Paradise Valley. Робин Карр

hear the latest news. He also wrote to his grandmother, who was his only family, and his girl, Liz, who lived in Eureka.

      But this letter hadn’t gone to the bar. Jack ripped it open at once.

      Dear Jack,

      God, I’m sorry to do this to you. I gotta get this out—and I don’t want my grandma or Liz upset. But you know about this stuff. You know how it is, and I have to lay it on someone who won’t freak out. You would’ve gotten some of this on the news, but you wouldn’t have known it had anything to do with me. We moved on Haditha Dam, doing house-to-house searches, trying to root out al Qaeda insurgents, and one of the squads right in front of us was obliterated by a bomb. A truck bomb. There was only one survivor in that squad, and they were a tight squad. Tighter than ours. One survivor, Jack. Holy Jesus, I think I’d rather be dead than watch eleven of my best friends blow up. I knew some of them. Sonny was waiting for a baby, Gravis was engaged, and Dom was this little Italian kid who was just scared shitless all the time. He wanted to go home so bad, he cried. Cried. But his whole squad was holding him up, taking care of him, trying to bolster him and prop him up all the time. They never cut anyone out of their fold—no matter what kind of problem they had. The guy that made it, the one guy, he has a girlfriend back home, and he’ll get back to her, but he’s going to be messed up. But he doesn’t even get to leave yet—they’re moving him to another squad. Holy God, I hope they move him out of the worst of this shit—it’s horrible.

      They were right in front of us, Jack. Another two minutes, it would’ve been us. I can’t hardly sleep since that happened. A couple of my boys puked and one fainted, I think. He got back on his feet real fast and denied it, but I think he really passed out. There was so much screaming I couldn’t tell if it was me or the rest of them. It was all black and cloudy and then it was all blood. I wanted to die on the spot. I hit the ground because there was so much shooting I didn’t know for sure I wouldn’t take one from my own platoon.

      Right after the bomb and all the shooting, an Army Cobra came in and bombed the shit out of one of the buildings. Debris everywhere, really heavy stuff. Big hunks of cement and wood, flying like missiles through the air.

      This place is like hell sometimes. I’m sorry to write you this stuff. Don’t tell anyone—don’t get anyone scared or upset. My grandma and Liz can’t know this shit. We just have to keep them thinking positive.

      And then—if all that crap isn’t bad enough, I think I killed a guy. We couldn’t recover a body, but I saw a sniper and I nailed him. If he managed to crawl away, he didn’t get far because he left behind too much blood to make it out alive. I didn’t believe this could happen, because I was so far away, but I saw the look on his face. And for just one second I thought, why’d I get him before he got me? War can’t be luck. Not with the amount of training we put ourselves through.

      My squad’s all shook up. Hell, the battalion’s all torn up. Since I’ve been over here, I haven’t seen an American die—and then eleven of them went up in one giant explosion. Jack, it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. And then I killed a guy.

      I’m sorry. I had to tell you. Don’t get anyone upset with this. Burn this.

      Jack, I’m not scared. Sometimes I get nervous, my adrenaline gets pumping real hard, it works on my brain a lot, but I’m okay. I don’t want you to worry that I’m scared and will do something stupid—I use the fear to keep me sharp. Some of the boys are terrified, but it’s real easy to see it isn’t going to do them any good to give in to that.

      I’m still okay. But I had to write this to someone who could take it, someone who’d understand, because it’s so freaking awful and if I keep it in my gut, it’s going to eat me alive.

      Rick

      Jack’s hands shook as he read. And reread. He had fallen into a kitchen chair. He felt his wife’s small hand on his shoulder and turned his eyes up to her.

      “What is it?” she asked him.

      “It’s from Rick. It’s not good. It can’t be shared with anyone, he says.”

      She held out her hand. “That doesn’t include me,” she said.

      “Mel, it’s very ugly.”

      “I need to know what makes your hands shake, Jack. We get through things together.”

      “Yeah,” he said wearily. He handed her the letter, let her read. Before she got to the end, tears were running down her cheeks. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “Our poor boy. God, all the poor boys.”

      Jack was up until three in the morning, writing to Rick, telling him he could send any kind of letter he wanted, Jack would always be there to read it. He wrote anything he could think of to pump him up, tell him how proud he was, how completely sure he was going to make all the right decisions. He praised him for his ability to empathize with his boys—the ones who survived, the ones who were having a hard time. And he wrote, “Yeah, buddy, we’ve all seen some bad, bad stuff. When you’re home, you’ll better appreciate all the good stuff. I swear to God.”

      And then Jack went back to his previous practice of writing a letter a day to Rick. Anything to keep him going, keep him positive.

      A few days later, at about four in the afternoon, before the dinner crowd showed up and the bar was quiet, she came in. Liz. Rick’s girl. She stood just inside the door and smiled at Jack. Jack smiled back. What irony that she should turn up just a few days after Jack had received that letter, the one that threatened to rob him of any hope for a good night’s sleep till he had his boy home.

      The first time he’d seen Liz she had been a fourteen-year-old hottie. She wore tight tops, skirts the size of napkins, high-heeled boots and heavy, dramatic makeup. His boy Rick went right over the edge. Despite all Jack’s counseling, Rick ended up in trouble with the girl; he just didn’t get that condom out of his pocket in time.

      The next time Jack saw Liz, she had been so different. She actually looked younger than the first time. A pregnant child; a little girl of fifteen with no makeup, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt pulled over her pregnant tummy, her hair pulled back in a childish ponytail. And that was the real Liz, the girl Ricky loved and stood by. That was the girl who got him in so much trouble at school while he made himself late to every class making sure he got her past the sniggering girls in the hallway and into her classroom. Rick never once complained. He wanted nothing so much as to do right by her.

      Jack had been so proud of the way the boy stuck with her, protected her, was there for her through everything. Then their baby had been stillborn—a tragedy, a horrible way for these kids to grow up. But they’d been so strong, so brave.

      And this was what Liz had become—a beautiful young woman, almost eighteen. She was so lovely it almost took his breath away. Her hair was long, light brown with blond highlights, her eyes sparkling. She still wore daringly tight clothes, but she’d started adding tasteful elements, like today’s tan suede jacket. She wasn’t the showy, seductive nymphet anymore. And her makeup was light, only enhancing her natural beauty, rather than making her look like a too-young hooker, thank God.

      She walked up to the bar, jumped up on a stool and leaned toward him to give him a friendly peck on the cheek. “How are you?” she asked.

      “Never mind me. How about you?”

      “Good. I graduate in June. I have straight As. Rick will be happy about that.”

      “Are you happy about that?” he asked with a laugh.

      “I’m very proud of it. I didn’t think I could do it.”

      “But…are you doing it for Rick?”

      “Well, I was,” she said with a nod. “But I have to admit, I like the feeling. School was so easy for Ricky—he always got straight As without hardly trying. I’d like to think I’m almost as smart as he is, even if I do have to work at it real hard.” She smiled at Jack. “But, I signed up for community college in the fall.”

      “Good