I rattled the handle, my sweaty hands slipping. I pushed against the door with my shoulder like I believed I was strong enough to push it open by sheer will.
Denis snapped his hand back and stared down at me in shock.
“What are you doing? I didn’t think you wanted to go in?”
“Open the door,” I screeched, blowing my hair from my eyes, my limbs heated with anger and anticipation. “Open the damn door!”
He moved around me and quickly punched in the code. The door clicked, and I barged inside, breathing hard, breathing clouds of pins and metal triangles.
In the corner, sitting on a suspended bed with her legs out in front of her, a long plait hanging over one shoulder, was a thinner, sallower girl than I remembered, but her voice was as strong as ever. Out of key, but filled with a love for the music and the words.
My lips quivered, two tears spoiled my cheeks as I whispered, “Oh Gwen,” in a voice, split open and chopped into pieces.
Two concave eyes nested in purple and suffering glanced up, and my hatred for Grant scored my bones a little deeper. I was serrated, sharp, boiling with anger and disgust. Because he wanted me to come to this room and witness this scene… and he knew what it would do to me.
JOSEPH
I know what the end of war sounds like.
It sounds like broken glass crashing against metal. Shrieking and cheering. It sounds like clapping and sighing at the same time.
I know what the end of war feels like.
It feels like relief trapped inside death. Wanting freedom. Knowing the cost of freedom. Celebration and agony wrapped together in bloody bandages.
I should know by now what it is to lose someone, but it’s always fresh. Like a retractor, it opens old wounds again and again.
I let my hands fall from my face and my ears began to ring dully. The lights slammed on, showing the devastation and the success. Torn apart by the blast, one gate hung pathetically from a twisted hinge, the other lay flat on the ground. People stopped for about five seconds before they flooded the opening in elation, knocking my shoulders in their haste to get through.
The people of Palma were ready for this. They stepped between the bars on the ground like they were playing hopscotch. Most of the soldiers were already lined up against the concrete wall, disarmed with their hands on the back of their heads. The gunman who’d shot Nafari had been taken down too.
I rushed to where I’d last seen him.
The ground and wall were scorched black. There was no body. I started tipping up debris and calling out his name. “Nafari! Nafari!” I screamed, my voice disappearing, my ears thrumming.
A hand gripped my shoulder. “What are you doing, my man?”
I flinched and swung around, my fists up, ready to fight.
“Whoa, let us help you,” the man said, his voice deep and tinny, his face scored with age. He had kind eyes, and I latched onto that.
I tried not to cry as he waited for me to speak. The whole situation was pounding down on me like an enormous fist from the sky. “The man who freed you, who blew the gates is here somewhere…” I managed breathlessly, sweeping my arms over the piles of concrete and segments of iron, pointing to the vague area where I’d seen his smiling face before a blanket of white.
“Nafari!” I yelled again.
The man nodded and started yelling Nafari’s name. Somehow, word traveled, and soon there were twenty people upturning bits of gate and rubble and shouting his name. All the while, others were leaving the compound.
I looked up at the where the gate used to be and saw Desh standing there, beaming. The others were picking their way over the debris too.
“Here!” someone shouted.
I ran to them, my legs grating against sharp rubble. A twisted arm protruded out from under a collapsed shed. The guard’s shed. I kneeled down and grabbed his wrist. A thin pulse blipped under my fingers.
“He’s alive,” I said, relief pouring out of every pore in my body. He was alive.
The others ran towards me, and we pulled the sheets of tin from his body. I gave him a quick physical assessment. He was bleeding badly, but he would live. Some men lifted him up and laid him on one of the sheets of tin. “We’ll take him to our hospital, friend,” one of them said.
I lifted his dangling, broken arm up and placed it over his chest. He opened his eyes and managed a smile. “You did it, Nafari,” I whispered.
“I said call me Naf,” he managed before his eyes fluttered closed.
It had turned around in a matter of hours. Now we were sitting inside one of the cottages in Ring Eight with some residents of Palma. Laughing, drinking, and celebrating freedom.
Pelo slapped me on the back. “This is what we wanted,” he said, sweeping his arm around the scene we could see from the window. Soldiers were being marched to a holding building. People were cleaning up the debris. The thing that made my heart swell was watching the children running between the legs of their elders. I memorized that sight and stored it away for later. I captured it in my store, the one I kept for Rosa.
I sighed. I hadn’t been thinking of her. It had been good to have a break from the torture, but as soon as I let my mind wander, it always went straight back to her.
“Does it hurt?” Elise asked as she dabbed my cut with antiseptic.
Yes.
“No.”
Cups were offered and we cheered to Naf and to the huge success of the mission as we sat on borrowed dining chairs.
Desh shook his head in disbelief. “I never thought we’d be celebrating inside the walls.” He clinked his cup with mine, and we drank. The cider flew down my throat and relaxed my mind. I locked the store for Rosa and filled my cup again.
A Palma local knocked my shoulder and laughed. “Now that you have helped us, are you going to return to your home?”
Home. To me, home was two people, one who might be lost to me forever. I was homeless. The bubbles swirled around my brain. They begged me to let it go. Forget her. Forget it all. I turned to the man and laughed too loud, too hard.
“I don’t have a home, man, I’m homeless.” I hit my leg and chuckled more. “I’m homeless!” Desh’s shaking head caught my attention. “What? It’s true. Isn’t it? We’re all homeless.”
Some of the men laughed, others ignored me. But I didn’t care. I had no grasp on what I actually did care about.
Clink, drink, clink, drink.
Someone patted my back gently, whispering, “I think you better slow down, Joe.”
I shrugged them off.
Everything seemed funnier.
Everything seemed stupid.
I was weightless, in muddy water, sinking lower and not caring. Laughing too loud and not caring. Allowing Elise to put her arm around my waist and lean her head on my shoulder and not caring.
I let the alcohol carry me off into a dreamless sleep.
ROSA
Gwen lifted her head slowly from where she stared at her knees. A nightdress lay over them but every bone, every angle, of her jutted out like the dress was her skin and underneath was just a skeleton. She didn’t jump up to greet me, but I was already running towards her anyway. I rushed her and skidded into the bed, falling to the ground as I tripped over my dress.