Stephie’s squad worked along a roadside to build a blocking position that would be manned by someone else. But the quiet combat veterans didn’t complain about their transformation into manual laborers. The distant rumble that arrived periodically on the shifting winds reminded all how good this job was.
You gotta pace yourself, she told herself as she stepped onto the blade of her short folding shovel. She didn’t mean pace yourself at the hard digging, but in the fighting — in the dying — that the war periodically demanded. The blade slipped into the loose fill that a backhoe had gouged from the road’s shoulder. The rivulets of sweat on Stephie’s neck changed course as she dumped the shovel’s load, filling a sandbag. Their squad’s medic — Melinda Crane — closed the bag with a plastic tie. Both were stripped down to their olive drab T-shirts despite the furtive stares of their male squadmates. It was hot, and they were all tired. And if anyone did anything more than look, the two women also had rifles.
A continuous line of pain ran from one end of Stephie’s spine to the other, but its character changed along the way. Stabs between her shoulder blades brought sudden winces and loud hisses. They contrasted sharply, however, with the dull ache in her lower back, whose tendrils rose like a vine to wrap around her chest. Stephie straightened her back, arched her shoulders, and rolled her neck. But no matter which way Stephie stretched, she couldn’t loosen the vise that seemed to grip her lungs and rob her of breath.
An ordinary civilian car approached from the southwest, the direction of the front lines. The road was to be mined later that day, but for now it remained open like a causeway, Stephie thought, down which people escaped from an approaching storm.
Stephie’s squadmates took the opportunity to stop and stare at the sight. They had seen no traffic since just before daylight when the trucks had left them there. The car wound its way purposefully toward the north.
“Refugees,” Melinda said. Still, everyone watched with what Stephie thought was a vague sense of foreboding. They didn’t fear the car’s occupants, but the news that they might bear. They’ve broken through! Stephie imagined. They’re right behind us! The clarity of the panicked words in Stephie’s head startled her.
Just as in Stephie’s imagination, the car slowed to a stop and cracked the window. The lone occupant — a woman in large sunglasses — leaned onto the passenger seat. “Can anyone tell me…?” she began, but was interrupted by Stephie.
“Mom?” Stephie asked with an incredulous, high-pitched tone.
“Oh! There you are! Finally,” Rachel Roberts said with a discordant note of irritation. She parked the car and emerged with an old pink and green school backpack that bulged with hidden contents. Stephie met her at the car door.
“You should wear a bra,” her mother whispered.
“What are you doing here?” Stephie belted out before lowering her voice and saying, “It’s illegal for you to be here.”
Rachel snorted. “Another of that jerk’s stupid laws, and one that doesn’t seem to apply to him, I’ll have you note.”
“They’re not the president’s laws,” Stephie icily replied. “They’re passed by Congress.”
Her mother rolled her eyes as if Stephie didn’t understand, then kissed her cheek and squeezed her arms. “You’re filthy!” she proclaimed on inspecting her daughter closely. With flicks of her tongue on her fingers as if to turn the pages of a book, she wiped smears of dirt from Stephie’s face. She then tried to arrange hair that had been pressed flat under the webbing of Stephie’s helmet. Stephie recoiled with each insult.
“Mother! Stop it! People are watching! Stop!” Finally, she pulled away with a, “Grrr!”
“When I visited you in boot camp,” her mother said disapprovingly, “it seemed like the army was obsessed with hygiene. It looks like you haven’t had a shower since.”
“Why are you here?” Stephie asked again.
This time, the question seemed to throw Rachel. She started to say something but stopped several times before words escaped her. “Here,” she finally said, handing over the school backpack. “I brought you some things. Extra toothbrush. Some nightclothes. A couple of trashy paperbacks.”
Stephie stared in horror at the bright girlish colors on the pack that she had discarded as too juvenile even for junior high. She looked over her shoulder at the others. The snickers and whispered jibes were already spreading. Across the road behind her mother, she saw John and his team carefully descending the hill stringing wire for explosives meant to topple an avalanche of rocks across the road.
“I don’t want that stuff!” Stephie insisted through gritting teeth.
Her mother frowned. “Fine,” she said, tossing the pack through the window into the passengers seat in a fit of pique.
“Where did you come from?” Stephie asked, turning to the again empty road to the south.
“I was given bad directions by some halfwit,” Rachel griped. A shiver rippled up her spine to her shoulders. “It was awful down there,” she said, turning toward the distant sound of thunder drifting gently through the hills. “People were running everywhere. Nobody knew what was going on. And the poor wounded boys,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re much better off up here working on road construction, let me tell you.” Stephie’s mouth opened wide to object, but her mother said, “I know it’s hard work, Stephie, but really it’s better than fighting.”
“Mom,” Stephie said, trying to keep a lid on her temper, “you don’t understand. We’re a combat unit! I’m in the infantry!”
“Of course you are,” Rachel responded, smiling and patting Stephie’s cheek. Stephie slung her head away from the patronizing, offensive touch. “But you don’t have quite the same kind of job as Conner Reilly,” she said.
“He’s armored cavalry,” Stephie blurted out. “I’m infantry. They find the enemy. We fight them.”
“He’s dead,” Rachel informed her.
The news seemed to still the breeze and bring to a close a chapter of Stephie’s life. Induction into the army and boot camp had not spelled the end of her teenage years. Even after the shock of combat, she had felt much the same age as before. Now, however, although still eighteen, she was no longer young.
“How?” Stephie asked, before swallowing to wet her throat. “How did he die?”
“Fighting,” Rachel replied. “Somewhere in California.”
“But how did he die?” Stephie insisted on knowing. “Was he shot? Killed in a barrage? By a mine? Friendly fire? Enemy fire? How?”
“He was just killed, Stephie,” her mother said gently. “I don’t know how.” After a few moments, Rachel said, “It’s all right to cry, Stephie. It’s okay. Go ahead.”
Stephie focused. “I’m not crying,” she said simply. After all these years her mother still didn’t know her. Stephie felt not even the faintest tremor of tears.
Her reaction seemed to distress her mother, and like all ambiguous emotions Rachel Roberts experienced, it slowly turned to annoyance. “So,” she said, “you see, I understand that this is, in name, a combat organization that you’re with. But Conner was with the regular army, not one of these new groups that they’ve thrown together at the last second.” She shook her head. “Those poor boys. It’s terrible for them up there, Stephie. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Consider yourself lucky that you’ve got the job that you’ve got,” Rachel said. She inspected with an approving cast of her eye the half-built machine gun nests and the rocks piled on the shoulder of the road to be used as a barricade to prevent traffic from straying into the mines. “At least you’ll never have to know the horrors of combat like poor Conner did, God rest his soul.”