AT THIS POINT, Callar protested to Terreri.
“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said.
“He’s lying in his own filth. Deprived of any stimuli. This is how you provoke a complete psychotic break. Irreversible.”
“You said he could have four weeks,” Terreri said again. “We’re nineteen days in. I’m going to give Karp the last nine days.”
“What am I doing here?”
“Major, believe it or not, I listen to you. If not for you, I’d keep him in there forever.”
“That supposed to make me feel better, sir? Because it doesn’t.”
Callar walked out of the barracks and into the cold night air, across cracked concrete to the edge of the base. Stare Kiejkuty didn’t have much security. An eight-foot fence, a few spotlights, guard towers at the four corners, usually unmanned. It didn’t need more. Poland was its own security. There were no Chechens here, almost no Muslims at all. And after centuries of being batted back and forth between Russia and Germany, Poland had finally found a protector it could trust, a protector with no interest in swallowing it whole. No wonder the Poles loved the United States.
Outside the fence, life. Peasants sitting around their kitchens, eating boiled pierogi dipped in runny applesauce. The old ones gossiping about their children’s children. The young ones drinking buffalo grass vodka and texting one another — yes, even here — as they looked for their escape, to Warsaw or even farther west.
Did the peasants have any idea what was happening here? Would they care if they knew? No, Callar decided. Two generations before, they’d watched the Nazis feed Jews into ovens. They hadn’t protested. They hadn’t cared. More than a few had helped. The Poles were not a sentimental people. The tread of foreign armies had stamped the sentiment out of them long before World War II.
Nine days. They’d put bin Zari through hell for nineteen days already. What were nine more? Nine more might break him. It might.
“Nine days,” Callar said aloud.
She thought of how she’d gotten here: her decision to join the reserves, her tours in Iraq, Travis’s suicide. Along the way, each step had made sense, or seemed to. But taken together, they had the empty logic of a dream.
When they’d signed up for this squad, they’d all been promised two two-week leaves, recognition of the intensity of the work. Callar had taken one, halfway through. The trip had not gone well. Steve loved her, she knew. The blunt truth was that he loved her more than she loved him. He’d grown up in an army family, raised to obey. Unlike most kids, he had accepted the rules without question. His parents had died while he was in community college, his dad of a heart attack and his mother of breast cancer that had refused to answer to chemotherapy. After they were gone, Steve had retreated into himself while he waited for someone new to obey. Probably he should have been a soldier, but the military’s machismo didn’t suit him. So he went to nursing school and moved to California, where he found his way to the VA hospital where they’d met.
He was a handsome man, Steve, but he’d had only one previous girlfriend, and their relationship had ended badly. She said I was too in love with her, Steve said. That I never said no. I don’t understand how you can be too in love. Rachel hadn’t tried to explain. But she knew how his ex had felt.
Still. He was smart and funny in his sly way, a simple and good cook, a considerate lover — sometimes too considerate; sometimes she wanted to tell him to hurt her a little, but she never did because she knew he wouldn’t understand — and he supported her without question. He was the opposite of her father, who sucked all the oxygen out of every room he was in, who demanded unending attention as the price of his love. When Rachel went away, Steve wrote her every night, the quotidian details of life on the ward where he worked, misbehaving patients and hospital politics. She cherished the letters, cherished the knowledge that life went on back home. But she hardly wrote back. And he never minded, or if he did, he never complained.
Children would have changed him, she thought. Children would have given him a new focus. He would have been a wonderful dad. But she’d miscarried and then had an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried again, and after that, the docs said she couldn’t risk another pregnancy. They’d talked about adoption but hadn’t done anything, not yet, so it was just the two of them.
He’d argued with her, really argued, only once, when she’d told him she wanted to go to Poland. He’d warned her: You’re more fragile than you think, Rach. What if it’s too much? What then?
It won’t be too much, she said. And if it is, I can always leave. It’s only fifteen months — eighteen, max.
Please, he said. Listen to me on this.
But she’d never listened to him before, and she wasn’t about to start.
NOW SHE KNEW how right he’d been. And yet she couldn’t tell him. Not over e-mail, not over the phone, not during those unbearable two weeks at home. Not because of anything he would have said. He would never have held his rightness over her, never tried to punish her for her mistake. And not because she’d be breaking every secrecy oath she’d signed, either.
Because she was humiliated at her weakness. Terreri and Karp and the others in the squad saw the bigger picture. They saw that breaking these detainees might help them dismantle terrorist networks that were responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, nearly all Muslims.
But she could see only the prisoners themselves, screaming as they were Tased or locked for hours in a box smaller than a coffin. Watching them suffer tore against her instincts and her medical training. But she’d signed up for it, and she couldn’t quit. She would finish this tour, whatever it cost her. Just like the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to leave wasn’t hers to make.
She needed to tell Steve all this, but when she tried to, she couldn’t. They’d passed her leave in silent agony. He’d bought Padres tickets for them her second night back, and she’d forced herself to go. After that, she spent most days at home. She made plans with her friends and canceled them. She hardly slept. One night, at 2 a.m., she got into her 4Runner and drove east into the desert to the Arizona border and turned around and drove back, listening to the mad conspiracy theories high on the dial the whole way.
When she got back, she smelled eggs in the pan, onions sizzling, toast browning. In the kitchen, two plates were set, two glasses filled with orange juice. She sat down and watched him cook.
“Breakfast? ”
“Sure.”
He filled the plates and sat across from her. They ate in silence. She hadn’t eaten in two days, and she tried to savor every mouthful, to be present with him and not at the Midnight House. But she couldn’t help herself.
“This is great,” she said.
“You like it?”
“I do.” She shoveled scrambled eggs into her mouth, and before she could help herself she was crying.
“Tell me,” he said. “Rach, please.”
“I can’t.”
He turned away from her, went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He drank it down before he spoke, still facing away.
“Watching you like this. I can’t take it.”
“You should leave me, Steve.” The baldness of her words surprised her. “I’m no good.”
He turned to look at her. Panic was in his eyes. “Do you want that?”