“Yeah, but—I mean, thanks for coming at all,” I blurt out, feeling a little stupid for allowing myself to get so emotional about all of this. I know I should keep myself together, stop myself from getting drawn in to the feelings that are threatening to get the better of me. I need to stay focused, not let myself get too wrapped up in the possibilities of everything that might happen now that they’re here with me. I take a seat, squishing myself in on one of the old couches next to Dylan—there’s hardly room in here for all five of us, but as we begin to eat, it feels homely. Cozy, instead of crowded.
“This is great,” Joe tells me through a mouthful of food, reaching for his wine to wash it down. “Didn’t realize what a good cook you were, Angelie.”
“Nice to have an excuse to make something other than toddler food for a change,” I reply, and the others laugh.
“And soon you won’t have to stick to that tiny kitchen either,” Callum adds. “The house should be done by the end of the year, at the latest. Plenty of room in there for you to try out new recipes.”
“Well, when I get the time away from work,” I protest. “I thought I was going to get at least a year off when the school burned down, but you guys had to go and build it up again like that…”
“Yeah, we should have known better,” Carlisle replies. “Let you take a sabbatical.”
“Not that we’re much good at those,” Dylan reasons. “We hardly took any time off, after we…” Suddenly, he trails off, and a heavy weight clings to the air in the room—none of them want to say it, but I can sense it, the matter that they’re dodging.
“After the military?” I ask, as delicately as I can. I don’t know if I have any right to go delving into all of this, but at the same time, I want to know what happened—why they left, why they seem so reluctant to talk about everything that happened there, why they’ve abandoned that part of themselves as though they never want to acknowledge it again as long as they live.
“Yeah, after the military,” Dylan agrees, and all of a sudden, none of them are eating, all of them reaching for their wine like they want nothing more than to forget it.
I chew my lip. I could just leave it there…but if I’m going to come to really understand these guys, really support them in the way that I want them to support me, then I need to ask the hard questions.
“What…what happened while you were in the military?” I ask softly. The words seem to hang there in the middle of the room, so heavy nobody wants to be the one to grab on to them.
But after a long silence, Carlisle finally begins to speak, his voice weighted with the pain of something that he has long-since wished to leave behind. “It was my idea, for us to join up,” he admits. “We were—shit, I was sick of sitting around on my ass in this town, feeling like I was doing nothing but making life harder for people. Feeling like they hated me and my family, and they wanted me gone, sooner rather than later. And the guys…”
He looks around, a slight smile curling up the corners of his lips. “They said they were coming with me,” he replies. “Wouldn’t let me do it alone.”
“Not like we had much else going for us,” Dylan interjects, trying to lighten the mood, but it doesn’t seem to change much.
Carlisle glances in his direction, acknowledging him with a slight smile, before he continues. “And I had it in my head that this would be some kind of way to…I don’t know, fix all the shit that my father did here,” he explains, shaking his head. “Like it would put it all behind me, and I would be able to actually do something useful with my life. I had this stupid, romantic idea of the military in my mind and I was sure that I would be able to feel like I actually had some kind of purpose if I signed up and did what they told me. Maybe I was looking for direction, maybe I was—I don’t fucking know.”
As his words fail him, Joe picks up, locking eyes with me and downing another generous gulp of wine. I wonder if any of them have noticed that I haven’t so much as laid a hand on mine, but they seem so caught up in the conversation at hand, I doubt it’s crossed their minds.
“We went through training together, the whole nine yards,” he explains. “And we got deployed together too. Sent out to—well,you know damn well where they were sending new recruits like us four years ago, right?”
I nod. Hard to miss that kind of thing, even if I was up to my eyeballs in diaper changes at the time.
“And it wasn’t what any of us thought it would be,” he continues gruffly, glancing around the room for confirmation, which he soon gets. The others nod, none of them so much as looking as each other, as though locking eyes with the others will bring back memories none of them want to deal with.
“We were sent out to these villages, tiny places in the middle of nowhere that weren’t doing a damn thing to anyone,” Dylan cuts in, his voice dropping suddenly, cold. “Told to evict families from their homes. Told to?—”
Callum shoots him a look and he stops dead, like he thinks it will be too much for me to hear.
“We did things that no right-thinking person should ever have to do,” Callum says. “At first—it feels like you have to, like there’s no choice. Like it’s life or death and you against them, and this was a matter of making it out alive…”
“But that’s not how it was,” Dylan adds. “Never how it was, really.”
“That’s why we left,” Carlisle explains, at last. “As soon as that first tour was done—we were out. Meant to serve a few more before we got our full pensions, but I didn’t want to live like that. None of us did. So we just…we walked out. Came back to America. Figured out what we could do here that would actually help people, instead of getting caught up in shit that we weretoldwould help people when we knew it was anything but.”
I look between the four of them, and I can practically feel it, the weight of what they went through pulsing through their minds. I might not be able to see into their memories to understand what happened to them, what they were forced to do over there, but all I have to go on are the men who sit before me now.
“And that’s how you wound up firefighting?”
“Thought I would put some of my father’s money to good use, for a change,” Carlisle remarks. “And given that Joe had history with it, with his dad and all, we knew what we were getting into.”
“Knew we could actually help people,” Callum mutters. “Not just carry out orders for someone else’s plans that left everyone worse off than before.”
“You saved so many lives, doing this,” I tell them, trying to keep my voice as steady as I can make it, given the circumstances. “I mean, with the firefighting…if it hadn’t been for you guys, I don’t even want to think what might have happened in Devin Ridge. Even just to this house…”
I gesture around, and find that I’m gripped by a sudden rush of sadness, imagining that this place might have slipped through my fingers just like that. I know I have a new home on the horizon now, but that doesn’t mean that this house doesn’t hold memories for me, memories that I would have been devastated if I had to lose out on with no warning.
