Breaking the Rules (5 page)

“Jenni, he’s still alive, but—” She cut herself off again. Whatever that
but
was going to be, she substituted it with, “He’s strong.”

“You need to tell me everything,” Jenn said.

Maria exhaled hard. “I know. It’s just … he lost so much blood,” she said. “One of his teammates ended up doing a battlefield transfusion, and nearly died himself, because of it. Jenni, it’s a miracle that Dan’s still alive at all. If he didn’t have the friends that he has … This would already be a very different phone call. As it is …”

Dear God. “Was it an IED?” Jenn asked, because it was clear Maria had gotten at least some details.

“Indirectly,” Maria said, and her word only made sense when she added, “Dan was assisting with the civilian casualties after some kind of car bomb went off, and a sniper started shooting. He was hit.”

“So he’s been shot,” Jenn said, meeting Jack’s steady gaze, “someplace where he lost a lot of blood. In his chest or—”

“It was his leg,” Maria told her.

“His leg,” Jenn told Jack, unable to keep herself from glancing down at his empty pant leg. Oh God.

“If something goes wrong with the surgery,” Maria said, “or if he’s too weak to be operated on … He could lose his leg. And that’s one of the better-case scenarios. I really think you should wait before you go anywhere, Jenn.”

“I don’t want to wait,” Jenn said. “Tell Savannah yes, please buy me a ticket. Tell her thank you.”

“Jenni,” Maria started.

“I want to be there,” Jenn said. “I need to be there when he wakes up, especially if … God, most people don’t get that chance. I’m going to be there.”

“Jenn, he might not wake up.”

“But he’s strong,” Jenn reminded her. “He’s a fighter. Just tell Savannah. I can be at the airport in an hour.”

Danny
was
strong. He
was
a fighter.

But all young men and women who went to fight wars were strong. They were all fighters. And sometimes, despite that, they died anyway.

Jenn looked at Jack, who was still holding her hand.

And sometimes they lost their legs.

For too many years, there was no such thing as no in Neesha’s world.

Dissent was not allowed, not without punishment.

Years ago, when she was first brought to this awful place, punishment meant an empty belly and nothing but a hard, cold floor to sleep upon, a faucet for water, and a bucket for her waste, while locked in a tiny, empty cell. That was often all it took among the other new girls to turn a no into a yes.

But in those early days, Neesha preferred the hunger, the bucket, and the cold floor to the pain and humiliation that came when the men—the clients or visitors, they were called—held her down with the weight of their bodies and jabbed themselves between her legs.

It was wrong, and she would
not
do it ever again.

And she screamed and cried, which frightened the visitors, and kept them from touching her. It also made the tall man with the florid face who was her new lord and master angry, so he locked her again in that cell.

The hunger made her cry, but she still said no. And then a fellow worker, a girl who was older, saved part of her meals to share. She furtively passed the morsels through the tiny window in Neesha’s door. And so she put up with that hard, cold floor for nine whole days and nights of no, with only twinges of hunger instead of great, yawning pain.

But the tall man—Mr. Nelson—he must have found out about the food, because the kind girl vanished. Neesha hadn’t seen her again, not even once in all of the years since.

It was then that Mr. Nelson brought Neesha and her no into a beautiful room—more beautiful than she’d ever seen before in her entire short life—where a magnificent meal was set out on a huge table.

He’d left her there, and Neesha, still hungry, had eaten her fill, filled, too, with hope that her grandfather, a man her mother had
spoken of with such affection and respect, had somehow managed to find and rescue her.

But when a man came in, while he was, indeed, old enough to be her grandfather, he had a face as pale and a head as bare of hair as the moon. His eyes were not like Neesha’s or her mother’s. They were blue and flatly ugly, as if his soul had already left his body.

And although she hadn’t yet learned to speak any American, she knew what he wanted from his gestures.

When she gave him her emphatic no, he smiled. And he didn’t just take what he wanted anyway, like the other men before him, hands trembling and even weeping while they’d kissed her, before she’d learned that her piercing screams would scare them away when simply sobbing wouldn’t.

Instead, he took while he beat her, and he laughed with delight even as she screamed. And then he took some more in ways that were meant to hurt her, until she lay naked and bleeding, too stunned to cry, on that beautiful floor.

The man washed himself after, whistling as he did so, and then he left.

Women came in then, but they weren’t warm like her mother had been, back before she’d fallen ill and died. They cleaned Neesha and bandaged her as best they could, but they did it without any comfort or kind words. In fact, they spoke to her sternly.
You reap what you sow
.

And then they brought her back to her cell, where she wept until she fell asleep.

The door didn’t open for three very hungry, very sore days as she lay on the floor, curled up in a ball. And when it finally did open, it was once again Mr. Nelson who stood there, looking down at her as she trembled and wept with fear.

And he took her, carrying her because her legs wouldn’t hold her. He brought her back, not to the beautiful room, thank God, but to a separate bathing room, where the cold, angry women again washed her clean.

They braided her hair in a way that made her look even younger
than she truly was, and they gave her a new dress and delivered her back to Mr. Nelson, who led her to the smaller room where she’d first lived and served the visitors, before she’d dared to say no.

A man was in there, waiting. His hungry eyes filled with tears as he saw her, because he, too, knew that what he wanted to do was wrong because she was just a child.

There was food laid out in there, too. It was nowhere near as sumptuous as the feast she’d had three days before. But it was hot and it smelled good and it would fill her belly and give her strength. The bed in the corner was soft and warm. Neesha knew that, as well.

And although she didn’t speak Mr. Nelson’s language and he didn’t speak hers, he made it clear that it was her choice. She could go in.

Or she could say no, and go back to the room where the men wouldn’t kiss her and lick her with their tremulous mouths, touch her almost reverently with their trembling hands, but instead would hit her and bite her and laugh while she screamed.

Neesha went inside.

And she never again said no.

Not until years later.

Until the day it happened.

Until the day that Andy, the fat daytime guard, had clutched his chest and fallen, gasping and wheezing, to the ground, leaving her door unlocked and open as he shuddered and shook.

Neesha stepped through the door and around him and quickly slipped from the wing of the building where the children were locked in their rooms. And because she’d just had a visitor who’d wanted only to watch and touch himself while she bathed and then put on the clothes and makeup of a much older woman, she was able to fade back and then pass, unnoticed, through the women’s wing, where the guards were there only to keep visitors from going where they weren’t wanted, instead of keeping the workers from escaping.

And then there it was.

An unguarded, open door.

It led to an outside that wasn’t part of the small, caged, inner courtyard that she had come to know so well during her long years imprisoned here.

Neesha stepped through that door, marveling at a sky that stretched out to the horizon, at a sun that shone full strength upon her upturned face, a sun that was not weakened by a screen.

But there wasn’t time to stand there, stunned by the possibility of her newfound freedom.

She was in a parking lot, outside of a long, low, adobe structure, and she quickly lost herself among the rows of cars, ducking down to hide from anyone who might come looking for her.

And they would come. Mr. Nelson. Or the guard named Todd.

And if they found her? She would be punished.

Of that Neesha had no doubt.

T
hey met, after school, in the coffee shop at the mall, because Eden didn’t want her mother or stepfather, Greg, to know she was back in town.

And it was crazy, but she honestly didn’t recognize her little brother when he first walked in. Ben had grown—a lot—since she’d seen him last. He was now taller than she was. And while he’d always been skinny, he was now razor thin, as if he’d been stretched on a medieval torture rack.

But the biggest change was to his clothing and hair. He’d always been a kind of geeky, dorky little redheaded kid, but now he was dressed like a Hollywood vampire, in black jeans, black T-shirt, clunky black sneakers, and a black overcoat that actually billowed behind him when he walked.

Eden had to admit the effect was striking. With his hair down to his shoulders and dyed a relentless, unforgiving midnight black, and with heavy eyeliner around his eyes, with the remains of black fingernail polish peeling from his chewed fingernails, the look accentuated his pale complexion and his blue eyes.

Both of which he’d gotten from his father, an Air Force officer their mother had hooked up with briefly after Eden, Dan, and their older sister Sandy’s father, Daniel Gillman the second, had moved out for good.

Because they were only separated but not divorced, and because the Air Force captain was both married and a total son of a bitch, when Eden’s mother, Ivette, got pregnant and Ben was born, she put Daniel Gillman the second’s name down on the birth certificate, in the slot that said
father
.

Which had led to a lot of shouting and name-calling when their divorce finally went through, and paying child support became mandatory.

But Ivette had tried to pretend that then-five-year-old Ben was the result of a night she and Daniel had spent together when he’d returned to Fort Bragg, and she’d gone up to see him in Fayetteville. Daniel had been pretty drunk at the time—it was no wonder he didn’t remember any of it.

Of course he didn’t remember it, because it hadn’t happened.

But because Ivette was not only a loser, but was also drawn to men who were losers as well, and because Eden’s father was a son of a bitch, too, he didn’t think about the damage that his words might do to a child when he used Ben with his blue eyes and red hair as Exhibit A. He didn’t need a paternity test, he’d shouted, because there was no way a child this ugly, scrawny, and fair-complexioned could possibly be his.

It had been Ben’s first meeting with his estranged “dad,” and all of his fantasy expectations had been cruelly dashed.

As he grew, he continued to see himself only as ugly. Try as she might, Eden hadn’t been able to change his mind about that. Because, bottom line, he wanted the same brown eyes and thick, dark hair that she and Danny and Sandy all had. He wanted to be a full, not a faux Gillman.

Eden stared at Ben now, dumbstruck. As she forced herself to greet and embrace this exotic stranger that her little brother had become, she wondered if he realized just how handsome—movie-star worthy, in fact—he was going to be in a few more years, when he filled out.

“Thank you for coming to Vegas,” he said as he hugged her in return. “I would’ve just left home, the way you did, but …”

“Your diabetes,” Eden said. He’d eventually run out of insulin.

She felt him nod. “I’d have to come back home. Or die.”

His voice was different, too—it was now deeper than hers. It had always pissed him off, the way he’d often been called “ma’am” when he’d answered the phone.

Eden’s voice had always been unusually low and husky, even when she was a child, and she’d turned it into a game—a contest—so that Ben would stop feeling bad. She would pitch her voice even lower to try to get the people who called to address her as “sir.” Ben, in turn, had to
try
to get people to call him “ma’am,” and whoever scored the most number of hits during the week got to choose the TV shows they’d watch on Saturday mornings, when their mother was sleeping late with whichever husband or boyfriend was currently sharing her bed.

Ben always won, but it didn’t matter. Eden had always let her little brother choose anyway.

But those days were long gone. No one would mistake Ben for a “ma’am” ever again. Unless, of course, he threw away the Goth look and dressed in drag. That could work. He was going to be
that
pretty.

“How are you?” he asked as he hugged her. “Eedie, I’m so sorry about the baby.”

Eden closed her eyes, refusing to go back there, but knowing it didn’t matter. Whether she focused on it or not, for the rest of her life, she was going to walk around with an empty space in her heart. “Yeah, that sucked. Let’s not talk about it.”

“I didn’t want to not say anything,” he told her. “Not just about the baby, but, well, about Izzy, too. He was cool. He, um, came looking for you after you, you know, left.”

“He did?” She pulled back to look up into her little brother’s eyes.

Ben nodded. “He gave me his e-mail address and his phone number and, um, some money. A lot of money, actually. Three hundred dollars. He said I should hide it where no one would find it—it should be my emergency fund.”

Eden stared at him. “Three
hundred
 …?”

Ben nodded again. “He said that you told him you were worried about me, but that you were in a place right then—on account of
Pinkie dying—where you had to focus on taking care of yourself. He said if I needed any help, for any reason, that I could call him. If you hadn’t e-mailed me and told me you were coming back … I don’t know. I think I would’ve done it. You know. Called Izzy.”