True North (21 page)

I felt his hands pull my face out from its hiding place. He was so weak I could’ve fought him off easy.

“
Look at me, baby.”

I brought my bloodshot eyes to his. “If you had died, it would’ve killed me.”

“
I’m so sorry. It won’t ever happen again. I’ll get help. I’ll stop the pills. They were prescribed, but haven’t worked in a long time unless I take them with a couple drinks. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Liv, and I didn’t mean to hurt myself. I’d miss you too goddamn much.” He searched my face. “Please tell me that you still love me.”

“
Jake North, I’ll love you ‘till the day I die.”

He sobbed quietly. “Are you going to leave me?”

“
I’ll never leave you—never.” I stroked his jaw and collected the tears that were trapped within his scruff into my hand. “I found the files. The doctor asked me to look for them. He said he contacted the base—”

“
Don’t … say any more, please. Does my family know?”

“
Only Jules, and she’s keeping it to herself.”

He nodded and looked away from me.

I pulled his gaze back to mine. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“
I have everything to be ashamed of. The only thing I ever did right in my life was loving you. And I very nearly fucked that up too. My family and friends, they all look at me like I’m some kind of veteran hero, but I’m not even officially considered a vet at all by the military or the Veteran’s Association. You look at me that same way, Liv … how can this not affect what you think of me?”

“
I don’t love you because of what you did or didn’t do. I’ve loved you since I was seven years old. And one thing I do know, Jake North, is that you’re the most honorable man I’ve ever known … and everything that happened in the last three years does not define you. It may acutely affect you, it might guide your actions and cloud your future, but I vow to you that it doesn’t have to be that way forever, and that together we’ll get through it until it’s a memory in the past that we can deal with the right way. But you have to let me in, no more secrets or half-truths.”

“
I promise, Livie, I swear it.”

I smiled to reassure him, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the nurse staring in at us. “The nurse is going to make me leave soon.”

“
No, I don’t want you to go. I could talk her into letting you stay.”

“
Of course you could, Prince Charming, but you need to get rest and heal. We have our whole lives ahead of us. I’ll come back in the morning and I’ll bring a great book and Chinese Checkers. Maybe I’ll actually beat you for once.”

“
Doubt it.” A real smile hinted at the corner of his lips.

“
Yeah, me too.”

His tone got serious again. “You can go through all the papers, but only with Jules. I can’t deal with the rest of my family knowing everything yet. But, Livie, there’s a lot of ugly shit in there,” he warned.

“
I can handle ugly shit,” I assured him. “I can’t handle losing you.”

“
You’ll never lose me, baby.”

The nurse poked her head in the door. “Sorry, guys, time’s up.”

Chapter 18

“
Rooster”

Alice in Chains

When everything you think about the world and the people in it spins out of control, you have a couple of choices: run away with your tail tucked between your legs or hang the fuck on.

I chose the latter.

I wasn’t really accustomed to fighting. Good grades came easy to me, so did my relationship with my best friend. My mom ran and never even bothered looking back and my dad had perfected escapism as an art form. I wasn’t going to follow in that DNA path.

Jake was easy to fight for because I knew who he was and what he was before all this shit went down. What wasn’t easy, what was hard as hell, was fighting invisible demons that had wedged themselves so far into him that I knew they would never be truly gone. But maybe if we played it right, they could be quieted.

“
Liv, you should be in school.” Jake set a coffee cup in front of me.

I had skipped my run this morning; we were having one of North Dakota’s famous early blizzards. And honestly we were taking it easy. I was wrapped in a blue throw, curled on the couch in what was now officially our apartment.

“
I am in school. I just dropped down to part-time. It’s really no big deal; I can make up the courses during the summer if I want to,” I explained.

Jake nodded, but I knew he was blaming himself for his perceived demise of my education.

He’d been home for a week now since the incident. The hospital had released him once he was out of harm’s way. After a full psych evaluation they deemed him not suicidal, but said that he was suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They referred him to the local Veteran’s Association and a local, retired-military psychiatrist. The doctor said it was mandatory to see him as a stipulation for his release instead of being admitted into the psychiatric ward.

Jake set a lingering kiss on my forehead. “I put a shot of Hershey’s syrup in it for you.”

I smiled.
Good man, bringing me chocolate and coffee.

He sat on the other side of the couch, facing me. He was holding the folders. I just stared down at them.

Was he ready?
Really ready?
I was so terrified that if he went back into it, into the memories and the land of ghosts so real they could steal your sanity, I would never get him back.

“
You deserve answers, Livie. And maybe now I want to tell someone. You’re the only one I’d trust enough. Just know the sequence of events might get choppy,” he warned.

“
I’ve got years, go at your own pace,” I assured him.

Part of me wanted to know everything—every horrible, terrifying detail. I wanted to see what he saw and what lingered there in his mind because I felt like maybe—maybe—if I could
see
it, I could grab hold of it and yank it out so it couldn’t hurt him anymore. The other part of me was scared shitless.

He put the folders in between us and sipped at his coffee. “There are things I feel like I should tell you, but at the same time I want desperately to protect you from it all. But obviously
that
hasn’t worked out real well.” He paused and I waited. “I’m just going to start throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks.” He closed his eyes and began in a quiet voice. “The first couple weeks in Afghanistan my unit acclimated to the climate and was fully briefed about what the real state of affairs was. You only get a portion of the reality from news sources. Very soon you learn your survival and the survival of others depends on you staying hyper-aware twenty four/seven, and you never come down from it. Not even when you try to sleep. It becomes a part of you, infused into your soul and bones. You exist in a perpetual state of hyper-vigilance.” He blew out a breath and ran his fingers over his scalp. His hair was starting to grow out and there was a good inch of chestnut brown. “So the stress never stops, there are no breaks in it. And
if
that off-guard, relaxed sensation comes into your consciousness it’s nothing but a death threat and you fight it.”

He dumped the photos over my blanket and picked one up, a twinge of pain crossing his features. “I haven’t looked at these since I’ve come home. This was Thompson. He wasn’t much older than you. In our first fire fight he was shot by insurgents with an automatic rifle. He went down and none of us could get to him until we got the shooters”—his eyes lifted to mine for a heartbeat then went back to the picture—“under control. The bullets severed Thompson’s femoral artery. His blood jetted out through his leg like a fucking fountain. We tried to apply a tourniquet, but we were too late. I can still see it and hear it. His blood pooled all around him, seeping into the filth while he screamed for his mom.” He got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment and I could tell he was struggling.

I wondered if I should try to stop him, to tell him we could do this another day, but then his look changed to one of determination. He wanted this. He needed this.

“
Our commander loved Thompson. He was like a kid to him, and for weeks he acted like he wasn’t even affected.” He shook his head. “I’ll come back to that.”

Jake lifted another picture and set it in my fingers, which had started to tremble. The guy in the photo was burly and would have looked seriously dangerous with all his gear and weaponry on, but he wore a smile that lit his face because it was so full of life, much like Jake. It was the kind of smile that when others saw it, they’d smile too. I felt my own face want to lift.

“
This
was
Smith.”

The way he said, “was” made a chill run down my spine.

“
Smith was blown to fucking shreds ‘cause he stepped closer to give a little Afghan girl a toy.” His calm commentary cracked. “A fucking, goddamn toy. The girl was probably seven years old and she was so poor, her clothes were rags. He was trying to do something good.” Jake released a shuddering breath. “He was there one second making a fucking joke about a whore and a priest … but when he saw her he shut his mouth.” Jake’s eyes stayed on the back of the photo as if he could see through it. “Sometimes we carried candy and shit to give out. Smith pulled his stash out of his cargo pocket and stepped to the side, reaching the gift out to her. The toe of his boot hit an IED—it means Improvised Explosive Device. He fucking splattered everywhere. Spraying us with his blood, bone, and flesh.”

Oh, Jake!

“
Then we had to collect his pieces. Commander started retelling the joke Smith never finished.”

I blinked the tears from my own vision and watched as Jake wiped his own over his arm. “Four days later our commander shot himself in the head. He left a note apologizing to the families of the men he’d promised to protect but lost under his watch.”

“
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” The words were so inadequate … I put my hand on his leg and tried to toughen up and be strong for him but I was spiraling into failure.

“
These IED’s are all over the place,” he continued as he snuffed back his running nose.

I got up and grabbed a box of Kleenex while he kept talking.

“
They’re hidden under the ground to blow up vehicles or people—and they don’t give a fuck if they’re taking out soldiers or civilians. Actually insurgents strap the fuckers to themselves, walk into a busy market and blow the place and everyone in it to hell.

“
This twenty year old I met from a small town in Ohio—his name was, fittingly, Kidd—he was a combat engineer working route clearance … searching for roadside bombs to get rid of them. That job sucks. At first Kidd was like, it was the coolest fucking sensation ever—he said it felt like you were in a movie and you’d get high from it—literally. The ground underneath would crack apart and explode as if a Transformer monster was bursting from the ground to swallow your ass. He’d come back hopped up on adrenaline and never came down from it. They call it the most dangerous job in the Army. A lot of route clearance guys don’t make it home. So he started having night terrors and after a while couldn’t sleep at all. Someone hooked him up with junk—”

“
Junk?” I asked softly.

“
Yeah, shit drugs. Kidd had PTSD bad and his commander told him he was full of shit, to pull it together. He was sent home on leave and tried a bunch of times to kill himself while he was high. The Army was supposed to have his back, but they railroaded him out for misconduct. He gave some of the best years of his life to them, and they fucked him hard. He’d been in for over two years without so much as a blemish on his record. The bastard psych doc said the kid didn’t have anything wrong with him, no PTSD, only a drug problem.”

I let my eyes drift to the window and watched the snow swirl outside.

Why do humans fight? You’d think we would have learned something by now. Discovered some other way to fix our differences rather than sending our parents and children into war.

“
I need a drink, Liv. Just to take off the edge.” It was as if he were asking for permission. It would be the first drink he’d had since he got out of the hospital.

“
I’ll get it for you.” I was long finished with my coffee and, truth be told, I could have gone for a beer too. I grabbed two Heinekens.

When he reached for the beer his hands were shaking badly, so I opened it for him.

I was surprised when he kept talking. “Then there’s the guilt—guilt that your buddy died and you didn’t. What the fuck kind of fair is that? Then you feel guilty because you’re happy you didn’t die. And you watch the sunset come up over the desert and wonder if you’ll ever make it home to the girl you love, and you’re scared to death you might be next. You’re fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t. And there was no time to get the fuck over it before the next mission, the next hell, began.

“
After a while, I couldn’t go to sleep sober. Even when I could crush it while I was awake with diversions, it all came back in my dreams. Drinking was the only thing that quelled the freakin’ paranoia. I won’t forget, I can never forget, but at least when I drank heavy the screaming wasn’t so close, and the film reel in my head wasn’t so vivid. But my entire personality altered, I was angry all the time. I started provoking fights with loud-mouth shitheads I’d never liked. It felt good to hit, as if I was getting it out of me somehow. At the same time I wanted to be hit. I felt like I deserved it. It alleviated some of the constant, gut-fucking-ripping guilt.” He let out a shaky sigh, and I could see that guilt on his face now.

I wanted to wipe it all away, to remind him that surviving was a gift, not a curse, but I knew that wasn’t what he needed right now. He knew it anyway. But right now he needed to remember. To explain it all.