was the poppy. Who knew how deeply he’d been dragged down that rabbit hole?

Some days—the lucid ones, when he couldn’t fight the fear—he would lie here shivering and wish for death. When pain ripped through his head, when the crippling dizziness reduced him to lying rigidly still, hugging the rock floor in a desperate attempt to stop the nausea, that’s when despair crushed him. And he would beg her to let him die.

But always, she refused. She continued to risk everything to make certain he stayed alive, and he had no idea why.

He only knew that every time she appeared on quiet feet and condemning silence, he felt both shame and gratitude, because she hadn’t forgotten him . . . the way he’d forgotten everything but the need to leave this place that even God had forsaken and find his way back home.

If he only knew where home was.

Northern Minnesota, July

T
oday, of all days, Jess
Albert needed routine. Most days, she got it. Shop keeping wasn’t exactly a glamorous, exciting occupation. In fact, every day was pretty much a repeat of the day before and the day before that. Little mini Groundhog Days, stacked up like cordwood, one on top of the other.

“Until tomorrow, my little lotus blossom. Dream of me.” Boots England, one of her regulars, wiggled his busy white brows and blew her a kiss.

Jess grinned as he tucked his newspaper under his arm and limped on his recently replaced knee toward the front door of the Crossroads General Store.

“One of these days, Marcia’s going to show up with a shovel and bash one of us over the head, if you keep flirting with me like that.”

“Ah, but what’s life without a little danger?” He let himself outside on a hot rush of July air to drive back to his lakeside cabin for his afternoon nap and his wife of almost fifty years.

The bell above the front door dinged softly behind the irrepressible old flirt, sounding the same as it had since Jess’s father had first set up shop almost fifty years ago. She loved the sound of that bell. It was comforting and comfortable, the bedrock of her childhood, as ingrained in her psyche as the scent of sunscreen, bug spray, and the cherry nut ice cream she’d already scooped gallons of this summer.

She’d spent her youth playing on this scarred pine floor, then working behind the counter when she got older. And after burning out as an ER trauma nurse, she’d taken over the store when her parents had retired to Arizona three years ago. So, yeah, she loved the sound of that old bell. Especially because every time it rang, it meant business, which was good, because her quarterly taxes were due soon and, as always, she was a little short on cash.

Today, she also loved it because it meant she had another customer to help keep her mind off the fact that this particular day would be tough to get through. She glanced at the framed eight-by-ten photo of her and J.R. on the wall behind the cash register. Suntanned and smiling, their whole lives ahead of them . . . And then it wasn’t. At least, not for J.R.

He would have been thirty-five today. If he’d been home and not deployed, she would have baked him a cake, and some of his buddies on the post would have stopped by for a few beers.

But the last birthday J.R. celebrated had been thousands of miles from home. He’d been thirty-two. Eight months later, he was dead.

“Too late to add these to the bill?”

She looked up at the young father making some final purchases before he and his son headed out for a week of camping
and fishing. He’d added a map and two black ball caps with “Lake Kabetogama” embroidered in red across the bills to their stack of supplies.

“Not a problem.” She gave him a bright smile and harnessed her attention to the business at hand. “Anything else?”

The Crossroads General Store was a north woods version of a Walmart, on a much smaller and less state-of-the-art scale. The store had been supplying goods to locals and travelers alike for more than eighty years. You needed boots? Whiskey? Bait? Groceries? DVD rentals? Anything you could think of, the Crossroads provided.

“Yeah, throw in half a dozen C batteries, and we’ll call it good. Right, son?”

The boy looked to be around ten, with flashing brown eyes and buzz-cut blond hair. He was the image of his father and clearly antsy to start their grand “just guys” adventure.

“Do you think we’ll see a bear?” Equal measures of hope and trepidation filled the boy’s question.

“It’s a good possibility,” Jess said, feeding his excitement. “At the last DNR count, more than a hundred and fifty black bears called this part of Voyageurs National Park home. Where are you camping?”