What They Found (21 page)

He grabbed Marian’s collar and pulled her toward the door with one hand, waving the M-16 with the other as he made his way backward out of the door into the sunlight.

“Stay down!” There was another soldier at his side. The Humvee had pulled up near the building and was hitting it with some heavy fire.

Curtis half-pushed, half-lifted Marian’s still form toward the Humvee and she was pulled in. He jumped on, and a
moment later the vehicle lurched forward and was speeding down the road.

Someone had taken Marian’s helmet off and was pouring water on her face. At first she was still, then gasping for air.

“Call for Medivac! She’s wounded!”

“Where are we?”

“Thirty-five clicks—I don’t know—let them find us!”

“Mason! Good looking out, man. I didn’t know she was missing! I didn’t catch it!”

By the time the Medivac chopper located them they were only a mile from the base and they had decided that Marian’s wound—she had been shot through her boot in the back of her leg—was more painful than serious. They drove her the rest of the way into the base.

It was late the next day before he went to the medical ward to see her. It had been twenty-four hours of reliving the events. Feeling the panic all over again, seeing the face of the person he had shot, undoubtedly killed, when he had burst into the building. He had thought of what he would say to Marian or, more clearly, what she would say to him. Would she tell him that she had run into the building? That they were protecting her there?

“Hi, how you doing?” she asked when he stopped near her bunk.

“I’m okay,” he said. “How are you doing?”

She moved the cover off her leg. It was bandaged from
the knee halfway toward the ankle. “What do they say? The best wounds are the ones you live to talk about?”

“Something like that.”

“Thanks for getting me out—they told me everything.” She was crying.

“You really all right?”

“Sit down,” she said.

Curtis sat down on the bed, watching Marian wince as she moved her leg to give him room. She took his hand and began to kiss it, to rub it against her cheek, even to wipe the tears away from her eyes.

“I don’t know exactly what happened back there,” he said.

“War happened,” she said. “But we’re not fighting now.”

He leaned over and kissed her forehead, and then her lips. He felt her arms around his neck and felt her clinging to him. There were the tears, and the holding, and the feeling that he would never be strong enough to escape her arms, never strong enough to keep his heart away from her.

Later, he knew, there might come a time to talk about what had happened. They might talk, one day, of what the locals had been thinking, or even whoever it was who had fired at them. There might never be a complete understanding of what they had shared in those frantic moments, or what they had given up of themselves. Or what they had found.