ally - self para
Christopher's parents are moving nonstop for a month after it happens.
They make fliers, they show up on the news, they call every number in the damn phone book. They don't even see him through the blur of activity. They don't know that he wakes up from a nightmare every few hours or that he sometimes waits for the bus to drive past the stop and then sits in those woods for the rest of the day. A week after she was gone, he looked for her, but the other times, he just sits. He tries to feel her, or at least, some strange current leading where she went. He doesn't mind that his mom and dad are blind to him. If they looked too long, they might see the guilt pushing down on his shoulders so hard he can't stand straight. If he'd just stayed with her, went out to explore with her or told her to just wait for the bus, they could explore later-- there wouldn't be people with thermal cameras looking for someone they expected to be dead. He doesn't believe she's really gone, even though his teachers keep extending his assignments and occasionally giving him a sad look and a nod. He just ignores them and all the casseroles that show up at his house. The whole damn town seems to know everything. The people at Dairy Queen give him a free cone every time he goes in with his friends. His friends' parents say things to their kids in whispers, probably warning them not to invite him to spend the night. They think he's too fragile to be away from home. But every time he's there, he ends up in her bedroom, hiding in the curtains of the canopy bed or staring at the plastic stars on her ceiling or repositioning all her stuffed animals on her bed. He never would've admitted it to her, or his parents, but he knows all their names. Brownie, her moose, looks so sad that he feels compelled to move it into his room. His parents don't notice until a few years later, but even then, they can’t quite see everything he's trying to hold in.
When Mrs. Forrester gets a call in the middle of the night, and doesn't say anything but "Really?" "Okay," "We're on the way," Pause. Tearful exhale. "Thank you," Chris leaps into action.
He's still awake, having finished his homework about half an hour ago, unable to go to sleep. He's imagining what she looks like now. She's twelve. And he knows that call was for her. He's already dressed, shoes tied, retainer discarded on the bathroom counter, Brownie the moose under his arm when his mother peeks into the doorway. She blinks hard, taking him in. "I-- guess you heard the phone call." She opens her mouth like she's about to say something, but closes it. Chris has refused to let them redo her bedroom for the past six years. Every time they start talking about it, he gets up, leaves the room, and goes upstairs to sit on her bed. "Are we going now?" She hesitates for a moment, but nods. When they get to the hospital in Alpine, he gives his parents a look because someone is leading them down a dim hallway, in the basement-- what kind of hospital would put their patients in the basement? He almost gags when they open the door. The room smells awful, like bad meat, or old blood or something. He realizes quickly that the thing on the table isn't a living, breathing girl. It's what they call 'remains' on the news. His mother starts crying, and his father puts an arm around her. "So," The person in scrubs starts explaining through a mask. "We don't have a full dentition, many of them are worn down, possibly by someone hoping to conceal the identity, and of course, Alexandra's teeth weren't all present when she disappeared. But these are quite similar to the permanent teeth she had. It's certainly not a guarantee. There isn't enough evidence to say without a doubt that it's her. But it doesn't match closely with any other missing person reports we've seen so far." Chris can't even believe what he's hearing. "So, it's not her." The person hesitates through their mask. "We can't say with certainty that this is or isn't your sister." He's so angry, he can feel himself turning red. His parents are holding each other and crying, like they're having some kind of mourning revelation. "It's not her!" "Christopher, please," His mother says quietly, her voice trembling. "It's not! How can you give up on her? She's your daughter!" "We aren't giving up, we-- we can't just keep living like this, waiting for her." His throat is getting tighter. "Why not? Telling yourself she’s-- Ally is dead might be easier for you, but how selfish can you get? My sister is not dead!" He can't defend that. She could be decomposing in a ditch or at the bottom of a ravine or sunk to the bottom of the ocean with lead weights on her ankles. The mental image almost makes him sick, or maybe that's just the smell. That's not how Ally smelled, she smelled like green apple shampoo and vanilla detangling spray, because she always complained that someone was pulling her hair if they brushed it for her, and her hands smelled like crayons because she could sit and work on one page of her Lisa Frank coloring book for two hours, and bananas because she liked to peel them and eat half of them and expect Chris to eat the rest. This isn't Ally. He storms out of the room, leaving his parents to cry if they want to. Fuck them and their stupid premature grieving. He's not taking "it's certainly not a guarantee" as an answer. Brownie the moose is not going to see those rotting pieces and think she's gone forever. Brownie the moose is going to stay out of that bullshit, and stay on Chris's side, on Ally's side. She loved that fucking moose, and Chris is not going to let him be put on some kind of gravesite memorial bullshit that doesn't even have a body inside. He's going to wait, and so is Chris, because Ally is coming back.
Leaving home isn't difficult.
Some of his friends admit that they cried a little when their moms started to. But he doesn't even think it's that hard for her. She gets a little teary-eyed, but he figures she'll feel better with him out of the house. Lately, they can't stop arguing. Most people would assume that after losing one child, parents would be connected constantly to their second, too clingy, too affectionate. But Chris can hardly stand to be in a room with either of them, and he’s pretty sure the feeling is mutual. They've actually done it, destroyed Ally's room. The canopy bed is in the attic with most of her stuffed animals. They took back Brownie the moose and pretended it was okay to perch him on a shelf in the new "guest room" as a reminder of the little girl who used to sleep there, the little girl who wanted plastic stars on the ceiling even though her canopy kept her from seeing them. Those are in the attic, too. Chris is chronically pissed off at them, because they have a memorial site at a cemetery as well. It cost a thousand dollars, plus six hundred more to engrave her name on a bench. They made him go with them once, but he refuses every other time they try to get him to visit someone who isn't fucking dead. At one point, his father called him selfish, as if his hope is worse than spending sixteen-hundred dollars on an elaborate way of fulfilling their own imagination. Chris told him that, and his father just shook his head. "What the hell do you think is happening to her if she's not dead? I'm sure at this point, if she isn’t, she wants to be. Maybe you’re the selfish one in this equation." Like he hasn't already thought about what her life could be. She could be in fucking Nepal, living in a brothel. Maybe some woman whose kid died took her and is treating her well, but he doubts that. Nepal seems more likely, but he tries to keep his mind on when he'll see her again, not where they are right now. Although, he wishes she could see Austin. The Army Reserves are the best deal he's ever made. He doesn't actually have to fight, and they're paying his tuition at the University of Texas. His parents and their guest room and memorial are 400 miles away. He has no idea what he's going to do with his life, but he ends up in political science and gender studies and sociology. ( No one else in political science seems to know what they're doing, either. ) He tries to go to a few parties, but he usually doesn't even have a drink. The first time he attends, he sees some guy trying to get a girl to go back to his apartment. She's tiny, obviously a freshman, with a low tolerance for alcohol. The party started an hour ago and she's drunk enough for half her cardigan to be hanging off and trailing the ground. She keeps trying to get his hand off of her wrist, and every time he utters a somewhat-annoyed "come on, babe," she shakes her head and Chris can't watch it anymore. Luckily, he doesn't look like a freshman. He's six foot two and 165 pounds, no baby face left. The other guy looks like he weighs about 130 at most, and could be anywhere from 15 to 24. Chris decides that even if he's toward the higher end of the spectrum, he could, hypothetically, take him. "Leave her alone," he calls across the yard, sitting his practically full solo cup on a table to walk over. "Chill," the guy's hand is wandering, from her wrist to her waist to her ass. Chris! Ally! Where are you? Ally? Ally-- "I'm just getting her home." Drop it. Ally is not coming home, Christopher. "Stop touching her." He's towering over the guy. The girl is halfway-stuffed in the back seat of the car. "I said chill, man, I'm jus--" A hot surge of anger shoots down his arm and he's shoving him, the scrawny guy is on the ground. He reaches into the car to offer the girl a hand, shooting a warning look toward the pavement. "Don't, dude. Don't even try it." After a moment of hesitation, the girl's hand finds his, a little shaky, doubtful. The anger drains, replaced by something softer. She doesn't smell like green apple shampoo and vanilla detangler and crayons and bananas, she smells like booze, but Chris wants to hold her. He hopes that when someone finds his sister someday, they hold her. ( Even if she's dying. Or already dead. ) He can't dwell on that now, the girl is on the verge of collapse and the guy is peeling himself off the pavement. Chris knows he'll just find another girl like her, there have to be about thirty inebriated young women wandering around the party. "Go home, bud," His voice makes the words into a threat. "Now. Don't let me catch you bothering anyone else." The guy looks like he wants to challenge him, but he gets in his car and screeches down the street. He picks up the abandoned half of the sweater, brushes it off, and slides it back up her arm. "What's your name?" He has to ask four times, because she just keeps saying "you saved me," and tripping over uneven places in the grass. Finally, she seems to register the question. Her name is Delaney, and she lives in a natural sciences dorm. Her roommate is also at the party, and not ready to go home, so he ends up parking himself on a couch with Delaney and some water. As he watches people grind and grow increasingly intoxicated, he wants to be annoyed, because he could totally be studying right now, but Delaney rests her head on his shoulder and any irritation seeps back out of his pores. Later that night, when she's starting to sober up, or at least transition into a hangover, she hugs him and thanks him and he just wishes he could have been there when Ally was scared and vulnerable, too, but this feels good, like maybe if he can protect others, the hole Ally left in his heart will hurt less. He figures Delaney must be somewhat popular, maybe because her sister is in a huge sorority and she's basically destined to join as well, because he accumulates some kind of reputation. Every time he shows up at a party, a couple of sober girls find him and ask him to help their friend, and at some point, it feels like a responsibility, but a good one. He likes knowing that he can be trusted to defend people, to protect them, rather than letting something terrible happen and hating himself for it every moment.
He doesn't expect that service to be expanded from vulnerable college students to the entire damn country.
When the army recruiters helped him sign the papers, they said he could potentially be enlisted some day. Like, if there was a fucking crisis, like the Holocaust. Not like, you signed up, so here's a uniform and a backpack, go kill some innocent Iraqi civilians. He's graduated, with no loan debt, and the campus has hired him as a security guard, but the army is not done with him, even if he wants to be done with them. He has to cut his hair short and report to Fort Hood immediately for training. It's a little demoralizing. Especially by his senior year, everyone thought he was pretty formidable. He could physically lift another man off of someone, fight them off, and carry whoever was in distress to his car and get them back home. As a guard, he could tackle someone to the ground, or restrain them, fight them, if it came to it. He can still taste blood in his mouth from the time he had to force three football players away from a sophomore who couldn't find her car, but she got home safely and even wrote a letter to the security office. But when he shows up at boot camp, none of that seems to matter. Someone is always yelling at him to go faster, go lower, go harder-- whatever he does is just not enough. The most frustrating part is when they yell right in his ear. He can set his jaw and yell back, but that doesn’t help the fact that flecks of spit hit him in the face, like liquid freckles, and he has to stand at attention, be respectful. His muscles feel like stretched silly putty and the implications of that yelling makes his heart feel like a cup of Jell-O. What the hell are you gonna do when an IED blows someone's arms off? Just stand there? Say you can't carry them? Let them die? Or be taken? Same damn thing. ( If she’s not dead by now, she wants to be. ) But it somehow makes his dead muscles stretch further, his Jell-O heart keep beating, because he won't let someone else be taken. No more dumb memorials or engraved benches. One of his fellow recruits, Chase, tells him he didn't expect to have to come, either. They secretly write "army reserves: you’ll probably never be enlisted! ... why the fuck you lyin, why you always lyin, mmmmohmygod, stop fuckin lyin" and “fuck the reserves” in the bathroom stalls, then spend an hour giggling at their own stupidity and scrubbing them to avoid being charged with sedition or something stupid. When they do a specific course based on mental and physical fitness, Chase is the one whose limbs are "blown off." Chris disobeys an order and goes back for him, insisting he can be saved with a tourniquet. He gets lectured for non-compliance, but they seem to admire his willingness to do anything for his team. He doesn't say that it's not just about that. On a break, they sit behind a building and channel all the built-up nervous energy into a kiss, tentative at first, but both of them get better quickly. Chris has had a couple of girlfriends, one who broke it off as soon as she saw the spare bedroom in his apartment, Ally's glowing plastic stars and rainbow hair clips. ( If his parents won't wait for her, he will. ) He's never been with a man before, but his lips are just as soft as a woman's, and his hand is rough against his cheek but it feels good, like it can erase the weeks of dried spit from the yelling sergeants. When he pulls Chris into his lap, a wave of fear washes over him, because holy shit, this is new and his breath is coming out shallow and shaky, and Chase's hands are on his waist and his muscles don't feel so tired, even if his heart is still weak. Now there's saliva on his jaw and his neck and where his clavicle peeks out of the olive green T-shirt, but it's not from his superiors' anger or attempts to push him harder, it's from a blond man with pretty eyes and soft lips and rough hands, and it definitely isn't a bad thing. They wait until everyone else is asleep a couple of weeks later to lock the bathroom doors and turn on the showers and Chris is scared, but in a good way, and his muscles feel like a feather pillow and his heart is thumping fast in his chest and feels like a shaken can of soda. Chase is gentle, maybe just as nervous as Chris is, but he makes his whole body feel like it's full of warm waves of light and hot water and steam are between them but nothing else is and the freckles he used to think were ugly, the freckles he used to wish would disappear if he stared hard enough at a star, are beautiful because Chase's thumb is tracing them and he feels so good that nothing about this can be less than beautiful. Then boot camp is over and they are separated and Chris tries to pretend that his heart doesn't have a brand new hole stabbed into it.
Iraq is worse than boot camp.
Chase isn't stationed with him and a lot of the men are like the ones he used to have to fight off during parties, brimming with toxic masculinity and internalized misogyny. The weeks become blurred with red and tan, blood and sand, explosions that shake the bunker during the night and constant shells, unloading guns, sweat that feels like mud, hate. Some of men around him see the people outside like bugs. "The only good Iraqi's a dead one," one of them says at night, and all his friends laugh. Chris decides it wouldn't be too hard to obey orders and leave him behind. The blood splashes up from the sand into his eyes when a roadside bomb really does go off. ( Turns out all those hypothetical training situations were simulated for a reason. ) His freckles are hidden under hot red liquid. The flecks of spit from the sergeant turn heavy and thick. His ears are ringing so loudly he can only hear rough static noises where voices should be. He's not even in the truck anymore, either forced out by the blast or pulled by someone he can't see yet. He reaches up to wipe his eyes, and the rest of the world is just as red. There's an arm beside him in the sand and for a moment he's afraid it's his. He can't even move for a moment, just stares at the sky, the only thing not poisoned by the redness. His chest heaves and his heart is pounding hard, blood leaking through the Ally and Chase holes into the rest of his body. When he tries to sit up, his muscles feel like they've all snapped. He rolls onto his side, coughing because his mouth is full of blood and he doesn't know if it's his. A pair of arms pull him up and a face appears in front of his eyes. "Forrester. You good?" Her eyes are sparkling green like a meadow, her nose is slightly upturned, her lips are light pink, her dark hair is wet with blood and out of its tight bun, long. She's young. Ally. He collapses into her and she catches him, but as soon as tears start to prick his eyes because she smells like apple and vanilla and crayons and banana and that means Ally is dead and she's here to take him-- the whole world turns from red to black. He wakes up in the infirmary with a concussion and three bruised ribs. The woman is there, with her hair washed and in a ponytail, bloody uniform replaced with a clean T-shirt and sweatpants. He sees now that her face is the wrong shape, and when she comes closer to tell him who they lost, she smells like mango and ocean. She's not Ally. ( For the first time, her absence is a relief. ) Her real name is Lauren, and she says she's glad he's okay, because he's one of the few people in their division she can stand. Even though they’re both lonely, they don't ever hide behind a building and kiss, or fuck in the showers because every time she looks up, his heart gets stuck in his throat because when her hair falls the right way, she's Ally, one of those predicted sketches. When he tells her about what happened, she doesn't think it's weird that he keeps the hair clips in his spare room. She's the first person to tell him to trust his instincts. "If you think she's alive, don't doubt yourself. Someday, when you find her--" When. That word sounds good there. "She'll love you a lot for believing in her." The next bomb hits when Chris walks into the barracks and a woman is crying, loudly, the kind that makes his bones want to shatter like thin glass, the kind that has the power to grab him and yank him into the room with the short table and six men and a young woman-- she is on the table and the men who no longer see brown people as humans are around it and one is on her. He remembers the girls at the parties on couches, empty cups and bottles, and he's yanking the man off, even though, for once, he's the small one. The other is four inches taller than him and maybe 70 pounds heavier. "C'mon, man, what the hell?" "Don't," Chris's voice is shaking, he's so angry. Black spots threaten his vision and his ears ring again. "Don't fucking-- go there. You assholes are the ones in here raping someone. Back the fuck off." He doesn't move, so Chris gets closer. "Now." He moves to bat him out of the way, but Chris is faster, and he smacks his arm down, hard enough to make him flinch. His wrist was sprained when the IED went off, and it's still not quite right. "I said move." When he retreats, reluctantly, not without a few choice words and empty threats, the rest of them do, too. The woman's hijab is on the floor, crumpled. He bends down to pick it up for her, and she seems to unfurl slightly, like even though she couldn’t understand what he was saying to them, that proves they can be allies. He recruits Lauren to help him, to type up a letter in broken Arabic to give to her family as an apology, but they decide not to say it on behalf of the U.S. military. She is one woman out of thousands. The military is not sorry. But Christopher and Lauren are, and that seems to mean something to the woman they steal borrow a Jeep for to return to her home. The final hit is from gunfire. Bullets are whizzing past them and three of them are down and Chris doesn't even want to fire back because he's seen civilians caught in crossfire and all of it feels bad and wrong, especially after seeing the terror in that family's eyes when he and Lauren took their daughter back. Then there's an explosion, one that Chris stays conscious for. He's thrown back about fifty feet, but from his place in the sand, he can see body parts rain down from the sky, a stray boot, a helmet. He squeezes his eyes shut because it was easier when they were full of blood and he couldn't see what was happening. But Lauren doesn't come to pull him off the ground this time and he knows something is wrong, just like he knows Ally is still not dead. ( Through the months of heat and sand and salutes, he can feel her, she is still fighting, too. ) He pushes himself to his feet, a little dizzy, and it's all red and black and the heat is making the air waver and he has to hit the ground again almost immediately because more bullets whiz through the air and he hears her yelling. "Forrester!" Chris! "Stay back!" They have her, her helmet is off and her hair is hanging in a ponytail and there's blood on her uniform and she's yelling as they drag her. An officer is yelling now, too, because he's back in motion. "Forrester! Retreat!" Bullets are hurtling past him and he doesn't stop. He finally allows himself to return fire, because he's close enough to see their faces now and they have her and he won't lose her again. Whoever is left of his squad backs him, and a few of the men fall, and Lauren is able to break away, even though her wounds are pouring red into the sand and she can't stand up and she sinks into the deep red mud and Chris grabs her waist, slings her over his shoulder, and wishes he was at a party in Austin right now and she was a freshman who he’d gotten to before it was too late. When she's in the helicopter, they start trying to pull him up, too, and he's confused until he realizes his blood is in the sand as well. An officer comes into the infirmary a few days later. Lauren is sent home with a Purple Heart, paralyzed from the waist down. Chris thinks they're going to tell him to go home, too, and they do. A cold fist squeezes his heart when the officer delivers the news without making eye contact. Other than honorable discharge. Disobeying orders, endangerment, homosexual conduct. He's wondering how anyone knew about that last part when he looks up and one of the rapists from his squad, someone he hardly glanced at in Fort Hood, is smirking. He's furious that he's being punished while the scum of the earth will likely receive an honorable release at some point, but otherwise, the only thing he feels, besides the tightness in his abdomen from the surgery, is relief.
The holes in his heart start to ache harder, leak faster when his phone rings and it's his mother.
"Chris," her voice is strained, threatening to break. "Get to Alpine. The hospital." He can't tell if it's because Ally is alive and she's finally back after twelve damn years or because they found her for real this time, she's actually dead. His stomach is twisting too hard for him to find that confidence again. After he says goodbye, and that he's on the way, but before he hangs up, he hears his mom's lungs contract with a sob. He's so fucked up, so frantic that he hardly brushes his hair, takes ten minutes to find a pair of shoes. Handfuls of clothes are shoved into his old backpack, camouflage, FORRESTER embroidered on the patch. He has to stop himself at one point, smoke a cigarette. He hasn't done it since sophomore year, but it makes him slow down enough to collect himself. Still, his heart is bleeding out into his stomach, which is in knots. He finally crushes what's left into an ashtray and shrugs his bag onto his shoulder. As he's about to leave, he stops and grabs Ally's rainbow hair clips from the nightstand in the spare bedroom. He drives 90 the whole way to Alpine. When he pulls into town, he has to slow down, but it makes his foot shake, his thigh tense up against the seat. He hasn’t been back here. It’s a ghost town to him, nothing is left, even though more stores have opened, apparently, artists love it, but Ally is not in the Dairy Queen, complaining about the flies, or asking to go to the museum at the university after school for the hundredth time. It’s harder to keep his speed under sixty when his brain whispers that he could take her to that museum today, because she could be in the hospital now. When he pulls into the hospital parking lot, there are no news crews, fuck, he was hoping for some kind of hint before he walked in. He doesn’t want to expect her to be there, like last time, and end up in the basement again. But his parents aren’t in the lobby, and when he asks the woman at the desk where they might be, when he tells her his last name, she points across the hall to a room with a sliding glass door and his heart almost leaps out of his chest and it’s pumping blood so fast he’s afraid he’ll pass out right there and it feels like it takes a year, or twelve, just to walk to that door and he jerks it open and a face he’s never seen before is right there and her cheekbones are sharp and the gown is loose on her, she’s skinny, with light pink cheeks and eyes that are a little green, a little brown, long dark hair, all her teeth, none of them are missing or worn down and she’s a woman, nineteen, older than some of the freshmen, and she’s in his arms before he’s even aware that he’s by her bed. His heart fills back up, the hole starts to close. She doesn’t smell like apple and vanilla and crayons and banana anymore. She smells like coconut and sweat, the kind that comes from sunlight, and that doesn’t matter because she’s still Ally. Some little childish part of him wants to look at their mom and dad and say, see, I told you! but he just holds her tighter, tries to ignore how small her body feels. “I knew it.” The words are only for her, not their parents. When he pulls back to look at her again, he sees her hair in her face and pulls out the hair clips, not because he thinks she’s actually going to wear them, but because they’re finally back where they belong and Brownie the moose is in her bed, too, from their parents. Tears start rolling down her face, her shoulders shake, shit, he didn’t expect that. She’s just staring at the clips, face twisting like someone she loves just died in front of her, and she has to inhale it, swallow it, and she starts nodding, holding her fist to her chest. When she can talk, she says “it’s Andie now,” and it takes him a moment to understand that she’s not Ally anymore, not totally, the little girl is gone, but Chris just finds her hand, holds it, and she keeps nodding. “With an -ie, not a -y.” She’s been Ally, the same Ally with the rainbow clips and Brownie the moose for nineteen years, and now she’s a woman named Andie with thick, raised scars that completely circle her wrists and a smaller mark on her forehead and eyes that have seen only one house but know so much more than that. But they’ve still only seen one house, and she’s still Ally, partially, even if she’s Andie now. “Wanna go down to the cafeteria?” He’s not expecting her eyes to light up so brightly, her entire face, but she looks like he just handed her two tickets to Paris. “Yeah!” She’s leaping out of the bed immediately, grabbing her pants and T-shirt from the plastic hospital bag, practically dragging him out of the room. She looks out every window on the way to the cafeteria, swinging his arm back and forth, and his heart feels like it’s wrapped in a warm hug and she can’t stop smiling when she sits down with a mini container of mint chocolate chip Blue Bell and starts listing everywhere she wants to go. His own face hurts because her happiness is contagious and he can’t not smile because Ally Andie is back and his heart is remembering how it feels to have a sister, one who is not in the basement, who does not belong on a memorial and a bench, who is here and laughing and free. The guilt finally shifts and his chest and shoulders are free, too.
