Page 13 of Enkindling

“Yes!” I answered without pause. “Of course, I did, Kat! I meant all of it – every word.” Memories of some of what I had said to her flashed to the front of my mind and I grimaced. “Not every single word,” I amended. “I meant all the parts about loving you. The rest was a bold-faced lie – those bad parts. You know what I mean, Kathy.”

She was frozen to the spot, curled up and looking extremely small and frail on her chair. Her eyes never left mine, however. They were big and glossy with emotion. Right now, they hauntedme. Those were the eyes of a lost and abused puppy at the moment, and it was my fault.

I reached out to her, my heart aching. “Kathy… Kat… Come here,” I begged. “Please. Just come here and hear me out.”

She didn’t budge.

“Please,” I urged. “I came back, didn’t I? It’s because of how I feel about you – how I always did and still do feel about you. Won’t you believe me? Just give me a chance to clear it all up.”

“I don’t,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Believe you, I mean.”

My heart sank, but I kept my arm extended in silent appeal.

“…But I desperately want to,” she finished and slowly got up from her chair.

I let out a breath. She didn’t take my hand, but she did come and plop herself down right beside me. Curling herself up on the couch, she leaned against me.

Thank God.“I’ll say what I need to say, Kathy. I’ll tell you the truth. After that, I’ll go if that’s what you want. I won’t blame you.”

“Go on,” she said in a small voice. “I’m listening.”

I drew in a steadying breath. Somehow this was more daunting than pulling a trigger or cutting a man down while looking him dead in the eyes. “Do you remember when we first met?”

“As if I could ever forget,” she returned. “I was fourteen. Those days I followed you everywhere, like a pet.” She uttered a bitter laugh.

“That’s true,” I smiled. “I used to find it so irritating. But I meant the very first day. What was particular about it?”

“You were badly injured,” she answered. “You came home to heal.” Then she seemed to lose herself in a wave of nostalgia. “Your mother told me you were a soldier. She used to boast about you all the time. You should have heard her. She was so proud of her boy. I was a bit scared of you, at first, to be honest. Your wounds were terrible, you hardly said a word to me, and to top it off, you were so dreadfully serious and brooding whenever you weren’t talking to your parents. I found you frightening.”

Talk of my mother brought back bittersweet memories. It also reminded me why I would highly esteem Kathleen Cruz until my final breath, whatever else happened between us before then. I had returned home sixteen years ago to find that a girl of fourteen had more or less taken up residence in my parents’ house. My mother’s health had been in horrifying decline for years at that point, and my father did his best for her, but it was the girl who held things together. My mother told me later that she was from one of the families down the street.

Kathy’s mother had grown close to mine a few years after I had left home rather unceremoniously with boyish dreams of power, valor, and seeing the world. When my mother started to be ill, she began to take care of her. When my mother’s condition grew steadily worse, her young daughter, Kathy, took over the lion’s share of the responsibility that she could no longer bear while tending to her own family. By the time a close brush with death had sent me home to heal and hide, Kathy had been acting as her mother’s proxy for about three years already. My mother had reached a state of near helplessness, and Kathy took care of all the things my father couldn’t, in the process, becoming like a daughter to my parents.

I still remembered the shock of seeing my mother in that awful state. I had been gone ten years by then and had only very seldom returned home to visit. By the time of my inglorious reappearance in the dead of night, I had gone seven full years without having seen my parents. I had sent those letters, but that, too, was infrequent.

Those days I had watched little Kathy, virtually a full-grown woman by societal standards but little more than a nuisance to me, take expert care of a woman who was, in reality, a stranger. She was so competent, neither her mother nor mine ever worried about leaving things in her hands. She was faithfully there for large stretches of day and night, alternating with her mother. The only thing Kathy didn’t do was sleep there, and even then, she did that during particularly bad spells. She did it all only because she wanted to because she had grown quite attached to my parents.

And she was brilliant. Kathy did it all while studying. Every spare moment, you’d found her with a book in hand. Her dream was to go to college in a few years, though her family had hardly any money. Other girls of her age were already getting married. I was amazed.

“My mother didn’t know half of it,” I said, my voice very low. “I wasn’t a soldier. Rather, I wasn’t the soldier the average person would imagine upon hearing the word. I’m still not.”

This surprised Kathy. She turned her head to look up at me questioningly. “You told us all you were.”

“Because it was true enough. But I’m a special kind of soldier, Kathy. Not the kind you send to the battlefield in troops. The kind who fights only in the shadows. The kind you call in only when you want someone very important or very powerful dead.”

She started to drawback. “You mean you’re a – ahitman?”

“Some might call it that since I do that kind of work,” I said cautiously. “But that’s not really what I am. It would be more accurate to say I am a deep-cover agent of the state.” I watched her process what I had said in silence.

She gaped at me. “So, you’re – a-are you serious?”

I nodded.

Kathy turned fully on the sofa to face me, she braced her elbow against the back of it, rested her jaw on her palm and stared out the window, her thoughts probably racing at light speed.

“I stayed home for a year back then,” I continued. “But that wasn’t due to the severity of my injury. I was in hiding. The incident that left me in such a sorry state also left the enemythinking I was dead. I was removed from the frontlines for tactical purposes.”

“And in that year, I became obsessed with you,” she admitted timidly, still staring out into the distance. “Not that you ever so much as glanced in my direction,” she added with another bitter laugh. “I was endlessly fascinated by you, you know. I wanted you to open up and talk to me like you did with our parents. But you kept an icy distance. So, I started to annoy you in an attempt to get your attention.”

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