by Ninie Hammon
Piper remained attached to Grayson like an appendage as he hurried up the steps to his mother. Carter stood next to Marian, his face neither smiling nor frowning. Impassive. Piper only let go when Grayson reached out to fold his mother into his arms. He held her gently—how did he know to be so gentle?—but she’d almost bowled him backward with her own strength. Marian gripped his neck in a stranglehold, her eyes squeezed shut, tears seeping out the corners to slide down through the creases of wrinkles on her cheeks.
The old woman let go briefly, pulled back to see his face, then gripped him tight to her chest again.
“So you jest figgered—hey, I won’t tell nobody I’m comin’ so I can scare my poor mama out of the few breaths she got left—that it?”
The palsy had vanished from her speech.
“No, Ma,” Grayson said. “I…it’s a long story. But more important than how I got here is I’m not going back! Vietnam’s over for me. I’ll explain the whole thing later, and I did try to call…” He shot a glance at Carter and said no more.
“Well, don’t hear that as a complaint, son. It’d a suited me fine if they’d a’done what your kindergarten teacher done—sent you home after three days with a note sayin’ you didn’t play well with others.”
Marian pulled back out of his arms again but kept her hands on his chest, like she, too, didn’t want to stop touching him. “That’s probably why they sent you home ’fore your time was up. You always was socially awkward.”
Piper’s head was reeling. Not going back! Was it possible that Grayson was home for good? The idea threw a party in her head—complete with confetti, streamers and fireworks. She gobbled up the look on her mother-in-law’s face. No pain showed there, and she probably didn’t actually feel any at that moment, not with her youngest son in her arms, home unhurt from the war. But more than that, the spirit of the old woman was back, the woman who’d once jammed a teenage Piper in the potato box when company showed up unannounced, then lifted the lid half an hour later and asked her why she hadn’t peeled none for supper.
“Well, don’t just stand there a’suckin’ on a prune pit,” Marian told Grayson as she dusted imaginary something off the front of his shirt and straightened his collar. “Come on in this house and let us fetch you some supper.”
“Ma, I’m not hungry. I—”
“Don’t be silly. Of course, you’re hungry. Boys is always hungry. We got left-over meatloaf”—she shot a look at Piper, who nodded—and it might even still be warm. I can whip up some biscuits and—”
Marian hadn’t made biscuits in months. It’d likely slipped her mind how painful it was. And Piper sensed Grayson had gotten a good enough look at the old woman now to know that whipping up biscuits probably wasn’t an option, that she was, indeed, having trouble standing.
“You’ll do no such thing, Ma,” he said firmly. “I’ll make myself a meatloaf sandwich. But first, I want you to sit down.”
He turned to face Carter, unaware that their greeting was a mirror image of Carter’s and Zeke’s parting on Friday.
“Carter,” Grayson said, his face expressionless.
“Grayson,” Carter said. There was a full beat of awkward silence before Carter turned to his mother, who was looking from one son to the other, confused.
“Grayson’s right, Ma,” Carter said, “you need to sit down.” He took his mother’s shoulders and gently turned her, pushed her toward the screen door and guided her inside.
Carter cast a glance at Piper, a look she couldn’t read.
Carter!
Grayson’s return had wiped every other thought and emotion out of Piper’s mind in a great roaring flood of joy and relief. Now, the floodwaters receded enough for her to remember, and she sucked in a gasp.
Carter had kissed her.
And Grayson had seen!
That’s when Piper heard Sadie inside crying and Maggie’s voice soothing the child. Obviously, the commotion had trumped Maggie’s efforts to sing her to sleep.
“I left my duffel in the road,” Grayson said and headed back down the porch steps to retrieve it.
*
An image flashed across the movie screen of Grayson’s mind in excruciating detail, so clear he might have been looking at it through binoculars. No, through the lens of a microscope.
His brother. His wife.
A nameless emotion so fierce it sucked the breath out of his lungs seized him, the pain of it like the tiny cuts of shrapnel, a thousand different agonies all over the body, exploding in every nerve. Behind him, in the roar of his damaged hearing, he thought he could hear a child crying.
Grayson took only a few steps out into the road, then slowed, and the doors to a thousand fears flew open in his mind. The seeping shadows spilled into the road like ink spreading through the fibers of a blotter. The darkness seemed deeper because he’d been looking into the lighted house, and for a moment, his heart kicked into a gallop.
Never look into a bright light!
Sergeant Hotchner had slapped him on the back of the head when he said it, then gestured out into the shadows of the jungles beyond the perimeter.
“In the three minutes before you can see again, Charlie’s going to come strolling out of the jungle and slit your throat with a rusty Spam lid.”
Grayson tried to shake it off, but he couldn’t keep himself from scanning the shadowy undergrowth beyond the road, looking for the glint of metal from the light behind him, searching for a rounded puddle of darker shadow in the bushes.
Nothing.
Of course, there’s nothing, you idiot. Knock-knock, Grayson. You’re in West Virginia! You’re home.
His head knew that, but still he snatched the duffel up off the ground and double-timed it back across the road to the gate.
Piper stood at the door, waiting for him. She held a little girl in her arms, a child with honey-colored hair in a tangle of bed-head around her face and down her back—the most breathtakingly beautiful little girl he’d ever seen.
Grayson stepped into the house and set his duffel on the floor, not taking his eyes off the child in Piper’s arms.
“Sadie,” Piper said. “This is Daddy. Do you remember Daddy?”
The child noticed him for the first time then and froze. Grayson’s heart melted into a puddle in his chest, and he reached out to take her from her mother. But she recoiled from him, tilted her head back and shrieked, then buried her face in her mother’s neck, sobbing.
Piper looked chagrined and patted the child furiously on the back.
“I’m sorry. She…she’s shy, terrified of strangers.” She realized what she’d said and tried to backtrack. “I mean, if she’s not used to you, she’s afraid—men particularly, scare her.”
Grayson heard something, a small voice, behind Piper.
“Want me to go get Rasmus? Or her blankie?”
It seemed familiar, a voice he’d heard before, though he couldn’t place exactly when or where. But the sound of it made him uneasy, took his mind somewhere unpleasant, somewhere he didn’t want to go.
Then Piper stepped aside, and he could see who was standing behind her.
“Honey, this is Gray,” Piper said to the child.
“Your name’s Gray?” the little girl asked.
“You name Grape?” Nguyen asks, but she’s not walking beside him through the little village of Yan Ling, ignoring the stench of his latrine-soaked clothing. She isn’t wearing her habitual gap-toothed grin, either. Her face is a mask of terror, and she is covered in blood. Not splattered with blood. Covered in it from the top of her head to the bottom of her bare feet. Her hair is dripping it. Her sack dress is soaked. A wash of blood flows down her legs into a growing pond around her feet. He drops to his knees in front of her, stunned.
Then he notices for the first time that there are…cracks in her face. In every part of her that he can see, in fact. She looks like a broken glass that has been pieced back together. But not all the pieces are there. Her left hand is missing. So a
re all the fingers on her right. He can smell the copper stench of her blood. He can smell the cordite of explosives, too.
A machine gun rattles off rounds behind him, and he can hear the sound of shouting. More gunfire, screams.
“You can’t be here. You’re dead.”
She turns to run away but he grabs her—by the right arm, the one that has a hand on the end of it with no fingers.
“Wait! Are you still—?”
He reaches out, tries to pull up her dress to look for the explosives strapped beneath it, but she wiggles, beats at his hands. Then someone in the smoke grabs her hand and pulls her out of his grasp.
“She’s wired!” he yells and rolls away from her. “C-4 under her dress.” Gunfire rattles in his ears again, and he reaches for his rifle slung over his shoulder. But his rifle’s gone! Where is his rifle?
The gunfire is closer! There’s an explosion, and he curls into a ball as the debris falls all around him. Someone grabs his shoulder, shakes him, calls his name.
“Grayson! Grayson, what’s wrong with you?”
He opens his eyes.
Carter stood over him, shaking him.
“Grayson, what’s wrong with you?” Carter demanded.
The world slid back into place with a sickening sensation, like the pit of your stomach in those seconds after you leap out of the plane before your chute opens and yanks you upward.
He was lying curled in a ball on the hardwood floor, with his hands over his head, cringing. He sat up slowly, looking around wonderingly. The rag rug on the floor was bunched up where he’d slid it across the floor. Piper stared down at him, shocked and shaken. Sadie clung to her mother’s neck. No longer screaming, Sadie’s head was borrowed down out of sight, and she made the hitching sounds of a child too frightened to cry. His mother sat on the couch. Her look of shocked confusion felt like a slap in the face.
Carter hulked over him. His brow was furrowed, pleated above his nose with twin lines. His lips were twisted down in a frown that might have been disgust. A flash of rage blossomed into a blaze in Grayson’s chest, and his hands curled into fists.
Then he saw a little girl who looked to be maybe ten years old clinging to Piper’s leg and cringing away from him. Her hair was the color of napalm flames in the trees, and a spray of red freckles on her nose stood out like sequins on her pale skin.
Grayson gestured toward the unknown child.
“Who..?” He meant to say more, tried to, but his voice locked up tight in his throat after the first word.
*
Piper thought wildly that Grayson sounded like a hoot-owl on the limb of a sycamore tree. She almost blurted out, “Who-who!” in response, but she held onto the words, recognizing them for what they were: incipient hysteria.
What just happened?
“Gray, what are you do—”
“Who is she?” he asked, never taking his eyes off Maggie.
Maggie was equally transfixed. Only she was staring at Grayson in terror. And why wouldn’t she be afraid? A big man yells at her for no reason, starts pawing her—it occurred to Piper this probably wasn’t the first time—she felt sick.
“Why did you shout at her?” She couldn’t keep the angry accusation out of her voice as she patted Maggie with her free hand. “Why did you? She’s only a little girl, a lost little girl.”
“Lost?” He seemed to be having trouble forming words. He was panting. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
“She came here Wednesday. I opened the door and there…”
She turned to Maggie. “Honey, would you take Sadie into the bedroom, give her Rasmus and her blankie and—”
“She was about asleep when…” Maggie’s voice was trembling, and she watched Grayson out of the corner of her eye, prepared to bolt if he came at her again. “I’ll rock her, but she’s mighty upset.”
Clearly, so was Maggie.
“Sing to her,” Piper said and began to peel Sadie’s arms away from her neck. The toddler clutched at her, started to cry, then noticed Carter standing beside Piper. She turned toward him and held out her arms.
“Hold you, Unka Cardur!” Her voice sounded desperate, and she lurched toward him, leaning so far out of Piper’s arms that Piper was thrown off balance, and Carter had to snatch the child out of the air before Piper dropped her. Sadie wrapped her arms around his neck and snuggled close to him for comfort. Then, from the safety of his arms, she cast a sideways glance at Grayson on the floor—only for a moment—before she turned away and planted her thumb in her mouth, snug as a cork in a wine bottle.
Carter held out his free hand to Maggie.
“Tell you what—let’s both put Sunshine to bed.” He led the little girl into the bedroom without looking back.
Piper turned to Grayson. He was still sitting on the floor, leaning now against the pile of rug he’d scooted aside when he went rolling across the room.
“Her name’s Maggie,” she said. “She must be from way back up in—”
“Must be? Don’t you know? How’d she get here?”
Was there accusation in his tone?
“I don’t know.”
Grayson stared at her with a look she couldn’t read. He said nothing. She said nothing. The moment drew out, and Piper didn’t know how to get from where they were now back to where they’d been only a few minutes before. She didn’t think Gray did either.
Chapter 15
Carter broke the spell. He stepped out of Sadie’s bedroom at the end of the hall, closed the door behind him and walked with purpose into the parlor. They could hear Maggie’s muted singing behind the door.
“I have to get back to Charleston,” he said.
“But Carter, aren’t you going to—?” Marian began.
“It’s late,” he said, his voice curt and clipped. He looked at Piper and for a moment their gazes locked, then he turned to Grayson. “You two…obviously have lots of things to talk about.”
Without another word, he strode to his mother and planted a peck on her cheek. She grabbed his hand and held on—but he pulled it free and was out the door and gone in seconds.
The room was quiet.
Grayson still sat at Piper’s feet, and the incongruity of having a sane, rational conversation with a man who’d rolled around on the floor like he was suffering some kind of…hallucination…struck her.
“What was this”—she made an all-encompassing gesture—“all about? What happened to you?”
His voice was soft. “I don’t know.”
“I do!” said Marian from the couch, and they both turned, startled. “I disremember what Everett called it, but he was still having them…visions when he and I got married, and he’d been back from Germany for nigh on six years then. Jumped sky high if’n the door slammed. And he had horrible bad dreams for years. After a while, it got better, of course. But it took time.”
She looked at her son tenderly.
“You seen some terrible things over there in Veet Nam, didn’t you, son?”
Piper watched his face close, saw the shutters slam shut behind his eyes.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He sounded cold, like a robot.
Then he got to his feet and leaned to straighten the rug. Piper took the other edge and helped him move it back into place in the center of the room.
“The little girl, Maggie, what’s she doing here?” he asked.
Piper told him the story, searched his face for the sympathy she expected to see there but could find it nowhere in evidence on his features. He sat down beside his mother on the couch, and the old woman took his hand in hers and sat patting it as Piper spoke.
“She’d been out in them woods at least a couple of days, I’d warrant, ’fore she come here,” Marian put in. “Them bruises was two or three days old. And she was so hungry, she liked to eat up everything we had in the house.”
“But why is she still here?” Grayson asked. “If she got here Thursday, didn’t you take her to the sheriff?”
&nbs
p; “Of course, I did. But Deputy Higgins said he didn’t have any reports of missing children.”
“That still doesn’t answer my question—why is she here and not in some—?”
“Because I said she could stay with me until they locate her parents.” Why didn’t he get that she wanted Maggie here. It had made perfect sense to Carter. “Is that so hard to understand?”
“No, it isn’t.”
That maddening calm. No, not calm. Detachment. Disinterest.
“Tomorrow morning when I go into town for groceries, I’ll stop by the sheriff’s office and find out if they’ve made any progress finding the family that beat the crap out of her,” Piper said. “Okay?” She turned toward the kitchen. “What would you like on your meatloaf sandwich?”
*
Grayson could hear his heart, sledgehammer heavy, pounding and pounding, slamming blood to his brain to flush out unreason.
He knew he was missing something, but he couldn’t make out what. He wasn’t picking up on emotions, but he couldn’t seem…
Bottom line: he was exhausted. It felt like he’d been traveling for weeks. On his body clock, it was dawn—after a sleepless night. He took two bites of the meatloaf sandwich Piper fixed for him. It tasted like sawdust. The room began to swim in and out of focus.
A hand gently shook him. He was sitting on the sofa, his chin on his chest. The room was dark. His mother was gone. The house was quiet.
“Come to bed, honey,” Piper said softly and took his hand to tug him gently to his feet. “You have to be very quiet. Sadie is a light sleeper.”
He tried to tiptoe into the bedroom, but combat boots made that activity more or less ludicrous. He did manage not to stumble, though, sat down on the edge of the bed, got the boots unlaced and off his feet without sounding the baby alarm. He stood, dropped his pants to the floor and stepped out of them. Then turned to face Piper as he unbuttoned his shirt. She sat up in bed in a simple white cotton nightgown that shone like a polished pearl in the moonlight streaming in the window. All the fatigue left him then. He pulled his shirt off and tossed it on the floor, knelt on the bed and took her into his arms. She felt so good, so soft and warm. She melted into him and—
