Will never be here again, p.1
WILL NEVER BE HERE AGAIN, page 1
WILL NEVER
BE HERE AGAIN
SHEELA S.K.
Copyright © 2024 by Sheela S.K.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author/publisher. For permission requests, please contact the author.
Something for Sarah
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
contents
Prologue
Chapter1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
PROLOGUE
Ashton Carter’s Apartment
35 Adams Boulevard
Fayetteville, NC
June 2010
Ashton sat in his apartment as the morning sun finally peeked over the low hills to the east and made a long series of warm lines on the carpet at his feet as it filtered through the blinds in his bedroom. He had been up for hours…well…to be more accurate, he hadn’t gotten any sleep . He was still wrestling with a decision that was about 95% made , but that last 5% was keeping him unsettled. Ashton knew that if he followed through on what he had been planning and preparing for over the last few months, nothing would ever be the same for him again…personally as well as for his family and friends who surely would bear a bit of the brunt .
With all that he had sacrificed and lost, both through his military service to a cause that he had come to understand had been a huge lie as well as in his personal life once he had come home following his long and sometimes almost overwhelming rehabilitation after his injuries , Ashton knew he was no longer the same man he had once been. As he took one final scan of all the stuff he would need for what lay ahead as well as made a mental inventory of how it would all be carried out, the only real positive thing he figured he had held onto from his military training was that trite and overused axiom attributed to former Secretary of State James Baker that his Marine trainers had drilled into him from Day One, the 5 P’s: “proper preparation prevents poor performance.”
Ashton closed his eyes and exhaled deeply as he remembered growing up in the small town of Beulaville, just an hour from the shore where he and his brother, Dave, had played during family vacations. He had been brought up in a wonderful place and by the most loving and supportive parents he could imagine. And until recently, all those years under their gentle but stern hands had made him a man he hoped they had been proud of. He had enjoyed growing up in a fairly typical lower-to-middle-income environment, and though he had not always had everything that some of his neighborhood friends did, Ashton had never felt like he was missing anything or gotten the short end of the stick.
When the 9/11 tragedy struck, Ashton, like many of his close friends both in college and back in Beulaville, heard the call to action and signed up to do their part in defending their country against what had come calling in New York, Pennsylvania, and D.C. He’d never seen himself as particularly patriotic—no more so than the next person, he figured—but following the attacks, he never had to think twice about what he needed to do. Even now, as all the lies that the government had spread to justify an erroneous invasion of Iraq had become public knowledge, Ashton didn’t regret his decision to join up. Had he known beforehand how things would turn out , he supposed he might have had second thoughts…but there was no way to go back now .
Prior to his military service, Ashton had seen himself as the most easygoing , peaceful, warm person you might ever come across, which he attributed to how his parents had raised him and Dave. But somehow all that effort had just never sunk in and become part of Dave’s makeup. Ashton had never figured out why that was, but he and his brother had become radically different people. Maybe it was just something physiological in Dave that kept him from absorbing all that they had been taught and shown as kids…or maybe it was some weird emotional issue. Ashton was no shrink and had long ago stopped trying to understand why Dave was what and who he was.
By the time he and Dave had reached their early teens, what might have once been a typical sibling rivalry had evolved into something much more serious. Rather than growing closer as they grew older, Ashton and Dave grew further apart despite Ashton’s efforts to understand why Dave was so filled with jealousy over Ashton’s interests and accomplishments. By the time Ashton was heading out to begin his military training, the chasm between them had reached an all-time high , and Ashton was actually relieved to be putting some distance between them, though the reasons for that distance were anything but comforting.
Even with all that Ashton had seen and done during his deployments, he felt he had still maintained at his core who he was in civilian life before 9/11 hit. But since his return and his victimization at Dave’s hands , he was having trouble finding that old version of himself that he had vowed he would not let the war destroy. And this was the inner struggle that Ashton now felt as he tried to erase that last 5% of doubt and indecision. What had been revealed to Ashton about all that his brother had been behind, maybe to get even for some unfounded hurt, seemed way over the top for just a simple case of sibling rivalry…Dave’s sins were baffling and unforgivable.
In a war zone, payback was often rolled into their missions when they saw the senseless and brutal violence firsthand…experiences that often led to the loss of comrades he had trained with since his initial time at Fort Bragg when he had enlisted. But Fayetteville was hardly the killing ground that Baghdad, Al-Fallujah, and Mosul had been. It was this inner debate over revenge in his home country that Ashton was not quite able to settle. But when he pondered all that Dave had taken from him, a quote popped into his mind from his introductory philosophy class at the University of North Carolina. He couldn’t recall the source, but the longer he mulled it over, the more certain Ashton became that he would move ahead with his plans:
“There is nothing wrong with revenge. The wrong has already been done, or there would be no need to even the score.”
With his reservations finally vanquished, Ashton made his brain morph into the same state it had been trained to assume when on the killing fields in the Middle East. He gathered his gear and headed out, knowing he was likely to be mistakenly viewed and then reported on as just another vet who could not deal with his PTSD upon his return to America…
Chapter ONE
THE CARTER HOME
237 Martinette Street
Beulaville, NC
1977– 1995
Beulaville was one of many small towns in southeast North Carolina, but in the late 1980s, it still possessed the same kind of separation in terms of race, socioeconomic status, and other factors that were found in much larger cities all around it. The Carter home was located in what some today might look back on now and describe as being on “the wrong side of the tracks” for lack of a better descriptor. That old and hackneyed phrase has been beaten to death like the proverbial dead horse, but to make a point here, it seems adequate if not outdated. Stuart and Wendy Carter were a simple, hard-working couple who grew up together right in Beulaville and never had any desire to seek a home elsewhere. They had obviously seen their share of problems and challenges during the turbulent late 1950s and ’60s, but relative to larger towns in the state and elsewhere in the country, they felt pretty insulated and isolated from the bulk of the growing pains that the United States went through in those times.
They had been sweethearts since they were just kids, really, and when they had finished high school, neither wanted anything more than to raise a family in Beulaville just like their parents before them. After they got married, shortly after graduation, Stuart went to work for the same construction company that he had held summer jobs with from age sixteen. Due to his reliability and history with the company , he was soon given more and more responsibility, and by the time their first child, Ashton, came along, Stuart was the primary foreman for the organization, hoping to eventually get out of the field and into a managerial role. It was not especially glamorous work, he knew, but Stuart looked to the future, knowing a better opportunity was on the horizon.
Until she became pregnant with Ashton, and then another child, Dave, just a year and a half later, Wendy had worked as a filing clerk for the sole lawyer in town, Everett Simmons. During her summers as a teenager, Wendy had never done anything more elaborate for a job than bag groceries at the local Kroger or flipping burgers at Roy’s Grill, so the job with Simmons was like a gift f
Everett’s practice had been small and struggling for years, but then a major environmental case that he won against a company that had been found guilty of dumping toxic material into the New River delta, just south of Jacksonville, made him very visible, and his practice, as a result, blossomed and flourished beyond Everett’s imagination. Wendy played a vital role for Everett during the preparation and the trial itself, keeping the sometimes quite unorganized man on track by making sure all the myriad briefs, court filings, and other documents he needed to make his case were in order and at his fingertips. When it was over, and Everett finally got a chance to take a breath and really savor what he had accomplished for the people in and around the New River delta, he knew that without Wendy at his elbow, it might not have turned out so well.
And to thank her properly for being such an integral piece of his efforts, he rewarded her by setting her up as his office manager as he was finally able to take on two new associates. They would be much-needed now that Everett was such a public name…the workload that followed his publicity and perhaps even notoriety, as some called it, would have simply overwhelmed him. And Wendy, he knew, was just the person to keep the new, larger office running like a well-oiled machine. But even so, like Stuart, what she was earning was not anything that would enable them to be considered more than lower middle class, even in Beulaville. But neither Stuart nor Wendy could have cared less. They were still as much in love with one another in those times as when they had been teenage sweethearts…the money and their standing in town simply did not matter.
But when a second child came along, Wendy knew she could no longer split her time between giving her family the attention and care she felt they deserved and being fully effective in Everett’s growing practice. With a heavy heart, knowing just how much she loved being a vital cog in Everett’s machine, Wendy reluctantly went to the man who had given her a real leg up professionally when no one else would, to tell him she needed to resign in order to be a full-time mom .
“I need to talk to you, Everett,” Wendy said as she stood at the door to his office one oddly quiet afternoon.
“Certainly, Wendy…come on in and have a seat. Is this about the Millmore case?”
“No, sir…I’m afraid it is a bit more serious than that, though I know you’re still struggling with that particular client.”
Simmons could see the dire look on her face, one that he had seen little of, even when things got very hectic in the office and they had to rely on her to fix a problem that only she knew how to address.
“I see,” Everett replied. “You look pretty serious just now…is everything OK at home?”
“Well…we’re fine, but I’m afraid with the arrival of David that trying to split my time between the boys as well as taking care of Stuart and keeping this office up and running is just not going to work out in the long run.”
Simmons had suspected that something like this might be headed his way when he’d seen how frazzled Wendy had become lately…and even when things got really crazy for them, she seemingly never got shaken or even slightly thrown off her game. She not only kept him on target and organized but had been doing the same for the new associates while they got some hands-on experience and figured out what it took to be actual lawyers .
“OK, Wendy…. understandable. I really hate to lose you. Would a reduced schedule help at all?”
“I appreciate the offer, Everett, but I don’t want to come in here and do a half-baked job for you because of how busy life at home has become. I respect you too much and have too much gratitude for all that you have done for me to offer you anything less than my full abilities. My kids need me, Everett, and I just feel that is where I need to be, OK?”
Simmons nodded, sad that she would be leaving him but still just as impressed with Wendy’s character and honesty as the day he had taken her on when it was just him and her and the practice was a fledgling enterprise.
“This is fine, Wendy. I’m sure that Sonia can take over for you by now. She’s been at your elbow for over a year. I will miss you around the office more than you know, but I completely understand your position. If not for you, I’m not sure what kind of shape this place might be in today.”
“That’s very kind, Everett. How about I stay on until the end of the month just to make sure that Sonia doesn’t have any questions or other concerns when you hand over the reins to her for good ?”
“Thanks, Wendy…I appreciate that. And if you change your mind or ever want to come back here one day, just give me a call, OK?”
Wendy nodded and stood to leave his office when Everett came around his desk and hugged her warmly.
“Thanks again for everything, Wendy,” he whispered in her ear. “Take care and let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”
Wendy felt her eyes fill with tears as she left , but forced herself to not cry until she was clear of the office, not wanting to make a scene in front of the other associates and clerks.
Chapter TWO
THE CARTER HOME
237 Martinette Street
Beulaville, NC
1997–2000
And this was the world that both Ashton and Dave Carter were born into and came to know. But as you may have surmised by now, being brought into the same world, with the same loving parents, the same living conditions, and the same overall environment does not necessarily set the stage for siblings to have relatively close characters and personalities. In a sort of reverse of the famous experiment of taking identical twins and exposing them to vastly different environments to observe how they grow up , Ashton and Dave grew and evolved into exceptional boys and then men while under the influence of identical surroundings. But it was not always that way, of course. The sharp schism that eventually formed between the brothers grew over time as they got older…this was not a situation that made itself manifest from their earliest days together at all.
When they got old enough to be mobile and active, both boys mingled and okayed well together…it was like nothing anyone had ever seen for children that young, everyone in Beulaville noted. When either Ashton or Dave stubbed a toe or skinned a knee or such, the other was there right away to offer a hand until either Stuart or Wendy could be found to address the injury and offer both a comforting parental shoulder to cry on as well as any needed medical attention. Even as the pair grew to the point when they were enrolled in kindergarten and then elementary school, this trend continued. Teachers at every level watched them with stunned pleasure, often remarking that in all their years in the school system, they had never seen such a dynamic between two siblings…especially boys who often behaved in quite the opposite manner as they came into their own personalities and developed the naturally competitive nature they were accustomed to observing in the other kids.
However, once Ashton and Dave reached their preteen years and then slid into technically being teenagers, this all changed. No one could ever pinpoint exactly what it was that had occurred to make the relationship that had so stunned everyone around them a thing of the past…not even Stuart or Wendy or any other relative that was close to the family. It was like an unseen switch had been thrown somewhere along the way, and the close, supportive, warm way Ashton and Dave had once been with one another just seemed to vanish. And perhaps no one was more baffled and confused over this development than Ashton himself. He tried to figure out what had suddenly made Dave not want to have anything to do with him, and trying to get his brother to explain why was just as fruitless.
Dave, it seemed, had just arisen one day and decided that he just didn’t care too much for Ashton anymore. As everyone looked back later, the real take-off point seemed to have been when Dave announced one morning at breakfast that he no longer wanted to be called David, preferring the shortened, less formal version, Dave. It appeared to be an odd thing at the time, but so inconsequential to Stuart and Wendy, that they just shrugged and let it go. Deep in their hearts, it pained them as Dave had been named after Wendy’s grandfather, David, who had been an anchor for her growing up when her own parents had fallen ill from an especially virulent strain of flu that they never recovered from, leaving and her brother, Simon, adrift.
