Page 96 of If This is Love

I gave a half-exasperated, half-salty chuckle. Emma was a strange brand of obnoxious that I weirdly related to. She reminded me of a few Marines I’d been in charge of over the years, who’d been supremely annoying but also supremely skilled and loyal. “Probably thenotmilitary thing.”

“Okay then,” she went on in that same snarky, jabbing tone, “so, you didn’t hearall aboutme on the talking-head, cable news, fake ‘journalism’info-tainment shows? When they were reporting onme, areporter, andnotall the shit that was so important that my teamliterallygave their lives to report it?”

I chuckled again. This snarky young woman and I were cut from opposite sides of the same shitty, jaded cloth. “I heard that the scumbags I’d been dealing with had started kidnapping war reporters and murdering them. I heard that a female reporter who’d been believed to be dead turned up alive at one of the refugee camps. That’s all I heard because I stopped watching the talking heads way back in the day when I saw what they were saying about what I was doing and getting it all wrong.”

“Okay, good. That’s a start.” Emma downed her drink and politely flitted her fingers at Missy.

“You need a refill,cher?” Missy called, moseying back over.

“Yes, ma’am, thank you,” Emma said, still polite.

I drew in a long drag, eyeballing her while Missy refreshed the ice and refilled the glass. “You’re not originally from DC,” I observed.

“Nope.” Emma smiled at Missy. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome,cher, andno, you are definitelynotfrom noDC.” Missy snorted and snickered as she splashed a little more whiskey in my glass and then quickly dumped the ashtray and set it back on the bar. “Lord, if someone fromDC ever came in here sayingyes ma’am, no ma’am,thank you ma’am,I’d probably just give up the ghost right here behind the bar.”

All the barflies shared a hearty chuckle over that, and Gunner stretched and grunted from where he was sprawled out on the floor again.

“Yeah,” Emma continued through light laughter, “I’m from South Carolina. You can’t really tell anymore because I studied journalism at Berkeley and worked really hard to get rid of my accent, but I kept the manners.” She waved her cigarette, then took a long drag before snuffing it out. “Anyway, yeah, they thought I was dead because of all the shit you just said. That’s the major thing that has Austin so fucked up. He and the four other living people that give a shit about me spent at least a month believing I was dead. They had a fucking funeral for me and everything, and thenoops. I was actually alive.” She flapped her eyelashes, picking up the pack of cigarettes again and slipping out another one. “I don’t care who you are, that’ll fuck you up four ways from Sunday.”

I nodded somberly. “Shit yeah.”

“Yeah.” Emma paused to light the cigarette. “Anyway,so, I was a freelance beat reporter in LA before I was offered an assignment covering the displacement crisis in Syria. I was inwayover my head, but I made up for it by basically not caring if I was going to die or not, but my team was all badasses. They were the most seasoned and respected conflict journalists that have ever worked in our field. One was an Army Ranger, and another one was a Marine. They’d started focusing on the precursor to the shit we went to cover when it was still contained to Iraq and had already seen fuckingeverything, right? So, we spent four months traveling around the Syrian countryside, visiting refugee camps and people trapped in villages that were under siege from terrorist groups. We were supposed to be there for between six and nine months, and wewere, but the last half of it was spent being held captive by the scumbags you’re acquainted with.”

My shoulders started to prick with the precursor to the phantom burn, but I didn’t feel the agitating tingle that always accompanied one of my episodes. “That fucking sucks.”

“Yeah. It did.” She was rapidly twitching the cigarette, and it wasn’t that Ilikedseeing someone else suffer exactly the way I was constantly suffering. It just made me feel like less of a freak. “I probably don’t need to tell you we were all tortured that whole time. I probably don’t need to tell you how they specifically torturedme, as a woman. I probably don’t need to tell you that they had much bigger plans for me than just the desert cell I was being held in.” She waggled the cigarette at the level of her chest. “That’s not me sugar-coating for you. It’s sugar-coating forme.”

“I get you.” I gestured for her to go on. “Do what you gotta do. I hear you.”

“So we were kidnapped and held and tortured.” She held the cigarette at an awkward angle while she wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “I didn’t see my team… and they weren’tjustmy fuckingteam. We were brothers.” She paused. “I mean, I know I’m agirl, but we were brothers. I don’t need to explain that to you either. Band of brothers and all that shit. It’s thesame fucking thingfor conflict reporting,” she clipped, smacking her palm on the bar to emphasize her words. “Just without the weapons. It’s just another job in the middle of a warzone, and it all fucking sucks, and everybody bonds over the suck, right?”

I gave a single nod. “Embrace the suck.”

“Exactly.” Emma swallowed a large gulp of whiskey. “Yeah, so my team and I were captured and held for a hundred and sixty days, and on day one-sixty, they dragged all of us out of our dungeons and threw us in the back of a van, blindfolded and tied up, and drove us out to the middle of the desert. They took off my blindfold just in time for me to watch this hooded motherfucker slit their throats one by one, let them bleed out, and then decapitate them. And then they threw me back in my dark, disgusting cell, where I had nothing to do but be angry that I was still alive. Then later, there wasthisshit.”

She tapped her index finger on the circular scar in the middle of her forehead. “This fucked me up way less, but it was still a mind-fuckery of guilt. I wound up in a refugee camp, sharing a tent with people I had originally come to talk to about what it was like to live through displacement. And then I got a chauffeured car and a first-class flight out of there after only a few days just because…” She hitched her shoulders way up to her ears, gesturing at me with two open palms. “Why? I’m a reporter? I’m American? I’m a woman? I’m awhitewoman? I still trip over that one.” She exhaled loudly and slumped, turning toward the bar. “I’m supposed to be grateful to be alive, andI am. I’m just…”

She shook her head slowly, staring at the space in front of her eyes. “Sorry. For all kinds of shit. And I’ve been working really hard for the past five years to not drown in how sorry I am and how guilty I feel, and it’s justhard. It’s exhausting, so you don’t even have to say anything.” She slid her eyes timidly to me. “Maybe I needed to say all that because I don’t like that we don’t get each other. Because everything Skye and Ruth told me about you made me feel like you were going to be one of these rare people whoget it.”

“I am.” I shrugged. “I do. Get it, I mean. I just didn’t know all that, and I got triggered before we could have a real conversation, and it all got fucked. So…” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I owe you a proper apology for… y’know, all the shit I started. The day at the Rileys’ house. I don’t even remember what all I said, and I only know because Brennan told me. I’m sorry I did that. Sorry I snapped at you at the last meeting. I don’t mean to do those things, but sometimes… I mean… you know… a lot of this stuff is just hard. And I don’t think the work you did or do isn’t important. Or that what you went through wasn’t hugely fucking awful. I don’t really know you, but I hate that those things happened to you. I hate that stuff like any of this exists in the world. And I think what I’m really angry about is that every time I had an opportunity to do something about it, I failed.”

“Is that the deal with the temple?” Emma ventured. “The Yazidis remind you of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.” She pointed at me with the cherry-end of her cigarette. “Because the worst thing that’s ever happened to you happened in tandem with the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.”

The burn flared across my shoulders, and I blinked slowly, ignoring the chaos exploding behind my eyelids. “I don’t know for sure, but everything y’all have said points to it being them. It was a religious minority in this little village called Khana Sour. I don’t know what religion it was. They weren’t Christians, Jews, or Muslims. It was the only area of Iraq I ever encountered them. And I only encountered what was left of them.”

Emma watched me with a patient sort of focus that seemed like something out of her reporter’s toolbox. “So what was left of them?”

“Just a whole lot of rubble and tortured, terrified little girls and women,” my mouth was saying, feeling disconnected from the rest of me all of a sudden. “I found them when I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been with no orders from anyone I reported to. No resources. No back-up.AndI found them too late. There wasn’t anything I could do, and then I had to choose and I didn’t choose fast enough, and then there was nothing but rubble.”

I blinked, and the rubble of bricks and body parts stretched as far as I could see in front of me.

Gunner’s low, throaty growl sounded far enough away to shake me back from wherever I was lost in my mind, and soft hands were gently patting my cheeks.

“Hey,cher.”

Pat-pat-patwent the hands on my cheeks.

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