Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

I glanced over at Palmer—and a thought occurred to me—something I hadn’t remembered to say before. I said it now: “Hey, Palmer. Thanks, you know? For coming back. Thanks for coming back to get us. You didn’t have to do that. You had your van—you were outta there. You coulda kept driving, but you came back and saved our lives.”

“Yeah,” Jim added quickly, nodding.

“That’s right,” Nicki said. “They’d have killed us for sure.”

“Yes,” said Meredith. “Thank you.” She was sitting across the fire from him, looking through the wavering light at him. She had washed herself down by the spring, as we all had, and she had untangled her hair, and her eyes were clear and full of warmth in her pale, cool features. I have to admit: it sent a pang through me to see her looking at Palmer that way.

But Palmer didn’t seem to care. He didn’t answer any of us. In fact, he acted like he hadn’t heard us at all.

“We better get some sleep,” he said. And with that, he stood up and moved away from the fire into the darker shadows of the chamber, muttering, “We’re going to need it. We’ve got a long way ahead of us.”

So we all left the fire to die on its own and moved off into our own corners of the chamber. I took my machine gun with me and lay down next to it on the floor in the dark. It was a small room and I could feel the others close by and even see the shapes of them by the fading firelight. I closed my eyes and listened to them breathing. It was a comforting sound.

“Oh,” Nicki groaned. “I am so exhausted…”

A few seconds later I could tell by the way her breathing deepened that she had fallen asleep. Jim too—I could hear him snoring.

As for me—well, tired as I was, you would think I’d have fallen asleep too, just like that. But in fact I lay awake, my mind racing. After a while, I opened my eyes and stared into the flame-lit darkness.

I was still thinking about everything that had happened. Pastor Ron getting killed. And me shooting that guy who was going to throw the hand grenade. And that firing squad… I was remembering that feeling I had when I thought I was about to die myself—that feeling that life was incredibly beautiful, and that people were incredibly beautiful, or that they were meant to be beautiful, anyway, but that they did wrong things and messed themselves up somehow. I remembered how, in what I thought was going to be my last moments, I wished I’d enjoyed every minute of life more, even the hard parts, and I wished I’d been nicer to everyone, even people who got on my nerves. In those few seconds in front of the firing squad, I actually could understand for the first time how you might be able to do stuff like love your enemies or forgive people even when they’d really treated you badly.

But now—now that the immediate threat of death was past—those feelings were gone. Lying there in the dark, I tried to bring them back, but I couldn’t. I could remember feeling them, but I couldn’t actually feel them anymore, you know. I mean, for instance, I don’t think I was enjoying this particular moment of life very much. My clothes were still damp and I was scared about tomorrow and I wished I were home instead of out here in the middle of this snakeinfested nowhere—back home where—guess what?—my parents were probably still fighting with each other all the time, probably about to get a divorce. What was so enjoyable about that?

And as for loving my enemies—let me be honest here— no way. I didn’t love Mendoza and his rebels. I hated them. I hated them for their cruelty and violence, for what they’d done to Pastor Ron and for how they’d tried to kill us and for chasing us into this awful jungle. As long as I’m being really truthful here, I should add that I didn’t even love the people I was here with that much. I mean, I still knew that Nicki had a sweet heart and that Jim had a good soul, but… well, her sobbing and crying all the time kind of annoyed me… and Jim talking about what a great guy this Fernandez Cobar was… It just seemed stupid, that’s all. And Meredith… the way she looked at Palmer across the fire…

It’s too bad you can’t always live as if it were the last moment of your life. Because, you know, it might be—it might really be. And if we could really see it that way, really live like that, I think we’d all feel a lot differently about everything; I think we’d all feel a lot more the way God wants us to feel.

I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep.

But then I heard something… a low whisper in the dark, very soft.

“Palmer.”

It was Meredith. Even with her speaking so quietly, I recognized the calm, steady tone of her voice.

And Palmer answered her with a low noise: “Hm?”

“Why did you?” she whispered.

“Why did I what?”

“You know what I mean. Why did you come back for us? I thought you said you were going to get in your van and drive off. You said you’d have a better chance of getting away on your own…”

“Yeah, well… I would’ve.”

“You would have. That’s right, I know. But you came back for us.”

“Actually, I just happened to be driving by.”

Meredith laughed softly in the dark. They were both speaking in the quietest whispers, almost inaudible. I knew they thought all the rest of us were asleep.

“I knew you were going to, you know,” she told him. “I didn’t believe for a second you would leave us.”

“Don’t gloat, Lady Liberty,” Palmer said. “It’s an ugly habit.”

“Was it because of me?” she asked him—and there was something in her voice I’d never heard before. Something—I don’t know what you’d call it—girlish, I guess. All I know is the sound of it sent another pang through me. “Was it because of what I said to you?”

“You said something? I wasn’t listening.”

She laughed again—and it was a kind of laugh I’d never heard from her either, a sort of giggle, almost like one of Nicki’s. The two of them were silent after that for a couple of seconds.

Then Meredith said: “What happened to you? Would you tell me?”

“Go to sleep, Liberty. We’ve got a long trek in the morning.”

“What happened to make you so angry?”

He didn’t answer.

“Was it the Marines? Was it something that happened in the war?”

And still, Palmer said nothing.

“Because when Mendoza mentioned your fellow Marines, you said, ‘They’re not my fellow Marines,’” Meredith went on. “My uncle was in the Marines. He told me that once you’re a Marine, you’re a Marine forever.”

“That’s true,” Palmer said. “Unless they toss you out.”

“Is that what happened?”

He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t ever going to answer her. But then I heard him move. I stole a glance at him through my half-closed eyes and saw he had rolled over on his side to face her so that she could hear him more clearly. In that same low voice, nearly inaudible beneath Jim’s snoring, he said, “We were outside the wire, up in Nuristan, deep in Bad Guy country. We were stationed at a local police base—just a bunch of tin shacks on a hillside. I got word that one of the local cops had arranged to lead us into a Taliban ambush. I asked him about it. I guess I wasn’t very polite. It’s possible I even stuck a pistol under his chin by way of a conversation starter.”

It was a moment or two before Meredith responded. Then she said, “And did he tell you what you wanted to know—about the ambush?”

“Well, he did, in fact,” said Palmer. “So we were ready for it when it came. Turned out to be kind of a disappointing ambush from the bad guys’ point of view. We took out a couple dozen of them, chased the rest back into the hills.”