The Heart You Carry Home (29 page)

“You're Becca,” the woman said. She had a broad forehead and large, dark eyes. A guarded face. Not mean, but not welcoming either. “I saw you run out this way,” she continued. She looked down at the ball of tinfoil. “This is Jacob. I'm Lucy. Are you all right?”

“I'm fine.” But Becca did not feel fine and she suspected that she did not look fine either.

“You're Ben's wife,” Lucy said. “He brought us out here.”

Becca looked at the woman and child, incredulous. Ben had picked up a couple of strangers?

“We sold him frybread!” the boy said gleefully, as though this clarified everything.

“Ben went up to Hands of God to find your mother,” Lucy explained. “He found us instead. And now we're all here.”

“Ben saved my life!” the boy exclaimed.

“I'm sorry?” Becca was confused and feeling frantic.

“My nephew was dumb enough to think he could swim that river over there.” Lucy nodded at the rise. “Ben dove right in. Didn't hesitate for a second.” She tousled the boy's hair roughly. “Though I will tell you, your husband's got the worst mood swings I've ever seen. Worse than when my grandma went off her Prozac. And she was loony tunes . . .” Lucy pointed her finger at her temple and twirled it around. After a moment, her face fell. “Hey,” she said. “I was just trying to lighten things up. I didn't mean to make fun.”

Becca wiped at the wetness on her cheeks. She turned away, hiding her face. But maybe it was funny—to call Ben's problem “mood swings.” To liken him to somebody's batty relative. Maybe she needed to laugh at all of this, just a little.

“He bought me a milk shake,” Jacob said. “He took me to the ball pit at Sonic.”

“He did?” Somehow, these details seemed even more extraordinary to her than what Lucy had said about the river.

Jacob nodded, his head rocking exaggeratedly up and down, like it was about to roll right off his neck. He was so earnest—he seemed so enamored of Ben—that Becca couldn't help but smile through her tears. And soon enough she was laughing. She laughed at the absurdity of Ben and King and Jeanine and herself all showing up here at the same time. She laughed at her fucked-up life, the kind of life she'd struggled so hard to avoid. She laughed and cried, because none of this was very funny and because she had no control over any of it.

“You okay now?” Lucy asked when Becca had calmed some. Becca nodded. “Good. Now, let's get down to work.” She told Becca that while Ben was swimming after Jacob, she'd been picked up by one of the guards and blindfolded. She'd been terrified, but when the car stopped and the guard let her free, Lucy realized that she was inside Kleos. She told Becca about how one of the guards had Tased Ben for trying to talk to Jeanine. Then she put her hands over Jacob's ears. He squirmed, but she didn't let go. “My sister says the men here have a ritual. They build these huge pyres in the desert.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “They're burning people out there.” She looked at the sky as though she expected a shadow to descend. “I want to get out of here,” she said, finally releasing Jacob. “But not without his mother.”

The wind had blown the tears dry on Becca's face and now her skin was tight with salt and dust. She shivered despite the heat. Two different sources had now told her about fires in the desert—about burning. This very morning, there'd been the pile of smoldering bones.

“We're going to help you,” Lucy said, squeezing Becca's shoulder. “We'll help you get Ben and then we'll all get out of here. We've got a big black beast of a car. It's parked over the rise.”

The Death Star! Becca swallowed hard. “And my dad,” she said. “I can't leave without my dad.”

Lucy stroked Jacob's dark head with such tenderness that Becca thought,
Why aren't you his mother? You should be his mother.
She thought about how her own mother had selfishly dragged all these women out here, putting them in harm's way. And then she thought of Ben, who'd come out here following
her
. The moment she ran from Dry Hills, she might as well have written a summons to him across the sky. He'd hurt her too badly and loved her too much to stay put.

L
UCY AND BECCA
wanted to hurry back to Kleos, but Jacob lingered among the graves like a dog sniffing out a hidden prize. Soon enough, he brought the women a leather pouch the size and shape of an envelope. “Let me see that.” Lucy took the object and extracted from it a dirty piece of paper.

September 15, 1991

Dear Harvey,

To be honest, it never would have occurred to me to write you a letter, but that's one of the things we do here. Every week, we write to somebody who didn't make it back, and we bury the letter in a kind of grave with a cross. Letters come from the outside too. Bags of them, like it's almost Christmas and we're at the North Pole. People send dog tags and photographs. Sometimes money. I don't know how the CO convinced anybody to send these letters here. I often wonder where the senders think their letters are going. But they come by the bagful and the CO has us read them and then bury them too. Personally, I think there're plenty of sad stories in my head; I don't need to read other people's. But the CO says it's good for us. He says he's written letters too, that his were the first to be buried in this earth. He says all of these stories must be read and then put to rest. He says we—and no one else—must be the ones to do it.

You've never seen anything quite like the graveyard of letters, Harvey, and it grows larger by the week. Sometimes, I think it'll fill up the entire desert.

I told the CO about you, Harvey, and that's why I'm writing. Before I met the CO, nobody knew about you, but he's got this way of bringing things out. We have private sessions with him—he calls them Purgings. Even when I don't want to talk, I end up talking. And somehow, I do feel better. At least some of the time.

Your friend,

Roger

Lucy folded up the letter and put it back in the leather envelope. “Return this to where you found it,” she said sternly. “And leave the others alone. This is not our place.”

Back at the camp, in the infirmary, Becca found King sitting up in his cot and Jeanine in the corner of the room, her arms folded across her chest. Clearly, Becca had walked into a standoff. “How are you feeling, Dad?” she asked.

“Fine.” The word dropped with a thud. Becca had hoped that some sympathy and deference might ease her father into communication, but clearly it did not.

“What's going on with you guys?” she asked. She kept her voice gentle, her expression open, as though to say,
You can tell me. I won't judge.
But neither of her parents spoke. They wouldn't even look at her. They wanted her to leave, that was obvious. But Becca had come too far and endured too much to walk away. She could feel a fireball gather strength in her stomach and she had no desire to hold it back. “What the
fuck?
” she demanded.

King looked taken aback. Jeanine, who was not taken aback by much, stiffened.

“I'm here. You can't keep pretending that I don't exist. It's obvious I should never have expected anything from you. But I don't know . . .” Becca shook her head and opened her palms as though truly surprised by how empty they were. “Aren't parents supposed to love their kids unconditionally? Was I so naive, so stupid, to want that? To think my parents might give me the one thing in life that's totally free?”

Jeanine slowly shook her head. “Ungrateful child.” Becca opened her mouth to protest, but her mother said, “I sent away the man I loved because it was my responsibility—as your
mother
—to give you a normal life. I mean, Jesus, if it wasn't King's raging and wrestling, it was those ridiculous, cultish stories about Durga.” Her mother sucked in a breath. “You were absorbing every part of that man. If you went on being his daughter, do you really think you'd be in college right now? Would you ever have stopped fighting off the whole goddamned world? I sacrificed my marriage for you, child, so don't you dare lecture me on love.”

Becca gaped. She'd never once considered that Jeanine's critical and distant mothering was born from resentment. Jeanine was probably right—by sending King away, she'd changed the entire trajectory of Becca's life. Or maybe her mother had succeeded only in sending her on a brief detour. Because now, hadn't Becca ended up exactly where she'd started? Worse off, even?

She could still feel Ben's hands on her, beating her awake. Disoriented from sleep, she'd thrashed and screamed, tried to push him away, but he'd only doubled his efforts. As his strength waned, she'd nearly submitted, then decided to play dead until he stopped. She finally managed to roll away from him and onto the floor. By the time she stood up, he'd left the bedroom. She discovered him in the next room, slamming the fiddle against the shelf.

“Maybe you made the wrong sacrifice, Mom,” she fumed. “And maybe
you
,” Becca said, turning to King, “shouldn't have been so quick to run away when she showed you the exit.”

Becca knew her parents thought they'd done the right thing, and maybe they couldn't have predicted the fallout—Jeanine coming to resent her daughter, King seeking his salvation out here instead of with his family. But it made her so angry to think that they'd just given up on each other and on her.

Jeanine and King looked at each other like they were both waiting for the other one to claim responsibility for the insolent creature accosting them. Becca had never yelled at them both like this. But that was mostly because she'd never had the chance. They hadn't all been in the same room together in six years.

“Your mother did the right thing,” King said quietly. “I wasn't fit to be a father. You know that. And look at you now. The first Keller to go to college. A running star! See how you've turned out?”

“You're right, Dad,” she said. “But let's show Mom, because she hasn't seen it yet. Here's how I've turned out.” Becca pulled up her shirt. The bruises were now greenish yellow, like muddy grass stains. She stared at Jeanine, watching the shock register on her mother's face. It was grief, the purest form of sorrow. King had already gotten a look at his daughter's bruises, but he seemed to be seeing this all for the first time. He hung his head.

It was cruel, what she'd just done, and childish. But Becca felt a numb sense of justice when she left her parents in their stunned silence and walked out of the infirmary. King was right. Life with him
was
awful. But the fact that her parents had been in contact for so long, lying to her, living half their lives behind her back, even sneaking around at her own wedding, made her feel insignificant to the point of worthless. She was baggage to them, dead weight.

Becca stood outside the infirmary, not knowing where to go. It had grown dark. And now a flatbed truck headed her way. A bunch of men sat in the back, hunched over their knees. The losers, Becca realized, and she strained to see whether they were injured. Whether Ben was among them. Mostly, they looked exhausted. And, of course, Ben was not there.

T
HE MEN PILED
most of the chopped wood on the truck beds and then walked toward the mesa in a single-file line, each person dragging a log behind him. They followed the rockface for a short time before turning eastward and heading out of the trees. In front and behind them, the hoplites kept watch. Ben found this procession—the heat, and sand, and steady march—all too familiar, and he looked at the night sky to try to remove himself. What was Becca doing? He longed to be with her. His need felt as large and vast as the desert.

The hoplites stopped the men in the middle of nowhere. Here were the trucks, piled high with wood, and a Wrangler Jeep in which the CO stood, waiting.

“Achilles decided funeral games would be held for Patroclus,” he bellowed. “And so the men entered the ring, ‘and grasped each other with their mighty arms . . . The sweat streamed down while many a blood-red, swollen bruise appeared on their ribs and shoulders. And they were eager for victory.'” The CO surveyed the men. Their number had shrunk to just under forty.

The hoplites split the men into teams, and a series of competitions began. There were races, and wrestling matches, and javelin contests. Winners and losers were sorted and paired and pitted against one another. Ben felt uncomfortable watching these old men fight, watching the way they grunted under the strain, how sweat poured down their faces, how their bellies heaved.

Left and right, men were relegated to the sidelines. At first, Ben assumed these losers had been cut from the competition, but sometimes the CO would send a defeated man back into the ring. Sometimes he had the hoplites lead winners into the trucks. When the first truck was full, it headed back to camp. The remaining men paused to watch, their faces glowing in the headlights with vindication and relief.

“But maybe they're the ones advancing,” somebody said, and Ben felt the group deflate. He didn't want to think about the other men. He needed to win this thing, needed to be the last one, so that he could help King reach the final challenge, whatever it was. Then he needed to get Becca into the Death Star and get them home.

Ben was called to wrestle Reno.

“This isn't the way to get her back,” Reno said when they stood face to face. The whistle blew. Reno was more agile than Ben had expected, his movements slippery, but when Ben did manage to get a hold of him, it was easy to pin Reno to the ground. Reno smiled up at him, and Ben wondered if he'd lost on purpose. Then Reno winced. Ben had his elbow pressed on the poker burn. He could have Reno kicked out right now. He needed only press a little harder, dig his elbow in deeper. But for some reason, he couldn't. He let up slightly.