The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10
It took five weeks, not two, and when it came it was four pages in a plain folder and Carlos was sitting at the kitchen table with it when she got home.
She stopped in the doorway with her keys in her hand.
“That is it.”
“That’s it.”
“You read it.”
“I read it.”
“You said you would not protect me.”
“I’m not protecting you.” He kept his hands flat on the folder. “I read it so I’d know what was in it while you were reading it. I haven’t taken anything out and I’m not going to.”
She put the keys down. She did not take her jacket off.
“Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
“How bad?”
“Avîn.” He said it gently. “Sit down or don’t sit down, but don’t make me tell it to you standing in the door. Let me give you the paper.”
She came to the table. She did not sit.
“Do you want me to go out?” he said.
“No.”
That was new. He did not say anything about it.
She read standing up, one page at a time, laying each finished page face down on the table with great care, the way you’d handle something wet.
She did not make a sound for the first page.
On the second she said, “Hemin,” once, and nothing after it.
Halfway down the third page she stopped and went back up and read the same few lines again. Then again.
“Carlos.”
“Yeah.”
“Where is Karwan.”
“Fourth page. He’s on the fourth page.”
Her hand was not steady when she got to it. It was the only time he had ever seen her hands do anything but exactly what she told them to.
She found it. She read it twice. Her breath went out of her.
“He is alive.”
“He’s alive.”
“It says he is alive.”
“He’s alive, Avîn. He’s out. He’s with his uncle’s people up north, he’s got work, he’s fine.” Carlos said it the second time slower. “That one I chased down twice because I wanted to be sure before I put it in your hand.”
She stood there holding the fourth page and she nodded, several times, at nothing.
Then she went back to the third page.
“Tell me about Aland,” she said.
“It’s there.”
“It says killed. I can read that it says killed. Tell me the rest.”
Carlos took a breath.
“Ambush on a supply road, north of the city. Not the fighting — after. Cleanup, a stay-behind element nobody knew was still there. There were four of them in the vehicle. He was gone before they got him out.”
“Which road?”
He told her.
“I know that road.” She looked at the page. “I have been down that road two hundred times. It is not even a bad road.”
“No.”
“It is a boring road. There is a shop at the second turn that sells very bad cigarettes.” She said it flatly. “He did not smoke. He complained about everyone who did.”
“Yeah.”
“What day?”
“Avîn —”
“What day.”
“The fifth of March.”
She did not move for a long moment.
“Say it again.”
“The fifth of March.”
She turned her head slightly, the way she did when she was working something, and he watched her do the arithmetic and he saw the exact second she finished it.
“That was the Saturday,” she said.
“What?”
“The Saturday I cooked. The one where I made food for twelve people and nobody came and I stood in the kitchen asking you where everybody was.” Her hand moved, once, uselessly. “That was that week. That was that day, I think. I do not know the exact day but it was that week.”
“Avîn, don’t.”
“I was angry about a lawn.” She was still looking at the page. “I was standing in a warm kitchen being angry that nobody had come to visit me, and I was ashamed of myself for it, and I thought, this is not a war, it is a shelf. And he was on that road.”
“You didn’t know.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing you could have —”
“I know what there is and is not.” Her voice had not risen at all. That was the worst part of it. “Do not say the sentence. I have said it to other people. It is a true sentence and it does not do anything.”
She read the fourth page through twice more and then squared all four pages up on the table, edges even, and set them down.
“Thank you,” she said. “For getting it. And for not taking anything out.”
“You want me to —”
“I would like to be outside for a little while.”
She went into the backyard, and Carlos watched from the kitchen window and did not follow her, which he told me later was the hardest thing he did that whole year. She stood in the middle of that small square of American grass with her arms at her sides. She did not sit down. She did not put her face in her hands. She stood there like a woman at a formation for about forty minutes while it got dark, and then she came in and washed her hands and asked what he wanted for dinner.
They ate. She was pleasant. She asked about his day and listened to the answer.
That night she slept, or seemed to. She got up at five and went to the range.
On the third day he found her at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and a pen and nothing written on it.
“What’s that?”
“I am writing to Karwan.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“It is not good. It has been forty minutes.” She turned the pad around so he could see it. At the top, in careful block capitals, she had written the boy’s name, and under it, nothing.
“Take your time.”
“I have taken forty minutes.”
“So take an hour.”
“What do I say to him?” She was not asking rhetorically; she genuinely wanted the answer. “He is twenty-three years old and everyone who taught him anything is dead except me, and I am eleven thousand kilometers away in a house with a lawn. What is the sentence for that?”
“Start with ‘I’m alive.’”
“He knows I am alive. That is the entire problem.” She put the pen down. “If I write to him he will know I am alive and well and warm and paid, and he will be happy for me, because he is a good boy and he will be happy for me. And that will be worse than if he hated me.”
“Why?”
“Because I will have taken his happiness for that as well, and given him nothing, and I will have done it from a house with a lawn.” She looked at the blank page. “You do not understand. I do not want him to be glad for me. I want him to be glad for himself. There is nothing in that letter that can make him glad for himself.”
Carlos sat down across from her.
“Tell him what Aland said about the cities,” he said. “Tell him what the man said. He’d want it, and there’s nobody else left who can give it to him.”
She was quiet a while.
Then she picked the pen up and wrote for two hours, and did not let him read it, and mailed it herself.
She was fine for nine days.
She was, in fact, excellent. She was early to the bay every morning and she was patient with Reyes and she caught two errors in the following week’s curriculum that nobody else had caught, and Boyd told her twice she was on fire, and she said thank you.
On the sixth day Boyd caught her packing the bay out alone at six in the evening.
“You’ve been here since when, ma’am?”
“Since it opened.”
“Uh huh.” He leaned on the door frame. “You corrected Reyes four times today.”
“He made four errors.”
“He made two. The other two were fine and you corrected them anyway.” He said it without any accusation in it. “I’m not writing anybody up. I’m saying I’ve seen a person work like that before and it wasn’t because the work needed doing.”
She kept packing.
“Sergeant.”
“Ma’am.”
“Do you remember what you asked me. About being a person again, after.”
“I remember.”
“I do not have any better answer this month than I had last month.”
Boyd nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s like that.” He straightened off the door frame. “Go home, ma’am. The rifles’ll be here Monday. They’re not going anywhere.”
“That is what I dislike about them,” she said.
Carlos watched it and said nothing and did not sleep much.
On the ninth night he woke at some hour past three and the bed was empty and she was not on the floor.
She was in the kitchen. No light on. Standing at the sink with the water running over her hands, not washing anything, just letting it run.
He stood in the doorway.
“It does not run out,” she said.
“No.”
“I keep waiting for it to run out.”
He came in and turned the tap off. She let him.
“He was forty-four,” she said. “He had a wife. Two girls. He used to say when this is finished I will grow tomatoes and never speak to anyone again.” She was looking at the drain. “Eleven years he knelt next to me. Eleven years he told me the wind and I made the shot and everybody said my name. Nobody ever said his name. Nobody outside of us ever knew there was a man there at all.”
“You knew.”
“I am here.” She said it like she was reading it off a page. “I am here, in a warm house, with a job, and hot water that does not run out, and a bed I cannot sleep in because it is too soft. And he is on a boring road with a shop that sells bad cigarettes.” Her hands were still over the dry sink. “I was better than him with a rifle. That is the only difference. That is the whole of it. I could shoot and so they made an exception for me and put me on an aircraft, and he could not, so he stayed, and now he is dead and I am learning about tea.”
“That’s not —”
“It is exactly that. Do not make it a nicer shape.” She turned around then and looked at him and her face was completely dry. “I am not sad, Carlos. I want you to understand. I have been sad. This is not that. This is that the arithmetic does not work and I cannot make it work and I have been trying for nine days.”
He did not tell her it was survivor’s guilt. He did not tell her Aland would have wanted her to go. He did not tell her any of the sentences, because she had already said they were true sentences that do not do anything, and she was right.
What he said was: “It doesn’t work. You’re right. It’s not going to.”
“No.”
“There’s no version where it comes out even. He’s dead and you’re here and there’s no arithmetic that makes that fair and there never will be.”
“No.”
“Okay,” Carlos said. “So we’re not going to solve it.”
Something in her shoulders went.
“Then what do I do with it,” she said.
“You carry it.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only one there is.” He was standing about three feet from her and he did not close the distance, because eleven years of not being reached for had taught her body what it had taught it. “You carry it, and it’s heavy, and it’s heavy tomorrow too. And you don’t carry it standing in a dark kitchen by yourself at three in the morning for nine days pretending you’re fine.”
“I do not know another way to carry a thing.”
“I know.”
“I have never had another way.”
“I know that too.”
She looked at him. Then, very slightly, past him at the doorway, the way she looked away from things.
“Carlos.”
“Yeah.”
And she said it. Flat, quiet, in the voice she used for range cards and casualty lists, which was the only voice she had for anything that mattered.
“I do not want to stand here alone.”
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