A Battle Raging (20 page)

Another shrug and then Jada looked her square on. "I couldn't tell you. You knew about all of my other fuck ups and this time it was more than just sex. I hadn't wanted to jinx it…and I still managed to fuck it up. I didn't feel safe telling you because well, I could feel your judgment every time I got into a new relationship. And this particular time, I just didn't need your shit."

"Wait a minute! I never judged you. Not about that."

"Oh, c'mon, didn't you feel a little bit morally superior to me all those years. I mean you were the nice one, the one who never got in trouble, who never got…pregnant…"

"What?! Oh god Jada, you never said. What happened? Did you have…did you get rid of it?"

She shook her head sadly. "No, it got rid of me. Figured it didn't want me as a mama so took a vamoose."

"Oh, Jada. I wish you had come to me. I never thought of you as anything but my sister. I love you just as I loved Mark…and Mama."

She walked over to Jada who held her head down over the stove after shutting the oven door. Maya saw a small tear trickling down her sister's cheek.

She didn't ask permission but took her
Jada in her arms. She felt a small tremor go through her sister as she held her and heard a slight sob.

She was still holding
Jada near the oven they had yet to turn on when a news flash interrupted the smoky sound of Cassandra Wilson singing a soulful rendition of Sting's "Fragile."

A shooting in a near downtown office.
Two killed, one injured critically.

She barely
heard what the news announcer said. That is, until a name penetrated through her fugue.

"What…who did
they say?" she asked herself softly.

Jada looked up and pulled away. "What?"

"The radio…there was a shooting. They said Zachary Yarborough."

"Your Zach?"

"No, he isn't mine," she corrected illogically, her mind pushing away what she'd heard. What she thought she'd heard. Zach. A shooting. Two dead. One critically injured.

"Call him Maya. I don't care that you say it's over. I can tell by your face that
it isn't…at least not for you."

Maya
nodded then walked to pick up the handle of the landline on the kitchen wall. She dialed a number she now knew by heart.

The interrupted song resumed on the radio
, with the last few words playing smoothly:

On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are, how fragile we are
 

###

"Zach, open up!"

He heard her knocking, calling to him through his door. Someone had obviously let her into the building.
And she'd probably gotten his apartment number from the class roster.

He sat in the dark living room, listening to her voice and the rain thrumming against his window.

Everything right now was so surreal, he wasn't sure that she wasn't some phantom in his head. Much as Joseph was his constant nightly phantom. Maybe he, Zach, wasn't even here. Maybe he was still back in Afghanistan, in some sort of come, between life and death.

That was
how he'd felt that afternoon at the police station giving his statement, telling and retelling his account like an automaton.

The
police told him that the surviving members had heralded him as a hero.

I'm no fucking hero!"
he heard Jerry's last words echoing in his mind.
They don't kill innocents.

No, he was no fucking hero.

He'd killed an innocent.

A good man with a wife and infant son,
a man who would never see that son grow up because of him.

"Zach, I know you're in there,"
Maya said through the door, refusing to go away. She never seemed to give up.

How did she know?
But then, how did she know everything? How did she know that he'd been running from himself, from a truth that was tearing him from the inside?

"You know, I can stand here all night if I have to," she said, then more softly, "I'm not going anywhere until I make sure you're al
l right. Please Zach. At least let me dry off. I'm soaked."

He sighed and
closed his eyes, momentarily blocking out everything, including the sound of her appeal. Because he knew that in a few seconds, she would be standing in front of him. In this apartment and everything he was, everything he'd hidden from himself would be bared for her to see.

He wheeled over to the door and opened
it.

She hadn't been kidding. She was soaked from head to heel. He could see her clearly in the hallway lights. Her blouse clung to her skin showing the darkness of her skin. Her hair had rivulets dripping from her curls. Her jeans clung to her thighs.

She'd never looked more enticing.

Her smile was barely perceptible. But it was there, beseeching him not
to shut her out. Instead he rolled back to allow her entrance.

"Why ar
e you sitting in the dark?"

"Trying to save my skin from the dangers of ultraviolet light," he said, not knowing why he said it, why he was being
sarcastic.

"Well, can we risk some moments of exposure? And can I have something to dry off with
…please?"

He wheeled himself to reach around her
and flicked the on switch. A floor lamp near the divan lit the interior and he watched warily as she took in the sparseness, the ragtag look of his furnishings. Not that he gave a damn what she thought.

Trouble was that was a lie. He was embarrassed at the frugal décor.

She spied the Def Leppard poster and he was surprised to see a smile.

"
"Pour Some Sugar on Me." I used to play that over and over when I was a kid. Back when they still had turntables and vinyl records."

He felt some of the strain in his head loosening.

"Yeah, I played some mean air guitar along with them. Actually tried to learn bass, but I was a dismal mess at it. Drove my mom crazy."

A flash of a memory.
His parents' garage, where he had set up an amp and other equipment. His mother, her strawberry blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, dressed in shirt and shorts, her regular gardening gear. Coming into the garage with shears in hand.
Zach, you could wake the dead with that volume and the cemetery is miles away from here.
He'd promised to lower the volume, sure the neighbors had complained directly to her. One year she was there admonishing him…and the next year, she and his dad were gone. And it was just him and Janey.

He shook away the m
emory and the pain. Looked up at Maya.

"If you've come here to see whether I'm OK, I am. As you can see, I'm alive."

For the first time since she stepped through the door, he saw a flicker of anger.

"Of course I was going to come over since you refuse to answer your damn phone. I know we didn't part well, but for a few seconds I didn't know whether you were dead or alive. I only picked up the tail end of the story on the radio. If you'd just answered the phone…"

"I was at the police station…being questioned. I couldn't answer the phone at that moment."

"And some sort of mental paralysis kept you from returning the call when you left the station. Damn it Zach,
I care about you."

"And that fact
seems to bring you a lot of joy."

"Why can't you ever get through a moment without your usual snark."

"Snark is what's keeping me sane for the moment, so don't snark at my snark."

She looked as though she would slap him and part of him wished that she would. Maybe it could get him out of this fugue state, bring him back to
his reality. A reality he was still running from.

"Did anyone ever tell you that you look beautiful when you're angry
?"

"Stop the bullshit," she said
flatly, the anger gone. Right now she just seemed tired.

"Those are my basic charms, t
he ability to snark and bullshit. What you see is all there is. Look around, Maya. This here is me. Bare, lifeless, nothing."

"I'm sorry you feel that way. Especially after this afternoon. The news are saying that you're a hero…"

"Stop! Just stop! I'm not a fucking hero!" He heard his inner voice merging with Jerry's phantom voice. He expected to hear Jerry in his head for the rest of his life.

His unexpected outburst seemed to momentarily rattle her. But she quickly
regained her composure. And she did something that really put him off. She knelt in front of him, her face damp, her hair dripping.

"What happened must have been terrifying, Zach. And I know this is something you don't want to hear, but you're going to need to get another psychiatrist, since…"

"Since my old one was murdered by one of the crazed patients he failed to help," he said, filling in the awkward pause.

"This can't be good for your
condition."

"No shit. I can't wait to see what my nightmare holds tonight. Maybe the doctor and Jerry will be there, featured prominently with their bullet wounds along with my pal Joe…oh forgot, make that Joseph…whose face is one messy hole. And do you want to know why my pal Joseph
is dead? Because of me. Not the Taliban, not the insurgents…it was me. I was the one who killed a fellow Marine. And all this time, I thought my hands were squeaky clean. See Maya, you were right, I had to face my demon and now that I have it's kicking my ass."

If he'd expected to see condemnation in her face, he was wrong. Neither
did he see pity in her eyes as she reached a hand to stroke his cheek. Instead, her eyes were full of mercy, a mercy he didn't deserve.

Zach
wasn't strong enough to resist those eyes, her beauty. He'd been holding everything in all day since the tragedy. Actually, he'd been holding everything in since that shit-filled excursion into the Farah district, into the town of Pur Chaman, where the shit had hit the proverbial fan and splattered him in the face. Much as his bullets had ripped into Joseph's face.

Zach
hadn't expected the tears. He felt them falling along his cheeks, but he was disconnected from them, as though they were apart from his body. Neither did he expect the sob that tore from him. That shook his body as he choked out the whole story to her.

After he finished, he waited for her to say something. Again
he waited for some condemnation about his cowardice. At least he felt like a coward, shooting aimlessly because he'd feared being killed.

But i
nstead, she leaned in and her lips touched his cheek softly, before shifting her cheek to press into his. He felt his world spinning as she moved her lips, settled on his mouth, touching tentatively.

He resisted at first, not feeling worthy of her
solace. Everything he had tried to believe about himself was a lie. That he was an honorable man, that he had been an honorable Marine. Because in the end, he must have known all along. That he'd killed Joseph Clarence…and that his men had lied for him, to protect him. And the truth had tried to awaken his conscience when he was unconscious in his dream world, in the hell that had arisen that day, in the hot, dry hell of being holed up in that house, afraid. Yes, he'd been so afraid. That was the thing he couldn't face even with therapy.

H
e didn't deserve a woman like Maya. He didn't deserve her.

But as she continued
pressing her moist lips into his, instinct took over. His lips opened, desperately grabbing hers as though they held a lifeline to his immediate past, a past where he did not remember what he'd done.

He reached down,
grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up onto his lap. He wrapped arms around her torso, his hands pressing through her wet blouse.

For this moment, the here and now, there was no past, no pain, no danger. This afternoon never happened. Nor had Afghanistan.

He tore his mouth away as he worked to pull her soaked top off. She obliged, moving her body to aid him. He threw the wet top to the floor, then unhooked her bra, threw that down just as brusquely.

Their previous times together had been wrought with emotion, but nothing like this. This was tearing at them both – he because he knew this was the last time he would be with her…and her…he didn't know. Maybe because she thought this was a new beginning.

He should tell her they weren't going to be. Should tell her right now and not let this continue. Instead he buried his face between her breasts, relishing the softness against his cheeks. Loving her scent, something between floral and musk.

She held him and he knew he could stay in the shelter of her arms for
ever. He wanted to hide in her, to run away from himself.

She continued holding him tightly as he blindly navigated them and his chair toward the bedroom.