Free The Heart You Carry Home by Jennifer Miller Page A

she’d have to fess up about it. But she felt like somebody had poured cement into her mouth. Kath said nothing more. With one hand, she cracked eggs into a bowl and tossed the shells into the garbage. She added oil and sugar. She did not use measuring tools. Her silence was heavy and dense as a ball of dough.
    â€œSo they’re going to Utah to visit an old commanding officer,” Becca said, unable to tolerate her aunt’s stoniness. “They’re talking about this trip like it’s a big deal.”
    â€œYour father can’t help you if he doesn’t know what the real problem is,” Kath said.
    â€œI don’t know what you mean.”
    Kath stopped what she was doing and turned to her niece. “Earlier today. You went for a run down the mountain? Trip Meester was out on his porch.”
    The run had been painful; with each footfall and each breath, sharp flashes had shot out from the ring of bruises. It was nearly too much to bear—nearly. But Becca decided to bear it. The pain was a necessary reminder of her weakness and stupidity; she would not go back to Ben and she would never, ever, let anything like this happen again.
    â€œYou were in your sports bra, honey. Trip knew the men were here. Seeing you—” Kath nodded at Becca’s torso. “Well, he was worried. So he called me.”
    The backs of Becca’s eyeballs stung, but she gritted her teeth until she was certain that not a single tear would fall. “Momentum, rhythm, stride,” she whispered to herself. Let the electricity burn itself out. Let the despair ease up. Let go of every hope you had for your life and be free. You’re running. You’re already gone.
    Becca felt Kath’s warm body beside her, hovering close. “It’s not what you think,” Becca said, though her voice sounded very small.
    â€œHow is it not what I think?” Kath’s face was pitying. “Either he put his hands on you or he didn’t.”
    â€œI’m not one of those women—the ‘he didn’t mean it, it was just this one time’ women. But we were asleep and then . . . I don’t actually know if . . .” Becca felt ill-equipped to explain. The events of that night lay broken in her memory, scattered like the shards of the fiddle Ben had smashed. What frightened her most of all was that Ben apparently didn’t know what he’d done. Didn’t realize that he was incapable of controlling himself. “I’m not naive!” she burst out. “I didn’t think that he’d come back and everything would be fine. I tried to get ahead of all of this.”
    â€œHoney, you’re not making sense.”
    â€œIn the beginning he told me stories. On the phone, video chat, e-mail. He made me feel like I was with him. There was an Iraqi soccer-star kid who ate Corn Pops, and a platoon corporal with weird superstitions, and kitty litter to cover the latrine stink, and every other thing you could ever want to know. And then one day, out of the blue, he just stopped talking.” Becca knew she was rambling incoherently, but she didn’t much care.
    â€œWho knows what might have happened,” Kath said. But Becca, who’d started pacing around the kitchen, wasn’t listening. She felt like an attorney arguing to a jury of one: herself.
    â€œIt was like somebody flipped a switch! He shut down and I didn’t know what to do. I asked him questions, but he wouldn’t answer. And I couldn’t stand it—the not knowing. So I tried to fill in the gaps. I read all this stuff—books and articles. You would have laughed at me.”
    Even in her keyed-up, frantic state, Becca was too self-conscious to confess aloud all that she’d done. It had involved rereading all the books from a war-lit class she’d taken her freshman year, renting every war movie at the video store, and obsessively consuming soldier blogs.