“The question is, where did you find it?”
Tracing the edge of the picture with the tip of her finger, she takes a deep breath and lets it out again.
“Zach was my neighbor.”
I blink a couple of times as Alina looks off into the distance. Zach was from Harwood Heights, not Oak Park. Of course, her father could have moved during that time.
“He was a few years older than me,” she says, “but he was always really nice to me. He talked to me about school and how important getting an education was. He planned to go to college for engineering so he could take care of his parents and never have to worry about money again. I think he was the only boy I knew who wasn’t paying my father…”
Her voice trails off and she clears her throat.
“I guess I had a crush on him.” She chuckles softly. “I don’t know if he realized that or not, but I did. I think he was seventeen when I was eleven. He left for the Marines right out of high school, and I was really upset that he was going. When he left, he promised to write to me all the time, and he did.”
“You knew me,” I say, suddenly putting it together. “That very first time I picked you up, you already knew who I was and not because of my reputation on the street.”
“I did.” She nods. “Zach told me everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t see any reason to,” she says as she leans back on the cushions. “I understand why you don’t want to talk about what happened over there, and I didn’t want you to feel like I was pushing you to give me information. I already knew enough.”
“What did you know?”
“Zach told me about a lot of the guys in his unit but mostly about you,” Alina says. “He told me you were the best marksman he’d ever seen in his life and how proud he was to be your spotter. He talked about how protective you were of your unit and how often you were there helping out the other guys when they needed it. He said everyone looked up to you, even the officers, and you were just a corporal.”
I swallow hard. She’s talking about times I just barely remember. As often as I think about all the horrible things I’ve done and seen, I rarely consider some of the other times.
“I remember one of his letters where a new guy had just been sent over there to join you. He was a radio operator or something like that. He was only eighteen and really scared to be deployed in the middle of everything. He’d only enlisted to pay for college and never thought he’d be sent overseas. Zach said you found him in the middle of the night, crying, and you stayed up with him and talked him through it. You gave him the confidence and courage to keep going and that you always protected him.”
She’s talking about Eddie-boy, and I close my eyes as I remember that night. The temperature had gone from about a hundred and ten that afternoon to fifty at nightfall, and all those insanely huge spiders had looked for heat inside our barracks. Eddie-boy had stepped on one coming out of the shower and had completely freaked out. We talked for hours about his childhood and why he joined the Marines. His family went camping a lot, and he’d come across critters in his tent before but never something that looked quite like those spiders.
We had a big discussion about size ratio and how he was a lot bigger than a fucking spider. Then we’d gone searching for more of them, learning how to trap them and kill them. Eddie-boy became the unit’s exterminator after that.
“What else did Zach say?” I ask quietly.
“That you were incredibly brave, even when you had to do something you didn’t want to do. He said you always did what was necessary and that sometimes he didn’t know how you managed it. When things got bad, he said you were always there for everyone, saying and doing things to make life over there a bit more bearable. He kept saying they needed to promote you—make you an officer—since all of the officers listened to you anyway. Zach said he couldn’t imagine what it would have been like if you hadn’t been at his side.”
“He was hit right beside me,” I tell her. “He died in my arms. We were under heavy fire, and I tried to stop the bleeding, but by the time the medic got there, it was too late.”
“His mom told me,” Alina says as she squeezes my hand. “I didn’t know how. I just knew he was killed in the line of duty. It was right after his funeral that I left home.”
I do the math in my head. Zach and I were the same age, and he died when he was twenty-one. If she was fourteen when she left home, it means Alina is now twenty-three years old—the same age I was when they pulled me out of that pit.
“Before then, I was actually considering enlisting,” Alina says. “Zach knew my home life sucked, and he was always encouraging me to do it. Probably the Army, not Marines, or maybe even the Navy. I thought it would be a good way to get money for college, just like Zach was doing. Once he was gone…well, I guess the motivation wasn’t there anymore.”
“And then you were living on the streets.”
“For a while, yes. I didn’t have any other family and didn’t think it all through when I left. I had maybe five hundred dollars at the time. I thought that was a lot of money.”
“That won’t get you far.”
“Lasted about two weeks.”
“Then what did you do?”
“Made a living the only way I knew how.” Her voice is low, almost monotone. As she speaks the words, her tone becomes more and more detached. “What else was I going to do? I turned tricks and made enough to get a shitty apartment. Got beat up and raped a lot, but that’s how it goes.”
I bristle at the words and the casual way she says them.