Ask Him Why (27 page)

“But I don’t mean it like that,” he said. “It’s a straight question. What would he do in those circumstances?”

I paused to think, but I didn’t need to think for long.

“He’d defend us,” I said. “Or, well . . . at least he’d defend himself. Aubrey is nothing if not defensive. He wouldn’t roll over for anyone.”

“Exactly,” he said.

But right in that moment, I still didn’t quite get it.

“I don’t—” I began.

“Aubrey would be an insurgent.”

And we sat in the flicker of the fire for a minute or two, with nothing being said.

“That’s why you didn’t go.”

“I couldn’t go out gunning for a bunch of young men who were more or less the Iraqi equivalent of my own little brother.”

Another long silence.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

I actually hadn’t realized I was crying until he pointed it out. My mind was a million miles away, and the tears were just something going on in my absence.

“I guess I was thinking about that morning Aubrey went out and talked to the reporters in front of Aunt Sheila’s house, and it seems so incredibly sad after what you just told me.”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t look over. Because he’d known the sadness of that moment all along, ever since it had happened, and I didn’t want to know what that pain looked like.

“Why didn’t you tell him?” I asked.

“I tried. But I wasn’t home long. I went up into his room that first night and tried to tell him. But I left out most of the details. Because I woke him up. He had school in the morning. I didn’t want to dump a bunch of stuff on him that would only keep him awake all night. So I just told him it was more of a principled stand than Brad was making it out to be. I thought I’d have plenty of time to finish the story over the next few days. Even though I was actually already AWOL. But I figured we’d be in touch, at least. Funny how sure we are about stuff like that and how wrong we can turn out to be.”

“Oh, he’s going to hear this,” I said. “I’m going to see to it.”

“Don’t force it too hard. He’ll just reject it. Wait until you see a crack in his armor.”

“I’ll make my own crack,” I said. “I’ll crack that little brat with my own hands.”

We sat for a few moments in silence. The fire was already dwindling down. It had burned hot and now it was burning itself out. My eyes were grainy from lack of sleep, and I was thinking seriously about going back to bed. But Joseph was right about one thing: that wasn’t exactly a bedtime story, what he’d just told me.

“Let me ask you one more question,” I said. “Okay, so you’re lying on your cot alone, and you decide this. The other guys are out smoking. Then what? How does this get from your head into the heads of three other guys? Where did the conspiracy come in? How did it turn into mutiny? Or
was
it a mutiny as far as you were concerned?”

He shook his head, and I waited, but for a while he just kept shaking it.

“God, I wish I knew,” he said. “I mean, I was there. I remember every single thing that happened that night. But I just couldn’t feel the moment when it crossed that line. Except I can see it looking back. You look back and it’s this huge thing. But it never felt that way at the time. I swear to God I don’t even understand it myself.”

“Well, maybe just tell me what you remember happened, then.”

“Tim came in. And he was sort of a friend of mine, and I knew he was uneasy, too, about what we were doing. So I started talking to him about what I’d decided. I didn’t mention Aubrey, though. Just my feelings about the raids in general. There were guys over there, and some women, you could talk to about stuff like this, and then a whole bunch more who wouldn’t have wanted to hear it. I could kind of feel which was which. I just wanted to hear how it would sound outside my own head. You know? I was bouncing stuff off him. So then Tim left the room. I didn’t even know for sure if he was going to refuse to go or not. Then he ran into two other guys and told them what we’d been talking about. And that it was my idea. But what I don’t know to this day is whether he
only
talked to two guys. Or if maybe he mentioned it to a third guy who turned out to be the wrong guy. Somebody he shouldn’t have told. Because somebody called the media when the whole thing hit the fan.”

“So Tim was really the one who started the mutiny.”

“No,” he said firmly. “I started it. I rolled that snowball downhill. I never thought it could get as big as a house and flatten part of a village. But I have to take responsibility for starting it rolling.”

“What happened to Tim?” I asked, not sure how much I agreed or disagreed with Joseph’s assessment of his own guilt.

“Bad conduct discharge.”

“Why wasn’t he charged with mutiny, too?”

“Because I never ratted him out.”

“But he did more wrong than you did.”

“It doesn’t matter, Duck. If he’d gotten prison time, too, it wouldn’t have made my time any shorter. Besides. That’s not all there was to it. He brought the other two guys back in to talk to me. And we all four had a conversation. That was the conspiracy part, I guess. Right there. I feel stupid looking back, because it seemed so innocent. I guess I thought we were doing something good. There would be a group of us who would question the whole way we did those raids, and maybe it would change the way things were being done. We thought it was like a principled stand, but it was incredibly naïve. I see that now. I went at it totally the wrong way. I handled it all wrong. We figured if there were four of us or maybe even more who wouldn’t go, our commanding officer would have to call off the raid. But he didn’t. He sent it out undermanned. And two men died. And I’m responsible. And there’s no weaseling out of that. I set things in motion and two men died. I should’ve just not gone. Taken the discharge. I should’ve kept my mouth shut and left everybody else out of it.”

I wanted to ask him about the officer who sent the unit out undermanned, but then I remembered that I knew. There had been an investigation, but ultimately no charges against him. Joseph had taken the weight of everything that happened that night. Fairly voluntarily, from the sound of it.

He startled me by speaking again.

“Hammy says you can’t unroll a snowball. Just like you can’t un-ring a bell. He wasn’t blaming me or trying to make me feel guilty or anything. It’s just the way it is. We’re responsible for what we do.”

I reached over and took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. He seemed surprised—startled, even.

“I’m sorry I thought you were a coward,” I said.

“Didn’t know you did,” he said, a little hurt from the sound of it.

“Well, I didn’t mean to. But I didn’t ask you why. So I guess I figured it was fear, like everybody else.”

“At least you didn’t say it out loud into a bank of television news cameras.”

“You know how Aubrey is,” I said.

“I do indeed,” he said. “Our little insurgent.”

I sat another moment. Then I was on my feet, but I swear it was done with no premeditation.

“Wait here,” I said.

“For what?”

“I’m going to get Aubrey. And you’re going to tell him.”

“Hate to have you wake him up.”

“Why? He doesn’t have school in the morning.”

I marched inside and over to the couch, where Aubrey lay snoring almost violently. It seemed like an affront to me, to everything, that he should be sleeping soundly when there was something so important he needed to know.

I kicked the bottom of the couch. He didn’t so much as twitch, so I did it again. Still nothing.

Finally, I aimed a little higher and kicked
him
.

“Ow! What?” he said, jumping into a sitting position.

“Come with me.”

I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet, then towed him over to the patio door.

“What?” he asked again. “I’m sleeping, Ruth. What are you doing?”

“There’s something you need to hear,” I said.

“Can’t it wait till morning?”

“No. It can’t. By morning you’ll be all well rested and you won’t have so many cracks in your armor.”

“Wait. Am I dreaming this?”

I slid open the patio door and dragged him across the bricks.

“Talk to your brother,” I said, sitting Aubrey down in the chair I’d just vacated.

“And say what?”

“I take that back.
Listen
to your brother.”

Then I marched back inside. I watched them for a few minutes, just to assure myself that Aubrey wouldn’t get up and storm away. He didn’t. In fact, the more time went by, the less stormy he appeared, and the more he slumped in that chair as if anchored to it.

As with Joseph’s talk with our mom, I couldn’t hear the words, and didn’t need to. Partly because they were none of my business, partly because I already knew the story my brother Aubrey was being told.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Aubrey

I drove around on my motorcycle for what felt like a couple of hours. It was cold. Don’t believe that lie about Southern California always being warm.

I wasn’t wearing a jacket. The wind flapped in my shirt and froze me. I didn’t care.

An image kept coming into my mind. It was an image of me. On videotape. Holding court in front of the cameras regarding my brother. The big expert on my brother. Who he was. What he deserved.

Every time it came in, I pushed it away with the same resolute thought,
He had ten years in prison to make up that story.

What better did he have to do? Lift weights. Not answer my letters. Figure out ways to win me over again when he got out.

A voice that sounded like Luanne’s barged into my head. It said,
If he didn’t care about you, he wouldn’t be thinking up ways to win you back.

“You stay out of this,” I told her. Out loud. The wind grabbed my words away.

The thing I kept sticking on was this: If what Joseph had just told me was true, then what I’d done that August morning in front of Aunt Sheila’s house was no longer a brave and justified act. It was one of the greatest tragedies imaginable. And if what Joseph had told me wasn’t true, then it was a monstrous lie. Because it tried to reframe that brave act into the biggest mistake of my life.

Maybe the biggest mistake of anybody’s life.

After a time, I realized I was using up too much of my gas. And I wouldn’t have any left to get home after the holiday. I wasn’t what you might call flowing over with money. I’d have to hit somebody up for a loan. Mom. Ruth.

The list ended there.

I turned around. Rode back. Turned the bike’s engine off in the dark before coasting into the driveway. I didn’t want to wake anybody up.

I ducked in through the kitchen door, my helmet under my arm.

The old man, Hamish, was awake. He was sitting at the kitchen table in no light but the glow from the stove lamp. Drinking what looked like a cup of tea.

“Aubrey boy,” he said. In that accent.

“What are you doing up in the middle of the night? Couldn’t you sleep?”

He tossed his chin in the direction of the clock on the microwave. It was 5:58 a.m.

“I slept fine,” he said. “Just, when you get to be my age, you don’t need so much.”

“I’ve heard that.”

I plunked down at the table. Rested my forehead on my folded arms. Sighed.

“You seem upset,” he said.

I realized, just as he said it, that I’d purposely tipped him. I’d done a perfect pantomime of upset. Just so he would ask. The amazing part is the part where I realized it. Usually other people see things like that about me and I don’t. They try to point them out. Even then, I don’t see it. I tell them they’re wrong. Now I knew they weren’t. Probably never had been.

“Joseph told me some things,” I said. “And I don’t know whether to believe him or not.”

“I’ve never known Joe to lie right to anybody’s face,” he said.

“I just figured he had all those years in prison to revise his own history. To figure out exactly the best story to win my forgiveness.”

“Was it about that night in Baghdad?”

I looked up from the table. From the crooks of my own arms.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did he tell you the reason he didn’t go out that night?”

“Yeah.”

“Because the fellows he was supposed to be chasing down reminded him too much of you?”

“Yeah. But like I said. He had a lot of time to make that up.”

“Except he told me the exact same thing just a couple days after he came home.”

I tried to look closer into his face. To see if I could trust him. But it was too dark. I had an irritating sense that I knew, though.

“When did you even talk to him just days after he came home?”

“Where do you think he went when he left your house?”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t know.” I remembered trying to find out, though. Carrying cash to a private investigator. Like an idiot. Because I loved my brother so much. “Did you tell him to turn himself in?”

“No. I wouldn’t have told him what to do. And I didn’t need to. There was never any question that he would. He was always going to pay the price for what he did. He was relieved, of course, for a time there, when he thought the price was just a bad discharge. But when he found out otherwise, it never occurred to him to hide. However much they chose to charge him for what he did, he always aimed to pay it.”

It made me think of Luanne. Saying,
You can do anything you want, so long as you’re willing to pay the bill when it comes in.

Except maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Because sometimes other people get hurt in the bargain.

“I just keep thinking about those other two guys, though,” I said. “Those two soldiers. Who died that night.”

“So does Joe,” he said. “On the drive down, he told me not a day’s gone by in the last ten and a half years he doesn’t think about them. He even tried to go and talk with their parents after he got out.”

“Did they talk to him?”

“One did. One young man’s mother was very kind. The other, the father wouldn’t let him anywhere near.”

“Oh. Wait, I have a question, though. If he’s so thoughtful and trying to be honorable and he’s not a coward, and if he always planned to pay the price, why did he run away when the news came out?”

“Well,” Hamish said. “I’m afraid you can blame that squarely on me. That was my fault.”

“What did you do?”

“I was old.”

That made no sense, of course. But I didn’t ask. I didn’t say anything. I just waited. Blinked.

“I was eighty-five. And he was waiting to see if he’d be charged with the greater crime. When they sent him home to the US, he was only charged with disobeying a direct order to go out on duty. He was waiting to see what came out in the investigation. He went AWOL from his army base to go home and see you, because you and Ruth meant so much to him. He figured he’d spend what time he could with you and then they’d just come get him there at your family’s house. But then when the full story hit the paper, he took off and came to see me one last time. Or, well . . . I guess it wasn’t the last time the way it turned out, was it? But he thought it would be. Because he knew then that he was going away for a very long time. After we said our good-byes, he went straight back and turned himself in.”

We fell silent again. I dropped my head back onto my arms.

A bad feeling was forming. I had no intention of saying it out loud.

Then I lifted my head and did anyway.

“So it’s true, what he told me.”

“It is, Aubrey boy. You’ve had a lot o’ problems in your young life, I’ll be the first to testify to that. But not being loved by your brother was never one of ’em. That you’ve always had.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m such an idiot.”

My brain flooded with the image again. Me, at thirteen. My voice barely done changing. My skin tone washed out by the portable lights. Telling the whole world who my brother was. When I didn’t even know.

This time, I had nothing to say to scare it away.

“Oh my God. What did I do?” I asked out loud.

Then, much to my humiliation, I cried.

Hamish reached over the table and patted my arm.

“You mean that day you talked to the media?”

I nodded, unable to talk.

“I won’t lie to you, Aubrey boy. It hurt him.”

“What did I do?” I asked again. When my words broke loose, they were just a loop of the same words.

“I’ll tell you what you did, Aubrey boy. You made a mistake. Joe made mistakes with you, too. All people make mistakes.”

“What was Joseph’s mistake?”

“He let your father convince him that you and Ruth were better off without him. It was a low point in his confidence, so he believed it. He shouldn’t have. And if he hadn’t, he would’ve made contact with you, and the whole thing would have played out very differently.”

Before I could think of anything to say, I looked up to see my mother standing in the kitchen doorway.

“What the hell is going on in here?” she asked. In her famous high-dudgeon mode.

“Nothing,” I said. “We’re talking.”

“Nothing doesn’t make you cry your eyes out,” she said. “What happened? Who made you cry?”

I noticed she turned her face toward Hamish as she spit out that last sentence.

“
I
did,” I said. In a strong voice. “
I
made me cry. Now if you’ll excuse us . . .”

“I want to know what happened,” she said. Hands on hips. Unmovable.

“Fine. Fine, Mom. I’ll tell you what happened. I walked out of Aunt Sheila’s house and stood in front of the reporters and their cameras and told them Joseph was a coward who hurts people. And I was wrong.”

A long silence.

“I wondered when you’d regret that,” she said. “Didn’t put any bets on ten years after the fact. I’m going out back for a smoke.”

She slid open the glass door between the kitchen and back patio. A blast of cold air washed over me. And Hamish. I thought I saw him shiver.

Then the door closed again. With my mom on the outside. We watched her light a cigarette.

“Wow,” I said. “She really won’t give either one of us a break.”

“Not so far,” he said.

“Wait. Wait. Why did she even let Joseph spend every summer with you if she hated you so much?”

“Well,” he said, “it wasn’t so much of a ‘let.’ He ran off the first summer and came to my house. Your parents called the police to get him home. Then he ran off again. And again. And again. Pretty soon I think the police got tired o’ dragging him home. And maybe your folks got tired of admitting they couldn’t control him. After a while, everybody just sort of looked the other way.”

He reached out for his cane, a wild motion. “Help me up, Aubrey boy,” he said to me. “Help me out there. I want to talk to your mum.”

“Won’t you be cold?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I’ll do it anyway.”

I jumped up and took his arm at the elbow. Steadied his way over to the door. Opened it again. Walked him across the brick. I looked down to be sure he had something on his feet. He was wearing warm slippers.

My mom looked over her shoulder defensively. Wrapping her thick coat more tightly around her. Like it was a force field. And could save her. I settled Ham into one of the chairs. The one I’d sat in to hear my brother’s story. I expected her to get up and storm away. She didn’t.

Just like I hadn’t.

I hurried back into the house. Grabbed my blanket off the couch. Carried it outside and wrapped it around frail old Hamish.

“Thank you, Aubrey boy,” he said. “You’re a thoughtful lad.”

I walked back into the house to give them their privacy. I was thinking,
Really? A thoughtful lad?
If that was true, it was news to me.

Joseph came down about twenty minutes later. I had made coffee. He poured himself a big mug and carried it over to the stove.

“Can you stand the same breakfast as yesterday?” he asked.

“I’d
enjoy
the same breakfast as yesterday. Did me good.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Because it’s the only thing I can make worth a damn.”

I watched him pull a package of bacon and a carton of eggs from the fridge. Set three potatoes in the microwave. Start them nuking. Grab the bread from the breadbox.

He looked over his shoulder and caught me watching.

“You okay?” he asked. “You look exhausted.”

“I am,” I said. “Both.”

“Get any sleep after we talked?”

“Not a wink.”

“Sorry. It wasn’t my idea to roust you in the middle of the night. That was a Ruth plan.”

“I figured,” I said.

Then I watched him work in silence for a few minutes more.

“How’s grad school?” he asked me.

“I kind of hate it.”

“Well. You’ll be done soon, though. Right?”

“If I stay.”

“But you want to be an astronomer.”

“I thought I did. Now I’m not sure. It’s not quite what I expected it to be. Not the hands-on, me-and-the-stars experience I was picturing. It might get better deeper in. But I don’t think it’s ever going to be what I pictured.”