Swimmers in Winter Read online

  ◊

  One morning, Carmen and the thirty other soldiers in her platoon entered a village on foot. The sun was already tearing brightly into the sky. As she squinted through the lenses of her ballistic eyewear, she pictured herself lumbering along like a moving target, pounds of kit and a heavy net of weapons slung around her. She felt moisture on her skin, under the layers of clothing and her frag vest. Sweat dripped from her forehead and ran down her cheek like tears. Her helmet gripped her head tightly. She thought maybe she had put on the wrong one, and suddenly felt the urge to loosen it. But there was no time. She could feel her heart beating as though this was goodbye.

  They had not been told the name of the village by their commander. They had not been told about the people who lived there. All they knew was that Taliban were suspected to be hiding somewhere in the village, and they were being deployed on foot to find them. If the Taliban were already gone, the task would then be to show some force.

  “We’re going to turn up there without warning. Your responsibility is to let the civilians know we’re here now that the Americans have moved on,” the commander said.

  The soldiers around her were jittery and anxious in the heat, high on adrenaline and worn out from lack of sleep. They moved through the town toward its centre, then split into smaller groups of four or five, heading down the narrow streets past white and brown buildings. Some of the houses had been bombed by American forces and remained deserted. The unpaved streets were empty except for rubble.

  Carmen closed her eyes for a moment, dizzy in the blanketing quiet and the riot of heat.

  She was glad Jessie was there with her. They always looked out for each other, covertly, because anything that made you stand out from the guys could make you a target. But she was uneasy about the small group she was with. Especially Smith, who was now positioned right beside her. He was someone she avoided. He made a game of taking jabs at her that were both aggressive and explicit, and she never knew what he would do next.

  About a block away, a man stepped out of a doorway, his back to them, holding something at his side, swinging it a little as he began to walk.

  “What’s he got?” one soldier demanded.

  “Hard to say,” Smith answered. He lifted his gun. “Get his attention.”

  The first soldier called out, and the man on the street spun around to face them. He was too far away to make out the details of his body language or for any of them to see what he was carrying.

  Smith fired a shot. The man stumbled backwards a few feet with his arms up. Then Smith shot again, and the man folded over and fell to the ground. Smith fired again. And again. And again.

  Carmen flinched with each shot. She bit her bottom lip to stop herself from calling out, so hard that blood dripped down her chin and pooled under her tongue. But it was nothing like the blood the man was losing now as he lay in the street.

  The rest of the group had also lifted their guns, ready for an exchange of fire. They looked from Smith to the street where the man lay and back again. No more fire came. It was quiet.

  Carmen ran forward, thinking she could save the man on the ground. As she approached, a woman’s screams rose up from inside the house he had come from. Someone yelled at her to get back, but she kept moving forward, and then she was close enough to see the man’s eyes open, as if to watch her approach. They were brown, like her father’s. Beside him was the object he had been holding. A walking stick.

  There were more gunshots. Were they shooting at her now? She bent down to begin administering first aid.

  Someone else called her name, a woman’s voice this time, but she didn’t turn around. Bandages. She needed to stop all this blood.

  Suddenly, there was a heavy thud against her shoulders, knocking her off balance. She was wrestled to the ground from behind, and she fell hard with the weight of all her gear, her cheek against the dirt. She heard the woman’s voice again, this time from above, pressing her into the earth.

  “You better stop, Carmen.” It was Jessie. She held Carmen’s arms folded back behind her in a twisted embrace, and was leaning forward to speak into her ear.

  “Get off of me! I’m trying to help him. He’s losing so much blood,” Carmen stuttered, anger threatening to split her apart.

  “We’re retreating.” Jessie’s breath was hot and fast on Carmen’s face.

  “What about this civilian?”

  “We’ve got to get out of here.” All of Jessie’s weight pressed Carmen’s shaking body down, and she held Carmen tighter. “Follow me back. If you don’t, I’ll lose you.”

  The gunfire began moving away.

  “What about him?” Carmen repeated, trying to turn under Jessie’s weight to look at the man where he lay silent on the ground.

  “Someone’ll kill you if you stay here. The other guys are losing it. I swear one of them will shoot you.”

  Then, without another word, she sat up, and hoisted herself off Carmen’s back. On their knees and breathing heavily, they faced each other for a moment, the dust rising from their scuffle. They each stood slowly.

  Carmen turned to look at the man. His eyes were still open, his face motionless.

  The woman inside the house began screaming again, her voice climbing and falling in grief. As if it were a signal to retreat, Jessie and Carmen began making their way quickly back down the streets the way they’d come, until they reached a half-blasted compound on the edge of the town.

  The other groups of soldiers were already there, leaning exhaustedly, cradling their guns. Carmen wiped the blood from her mouth. Her bottom lip was swelling where she’d cut it with her teeth.

  The commander was telling them that they were going to head to a village farther north.

  Smith caught her eye, stared at her, as if daring her to say something. He seemed angry, not afraid.

  That was when Carmen started to realize that it was the beginning of the end for her. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the civilian’s eyes watching as he lay bleeding on the ground. She couldn’t shake the thought that the blood drying on her hands, where she’d tried to wipe it off her mouth, was his.

  ◊

  The shriek of a girl with long, shiny hair at the next table brought Carmen’s mind back to the bar. Her body, she realized, had tensed. She tried to open her fists and loosen her shoulders. As she did so, she heard the rattle of a semi-automatic rifle behind her. Carmen spun around and nearly knocked her beer off the table.

  Nothing. Just another table, collapsed into laughter.

  Carmen saw that the woman tending bar was studying her, so she turned away.

  She looked down at the T-shirt pulled tight across her chest and stomach, and remembered where she originally got it from. A bargain rack at the mall in the mid-nineties. It was like every part of her life had suddenly looped backwards in time. Here she was, wearing this old T-shirt, waiting nervously to meet a girl, acting as though she’d never been a soldier, never shot a gun, never watched a bomb explode or seen dead bodies, hadn’t watched her father die of an unstoppable disease.

  Stop it, Carmen thought to herself. You’re just mixed up from coming home after being away for so long. You don’t actually get your life back. You don’t get to rewind. Don’t get carried away.

  She went back to waiting, and watching.

  When Aurora finally arrived, Carmen noticed a scent with a hint of flowers as she walked toward the table. It wasn’t strong but it stood out from the stale, leathery smell of the bar.

  Aurora was wearing something dark green and sleeveless that scooped down a little bit from her shoulders. Her arms and her neck were bare, no jewelry, no makeup it seemed.

  Beautiful, Carmen thought.

  Aurora slipped her hair behind her ears, but it slid back across her face again. She said hello and apologized for being a little late, to which Carmen replied instinctively, as though in greeting, that she’d just arriv
ed herself. They paused. Then, laughing quick, Aurora apologized again, and went to order a drink at the bar.

  Carmen was caught by the back of Aurora’s body moving away. She looked down as if to study the amber of her beer, waiting, thinking about what she’d just seen.

  Aurora returned a few minutes later, sticking her change into the pocket of her jeans, her glass clinking with ice cubes and already dripping with condensation. The ceiling fans spun fast above them, but hardly brought relief from the heat.

  “Cheers,” she said, raising the glass. “What a warm night. I mean I love it, but this is definitely a hot one.”

  Carmen nodded. Don’t talk about the weather, she thought to herself. Don’t say any more about the weather because then it’ll seem like you don’t know what to say. “So how long have you been running?” she asked, realizing how abrupt the question sounded. She tried again. “I mean, have you been running for a while?” Aurora nodded, and that question led to another, and another.

  They discussed the routes the running group took, how they had changed since they first started. Carmen then mentioned that jogging had been part of her training, but that it had been on a track at the military base, all level, asphalted terrain, the route directed and prescribed between thick white lines. Nothing like the paths along the river. Those rose and fell, and you needed to really pay attention to them if you didn’t want to trip yourself.

  She left out all the running she had done in Afghanistan.

  Aurora was staring at her, so she got quiet for a minute and decided maybe she had been talking too long. She asked about Aurora’s job at the grocery store, taking another swallow of her beer.

  It had progressed, Aurora told her. They’d moved her up from cashier to working behind the meat counter. She’d agreed to it because she could make a few extra dollars an hour, and because the health and safety training was free, and was something she could add to her resume. As it turned out, Aurora was pretty good at remembering her customers by first name, usually women who came in to buy for their families. They’d ask her opinion on the ground beef or pork or chicken cutlets, even though the prepared meats hardly changed from week to week. Which one did she think would be good for dinner that night? Often, they’d tell her what else they were making to go with it. And sometimes she wondered if maybe one of them would have another, better job they could offer her.

  “Like what?” Carmen asked. Her first drink was done and the room was growing louder.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Aurora said, smiling in a way that was starting to seem recognizable to Carmen. It was the kind of smile Carmen used to see from girls who were trying to figure her out a little, and enjoying the effort—somewhere between a grin and a light invitation. Not exactly relaxed, but not fake either.

  “Can I get you another one?” Carmen asked, pointing to Aurora’s glass.

  “Oh, sure. Thanks.”

  Second drinks in hand, the conversation between them continued to dance along under the pulse of the music. Carmen had to lean toward Aurora’s voice. Her hearing had changed since Afghanistan. Soft sounds and anything in a higher register were muted—birdsong, for example, the rush of water, violin or saxophone. Carmen remembered how those sounds could be ecstatic and smooth at the same time, like different ways the light could shine, but they were only a lingering memory now.

  She ordered a third drink, then a fourth. She rarely let herself drink too much these days, because she couldn’t predict what the alcohol would trigger. But Aurora was something else—someone she never expected to find here, back home—and Carmen was desperate for something to give her a little ease, to soften her edges.

  As evening pitched into the deep humidity of a July night, Carmen became more aware of the agitated tics that worried her face. Since Afghanistan, her face twitched sometimes like it belonged to someone else, and a slight stutter would seize her tongue, cutting up her words like gunfire. She ran her hands along her lips and across her eyes, trying to hide the many small spasms lurking there. But she could still feel them under her fingertips as she spoke vaguely of her time in Afghanistan.

  “How’re you finding it being back?” Aurora asked, watching Carmen trail her fingers across her face.

  “I’m keeping myself busy. Hard to do here. As you probably know.” She smiled through the tiny jerks at the edges of her mouth and eyes, wanting to distract from the lack of detail she was providing. “How do you do it?”

  “All this is temporary,” Aurora explained. “I needed work for the summer and my cousin has a spare room. So I’m just here for now, building a small fortune.”

  “Oh.” Carmen said, though she meant to reply with something more, to show she was listening.

  “That was a joke. Almost every cent I make is paying for my last year of school. I basically failed, spent the whole time fooling around, ran my grades into the ground. It’s okay. I needed a new start. A new plan. And I like the way it is here. Pretty calm. I can lose track of myself and my bad habits here, get into the rhythm of days that don’t seem to change. I can just focus on getting up and going to work. Maybe this is what I need to find some direction.”

  Carmen thought about how fast Aurora was able to run. She wondered if it was because Aurora had a clear picture of where she was going and where the routes ended, or if it was because she finally had the space she needed.

  The DJ was starting a set. Tables and chairs were pulled aside, and Carmen and Aurora moved to the dance floor. Carmen found she could not stop blinking. She blushed in the heat, unable to think clearly, consumed with wanting to touch Aurora under the blurry lights.

  “What’s your name about?” Carmen asked, drunk enough now to not consider her questions before she spoke. “I mean, where did you get it?”

  Aurora laughed, her eyes on Carmen the whole time. “Well, it’s literally from the northern lights. You know, the aurora borealis. My parents loved them, used to go watch them when they were younger.”

  Carmen pictured the horizon, imagined the rippling lights’ approach, and then the sound of them too, growing more powerful, deafening.

  Stop, she thought to herself. Don’t lose yourself here. Don’t lose what you’ve found now.

  “I haven’t seen them,” she said. “The northern lights.”

  She fell into the music, which replaced all other sounds. Her mind returned to feeling like it was cocooned. She was drunk, but it was okay, this muffling rescue from her thoughts.

  Now, the small temporary dance floor was packed and there was so little room to move. Carmen put her hands on Aurora, lightly, because she couldn’t figure out where else to put them. She touched her arms, which felt as soft as she had imagined. Aurora lifted her arms a little and stepped in as near as she could. Carmen reached around to touch her back, which was as warm as the air pressing in around them, and rested her palms just above Aurora’s hips.

  “Your name is beautiful,” Carmen said, relieved to finally find a word for the thought that kept coming to her mind all evening. “It’s really beautiful.”

  When the bar closed, they went back to Carmen’s basement apartment, letting themselves in the door at the side of the house so as not to wake Aaron and Melissa.

  Quietly, under the dim light of an old lamp, they reached for each other, drunk on the push and pull of lust as much as on alcohol, and slipped into sex that was both furious and tender. They rolled off the old couch onto the floor, Aurora laughing a little as they hit the ground, and didn’t fall asleep for hours.

  A nightmare woke Carmen in the early morning. She began to weep quietly, burying her face to muffle the sound.

  ◊

  The road mine exploded in the middle of her platoon. Carmen was thrown backward, off her feet, immersed in intense light and heat, the sound shattering inside her ears. When she opened her eyes, it felt as if she were coming up from being underwater. The air was full of smoke. She l
ooked around slowly and saw Jessie lying on her back. One of her arms was bent underneath her body, like it no longer belonged to her. Carmen got closer, crawling on all fours in case there were more bombs, and saw that Jessie had lost consciousness and was bleeding. She pulled bandages from her bag and wrapped them around Jessie’s shoulder to stop the blood. She saw another soldier moving behind the grey curtain of air, and waved him over. Together, they got Jessie across the sand, toward another soldier with a radio, who was contacting the medics located farther down the road. Then they went back for more of the injured, and for the dead.

  The platoon was sent back to the temporary base. Carmen had by then lost the ability to make any sound. Her jaw was locked. She could hardly move her mouth to drink or to eat. Her tongue felt thick enough to fill up her throat.

  She was given pills, but she hid them away because she knew the drugs would keep her in a haze. She’d seen that happen with other soldiers, and she wanted to stay awake and alert. Carmen didn’t trust what she was doing in Afghanistan anymore, and she didn’t trust anyone around her.

  She decided that when her voice came back, if it ever did, she’d say something about Smith. What she’d seen him do. She knew it happened all the time in war, but to see a civilian needlessly shot right in front of her, when she could have stopped it, was unbearable. She wanted Smith to be confronted for what he had done. As if that could make up for all the wrong.

  ◊

  Soon after her first date with Aurora, Carmen began running on her own. Every day she headed up one of the few main roads to the outskirts of town, dodging the explosions in her head. She’d scale the hills a little harder every time, maneuvering her effort into upward force. The familiar sense of speed, the jostle of her body through space, soothed her like a temporary balm.

  One morning, she crouched down at the top of a hill. She was breathing hard, feeling the strain of the climb in the muscles of her legs and shoulders. Her hometown lay curled on its back in the summer heat of the valley. She pictured Aurora down there, her long hands sheathed in latex gloves, working behind the meat counter in the grocery store, tying up roasts, or preparing marinades and stuffing for the small display of take-home dinners.