A Million Miles Away (22 page)

Then Peter led them farther, until the trees broke.

They stood at the edge of what appeared to be a wheat field, golden stalks reaching to Kelsey’s shins, hitting nothing but big gray sky for miles and miles. It was beautiful and still and clear. Everything a person could love about Kansas.

“Is this someone’s land?” Kelsey asked.

“Probably,” Peter said, looking around. “They don’t use it, though. I think it used to be wheat, but now it’s just a bunch of dried-up grass. It was like this when I was a kid. Which reminds me…” He snapped off a stick from one of the surrounding trees. “You’re going to want a stick.”

Kelsey found a relatively stiff, skinny branch and snapped it. “Why?” she asked.

Peter looked at her with a sly smile. “You want to know what I call this place?”

“What?”

He whipped his stick through the grass, stirring it. “Snake Country.”

Kelsey clenched her stick, trying not to show that she was afraid, and whipped it through the grass around her.

“Don’t worry too much,” Peter said, feeling the ground for a dry place to sit.

Kelsey let out a “ha!” and sat down next to him, running her stick over the bending blades.

“I played all sorts of games here,” he said. “Just a lonely little kid, talking to himself about ninjas and dragons.”

Kelsey smiled at the thought, picturing him leaping through the grass, wielding his stick as a sword. “I’m sure you were a great fighter.”

“Against all things imaginary, yes.” He laughed shortly. “I was undefeated.”

They were quiet, listening to the wind rustle the new leaves.

“I’m not a fighter, though,” Peter said, looking out. “I wasn’t built to be over there.”

“I don’t think many people are,” Kelsey said.

“No, but they can adjust to it. They trained us well. They make everything you ever thought you couldn’t do, like—” He swallowed. “Just brutal stuff. They make that stuff into a habit. Into a reaction. And then it becomes necessary, in your mind. My whole world is flipped. Last night, while you were getting the groceries from the car, my sister dropped one of her textbooks on the floor by accident, and it made a banging sound, and do you know what my hands did?”

Kelsey was silent. This was not a question she was supposed to answer.

“They clutched the air for a gun, Michelle. As if I was going to disarm my goddamn sister.” He shook his head. “I can’t even believe I’m back here, racing with Meg at the supermarket and, you know, kissing you, after I’ve seen what I saw. After I’ve done what I did.”

When he was finished speaking, Peter shut his mouth quickly, as if he said something he shouldn’t, and looked at her, trying to measure her thoughts.

She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what he meant. She would try to understand someday. She put her arm around him, and he sunk into her.

She laid his head on her lap and stretched out in the grass, hands folded over his chest.

“I don’t want to go back there,” he said, hard, quiet, his eyes collecting the gray of the sky. “Not after I’ve been home.”

I don’t want you to go, either, she almost said, but that wouldn’t help him. That wouldn’t help anyone. She pushed herself to say what she was supposed to say.

“You have to. Here is here, and over there is over there, and there, you’ve got an obligation to your country.”

“It’s not that simple,” he replied.

Her fear was now heavy inside her, weighed down by guilt, by sadness at his leaving.
Believe me
, Kelsey thought,
I know how not simple things are
.

She bent her head to kiss him, her hand running across his shorn head, savoring the proximity of his smell, his breath, his warmth in the middle of all this vacant prairie.

“Nothing is simple,” she whispered to him. “But for now, we have to pretend it is.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Anyone who happened to be driving east on I-70 that evening might have witnessed quite a sight: a Subaru hatchback with four windows down, a seventeen-year-old girl with her head and arms hanging out the driver’s side, wind blowing, hands banging the metal door to the beat. Next to her, a young man in army fatigues, his canvas bag in his lap, mirroring her out the passenger side.

It wasn’t so much the pairing of the two that they would have noticed, but the rage and sadness with which they sang the songs. Though they were young, they sang them as if they would be the last songs they sung, loud enough to reach a pair of ears miles away.

Kelsey had volunteered to drive Peter to the airport as his father and sister spent the evening with Cathy. She couldn’t stand the thought of not having as much time with him as she possibly could.

The two of them spent the four-hour drive drowning out their sorrows with Michelle’s playlists.

Kelsey turned the volume all the way up until they couldn’t hear their own voices.

They screamed along to the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.”

They rapped along to Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.”

They crooned along to the Cicadas’ “Baby,” probably out of tune, first the English version and then the one in Portuguese, holding hands across the seats while they remembered the night they danced in Paris.

The airport was two exits away.

“Stop the car,” Peter said.

Kelsey scanned the horizon, frantic. “Where?”

“Anywhere,” Peter said. She looked at him. “Please.”

They found an emergency pull-off between exits, and while traffic surged around them, Peter unbuckled his seat belt. He took Kelsey’s face in his hands and brought her close to him, kissing her on the lips, on the cheeks, on the nose, on the chin, wherever he could find.

“It feels like I’ve only seen you for three seconds,” he said between kisses. “This is not fair.”

She steadied him, found his lips. “It will be over before you know it,” she said, and wished she did not mean it in any other way.

“Seeing you does that to me,” Peter said, moving his hand down her hair, to her shoulders, to her arm, and back up again, lining her, memorizing her. “I forget how time works. I forget we weren’t always together and won’t always be together.”

A passing semi rocked them slightly, but neither noticed. Kelsey took his hand and kissed his fingers.

“Tell me we will, one more time.” His eyes moved up and down her face, his lashes wet.

“We will…” Kelsey began, and paused. All she could say was what she knew, but she knew enough. Something with wings had spread behind her ribs, pushing against them, too big for her chest. “We are permanent. No matter what happens, everything we have will be there forever.”

“We are permanent,” he said, and sat back in his seat, his hand in hers. Headlights grazed the side of Peter’s face. He was so beautiful. She kissed his smooth cheek.

“I love you, permanently,” she said with as much force as she could put behind it, and looked forward, put the car in drive.

“I love you, permanently,” he repeated, setting his jaw, and squeezed until her hand hurt.

It was said, and remained said: Time was different when it was just the two of them. But he would be gone again. Permanent doesn’t always mean forward. Permanent doesn’t always mean with you. Permanent like the Flint Hills, to be thought of, to be passed through. To be seen, but not carried.

When they reached the drop-off area, Kelsey put the car in park. Peter would have to run to his gate. Sobs were starting in her chest and she had to swallow them.

“I wish I had some sort of trinket to give you, some token or something,” she said as he strapped on his bag.

Peter gave her a pained smile. “Like a kerchief from the Civil War?”

“Like a lock of my hair?” Kelsey said.

“That’s disgusting!” Peter cried, and they both made a sound that was almost a laugh.

He stopped, seeming unable to close the passenger-side door.

“I love you,” Kelsey said.

“I love you, too,” Peter said.

“Wait!” Kelsey searched her pockets, and glanced frantically around for something, anything, she could give him, but all she had was an old pack of cinnamon gum.

“Here, from me,” she laughed, and shoved a stick of gum in his hand.

They kissed their last kiss for a long time, with a tenderness and a torment.

He waved, then he had to run. When he was out of sight, something snapped back into Kelsey like a broken rubber band, rocking her.

She got lost in the maze of exits, forgetting where she had come. On a quiet intersection next to the rental car lots, she turned, and parked again. She wondered if all of it had really just happened.

She couldn’t stay in the car, which still smelled like him, like canvas and soap. She folded onto the curb, leaning back against the front tire of the Subaru, and wept.

She could see Peter’s face before he turned to go, and the yank of terror in seeing him be taken at any moment. If a truck he rode took the wrong turn. If he was two inches too far to the right in a bullet’s path.

If all of her fears came true, Peter would become another apparition alongside Michelle, another blur. Perhaps the two of them belonged in another world. They met first after all.

Why did she fall in love with a face on a screen, a figure leaving, forever getting smaller? Why wasn’t the flesh good enough? Why did she have to live on fumes?

A couple with a small child on the way to pick up their car called across the street to ask if she was all right. Kelsey didn’t answer because she didn’t know. She rested her elbows on her knees and tucked her face into the darkness.

Soon, the tears fell again, dripping from her eyes and rolling down her legs.

Michelle had no choice in the matter. She was dead and she could not speak for herself, and yet she was still alive everywhere Kelsey went. She had always hoped her sister was at peace, wherever she was, whatever that meant, but how could a soul be at rest when someone else was conjuring it constantly?

I can’t help it
, she said,
I miss you
, but no one would ever respond, not really.

I never even got to say good-bye.
Still nothing. Hope was an awful thing, she decided.

I miss you and that’s it. That’s why we’re in this mess.

No sign, no ghost, just the sound of her own heaving, the taste of her own snot.

That’s why
I’m
in this mess
, she corrected.
I’m alone in this.

For some reason, that thought was the only comfort she found. It meant that all her lies weren’t the external webs she imagined them to be. They all came from her, from her collapsed, tearstained body. And it meant she, alone, could fix them.

She had spent so long grasping for certain moments, trying to find the “right” time, when the ability to set things straight had been there from the beginning, from the moment she responded to Michelle’s name on Skype.

She just hadn’t had the strength to face the consequences.

She wasn’t lying when she had told Davis she had changed. She had. And if she could send the man she loved to war without crying in front of him, if she could name all the important artists of the past centuries, if she could leave the last three years on the steps of a fraternity, if she could write an A+ paper, well… She could write a letter. She could write what might possibly be the most important letter of her life.

Kelsey drove the half hour home and pulled into her driveway. She ran up the steps to her room, and pulled out the engraved stationery from her drawer—her own stationery, with her own initials.

Once the pen hovered over the paper, she didn’t know where to begin.

Dear Peter
, it read.

Write how you speak
, she could hear her sister say.

But Kelsey didn’t write. It was Michelle who had sent letters to Peter. Peter was lied to through the words Kelsey had crossed out and looked up and stolen from her sister’s life. And even when she had acted as herself, he had filtered everything about her through the wrong beginning, the wrong memories, the wrong name.

She would tell him face-to-face, as she had wanted to in Paris, or as close to it as she could get.

She opened her laptop, activated the camera, and waited for the screen to load. A tiny green bulb lit at the top of the monitor. Her own image surprised her.

Normally, when Kelsey Skyped with Peter, she was confined to a small square in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. Now, she faced herself in full, glassy-eyed and paler than she’d ever been, hair unwashed and wavy. She was ready. She pulled the strands back into a neat bun, and pressed
RECORD
.

“Hi,” she started, and something about the way she could see herself as she really was, as Peter had seen her and believed in her, stalled her words. Not this time. She shook her head. “I’m not going to make this pretty so you’ll have to deal with a lot of stops and… whatever.”