The helmet strap circling her chin was going to cause a breakout; Soledad could feel the oil and sweat there, and so she reached up to wipe her skin. Outside the window it looked like Nevada or Arizona, which is what she wrote to Luz in her letters, hoping it would make them seem less far apart. Soledad told Luz about the monkeys and the sounds they made. These were details a child would enjoy, but Soledad feared Luz wasn’t a child anymore, that she’d changed. There were warnings from school about truancy and smoking. It’d been a mistake to join the reserves—Soledad had learned that too late—but after Luz’s father died she was desperate for money and wanted to go to college. She’d earned two degrees, a bachelor’s in sociology and a master’s in women’s studies, and now she was paying for them.
For hours the Humvee traveled the barren terrain and Soledad thought of Luz. She held her gun to her body, which was constricted by the uniform and the pounds of equipment strapped around her. She dreamed of taking it all off and letting cool water splash over her skin. Agnes, who was sitting next to her, remained silent, looking out the tiny window without a hint to what she was thinking. Soledad was grateful for the quiet, which she expected to continue until they arrived, but then there was a boom.
Pulse of light. Heat. Shattered glass.
Boom.
It seemed to be hours long, the boom, and she was trapped inside it, rolling around in it, feeling it echo and vibrate through her.
The boom finally stopped and in its place there was silence, a pause; outside the window she saw nothing but sand and smoke. Then she heard shouting, and men’s voices, and the jackhammer sound of guns firing. She reached for Agnes’s hands, which were trying to free her from the wreckage.
Outside the vehicle there were bodies in the dirt, and parts of bodies. Soledad left a trail of blood behind her in the sand as she looked for the wounded; she was wounded too, but walking. There was a soldier on the ground, his thigh cut to the bone. Agnes was fastening a black band above the wound as the man screamed. Soledad pinned his shoulders to the ground with her knees, her hands on his head, trying to still him as Agnes worked. They were engulfed in a cloud of choking black smoke and sand. The guns were firing, but she couldn’t see them; she could only hear them. The dying soldier looked up at Soledad. Her face would be the last thing he would see in this world, but her face was nothing special.
“Mama,” he said. He was only a boy.
Soledad wiped the sand and sweat from his forehead. She feared she was going to black out soon. The blood from the wound in her left shoulder had soaked the arm of her uniform into a deep scarlet. She returned to the truck for supplies, taking a moment to rest her head against the side of it. When she turned around a man was heading in the direction of Agnes, screaming in his nonsense language, the sounds flying from his mouth. Soledad’s gun was strapped around her and she positioned it in front of her and shot at the man as he ran through the cloud. She missed and shot again, hitting him in the back. He fell to the ground, the enemy man, silent and still. Dead.
Look out! A voice in the cloud, an American voice, one on her side, was trying to warn her. Another enemy man was moving toward her, and she shot him in the chest.
When she awoke in the hospital three days later, she didn’t remember much, but she could see the man in the cloud, falling into the dirt and landing on his back, his legs twisted beneath him. She had never killed anyone before, but it had been easy. That’s what she remembered about it more than any other detail: how easy it had been.
In the hospital in Kandahar, Soledad was treated for a deep wound to the shoulder, blood loss, and infection. Her mind returned to the cloud, the choking black smoke and sand, the Taliban fighters she had killed. Several days passed before the doctors decided she was stable enough to learn about her daughter’s rape. Luz was still alive then, but it would be more than a week before Soledad was allowed to travel, and by that time Luz would have jumped in front of the train. Soledad feared that Luz had been angry with her for leaving her with her grandmother, for not being there to make everything all right.
Where was this girl’s mother? the people at home had said.
Until her weeping trio of sisters met her at the airport, Soledad didn’t fully believe that Luz’s suicide was real. When she arrived home, a photographer took a photo that ran across the wires: Army reservist Soledad Ayala arrives home in Santa Mariana, north of Los Angeles. Soledad went into the house and closed the door. Her mother was in bed, sedated and barely conscious, being tended to by relatives from out of town. She didn’t want to see her mother, who had failed Luz.
Soledad sat in the living room, feeling unattached to her surroundings, as if she were viewing the scene from afar. She’d traveled back from the war, moving through time and space, but she hadn’t completely crossed over. Her body was at home, but some part of her, some essential part, had been left behind.