“Don’t go,” I said, crossing the room toward her in the sliver of light. “Please. Stay.”
I was naked and cold, and she looked at me for a moment before taking her shoes off and lying back on the bed. I nestled against her, draping my arm across her hip and tucking my knees against hers, soaking up the warmth of her. When I spoke, my voice was barely above a whisper. A month into our second tour, Sergeant Fletcher received some information about the whereabouts of a sniper who’d killed one of our guys and wounded four, a shooter so skilled that we were all speculating he must have been trained in the Iraqi military. The target was supposed to be hiding in an apartment building on the eastern side of Ramadi, and we rolled out at zero four hundred, when the neighborhood was shrouded in darkness and the air still cool. The first to dismount was Perez, whom we nicknamed Chewie because of his red hair and mustache, then the rest of us followed. We’d gone maybe nine or ten yards when Perez got blown up. All we could find of him later was a leg that landed on the hood of our Humvee, and his intestines hanging from a tree. The sergeant had us collect what we could into a bag, which would be shipped to Perez’s family in Texas for the funeral.
A couple of days later, Sergeant Fletcher took us to see the informant who’d told him about the sniper’s hiding place. His name was Badawi, a former clerk at the Ministry of Interior. He had a nice house, with blue trim on the windows and an addition above the kitchen that he was still building. There was a whiff of burned bread in the hallway—that was the smell I could still smell in my dreams—and the only people inside were Badawi’s wife and children. Aside from making tea when we came to visit, the wife had never spoken to any of us. When Fletcher asked where her husband was, she said she didn’t know, that he hadn’t come home the night before. She was in a green housedress with a geometric pattern, and her hair was in a kerchief tied at the nape of her neck. Her kids sat on the floor, playing cards, the presence of Marines no longer a novelty to them, yet she could barely disguise her contempt for us. Her eyes were full of blame. Each question Fletcher asked, she answered with a clipped yes or no.
“Maybe she can’t say anything in front of the kids,” Fletcher said. He took her into the back room, and Fierro and I stayed behind, keeping an eye on the children. The game they played was unfamiliar to me, and I tried to figure out the rules by watching them. Not ten minutes later, the terp came out, walking past us to the front door.
“We done here?” Fierro asked.
“No, but the sergeant doesn’t need me. That woman speaks English.”
Fierro and I looked at each other, stunned. In the six months we’d been coming to this house to visit the informant, his wife had never given any indication that she understood us. Now I wondered what we might have said in her presence, whether it had any intelligence value, whether it might have been used against us. And there were other comments, too, comments about her, obscene things we were confident our English concealed. From the back room came the sound of a chair being dragged against the floor. “Sergeant?” I asked. But there was no answer: Fletcher had turned off his headset.
I went down the hallway, keeping the kids in my line of vision. Even with the sound of the nature documentary that was showing on television, I heard the pop clearly. I reached for the door, but it flew open and Fletcher came out, his body filling the frame. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“She tried to reach for my sidearm.”
Behind him, the woman lay on the floor, a bullet hole through her cheek, choking on her own blood. I walked into the room, yet her eyes didn’t track me, they were fixed on a spot in the ceiling. A minute later, she stopped moving. We mounted up and left, but all the way back to camp I ran through the sequence of events that had started with the killing of Perez and ended with the killing of Badawi’s wife. The story, or what I could make of it, had an arc that my instinct told me was wrong and, once we were alone in the barracks, I tried to ask Fierro about it.
“What the fuck does it matter?” he said.
“It doesn’t bother you that she didn’t have anything to do with this?”
“You don’t know that.”
“You don’t know that she did, either.”
“One of our guys is dead and you want me to worry about her? Go the fuck to sleep.”
At chow the next morning I sat next to Fletcher, found a way to bring the conversation back to the night before, but he only shrugged and said the wife had gone crazy when he’d told her he’d find Badawi no matter how long it took, and that’s when she’d reached for his weapon. “And you couldn’t stop her?” I asked. “A tiny woman like her?”
“I did stop her,” he said with a frown. “What’s the matter with you, Gorecki? Take some time to think through what you just implied here. Think it through carefully; you might have a different perspective.”
My perspective wouldn’t have changed if I’d stayed where I’d been ordered to, in the living room with Fierro. I wouldn’t have seen or heard anything. But I’d taken four inquisitive steps down the hallway, and those four steps made me doubt everything. Fletcher wasn’t trying to win the war—that was something for the higher-ups to worry about. He cared only about protecting his men. And he wanted to avenge them, too. But my questions had clearly irritated him and I found out just how much when he posted me on shitter cleanup duty for three days. Three whole days. I remember pulling out the first tub, pouring fuel over it, and before striking the match to light it up, doubling over to puke.
“What was her name?” Nora asked. “The woman Fletcher killed.”
“I don’t know. He filed a report, but I never got to see it.”
At some point while I was telling her the story, she’d turned around to face me. Somehow, she had removed all my pretenses. It was as if she had found the right key to unlock a rusty old safe, and the contents spilled out. But I couldn’t tell if I had gone too far, told too much. We were quiet for a while. Eventually, she closed her eyes, and I held her until the morning, when she got up to go to work.
Nora
I was wrestling with the lock on the medicine cabinet in the storage room when Veronica walked in with a half-empty bag of Dixie cups. She tied it in a knot and hoisted it easily onto the top shelf, where it landed with a loud, crinkly sound that set my teeth on edge. My head was throbbing, and the lock wasn’t cooperating. Veronica watched me for a minute and then, in a practiced gesture, readjusted the key and opened the medicine cabinet for me. “There,” she said. “It gets stuck sometimes.”
“Thanks,” I said. Inside the cabinet were bottles of antiseptic, antibiotic ointment, and bandages of all sizes, but no painkillers. “We don’t have any Ibuprofen?”
“We must’ve run out.”
On the wall next to the cabinet was a framed picture of the Pantry staff, taken the day my father had opened for business, twelve years earlier. Marty, still with a full head of hair, held a menu, and a younger Veronica, looking prim in her new uniform, smiled shyly at the camera. From the kitchen came the clatter of glasses being loaded into the rack.
“Ask Rafi,” Veronica said. Her tone suddenly turned vicious. “He’s always helping himself to stuff around here. Maybe he took it.” Then she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her apron pocket and stepped out.