Chuck Logan - Homefront

Shit.

She had always been an unusually gifted tactician. So she knew exactly what she had to do. Just hit the fast-forward button. Accept her life in real time. The way it was now.

Uh-uh. Can’t deal with that yet.

So she hit rewind. Then she hit play and watched that last moment: Nina, always getting the jump, ahead of the situation, a kinesthetic fucking intellectual calling the play, going for her gun. There was still that split second before her hand came up empty.

When she was still somebody…

Broker awoke, alert and rested after seven hours on the couch. He reached into the back of the couch cushions, retrieved the shotgun, and unloaded it. He listening carefully for Nina, who was in the kitchen and had been since 4:00 P.M., after a few fitful hours of sleep. He quickly raised the wall quilt, opened the locker with the key around his neck, and replaced the gun and shells. Locked it up and lowered the quilt.

Then he took a quick shower and checked himself in the bathroom as he shaved. Last night’s events still glowed in his eyes. Calling for revenge.

But you won’t do anything dumb. You’ll call Harry, talk it through. Not go rip Klumpe’s fat throat out. Agreed? Agreed.

Okay. Because of the readmission conference, he woke Kit at eight, an hour later than usual for a school morning, bringing her a short glass of orange juice and a Sesame Street multivitamin, which he placed on the shelf next to her bed. Then he raised the blinds on her small room’s one window. No help there, just gray overcast. Nina would have another bad day. He turned back to the bed, grabbed Kit’s toes under the covers, and wiggled them.

“C’mon, get up. Daylight in the swamp.”

Kit emerged from a tangle of covers and quilts, stretched, flexed her hand, and studied the stiff scab forming on her skinned knuckles. After she drank the glass of juice Broker held out to her and took her vitamin, she stared straight ahead, blinking the sleep from her eyes. Aware that Broker was watching her especially closely this morning, she said in a stoic voice: “You didn’t find Bunny, did you?”

“Not yet.” He pictured the toy standing lonely vigil out on the ski trail.

“Did Ditech come home?”

Broker shook his head.

Kit wrinkled her forehead. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She got in the woods, and some critter ate her.”

“We don’t know that, not for sure,” Broker said. The bunny and the cat. Sounded like a kid’s book. Maybe the first real lies he’d ever told his daughter. Two small utilitarian lies.

Kit studied her father. “Where do we go when we die?”

Broker came back glib. “Us, or cats?”

“I mean, when I die, will I get to see Ditech again?”

Blindsided by eight-year-old early-morning judo, Broker gestured vaguely, slow on the uptake. Too slow.

Kit spoke first. “Dooley says, if you believe in God and you’re saved, you go to heaven, and it’s a perfect place where you have the best times of your life all at once. How come he knows that, and you don’t?”

Broker proceeded gently in this terrain. “Dooley doesn’t know that, honey; he believes that.”

Kit scooted closer under the covers. “Uh-uh. Dooley is sure. You don’t know because you don’t believe.”

“Well, I believe things that I can prove,” Broker said carefully.

“Like?”

Broker looked around, saw a smooth, slightly oblong Lake Superior cobblestone on the dresser. The size of a goose egg. His mother, Irene, had painted it red with white dots and a green sprig, like a strawberry. He reached over, picked it up, and told Kit, “Like…hold out your hand.”

Kit raised her palm. Broker placed the stone in her hand.

“Now toss it up. Not too high. Just up.”

She flipped it up. It rose about a foot and a half and fell back to the comforter.

“Again,” Broker said. “Do it four more times.”

The stone went up and down five times. Kit picked it up and looked at it. “So?”

“There are physical laws. Everything in the world obeys them. What goes up comes down.”

“So?”

Broker tried to say it a different way. “Well, some people, maybe like Dooley, have faith that the stone will keep going up someday. That it won’t come down.”

“Maybe you got to throw it harder,” Kit said.

“No, it’s always going to fall back to earth.”

Kit knit her brow, plucked up the stone, and deposited it in Broker’s hand. “Maybe God isn’t a rock. What if God’s a bird? A bird won’t come down when you throw it in the air.”

Before he could respond, Kit let him off the hook by vaulting off the bed and asked, “What’s for breakfast?”

Broker blinked several times, not sure he entirely followed what had just happened. “Oatmeal. Now hubba-hubba. You get dressed, and don’t forget to comb your hair.”

Broker went down the stairs and into the kitchen, which since 4:00 P.M. had been an insomniac zone of nicotine, coffee, and the War in the Box. “Tanks from the 3rd ID have been pushing up this road all night taking small-arms fire…” Nina stood by the stove making an attempt to blow her cigarette smoke up into the powerful vent fan, watching the drag race to Baghdad.

Broker cleared the debris from her night watch off the counter, scrapped the remains of a sandwich into the garbage-good, at least she was eating.

Her sleep patterns were erratic. Sunny days she had a limited amount of energy and did her exercises. Cloudy days she was a zombie, slept in the afternoon, and walked the kitchen all night, watching cable TV.

He adjusted to her pattern. If she was in the bedroom, he slept on the couch. If she took the couch, he took the bed upstairs. Nights she slept with Kit, he had a choice. Sleeping in the same bed just did not work.

He stacked the plates and glasses and cups in the sink, wiped down the counter, and launched into his routine. Nina moved off as he measured Quaker Oats and milk into a pan and set them on the stove. From the corner of his eye, he checked her fast.

She stared at the dishes stacked in the sink like they were ancient ruins; not quite sure where to start deciphering the puzzle of their archaeology. She’d lost the ground she’d gained last night “Broker, I…” The thought lost its trajectory and burned up midway across the space between them. Efficiently, not losing a beat, he put two slices of bread in the toaster. He turned to Nina and asked, “Bad night?”

“Couldn’t sleep.” Her eyes darted out the windows and fixed on the overcast sky with a look of palpable dread.

He nodded and said nothing as she walked past him, left the kitchen, and went up the stairs. She’d take a shower, try to sleep.

“ One eight hundred sandals… ” Fast glance at the TV. The tanks had disappeared. A happy couple in bathing suits sprinted joyfully into an emerald surf. Broker took a jar of peanut butter and a plastic honey container from the cupboard. “ At Sandals we can please all of the people all of the time… ”

He checked the oatmeal, stirred it a few times, then walked to the front of the house and shouted up the stairs, “Five minutes.” Then he returned to the kitchen, selected a pear from a bowl on the island, washed it, and sliced it. The toast popped. He checked the oats, turned off the burner, took a wooden tray from the top of the refrigerator, put a bowl on it, shoveled in the oats, sprinkled cinnamon, brown sugar, a pat of butter. Grabbed the remote, turned off the damn televison.

Okay.

Peanut butter and honey on the toast. Milk. He assembled the breakfast on the tray and took it to the living room just as Kit came down the stairs, pulling a comb through the snags in her hair. Best for her to take it in here, away from the lingering cigarette smoke. Broker left Kit with the tray, spooning oatmeal with one hand, pulling the comb through her hair with the other.