Ethan by Rian Kelley Page B

youthful foolishness and rebellion, but also uncompromising loyalty and hope in the future. She’d gotten to know the teenaged Ethan and was just now learning about the young man who had gone off to war with a streak of patriotism spurned by the 9-11 attacks, only to find the Middle East a tenuous, dangerous place where a Marine wore his guard 24-7.
    Patriotism had a romance about it, until th e warrior was knee-deep in the carnage.
    “What page are you on in the screenplay?”
    “One hundred, forty-eight.” She sipped from her margarita and sat back in her chair. “You’re in Afghanistan—day three.”
    His ga ze flickered. His jaw tensed. “I learned a lot that day. A lot about life and what it’s not.”
    “Already d isillusioned?” she wondered, but she thought something else was at work, particularly in those pages. From the moment his feet had touched that sandy, foreign ground, death had presented itself in a variety of forms.  She sensed that the young Ethan had begun to pull back into a safe place inside himself. He’d wanted to believe that there was an inherent decency in all people, and yet he was holding in his arms a three year old Afghan girl whose body was riddled with the shrapnel of a homemade bomb. She’d had to stop reading there.
    “It happened q uickly,” he agreed.
    “T he loss of innocence is always devastating.”
    She wondered if he associated t hat kind of purity with his marriage. If it became for him that sacred ground, even while he was pulling into a protective cocoon.
    He looked at her as he lifted his shot glass. “I accepted it.” His voice was deep and a current of anguish ran through it. “It just took awhile.” He threw the shot back and then sucked on the li me wedge. Shae watched his brows knit together as the tequila burned his throat and the fumes ran up through his nose.
    “A long while, I’d guess.”
    “Yes.” He handed her a plate. “If I’d come to terms with it sooner, maybe I could have saved my marriage.”
    My wife. Shae heard the sentiment in his tone.
    “You’re not responsible for her decisions,” she pointed out.
    “Just my own,” he agreed. “And I made a lot of bad moves that affected our marriage.”
    “W hat about Tina? She must have made a few.” Shae had come to know the teenaged girl. Tina had been needy but not clingy. She’d known what she wanted and intended to have it with that single-minded focus of youth.
    “We all do.”
    “I’m just saying that fault in a relationship can rarely be assumed by one person,” Shae explained.
    “ I’m not looking for fault.”
    “You’re looking for transgression,” she insisted. “And not even hers—”
    “I know it already.”
    “But not your transgression ,” she agreed. He was looking for what he’d done wrong and refused to look at how he’d been wronged. In Shae’s experience it was rare for one to exist without the other. “I get the feeling this is target practice.”
    He nodded. “Okay. Fair enough. I plan to look at everything and wipe out the character trait that led to the dissolution of my marriage.”
    “And if this isn’t about character?”
    That made him pause. “It has to be. What other involvement is there?”
    “Setting, plot,” she provided , and then took it a step further, into territory he spent a lot of time and energy avoiding. “I think this is more about what happened in Afghanistan than what happened at home.”
    He sat back, his drink and food forgotten. She’d surprised him, but he was open to her theory. He thought through the possibility, memories passing like shadows in his eyes. She tried to help him along:
    “You went over there believ ing it was the right thing. You came back, realizing the cost was too high.”
    “True ,” he said.
    “You fear intimacy,” she spoke plainly, realizing that this was one of the moments he’d asked for, where she was ripping off skin with the bandage. “ It’s time to name it, Ethan. What is it