Free Wide Open by Deborah Coates Page B

open the pickup truck door.
    She leaned her head against the steering wheel for a minute. As she was putting the key into the ignition, Eddie drifted in and settled, waiting for a ride home.
    “What are you doing here, Eddie?” she asked as she started the truck and finally pulled out of the parking lot. She seriously wished she knew, wished she didn’t dream about him dying every night, all messy and crying and begging her to tell his girl back home— Yeah, even in her dreams.
    Hallie and Eddie had been together her whole tour in Afghanistan. He’d been a math geek, had joined the army to get money for college, wanted to teach math to kids who hated it.
    “Do you know what math is?” he’d asked her the first day they met, like a quiz.
    “Math defines the world,” she’d said. She’d been stacking boxes all day. She was hot and tired, and they were shipping out at the end of the week. She was not interested in discussing mathematics with some geeky kid she’d never met before.
    He’d looked put out at her answer, as if he’d been expecting her to talk about two plus two and four. She’d grinned at him and showed her teeth. Go away and leave me alone, asshole, she’d thought.
    But he came back the next day with a game board and a battered set of plastic chess pieces. “You probably don’t know how to play,” he’d said.
    “Oh for god’s sake, set them up,” because she’d never liked being underestimated. She hadn’t realized until their third or fourth game that he’d probably set her up.
    Eddie had been incredibly tough in his own way and utterly unsuited for the army and for Afghanistan. He’d talked about theorems and proofs and traffic patterns in downtown San Diego. People would look at him as if he’d lost his mind. He and Hallie played chess all the time, every chance they got, like it was the only thing standing between paradise and hell. Eddie had been precise and detailed, always thinking six moves ahead. Hallie’d been all big picture messy, knowing what was coming, but unable to say how or even exactly what she knew. He won more than she did, but her victories always blindsided him.
    They memorized the board and played in the Humvee on convoy making moves in their head or with x ’s on scrap paper until the rest of the team began offering feedback—like each piece was real. It’d been Hollowman, griping about grunts and weather and weapons, who’d inspired them to invent Soldier’s Chess, where the pawns got semiautomatic rifles and mortars because, by god, they were soldiers and were doing all the work, and why should they die so easy? All of it culminating in a glorious day when they’d scraped out a giant chessboard in the dirt and convinced a bunch of bored American, British, and Mongolian soldiers to be pawns and knights and bishops. For a moment or two that day, Hallie’d forgotten guns and war and the constant threat of death.
    A week later, Eddie died.
    And she’d killed him, hadn’t she? Because not only had she volunteered them for that detail, being pissed off at something she couldn’t even remember anymore, but she’d also convinced them to take the trail that got them killed. Because it was more direct and they needed to get there fast and no one had said not to take it, it had been cleared, after all.
    Maybe that was why she was carrying him around with her now.
    She pulled into the yard at the ranch. The yard light shaded everything in blue and white, chasing shadows back to the barn. There were no lights on in the house, not surprising, since it was almost two in the morning. Hallie turned off the truck and sat, listening to the engine tick over.
    She didn’t think about it, didn’t think about what time it was or what she was going to say. She pulled Dell’s cell phone out of her back pocket and dialed the number from memory, because she’d been looking at it for days, looking at it and not calling.
    The chaplain had given her the number. “It’s his