The young man ran in silence for a minute. “I don’t know — everything, I guess.”
“What about the wilderness training? Did you like that?”
“I guess so. Until you got swept away by the river of mud, I mean.”
Eva bit her lip to stop herself from laughing at his choice of words. “That wasn’t my favorite part either, let me tell you.”
“No, sergeant.”
“And what parts of basic training do you not like?”
“There’s nothing, really.”
“Is that the truth?”
“I guess so.”
They ran in silence for a couple of minutes. Eva could feel the nervous energy radiating from Private Sully. No doubt, he wanted nothing more than for her to run on ahead and leave him alone.
“Private, if I tell you something about myself, do you promise to keep it to yourself?”
“Uh, I guess so?”
“Come on, I’m going to need a more definite answer than that.”
“Yes, sergeant. I can keep it to myself.”
“Good. It’s about my brother. My older brother, by two years. He got into some trouble when he was in high school. You know, fell in with a bad crowd, drugs, that kind of thing.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. But I’m not into drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, I’m not saying you are. But I think there is something you have in common with my brother Sam.”
“What?”
“He wasn’t the only one of my siblings to go off the rails. We didn’t exactly have a fairy-tale childhood. I’m talking poverty, parents who drank their troubles — and money — away. They fought all the time.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It was. Some of my siblings followed the pattern they had seen growing up. But with Sam, it was worse. He was falling down a hole so deep I didn’t know what to do to pull him back up.”
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
Eva took a deep breath and told herself to keep her emotions in check. “There are ten of us, including me.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I already knew I was going to join the military. I was in cadets all through high school. I tried to get Sam to join, thinking it would be a way out of what he was doing, but he wasn’t interested. At first.”
“He changed his mind?”
“He did. Said he was going to come with me to a recruitment session, find out what all the fuss was about. But that never happened.”
“Why not?”
“The night before we were due to go, someone gave him some bad drugs. They were cut with something that fried his brain.”
“Oh, no. Did he die?”
