Merline Lovelace - Military Heroes Bundle - A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover

Sighing, he continued his perimeter check. He wondered if the good memories would ever begin to replace the bad. These days, his brain functioned like a bad TV show, with almost subliminal flashes of people being torn apart, buddies dying, and all the rest of it. It was as if no matter what he was doing or thinking about, some nasty director would flash up an image so fast he almost didn’t catch it.

Except he knew what they were. He didn’t have to wonder what had just zipped past his mind’s eye. Some things were burned too deeply into memory to escape awareness that easily.

Time, they said. It would just take time, and maybe some therapy. He’d tried the therapy while he recuperated but found it pointless. The guy he had talked to didn’t have any direct experience. Oh, he tried, even offering medication, but how could you discuss something worse than the worst horror movie with someone who hadn’t even seen The Exorcist?

Smiling grimly, he finished his circumnavigation of the house, aware that if this were his post, he would be ripping out a lot of concealing shrubbery and cutting down a few trees that came way too close to the roof.

But this wasn’t a military post, and he wasn’t preparing for a Taliban incursion. Drawing that distinction seemed to be getting a little easier, and for that he gave thanks.

Inside again, he glanced at his watch. Connie had been gone more than ten minutes. A man who had learned that tardiness could be a sign of catastrophe found it hard to remember that she had probably just stopped to talk with Jody’s mother for a few minutes.

God, this living in two worlds was going to drive him nuts.

The phone rang, and he hesitated only a moment before answering it.

“Hi, Ethan, this is Julia. Is my daughter there?”

He felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth as he heard laughter in the background. “Sorry, ma’am, she took Sophie over to spend the night at Jody’s. She should be back any minute. Do you want her to call?”

“Oh, that’s not necessary. Just tell her I won’t be home tonight. The girls have decided to have an old-fashioned pajama party.”

“Hey, that’s great,” he said with as much warmth as he could muster. “Have fun.”

“I will. Sally will bring me home in the morning.” Then Julia paused, her voice taking on a different note. “Take care of my girls for me, Ethan. Please.”

“I intend to.”

When he hung up, he felt oddly revitalized. As if he had his orders now and knew what to do.

He heard Connie pull into the driveway and come through the kitchen door. He heard the lock click behind her; then she returned to the darkened living room.

“Ethan?”

“I just realized something,” he said without preamble.

“What’s that?”

“That someone else has been organizing my life for so long, I don’t know how to get on without orders.”

She came farther into the room but didn’t switch on a light. “That must stink.”

“In a way it does. In another way it’s good.”

“How so?”

He turned toward her. “It’s another challenge. I need challenge.”

“I see.” Leaning over, she switched on a light at the end of the sofa. It wasn’t terribly bright, but it blocked all view of the world beyond the windows and revealed them to one another.

“Your mother called. She said she and her friends are going to have a pajama party. She’ll be back in the morning.”

At that Connie laughed. “Those women. They’re in their second childhood. It’s so neat.”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes came back to him, searching his face. “Didn’t you have decisions to make in the service?”

“Plenty. But they were always directed at completing my assignment. My orders.”

She nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that. And you’ve been feeling at loose ends without an assignment.”

“Basically, yes.”

He made a conscious effort to relax and sat on the couch again. “That’s probably part of the reason I feel so out of it. I’ve lived one lifestyle since I was eighteen, and now it’s gone.”

“That’s gotta be tough, Ethan.”

“No. I just needed to understand what was happening. Part of it, at least.”

“Is that why you were so ready to step in and help with Sophie?”

“Partly. But most of it is that nothing makes me madder than a guy who wants to hurt children.” His hands clenched on his lap, and he let them. “But don’t think this is some kind of therapy for me.”

“I didn’t think it was. If anything, I thought it might make your reentry more difficult.”

That surprised him. He looked at her and felt an unexpected surge of something so primal and elemental that it shocked him. Urges he hadn’t had time or room for since the war began, not even when he came home on leave, because even then he was too busy just coping with what now seemed like an alternative universe.

Despite his preference for silence, for dealing with things in the privacy of his own mind, he started talking.

“Coming home doesn’t feel like coming home anymore.”

She nodded encouragingly.

“I don’t know if you can understand, but I walk around feeling naked because I don’t have an M-16 in my arms. It’s as if I’m exposed to every danger in the world, and I don’t even have a knife to pull.”

“Oh, Ethan...”

He made a slight gesture, asking her to just let him continue.

“I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a kind of mental instability, but there it is. I come home, and I feel adrift. Purposeless. Naked. Being at home...it’s like visiting another planet. I felt less out of place the first time I was shipped overseas.”

“They say that Peace Corps volunteers adjust to their new countries more easily than they adjust to their return here. There must be a reason for it.”

He sighed. “Sorry, I’m dumping.”

“Dump away.”

He rose and began pacing the living room slowly. He paused just once to draw the heavy curtains closed over the sheers. “It’s like I know things other people can’t understand. Some folks I know think that makes them better. Hell, I know a SEAL who’s so full of his own superiority because he’s been through life-and-death situations, because he knows things...he scorns civilians.”

“Do you?”

“No. That’s the thing. I took on this job because I had the stupid idea that I’d be protecting other people from having to know, not because it would make me special. But now I can’t come home.”

He hated showing his weakness the instant the words escaped him. He wanted to snatch them back and rip them to shreds with his bare hands, because he had no business whining about this shit. No business at all.

But before self-disgust could conquer him, he had a warm, soft woman in his arms, holding him tightly as if she wanted to anchor him in the storm.

“Oh, Ethan... Ethan...”

Her voice seemed to call to him from across an abyss, the abyss that separated him from his current reality. The yawning abyss of places he had been, horrors he had seen, evils he had done.

I’m not worthy.

The words had been rattling around in his head for a long time, but now they rang loud with a truth he couldn’t ignore. He’d bloodied his hands, whether for good or ill he no longer knew. How could he know? Clausewitz had written that war was politics by other means. He couldn’t judge the politics. And after he got to Afghanistan, he couldn’t even tell any longer if the cost of chasing the Taliban and al Qaeda was worth it. Because he saw the cost day in and day out. The cost in innocent lives, which hadn’t stopped on 9/11.

His job over there had been to win hearts and minds while pushing back the forces of darkness. He wished he could be sure that was all he had done.