Otherwise Unharmed

Chapter 10—Blatant Truth

“I joined the Marines when I was seventeen.”

It seemed like as good a place as any to start.

“Why seventeen? Did your parents want you to?”

Or not.

“No, I never met my parents.” I sighed and dropped onto the ledge by the window. I ran my hand over my head, somewhat disgusted by how long my hair had gotten, but also recalling how it felt when Lia had her fingers in it, so I couldn’t hate it too much. “I was an orphan. I grew up in a convent in southwestern Ohio.”

“A convent? You mean, a place for nuns?”

“Yeah, and also orphanages a lot of the time, usually for kids who are hard to place in foster care or whatever.”

“Are you Catholic, then?”

I snickered a bit.

“Nah, not really. Not anymore.” My hand instinctively moved up to my chest, and I fingered the dog tags hanging there. I could feel the raised letters.

“What happened to your parents? How old were you when you went there?”

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “I’ve never found out who they were, just that—for whatever reason—they either died or didn’t want me. I was there as long as I can remember, so I guess pretty much always. No one would ever tell me what happened, not even when I got older. I’ve always assumed it was because they didn’t want to deal with a kid at all because if they were dead, someone would just tell me, wouldn’t they?”

“You would think so,” Lia agreed. She lay back on the bed and leaned her head against her hand. “So why seventeen?”

“I was emancipated. I was done with high school, but I didn’t really have any money or anything. I wanted to go to college, so the military made sense.”

“Are orphans usually emancipated?”

“No, not usually.”

“So why were you?”

I hadn’t expected this portion of my past to really be a part of the conversation, and I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. Still, I had promised her I would tell her everything, so I did.

“Because I asked for it,” I said, “and the Mother Superior wasn’t in a position to deny it.”

“What do you mean by that?” Lia’s eyes darkened.

She was way too perceptive.

“Well…” I let my voice trail off a second while I thought about how to word it. There really wasn’t a clean way to do it, so I went with blunt. “I’d been fucking her, and I threatened to use it against her if she didn’t sign the papers.”

“Holy shit!” Lia yelled out. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“But you were underage! How old was she?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. Fifty-something, maybe?”

“Jesus Christ, Evan!”

“It had been going on for years,” I told her. “I think I was fourteen when it started.”

Lia contemplated a moment.

“She molested you.”

“Whatever you want to call it,” I said with a shrug. “I wasn’t complaining. Knowing all her dirty little secrets came in handy when I wanted something. If she was using me, I was using her just as much.”

I watched Lia closely as she let my words sink in. She was staring down at the sheets, watching her fingers twist the fabric.

“You still want me to go on?”

“Of course,” she said quietly.

“Your mom was right, you know.”

“About what?”

“You don’t know much about me. You might not want to know all this shit.”

Lia thought for a moment and then looked back to me.

“I want to know,” she stated.

“It’s going to change everything.” My voice carried both warning and desperation. “I won’t be able to take it back. You won’t be able to just forget it.”

“I know.”

With a deep breath, I continued.

“I went through basic training and figured out I was a damn good shot. I became an expert marksman very quickly, so I went for sniper school at the base in Quantico, Virginia, and finished out on top. I could take out targets over a mile away and hardly ever missed.”

“Shit,” Lia said with a sharp outtake of breath.

“I ended up deployed to the Middle East as part of a Scout Sniper platoon to do reconnaissance into Afghanistan for a while, did well, got promoted to staff sergeant, and led the other members of the platoon under the captain of the battalion. When he was killed in battle, I was promoted to lieutenant in the field and took over for the rest of the…well, up until the time I was captured.”

My mind raced with memories, and I dropped my hand from my dog tags when I realized I was gripping them.

“What happened?” she asked softly.

“We were scouting out the area where one of the Al Qaida leaders was supposedly spotted. My team was the first one out, and we were the deepest into the area, but we hadn’t seen anything for days. There were four other groups behind us—spread out several miles to cover as much terrain as possible. We weren’t supposed to engage or anything yet—just watch and report back when the time was right for the rest of the SF infantry to join us.”

“SF?”

“Sorry. Special Forces.”

“Got it.”

“We had a small base set up in the rocks around the desert—tents, a couple Hummers, and a small outbuilding. I was back behind the outbuilding when they attacked.”

I took a slow, steady breath. I was trying to keep my memories focused on the debriefing that took place after I returned to Virginia and not on the events themselves, but it wasn’t completely possible.

“Like I said, it had been really quiet. I think we got a little complacent, which is how they managed to get the drop on us. I heard some noise, came back around, and everyone in my unit was dead.”

“Oh my God.”

I didn’t look at her as I went on.

“I didn’t really have much time to react. I got hit over the head, came to for a few seconds in a truck, bumping down a road, but got hit again. The next thing I really remember, I was in one of their camps. They didn’t do much but smack me around for a while and ask me where the other units were located– they were waiting for their leader to show up.”

“What did you do?”

“Gave them my name, rank, and service number,” I said with a hollow laugh. “Just like the fucking movies. I couldn’t really do much of anything—they had me hogtied. They kept hitting me with a bag full of fucking potatoes or something—ached for days, even when they left me alone for a while.”

When I glanced at her, I could see her looking at me closely, and I knew exactly what she was doing—checking for scars.

I stood up, unbuckled my belt, and shoved my jeans down just a bit over my hip.

“That’s the only one I have,” I told her as I showed her a two-inch long, faded scar on my left side. “The insurgents didn’t even give it to me. There was a bunch of shit lying around the motor pool when I got drunk and fell on a sharp piece of metal. I didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened, so I tried to take care of it myself. It got pretty infected, and I ended up in the infirmary anyway. It was the only official reprimand I ever received while I was serving. I think my captain called it ‘for being a dumbass.’”

I laughed and shook my head.

“The guys who captured me—they didn’t want to leave any permanent marks—hardly ever even hit me in the face.”

“What happened when the leader arrived?”

“Classic interrogation,” I replied. “He was a decent-sized guy with a shitload of facial hair and a nasty attitude. I never did hear his name, and he wasn’t someone well-known enough that I’d seen his picture before. He shoved my head in a bucket of water until I nearly drowned, then shoved my face into the sand. Then he had the rest of them beat on me for a while, claim they already knew the answers to the questions they were asking me, then start kicking me. He tore off my fingernails and seemed to have a pretty good time doing it.”

Lia gasped, but I didn’t stop.

“They’d ask questions; I wouldn’t give them anything, and then they’d start all over again. He yelled a lot, but he never could get anything out of me. After a few days, they tossed a burlap sack over my head and loaded me into a truck again. I tried to count so I could get an idea of how far we were going, but I didn’t really know where we started from, so it wasn’t very helpful. Still, I figure we drove about three hours. Once we stopped, I was pulled into a shed where they just made me kneel on concrete while they spoke in Arabic. I didn’t catch much of it—just got the idea they were setting something up. There were a lot of scraping sounds, like they were moving things around.”

“When they took the bag off, I could see two other guys tied up like me. They had cameras and shit set up all around us, and there were Afghani soldiers standing all over the place with assault rifles pointed at us.”

I turned my eyes to Lia to see how she was taking it all. She had moved to a sitting position on the bed and was watching me with her hands in her lap.

“I figured that was it, you know?” I said as I looked at her. “I thought they were just going to execute us and be done with it.”

“That’s where the video came from,” Lia said.

“That’s the one,” I confirmed. “It got a lot of YouTube hits before it was taken down, I hear.”

I collected my thoughts for a minute before going on.

“You’ve watched it, so you know a lot of what happened next. They wanted us to say how well we were being treated, which made me laugh, and then they wanted us to say that the US president was wrong to have troops in the Middle East and that we agreed they should all be removed—the usual shit. The journalist guy—he just kept crying and screaming that he didn’t know anything. The other one, though—I knew him.”

“Who was he?” Lia asked when I stopped talking for a minute.

“He was another Marine—a private who had just been deployed a few months before. I’d seen him around a few times, but he wasn’t a sniper, so I didn’t know him too well. He was part of the infantry group who would have joined us if we had spotted the enemy first. He kept telling them to fuck off until they bashed his head with the butt of one of their rifles. He was unconscious during the filming.”

“What was his name?” Lia asked.

“Classified,” I responded automatically. The last thing I wanted to think about was the freckle-faced private who had ultimately been our demise. I still thought he went down way too easy when they hit him and wondered if he had been conscious though it all. Regardless, if he hadn’t cracked, my unit might have made it through. I might never have been captured.

She blinked a couple of times but didn’t ask again.

“When we wouldn’t cooperate, they went with Plan B. They started rolling the cameras and told the world that we were invading their country unlawfully and all that bullshit. They said they were going to execute one of us as a spy, and I told them to kill me, but they didn’t. They took out the civilian dude just to make some fucking point. I was bagged and loaded back into the truck and taken somewhere else—I don’t know where. It took a lot longer than it had taken us to get to where they did the filming. I’d counted maybe four hours before I ended up falling asleep.”

“Once we got there, it was pretty obvious the place was a fairly permanent site. There were decently constructed buildings hidden in the rocks and not just soldiers there, but women and children, too. I was dumped in a small room in the dark for a while, maybe just for the night—I’m not sure—and then they started all over again. Mostly they deprived me of any food and water, trying to break me down. I wasn’t too interested in dying of dehydration, but I figured at that point, I wasn’t going to make it anyway.”

I looked over at the clock on the nightstand and realized I had been talking for more than an hour and a half already. I still hadn’t even gotten to the good shit—the shit that was likely going to make her turn and run.

“Give me a minute,” I said. I stood up and walked out the door, not even bothering to put on a shirt or anything. Luckily, the dude at the front desk was willing to sell me a few of his cigarettes, so I didn’t have to go far.

“Don’t smoke in the room,” he called out as I walked away.

Whatever.

I lit up with a pack of matches displaying the motel’s name on the front and walked into the room where Lia was still sitting on the bed.

“You smoke?” She seemed taken aback.

“Not usually,” I replied. I grabbed one of the plastic cups from the bathroom to use as an ashtray and put a little water in the bottom of it, then took my spot on the windowsill and went on.

“Once they figured out all their abuse wasn’t going to work on me, they tried just letting me rot for days at a time in-”

My throat tried to close up on me, like my body didn’t even want the words to come out of my mouth, but I swallowed hard and fought for a little control.

“They put me in a big hole in the ground out in the sun, sand everywhere, and when the sun got to the top of the sky, my back would blister in the heat. After a few days of just leaving me there, they’d come up and ask if I wanted water. Then they’d pour salt water all over me and leave. Usually the next day, they’d haul me out and give me something to drink. Then I was back in the hole. I think they were trying to just…I don’t know…drive me crazy? It probably worked.”

My organs felt like they were trying to climb out of my skin, and I realized I was gnawing on the edge of my thumb with the hand that didn’t contain the nearly burnt-down cigarette. I stopped chewing on myself and tossed the butt into the cup of water.

Lia sat quietly, barely moving. She was holding back tears, but I wasn’t looking for her sympathy. I only wanted to get through this shit so she would understand and hopefully decide my reasons for all the shit I had done were valid enough.

“So, that’s where I stayed for months,” I finally said. “Every once in a while they’d give me water and maybe some rice, but that was it. I’d completely lost track of how long it had been, but one day when they brought me out, that same guy—the leader of that group, or one of them, at least—came back. He started telling me a bunch of shit that was all classified information that he definitely shouldn’t have known. I figured out then that the private I’d seen when they filmed us must have cracked. He certainly would have had knowledge of the intel this guy was telling me.”

I leaned over and put my elbows on my knees. Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried not to let the anger from that time get to me.

“Then he tells me when and where they picked the dude up.” My hands clenched into fists. “Turns out they had him long before they got me. At some point, I realized he was the one who gave away our position, though it wasn’t confirmed until after I came home.”

“The private betrayed me,” Lia whispered.

“What?”

“You’ve said it in your sleep,” she replied, “a couple of times.”

More talking in my fucking sleep. Ultimately, that was what cost Bridgett her life—she learned too much from me while I was napping.

“What else have I said?” I swallowed past the tightness in my throat and awaited her answer.

“Nothing that made any sense,” she said. “Like what you said about the private betraying you—I never would have known what that meant until you told me. You’ve said the word ‘sand’ several times and something about being hit, and lots of letters and numbers that didn’t make sense. I never understood anything else you said.”

I wondered what the letters and numbers might have meant. They could have been military abbreviations, weapon types, codes—there were too many possible answers without having her write them down or something. If she did that, then I would have to explain it to her, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to set myself up like that.

Maybe I could record myself sleeping.

“I’m sorry,” Lia said. “I sidetracked you.”

“It’s all right. I could use a break.”

We ate a little of the leftover pizza, and I took a minute to shave. It was good to have the scruff off; I hated it when my face was stubbly and scratchy. I wished I had my trimmers with me so I could give myself a haircut as well, but I was going to have to live with just the shave.

I made a valiant attempt to distract Lia into fucking again, but she wasn’t having any of it. She quickly and definitively steered me back to my life’s story. I sighed as I gave up and then sat with my back against the headboard.

“So I figured out the private was how they found us,” I went on, “and the insurgent leader continued to try to get more out of me.”

Flashes in my head started feeling like a hammer against my temples.

“You like to tell me your numbers? I’ll give you numbers! How about you count this? Maybe we just keep going until we hit your number, huh?”

My gut tightened up, and my body went stiff. For a moment, Lia and the motel room were gone, and there was nothing but sand and sweat and pain.

“Evan? Evan, baby—it’s okay. I’m right here.”

I felt hands on my face and realized my wrists weren’t bound. I reached out and grabbed the arms that tried to encircle me, and then I heard her voice.

“It’s okay, Evan, it’s me. It’s Lia.”

It was the cracking in her voice that brought me out of it. My eyes found her, and I saw the streaks of tears running down her cheeks. Releasing her forearms, I reached out and brushed one of the tears away.

“Sorry.”

“What were you remembering?” she asked.

I closed my eyes and swallowed. I felt her fingers against my jaw and turned slightly to press my face to her palm.

“Just…everything he did. Trying to get information…trying to break me.”

I opened my eyes to find her staring into my face. My chest rose and fell as I tried to take in enough air. I could see it—I could see it in her face. She knew there was more, and she was going to ask for the details. My hands clenched, and I started to hyperventilate.

“Evan.” Lia’s voice was stern, the tone causing me to instinctively look to her eyes. “You’re all right. You are with me, and I’m not going to ask you anything else about that, okay? He hurt you—I understand that—and that’s enough detail.”

I nodded once, then again. My body was shaking uncontrollably, and I couldn’t even figure out how I’d let it get this far. I could feel sand in my throat and up my nose, heat from the desert sun on my skin, and there were hands on my back and arms—pushing me down and holding me to the ground.

Then they were gone, and it was just me and Lia in a motel room bed. Her arms were around my head, and I rested my cheek on her stomach.

“You don’t have to tell me any more.”

As much as I knew she was trying to make it easier, Lia giving me an out was actually making it more difficult.

“There’s a shit ton I haven’t told you,” I reminded her. “You need to know about some of it because of what’s happening now.”

Lia sighed and nodded.

“I really had lost all track of time after I had been there a few months,” I said. “I was always tied up, so I couldn’t even make scratches on a wall or anything, and I was in that…that fucking hole most of the time anyway. I spent most of the time trying not to think, but there wasn’t anything else to do. I counted up all my sins and asked God to forgive them. I swore if He’d just let me die, I’d do the penance or whatever I needed to do—anything to stop the fucking pain.”

I paused and raised an eyebrow at her.

“So, no,” I said with a sardonic grin, “I’m not Catholic anymore. God can kiss my ass for letting me rot there for a year and a half.”

Lia’s teeth grabbed her lower lip, and her eyes tensed. She nodded slightly, and I went on with my story.

“When their base was raided, and I was rescued, I’d pretty much given up any hope. I didn’t even believe there was anyone there, you know? I thought my mind had totally cracked and I was hallucinating. I don’t think I started believing it was all over until I was at the hospital in Germany, and that was because they finally gave me something strong enough to make the pain stop.”

I took a deep breath.

“Malnutrition, dehydration, muscle atrophy—which took a decent amount of physical therapy before I could walk properly—a dislocated shoulder, four fractured ribs. That’s what they said I had and kept telling me how lucky I was that I was otherwise unharmed.”

I laughed humorlessly.

“That’s a good one, huh? Otherwise unharmed.”

“I can’t say that I find it very funny, no,” Lia remarked.

I pulled my legs up and rested my arms over my knees as I smoked. I held the butt end of the cigarette between my thumb and first two fingers and angled the lit end toward the palm of my hand, shielding the glow from view. It took a few minutes for me to get myself out of my own head and back to the rest of my little tale, but Lia was patient. I finished the smoke and kept talking.

“My first episode was maybe a month or so after I came back to the States,” I recalled. “I remember the first time because it scared the shit out of me. I was at the gym doing leg presses or something like that, and all of a sudden, they were there—all around me. They were yelling, and I could hear the gunfire and see the smoke. The whole floor had become sand, and when I stood up, I fell face-first into it.”

I grabbed another cigarette and lit it.

“I spent a lot of time in the psych ward at the military hospital in Hampton, Virginia. The doctors there treated me for a couple of months. PTSD, the psych said. He wanted to write a fucking book about what I went through, but I wouldn’t authorize it. They talked about giving me a desk job, and I pretty much told them to shove it. I was a sniper, for fuck’s sake. What was I going to do behind a desk?”

I took a few puffs off the smoke to calm myself again and wondered why I thought it sucked when I just felt numb. I’d give most anything to feel numb about all of it right now.

“I was honorably discharged and moved back to Ohio, thinking I at least knew the area, even if I didn’t really want anything to do with the people I knew there. I spent every dime I had to buy my Barrett rifle. Whatever money I made doing odd jobs, I spent on ammo and time at the shooting range.”

“You bought the rifle?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

I looked over to her quizzically, thinking the answer was obvious, but then I couldn’t find the words to express why I needed it.

“It was…comforting,” I finally said. “It’s almost like…I don’t know…an extension of myself. I needed it.”

I could tell she didn’t get it, but I didn’t know what else to say to make myself clear.

“That’s where I met Jonathan.”

“Who’s Jonathan?”

“He was just another guy at the range,” I said. “He was always complimenting me on my accuracy and wanted to try out my Barrett. He ended up inviting me out to his place where he had his own shooting range set up on private property. He wasn’t in town a lot, but he said I could come out anytime I wanted to shoot. Saved me a lot of money, and he never pressed me for information about what had happened to me. He eventually figured out I’d been a POW and whatever, but he never pushed, you know?”

Lia looked down at her hands.

“Am I pushing too much?” she asked.

“It’s a bit late to be asking,” I said with a quiet chuckle. “No, it’s okay. I want you to know. Well, no, I don’t, but I think you should anyway.”

Lia nodded.

“At some point, we ended up talking about…well, about other shit. Career shit. I didn’t have one, and even though the military would have paid for college at that point, I had no desire to be a fucking engineer or whatever any more. He offered me an alternative.”

I stopped. This was it—the rest would be what might drive her away forever. I’d let her go, too. I wouldn’t like it, but I’d do it.

“Jonathan asked me to come to Chicago with him to meet the guy he worked for. I did, and his boss offered me a job doing what I do best.”

“What do you do best, Evan?” Lia asked when I paused too long.

I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and then looked straight at her.

“I’m a hit man, Lia. I work for the largest crime family in the city, and I kill people for money.”

Nothing could take back my words now.