by GlasOwl
III
"Kell? I've been thinking."
Kelly felt as content as a lazy cat who has finished off a pint of thick cream. Her thoughts were drifting like the puffy white clouds overhead as they drove through mountain country that looked as if a young Julie Andrews ought to appear and begin singing how alive the hills were with the sound of music. Kelly slowly took her eyes off the scenery to look quizzically at Jeri, who was focused on the road. It was a level road for the moment, but for several hours it had twisted sharply through a series of high valleys, keeping even Jeri to a slow pace.
"You have? Good, because you're going to have to think for both of us for a while, love. I won't be able to think for at least another day or two, maybe not even until next week." She reached over and took one of Jeri's hands from the steering wheel and kissed it. She was well into a sensual yawn and stretch when a twinge made her gasp.
Jeri, who had regained her hand for use in shifting gears as they came to yet another hill, glanced sharply at her companion. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I'm okay. I guess I'm finally getting stiff from the fall"
"What hurts?"
Kelly checked. "My wrists. My left shoulder. My leg, probably, though I can't quite tell. It's not bad. I can walk most of it off, I'm sure."
"That's what I want to talk to you about, Kell. As long as we're here, in Europe I mean, I want to go to this place I know for a few weeks. After we get Alenka to Sarajevo, of course. It's a training -- a school sort of -- where you can go through selected courses. You're good, really you are, one of the best I've ever seen and a quick study, but you haven't been trained and you need to sharpen your instincts. This will give you the basics in hand-to-hand stuff."
Kelly felt her stomach lurch. To cover a fear that she didn't quite understand, she joked. "You mean a boot-camp for outlaws?" But her mind was saying 'for terrorists.'
"You could call it that." Jeri glanced over at Kelly. "You look scared."
"I guess I am." It was one thing to bind her life to Jeri's and another altogether to even know about the people Jeri knew.
"Talk to me, Kell. This is one of those times that silence could be a very bad thing."
Kelly nodded. Jeri was right. This was important and if she kept her thoughts to herself, it would surely be the tip of a wedge coming between them. The trouble was she wasn't clear at all about what she feared. "Okay, here goes. I am scared. All we had to do in Tibet -- all I had to do -- was keep going and not get caught. I didn't really have to decide anything about what we were doing or who was against it. I mean what could be wrong with helping a UN official learn about persecution of children? So I didn't have to think about what was right or wrong, or how right or how wrong. Besides, just being with you was the beginning and end of what was right."
Kelly looked at Jeri who was staring ahead at the road, and she willed her next words to be true, willed herself to be in that particular place of understanding. "It still is."
"And Bolingbrook was there," Jeri added.
Kelly hadn't considered that before. "I guess that's true. She had all the authority of the UN behind her, plus her own reputation, so she brought along a kind of assumption that what we were doing was okay. She was kind of like a mother, giving permission to us just by her presence."
"I'm sure she'd enjoy hearing you say that, Miss Corcoran." Jeri caught the British inflection perfectly. That and a small smile cracked some of the tension. This was the first time that the possibility of discomfort had slipped between them, and how they dealt with this would surely set the pattern for their future.
Kelly laughed, and then continued. "It's different here. I know you had reasons for what you did in Ireland . . . "
"Don't confuse reasons with making a thing right," Jeri interrupted grimly.
Kelly nodded. "This stuff about training -- who's going to train me, and to do what?"
Suddenly, Jeri was standing on the brake and fighting to control the spinning car. She missed the tree fallen across the road but Kelly heard branches scrape against her door. Kelly braced herself against the dash, causing her palms to sting mercilessly while her shoulder sent out a wave of pain. The Yugo spun around another half turn before coming to a halt.
At first the dust kicked up by the slide obscured Kelly's view. As the dust subsided, she saw what had made Jeri stop. The car faced toward a fallen tree, toward a number of men with rifles in camouflage uniforms who stood behind the the tree. For a moment, everyone stayed motionless as they assessed the meaning of the situation.
Three men began walking toward them, two of them carrying rifles held loosely but still pointed toward the car. Kelly remembered that she strongly disliked the sound of bullets anywhere near her. The third man, with only a holstered pistol at his side, carried himself like an officer.
Jeri spoke low and fast, barely moving her lips. "They're Yugoslav Federal Army, not Croatian. Remember what we rehearsed. We're on our way to Belgrade. Whatever you do, keep your hands in sight on the dashboard."
Jeri leaned out the window, following her own counsel by keeping both hands in sight on the steering wheel, and smiled at the man who appeared to be in charge. As he neared the car, he lifted one hand, holding the first two fingers against his thumb. Jeri nodded and returned the same gesture.
Jeri's heart was thudding. It was impossible not to remember another time she had been stopped at a roadblock: on a back road in Armagh. She and her cousin, Fiona, and her cousin's boyfriend were on their way back to Belfast. Meeting her Irish cousin at last and going on a tour of green hills and sparkling bays and small village inns had made for a lovely spring vacation from Oxford for Jeri, but in Armagh they came to a roadblock, and British soldiers directed Jeri to pull over. Within an hour, she was no longer a Rhodes scholar at Oxford but a prisoner of the English Crown, and Fiona and her boyfriend were dead. Never mind that they had betrayed her by turning the rental car into a smuggler's vehicle. They had meant to use her American ignorance of the political situation as protection, and it got them killed instead.
Kelly watched the Yugoslavian officer's humorless attitude relax slightly as Jeri gave him a friendly, mildly flirtatious greeting. She was wearing blue jeans today, but the white blouse still suggested Europe. Kelly felt more than a little confused. As far as she knew, they were still in Croatia but Jeri clearly felt that being Croatian carried some risk. Belgrade was the capital of Serbia. Did that mean these men were Serbian?
The officer adjusted his stance so that he could get a better look at Kelly. Suddenly, he favored her with a smile that was quite charming.
"How do you do," he said in passable English. "Your cousin says you are here from America."
Jeri turned to Kelly. Her tone was disbelieving but she added a wink that only Kelly could see. "The captain says the war has started. Croatia declared independence today. I can't believe it, I can't believe they're being such idiots!"
Kelly looked from the captain to Jeri, her amazement only a little pretended. "But that's terrible!"
"Do not worry, miss. I am telling your cousin the safest way to get home." He stepped back, gesturing as he spoke.
Kelly was surprised at herself, surprised to find she been hoping that a way might be found around the impending crisis, as if it truly mattered to her. She wanted life here to be the way it felt in the wharf-side cafe, on the evening walls -- the way she had imagined it as a timeless lapping of blue waves over marble.
The captain finished giving his instructions and information. He favored Jeri with a smart salute and added to Kelly, "Good-bye, miss. I hope you enjoy your visit."
"Thank you," Kelly said. She waited for him to turn away before asking Jeri, "Who are these men?"
"Yugoslav soldiers. From the federal army." Jeri answered.
The captain returned to the squad behind the tree. The two soldiers who had accompanied him to the car stayed behind, still watching the women closely but too far away to hear them.
"Do you notice anything about these men?" Jerry asked without looking at Kelly.
"Not really. I don't like them."
"Don't let that make you quit looking. They say they're federal troops and that the war just started, but they didn't just get here. That stump where the tree grew -- the wood is dark. It was cut down quite a while before yesterday. And the leaves on the tree are shriveled and dry. I'd add the way the uniforms look, like they've been out for several days, but that could be from maneuvers. Still, it's a sure bet that this roadblock has been here longer than just one day."
The captain nodded and spoke to the men who gathered around him. One of the group was wearing a uniform so self-consciously styled, from his tight jodhpur fatigues to his mirror sunglasses, that he looked like a James Bond villain; he contributed a comment that made the group laugh uproariously. Kelly was sure that the comments had been about Jeri and herself. It had been a long while since she'd heard men laugh like that in connection with her, and despite the anger she felt, the sound also aroused an old familiar fear.
"Don't let it get to you, Kell," Jeri said, reading her thoughts. "Remember it's a weakness. Now you know something about them and they don't know much of anything about you. It gives you an edge. You can always use information and anger."
The Yugoslavian captain waved, gesturing for them to drive forward. Jeri turned on the motor and put the car in first gear. She approached the barricade cautiously. The captain waved some more, guiding her around the tree with large and humorous gestures while the James Bond villain posed in an attitude of arrogance, his long, dark hair riffling in a breeze that Kelly bet he had ordered along with the uniform. Once Jeri reached the road on the far side of the fallen tree, the captain called good-bye. The long-haired soldier next to the captain said something, obviously an obscenity from his tone and leer, but the captain hissed him to silence.
Jeri was frowning as they drove slowly away. "That was odd."
"What part? The beginning, middle or end?"
"The captain said to be sure not to stop until we get to the next town. Then the other one said that it was too bad we weren't Croatian and the captain made him shut up. I wouldn't have thought anything about it if the captain had just let the comment go."
"Why are they here? I thought we were in Croatia."
"I'm sure we are but, apparently, I got us closer to the Krajina region than I thought. Damn. It's too dangerous to be on this road. If there's going to be trouble, we're going to be right in the middle of it. The next crossroad, we're heading back for the coast. It will take longer to get to Vukovar that way, but there's no point in taking chances. Damn!" She added a few more curses as she considered everything the change in direction would require.
"What was that gesture you used with the captain?"
"What do you mean?"
Kelly held up her hand with the first two fingers against her thumb.
"Oh that! The gesture means Serb now. That's how Orthodox Serbs make the sign of the cross. Croat Catholics only use their fingers. And the Muslims don't make any sign."
"That's it?" Kelly asked, wondering again at Jeri's knowledge of Yugoslavia. "Not a language difference, not a different hair or skin, something you could see? You can only tell one person from another by how one person holds their hand to start praying?"
Jeri smiled at Kelly's indignation. Good. Venting would release the fear of the last few minutes. "Well," she drawled, "they do pronounce some words a little different. My contacts gave me a short list that could signal the wrong background. And there's always the alphabets. Croatians use the same one we do and the Serbians use the Cyrillic which looks like Russian."
"And the Muslims use Arabic."
"No. They use the Croatian mostly."
"Oh, that helps! Jeri, I don't understand at all."
"Don't worry. I just have a few more facts and I don't understand either.
The road continued on relatively level ground for a kilometer or two and then began winding through hills that were covered with more grass and brush than trees.
"Jeri, tell me again what the Krajina is? I meant to look it up later in West's book, but tell me now."
"Actually it just means border. This used to be the border land between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Refugee Serbians who were fleeing from the Turks were given land here so they would have a stake in keeping the Turks from coming any further. Ironic, huh? The folks you invited in to fix the problem have now become the problem. Now the Serbs want it because, according to Milosevic, where there's a Serb, that's part of Serbia."
They might have missed the woman who was sitting not far from the road since she was as still as any rock outcropping from the hill itself. What did catch their attention was somebody trying to pull the woman away but who gave up as their car drew close, someone who scuttled away to disappear into the brush.
"Something's wrong with that woman," Kelly said. "She looks sick."
Jeri was already stopping. She got out of the car and called out. She got no reply. She reached into the back of the Yugo and took out their water. Kelly followed Jeri off the road and they climbed toward the woman. Sitting a few meters upslope from the road, she looked quite old, a woman in a black dress with a black scarf tied country style under her chin. Strands of gray hair escaped from the scarf which almost hid a large bruise along her cheek and forehead. One hand rested on a bundle in front of her. She gave no answer to Jeri's greeting; indeed, she seemed not to even hear it.
Jeri, nearing the woman, stopped as if slamming into an invisible wall, turned. "Kelly, wait. Oh god, don't --"
Don't what? Don't look, don't come further, don't see? It wasn't a bundle. It was a child, a boy probably, judging by the clothes. Maybe ten or twelve. It was hard to see the hair since there was so much dried blood on the face, and one's eyes kept going toward the white bone exposed where the throat had been cut, where black flies crawled. One kept looking away only to be drawn back again to the horror.
Kelly thought she had seen a lot when George and Russell, and then Billy, one after another, had suffered through the opportunistic diseases of AIDS -- the pneumonias, the wasting, the cancer. But Kelly had never seen anything like this. She sank to her knees, unable to move. Her mind, desperately seeking any form of escape, thought they must look like some modern tableau of a religious painting -- the woman seated by her son, she kneeling, Jeri standing -- but she wasn't sure if they were viewing the Baby Jesus just born or the dead Jesus removed from the cross.
Jeri said something to the woman but she got no answer. Kelly looked up from the boy, glad of a reason to turn away from the sight before her, saw someone else coming toward them. It was another woman, younger -- a girl, really, not much older than the dead boy. She was dressed in jeans, more modern than the older woman. Her age was difficult to determine because her face was also bruised, as if from a number of blows.
"Do you know these people?" Jeri asked, translating her own questions as well as the girl's answers for Kelly.
"My mother. My brother."
"What happened?"
"Chetniks." The young woman seemed unable to manage many words. Tear marks were visible on her bruised face.
"When?" Jeri asked.
"Yesterday."
"Is there anyone we can get to help you?"
The girl shook her head. "Do you have some food for her? She has not eaten since yesterday."
"You can't stay here."
"Nowhere to go. She won't talk to me. She knows that I will have a Chetnik baby."
"A what?"
"They said when they left: "Now we have put a Chetnik in you." They made her watch when they put it in me and now she will not speak to me."
"Kelly!"
"What?" Jeri's sharp tone roused her from her shock.
"Go check the Yugo. There may be a jack or something we can use for a shovel."
Kelly stood up and went down to the car. She supposed that only throwing up once on the way was the sign of some kind of strength. Underneath their packs in the trunk, she found a folded trenching tool along with a hammer, two wrenches and a screwdriver. Whoever had given Jeri the car certainly had foresight, although Kelly hoped that grave digging didn't come up too often.
Another wave of nausea caught her. Not for an instant did she doubt that the soldiers they had just passed had done this -- or knew who had. People who could rape a daughter and slit the throat of a son and leave the mother alive after seeing both. Kelly gripped the trencher and used the pain from her scraped palms to help her get control.
Jeri nodded with grim satisfaction on seeing the small shovel. "We can start digging over there," Jeri said, pointing to a pine tree. "I told the mother what's going to happen, and at least I saw her eyes move. Here, I'll dig. I forgot about your hands, Kell. Can you find rocks, the bigger the better? The grave won't be that deep and rocks will help to cover the boy."
Kelly nodded.
"How are you?"
"I'm okay, Jeri. It was those men from back there wasn't it?"
"Yeah. As sure as if we'd seen them."
Gathering rocks was a good task. The hillside provided many of an appropriate size and Kelly carried them to where Jeri worked beneath the pine tree. The ground was dry and hard and although Jeri bent to the work with a will, the grave deepened very slowly.
"Jeri? What will these women do after we finish?"
Jeri paused, wiping sweat away from her forehead, and looked over to where the two women still sat, the girl a short distance from her mother. Vojna, that's the daughter, says that all the rest of their neighbors -- their Croat neighbors -- have already gone. She says her father was away and they were hoping he might come home, but he seems to have disappeared. Then the Chetniks came and burned the houses and brought them here. We'll take them with us. We can't leave them."
"What are Chetniks?"
"It's a name left over from World War Two. It used to mean resistance fighters against the Nazis. Now it means Serbian irregulars, paramilitary, a kind of volunteer militia."
"Which way will we go? We can't go back." Kelly felt her thoughts like rubber balls that kept bouncing, unable to stay on a single idea.
"There's a map in the car. Maybe we can keep on this road for a way, but we have to get out of the Krajina as soon as possible."
"You said those were Yugoslavian soldiers, not Serbian."
"Serbia's running Yugoslavia now. The two are pretty much the same thing, at least here in the Krajina. I didn't think this would happen so soon. The people I talked to in Dubrovnik were sure we had at least a couple weeks."
It was nearly sunset when they buried the boy. The mother went where she was directed, limp, as easy to move as a puppet. Kelly guided her over to the pine tree. Vojna followed, crying silently. She reached for her mother's hand but the woman drew away. Angry, Kelly went over to the girl and placed a hand on her shoulder. Vojna leaned toward her, not touching but taking comfort from Kelly's closeness.
Kelly had seen such coldness before. At Russell's funeral, his family had been cutting, as distant from George as it was possible to be while standing around a grave. Even in death they wouldn't forgive their son for being gay. They remained unmoved even when George spoke, his head bowed, spectral thin: "Wait for me, my friend, my brother, my lover. Where once I feared to go, now I want to hurry, knowing that I will surely find you there."
But in spite of her dislike for the old woman's hardness, Kelly's heart went out to her. The lines on her face were without meaning, as if they had all crumpled in and no longer bore any relation to the joys or sorrows that had created them. No one should have been made to endure what she had.
Jeri had lifted the boy and carried him to the shallow grave. She placed him tenderly in the ground and covered his face with his torn and blood-stained jacket. For a moment she seemed at a loss, unsure what to do. It was a look and manner so unfamiliar to Jeri that Kelly came forward of her own to help. She looked at Vojna and her mother, but neither woman had anything to offer.
Words came to Kelly of their own accord.
"Son of this land," she intoned solemnly, "may the god of your fathers guide you home." She paused and waited while Jeri translated the words. "May those who love you and remain behind find peace in the thought of your peace."
Jeri liked what Kelly had said, although she considered, sourly, that Kelly had missed a big opportunity to discuss the wages of sin and the pleasures of vengeance.
Once the dirt had been replaced, Jeri and Kelly laid stones carefully over the grave. They placed the largest and heaviest on top in order to discourage animals and, at last, a low mound of rock marked the grave. In the lingering dusk, Jeri shepherded them all back to the Yugo. The old woman went easily enough. At the car, she climbed into the back seat and Vojna joined her. In such a small car they were still able to sit without touching.
"Do you know where we are?" Kelly asked. Jeri was using a small flashlight to see the map.
"Yeah. I think there's a road off this one a few kilometers ahead. We can take it back to the coast."
"What are you doing?"
Jeri had taken a bottle of water and walked to the front of the car. She found a stick, poured out some of the water onto the ground, and then stirred, making as much mud as possible. She smeared the mud over the headlights.
"This will give us a little light to drive by, but it should give us a chance to see other lights before they see us. We're lucky it's dark. If we passed by soldiers now with Vojna and her mother, we'd all be in trouble."
Jeri drove very slowly. It wasn't only that the headlights gave so dim a view, she also didn't want to come up on a house or a village by surprise. She had very little idea of the exact shape of their danger, so she intended to act as if anything might hide peril. She glanced over at Kelly whose profile was outlined by the dim light of the dash. Kelly had her eyes closed, but Jeri knew she wasn't asleep. She reached over and found her own hand gathered in by both of Kelly's. Reassurance, love, acceptance of where they were -- more than a word could ever manage was in the way Kelly took her hand.
Jeri felt so proud of the woman beside her that she shook her head in wonder. It took an immense heart to have gone through a day like this and not fold. Kelly had nearly been killed herself in the morning. Jeri hadn't anticipated the turn events had taken. When she got Rafi's message, she had thought the matter would be simple: drive to Vukovar and then drive to Sarajevo. She certainly hadn't anticipated getting caught up in a civil war.
"Kelly?"
"What, love?"
Their voices were barely above a whisper. The passengers in the back seat might be sleeping.
"Earlier, when we were talking about you going through a training course, remember?"
"Yeah." Kelly's sigh in the darkened car was sad. "That seems so long ago now."
"I just wanted to make you safer. I promise you I'll never ask you to do anything that you'd regret doing."
They had rounded an easy curve and the road appeared to begin a gentle downhill slope when Jeri saw a faint glow ahead. She stopped, then reversed back around the curve before pulling the car off the road. She rolled down the window and listened to the silence for several minutes. After a while she could make out the sound of faint, far off voices.
"I'm just going to look. You'll be okay?"
"Sure. Be careful."
Jeri reached under the front seat and found the release where she expected
it to be. When she brought her hand back up, it was holding a large hand
gun. She searched again and found a piece of equipment that extended
the barrel. She looked over at Kelly and got a grim nod of approval.
A quick glance in the back seat showed two more pairs of glistening eyes
watching her intently.
"It might be better if all of you wait for me outside the car."
Kelly helped Vojna and her mother out of the Yugo and over to a shelter of sorts by some trees, while Jeri changed out of her white blouse and into a dark t-shirt and jacket. Kelly was shrugging stiffly into her own jacket when Jeri came to help. Jeri adjusted the shoulders unnecessarily and then pulled Kelly close in a hug.
"If you have to leave for any reason, go that way. I'll find you."
Jeri pointed in a direction that Kelly took to be west. Toward the sea.
"Just hurry back. We'll be here."
Long before she reached the men, Jeri could hear them. Cautiously, Jeri left the road and made her way through trees. The flickering firelight helped her and the loud laughter and raucous talk covered any noise of her approach. Clearly they were drinking, most likely slivovic, a strong, home-made plum liquor that was a favorite throughout the country.
Several men -- maybe ten or twelve -- stood or lounged around a metal barrel from which bright flames leapt skyward. None wore a real uniform, but most had longish hair and beards and all wore the olive wool cap associated with Chetniks, the name that the Serbian irregular fighters had given themselves.
Just a bunch of village louts until you took into account the rifles that each one kept close. Jeri swore to herself as she recognized up-to-date Kalashnikovs. These men were well armed for irregulars. The guns were ample evidence of powerful friends in the Yugoslav Federal Army.
Jeri wanted to use her own gun, wanted to step out into the open and spray bullets through the arrogant, drunken revelry. She struggled to control the urging of her quicksilver temper. Truth be told she had been inclined to be more sympathetic to Serbs than Croatians, but her sympathies were changing fast. To her mind there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Milosevic in Belgrade and Tudjman in Zagreb other than that Milosevic had the Yugoslav army's guns. Both men were more than willing to whip up ethnic hatred to promote their own ambitions. This fight wasn't about the past, or about some principle of nationhood, it was about land-grabbing here and now and these thugs were not only letting themselves be used by the head thug in Belgrade, they were willing to be used. In fact, Jeri bet they were having the time of their lives now that someone had called off all the rules.
Jeri eased her grip on the pistol. She could have done it, she'd wanted to do something like it since this morning when she'd realized how close she'd come to losing Kelly. And through her own complacency. She was the one who'd said you have to see the hunters before they get close and she'd seen the hunters and ignored them. It was one thing to toss your fate, win or lose, in a roll of the warrior's luck, and another to be stupid. She had been stupid by not paying immediate attention to the Aussies.
If Jeri stepped into the clearing now and made surprise an ally in killing a few soldiers before slipping away, she'd be taking a step back onto the road she'd meant to leave and she didn't think she could look straight into Kelly's eyes again if she did.
Jeri remembered Kelly's eyes and how they had changed as Kelly stared at the dead child. Disbelief, horror, all the feelings of a stunned soul had played over Kelly's blood-drained features as she confronted the evidence that men could slit the throat of a boy. In that instant, Jeri had wished she could step between Kelly and knowledge of, let alone the sight of, such an act.
One man by the fire called out to a group standing a bit farther off. Jeri looked in that direction and gave closer attention to two men she had at first overlooked. They were replicas of the Hollywood type who had been at the roadblock: same tight camouflage fatigues, same gym-sculpted physiques, same dark stylishly long hair.
The coin dropped for Jeri. She knew who they were: Arkan's Tigers.
The Tigers were a Belgrade gang who strutted around like armed roosters, preening and posing, and the combination of arrogance, vanity and guns made them genuinely dangerous. They fancied themselves to be a military unit but their real business was smuggling, providing anything for a price -- guns, drugs, anything someone was willing to pay for. Arkan -- not his real name -- had the run of Yugoslav army headquarters in Belgrade but he was also known throughout the tunnels of Europe's murky criminal underworld.
Jeri knew the type from Southie; she'd grown up among guys who were too smart to have to do anything straight. An angle, there always had to be an angle. Her older brother had been like that and he was dead now. Michael Joseph O'Donnell had been as small as Jeri was tall and he'd learned young to slip in and out of tight spots. He turned this minor talent into cash by running deliveries for the neighborhood drug dealer and hiding guns when cops came around. When one of the dealer's ripped-off clients came looking for his money back, it was Mickey O'Donnell he shot. Dead or damaged before twenty was common on the streets of South Boston -- very few home folks were surprised to learn that Mickey O'Donnell's little sister Jeri had ended up in prison -- just another Southie story. Jeri liked to remember Mickey showing up on a sweltering summer day with a bag full of Popsicles for his brothers and sisters. She also remembered that the owner of the corner shop never charged Mickey because he was afraid of trouble.
A branch snapped to her right and heavy footsteps shuffled in her direction. Jeri froze. Damn. The person approaching was still out of sight, but close enough that any move on her part could alert him to her presence. She leaned deeper into the shadows, so slowly she felt like she was melting.
The footsteps stopped. Noise from the group at the fire covered whatever was going on to Jeri's right. Suddenly, she heard the unmistakable sound of someone pissing. Luckily, Jeri was out the man's aim. Her situation was ludicrous, but if there was any humor, Jeri was immune to it; she felt only relief that she was unlikely to be discovered. When the man finished, Jeri carefully withdrew into the darkness and headed back to where she had left Kelly and the Croatian women.
Kelly sat cross-legged on the rocky ground, staring into the dark. She was trying to find a shape to the day's changes and it was eluding her. She would have said she had encountered death already, thought that she had a vantage from which to understand life. As of the end of this day, she realized she knew nothing, nothing at all. She'd seen sanitized hospital death, clean and combed, leisurely death. She'd never known that it was a gift to die quietly in bed, with your affairs put in order, with -- gods willing -- someone who loved you nearby.
Unbidden, unwelcome, the memory of the night she had been questioned by the British agents in Nepal returned to Kelly's mind. We can show you pictures, they'd said. Pictures of the victims who'd died by an IRA bomb. A bomb Jeri accepted responsibility for setting.
No! Kelly's heart cried out. No, that's different.
How different? Was the bomb different, the way the unsuspecting victims died different? She loved Jeri, that's what was different. But surely there was something more, some absolute difference, not just a difference contingent on her own position in the matter.
George, her heart wailed for her brother. George, I don't understand.
Hold on to love, Kell, that's all we can know. Don't ever let go of love. Kelly could hear the words in her brother's voice, in his tones. It was what he would say. Love is about forgiveness, the element in which change becomes possible.
Kelly heard a slithering in the darkness, then a quiet series of thumps from someone rapping on the Yugo.
"Up here," she called and soon she felt Jeri settle beside her. "What did you find?"
"Guys with guns playing soldier. Drunk. Probably the meanest combination in the world. We're going to have to leave the car and walk if we want to make it back to the coast."
"You really know how to show a girl a good time don't you?"
Jeri's arm went round her and hugged her very tight.
The ground was too hard to make it possible to sustain anything but a light doze. Kelly was wakened countless times, either by her bruises or to brush away insects, and each time she would wonder why sleeping outdoors had acquired such a reputation for being romantic; but then, as she shifted in search of a more comfortable position, she would feel Jeri's arm about her tighten and she would meld into the presence of this woman who, even here at the edge of chaos, could bring such immeasurable comfort to her bruised heart.