Out (33 page)

Carmen, who
hasn’t let go of me, nods, smiling through the tracks of tears and smoke on her
face.

“Well, God
bless.” She cups my chin in her hand and kisses my cheek, hugs Carmen, and then
runs back, gun raised, into the fighting.

Carmen takes my
face in her hands, kisses me hard on the mouth with dry, cracked lips, then
lays her head on my shoulder, sobbing soundlessly. “I didn’t think I would see
you again,” she whispers in my ear.

“You told me to
have faith,” I remind her.

“I know.” She
cups my head in her hands and I fall into her blue eyes. “I love you.”

I wrap my arms
around her as best I can, and try to pretend that none of this has ever
happened. The gunshot doesn’t even hurt; it’s kind of just a numb, cold feeling
that makes my head fuzzy. “I love you too.”

I don’t know
how long the fighting goes on; we just stay in our bubble of happiness and at
that moment, I wouldn’t have cared if we’d been blown to bits as long as we
were together. But I feel Carmen move, look up as if she’s sensed something,
and her eyes get wide like it’s Christmas or the end of the world.

“What is it?” I
try to turn to see, but I can’t.

“The cavalry.”
Tears stream down her face, pooling at the edges of a smile full of hope.

Sirens come
from beyond the woods, and I hear the crunch of heavy tires on gravel. “Turn me
around!”

“I shouldn’t
move you—”
 
she starts to say. I grab at
her jumpsuit, her arms, try to pull myself toward whatever this great thing is.
I manage to turn my head, and I’m shocked.

Six black
armored trucks in a caravan, Canadian military transports, a tank (a tank!),
all squealing into the compound. People in Kevlar pour out of the transports
like ebony ants, and stream toward the fighting, assault rifles drawn.
Everything stops. The soldiers from the camp stop, put their hands up, drop
their weapons. Maybe they didn’t want to be doing what they were doing any more
than I wanted to be there. Or maybe they know they’re outnumbered. It’s all
over so quickly that it never even seems to begin.

“Look,” Carmen
says softly. Following the Canadian military caravan, which is now focused on
storming the complex, rounding up the compound guards and helping the wounded,
there’s this huge out-of-place Cadillac Escalade.

It jerks to a
stop and Warren and Jana jump out. Carmen yells and waves them over.

“Chris!” Warren
yells as he trundles over the gravel toward me as fast as his legs will carry
him. Jana beats him, and when she gets to me, there are tears in her eyes too.

“We came to
bring you home,” she says, burying her blond hair in my shoulder.

“He’s been
shot,” Carmen says in a tiny voice.

Warren kneels
next to me, cups my face in his hand, strokes my shaved head. “I am so sorry.”
His voice cracks. “I hope you can forgive me.”

“You didn’t do
anything—” I say, my tongue feeling thick.

“You’re right.
I didn’t do anything.” He wraps me in his arms, hugs me so hard I nearly lose
my breath. “I should’ve done a lot of things…but that’s past. I’m here now.” He
motions to Carmen. “Come here.”
 
She
timidly finds her place encircled in his other arm.

“I…I can’t
walk,” I finally say.

“We’re here,
you don’t need to walk. Jana? Go find a paramedic.”
 
My sister nods and bolts out toward the
emergency vehicles congregating on the lawn.

“You got the
video?”

Warren nods
sadly. “I did. When people saw it, things exploded. Apparently, it was all the
Resistance needed to gain final support; the Canadians stormed the borders a
few days after it went live.”

Suddenly
everything feels kind of wrapped in cotton, soft, warm, fuzzy. I just want to
close my eyes and sleep, that’s all.

“I think he’s
going into shock,” I hear Warren say. The light dwindles down to a single
narrow tunnel surrounded by silver stars, and at the end, Carmen’s face,
worried, smiling, mouthing the words ‘I love you.’

Eight months later

I’m on a back
porch, on a white wooden swing.
 
The
garden overflows with blue lobelia, white impatiens, violets. As I drift, the
scents of the flowers swirl around me. Warm air is filled with the humming of
insects, an occasional bird, the rolling wash of the river rushing at the edge
of the yard.

Carmen steps
onto the porch with two glasses of tea. She hands me one, slick with
condensation, and sits next to me. She moves the swing, slowly, slowly.

“How’re you
feeling today?” she asks finally.

“Better.” I sip
the tea.

 
“Therapy in half an hour.” She brakes the
swing with one foot. “Jana said you’re making good progress. You won’t even
need the wheelchair in a month, she says.”

“Hmm.” I blink,
staring into the watered silk sunshine of the late Canadian afternoon.

 
“Chris,” she says, hesitating. I know what
she’s going to say. “You need to talk about it.”

“I don’t want
to talk about it.”

“You have to.
Otherwise, it just stays in here, trapped.” She taps my skull, but I grab her
wrist and pull it to my lips, kiss it delicately at the thinnest part of the
skin where blue-violet veins trace tiny rivers.

“It can stay
there, then.” She doesn’t understand. I don’t want to dissect what happened, or
take those memories out of the box they’re in. I visit them in my nightmares
often enough. What happened is always there between us, in the way we move so
cautiously, in our haunted eyes, in the way we need open spaces and locks upon
locks on our doors.

She sighs and
allows the swing to move again, up, back, up back. “The vote is today. I
suppose you remember that?”

I nod and sip
my tea.

“Aren’t you
excited?” Her eyes are shining, so I can’t help but smile. “Wish we could vote.”

“Too late to go
back.” The truth is, I don’t want to have anything to do with American
politics. When we moved here, I decided I’d start over, and that meant cutting
ties to everything south, except Warren and Jana. Carmen doesn’t understand
that. “And it doesn’t matter anyway.”

 
“Doesn’t matter? It’s amazing. It’s been less
than a year since we’ve been gone, and look what’s happened!” She grabs my
hand, her eyes shining. “This is because of what you did, because of what
we
did.”

I know she’s
right, but it doesn’t feel like much of a cause for celebration. “So they
finally realized that torturing people because of who they love is bad. But do
you think that’s going to change how they think? You think a law will stop all
of that? Maybe they won’t be actively rounding us up and herding us into secret
camps, but is it really changing how people feel about things?”

When Warren got
the footage on CNN, that was the end. Canadians rolled in to force the Church
to stop, and the allies in the House supported the movement – there’s a whole
revolution going on now. The government doesn’t want to appear to be advocating
torture, even for such a ‘worthy’ cause.

“What they
really had was an image problem, not an attack of conscience. And so many
people dead. Abraham, Noah, Magnus. McFarland.”

“He deserved
it,” she begins.

“Nobody
deserves it.” I don’t want to talk about it, so I bury my commentary in more
iced tea. Unbidden, the image of Ashburn’s bloody face floats in my mind’s eye.
Did he deserve it? I wish I could say no, but that would be a lie. One of the
biggest agonies of my life is that I killed him, and never felt remorse about
it.

 
I’m just like them.

She sighs, puts
her arm around me, and we watch the river for a few minutes. Then she pulls an
envelope from her back pocket. “You got a letter.”

I take it from
her wordlessly. Return address:
Elizondo
State
Prison. “Who do we know in prison?”

“You know it’s
from him.” She eases up from the swing and stretches. “I’m going to get ready.
After therapy, I was thinking we could go down to the Pub to watch the voting
results. It’d be good to be around other people for a change.”

I don’t answer,
just stare at the letter.

“Okay, then.
See you inside,” she says, overly cheerful. The screen door slaps against the
wood frame and I’m left with the letter and the sound of rushing water.

He’s written
three times before. I’ve never opened them.

But today, I
do.

It’s full of
apologies. It’s full of pleading, and explanations, and how he tried to do the
right thing, how he tried to be a good father. It’s full of declarations of
love. I tuck it into my shirt pocket, grab my braces, strap my legs into them.
I painfully drag my body down to the edge of the water, just at the furthest
end of the salt-and-pepper granite boulders jutting over the whitewater foam. I
plant the braces so I can lean on them.

I tear the
letter into snowy bits, let them fly into the rapids and flow on home, south,
where they belong.

Maybe we will
go to the Pub.

THE END

OUT would never
have been born without a lot of support.

Thanks to
Natalie Fischer Lakosil and the Bradford Literary Agency for believing in this
book.

Thanks to all
my
Kickstarter
supporters:
 
Cameron A.
Allander
,
Kim Austin, Laura Brewster, Dave Burgess, JR Busby, Jo Hollingsworth, Jasmine
Starr
Stedt
, Shaun L. Davis (my most meticulous
reader),
Anneke
Doty, Mary Evans, Jennifer Green,
Connie Henry, Sarah Jones, Michelle Liddell, Sian Lloyd-Wiggins, Danielle
LoPresti
, Geneva Mae, Patrick
Mayuyu
,
Dan McDowell, Kym Pappas, Darla Peterson, Gil Quintana,
blackgoat
,
Andrea
Radmilovich
, Jeremy
Reppy
,
K. Royce, Eric Sanford, Jon
Schwaiger
, Jon Stern,
Sarah
Suvilla
Young, Alissa
Zeljeznjak
,
Marilyn
Zeljeznjak
, Jenna Y.

Thanks to
Arthur
Salm
, Barrie
Summy
,
Catherine Ryan-Hyde, David Jefferson, and
Jincy
Willett for
writerly
support and
blurbage
.
Thanks to Benedict
Cumberbatch
for being.

Thanks to all
my students, current and former, who inspire me, and especially the
Gay-Straight Alliance members I’ve met over the years. I hope that someday we
won’t even need to have a Gay-Straight Alliance because whom you love will be
between you and the person you love and no one else.

Thanks to the
staff at West Hills High School, my band of brothers, we who take to the field
every day to do the good, impossible work we do.

Thanks to my
husband, Chris
Klich
, who supports me and props me up
when I want to fall down. Thanks to my two wonderful sons, Austin and Noel. I
love you to the stars and the moon and back. Thanks also to my mom and dad,
Richard and Therese Preble, and Manny
Klich
. I miss
you every day. Thanks to Helen
Klich
, my California
mom.

Laura Preble is the award-winning author of the young adult
series
Queen Geek Social
Club
(Penguin/Berkley Jam), which
includes the novels
Queen Geeks in Love
and
Prom
Queen Geeks.
She has also won a Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize, and has been published in
North
American Review, Hysteria,
and
NEA Today.
Visit Laura’s website at
http://www.preblebooks.com/
and follow
her on twitter
@
LauraPreble
.