The Survivor

Chapter 5

At UCLA the National Guard is not about training soldiers; it is about olive drab T-shirts, jumping jacks, and shooting-range practice one weekend a month. Nate enjoys the sense of belonging and participates with gratitude, if not the hoo-ah earnestness his superiors might prefer. The choice is primarily a financial one; he is on his own here. In high school he buckled down and studied hard, aware that that was the best way out of a house that had been lifeless since his mom had succumbed thoroughly, brutally, to cancer when he was in third grade. After her funeral his father vanished into an effluvium of scotch, a still life in a frayed armchair, the eternal microwave dinner resting on the eternal TV tray at his side. There will be no parent weekends for Nate in college, no palmed-off cash to help cover books.

Most of the time, Nate is a normal student. His roommate, a fellow ROTC cadet named Charles Brightbill, is pathologically relaxed and full of childlike wonderment. Charles has an unsurpassed appreciation of all things everybody else noticed five minutes ago, marveling at planes overhead, a classmate’s cleavage, the color of his just-blown snot in a Kleenex. “Hey,” Charles says. “Look at that rainbow in the sprinkler mist.” Despite Nate’s best efforts, he loves the guy. Charles who is incapable of deception, who dispenses the occasional nugget of inadvertent wisdom, who sleeps in the hall when he forgets his key rather than wake Nate, no matter how many times Nate tells him to bang on the door.

After a particularly soul-destroying exam in their junior year, Charles drags Nate out of bed, beach towels in hand. “Rise ’n’ shine, podnah. Moping’s like listening to Iron Maiden when you’re hungover.” That’s Charles; he can boil down the world and put it in a fortune cookie. Nate relents. Ten minutes later he cranks open the window of Charles’s Datsun 240Z and lets the salt-rich breeze wash over him. Sprawled on the hot Malibu sand, he basks, feeling the life creep back into him.

A distant waterlogged shriek startles him upright. A flailing feminine form, out beyond the break. Then a young man about Nate’s age is disgorged from the sea, landing on all fours on the wet sand before them, surf seething up his forearms. He heaves up salt water, and then his hoarse voice croaks at the beachgoers-“Riptide. She’s got a cramp.”

There is a moment of utter stillness, people frozen on their towels. A few heads swivel to the lifeguard station far along the beach. And then Nate is up and running, dried seaweed pods crackling underfoot. Charles is bellowing after him, but Nate hurdles a wave and strikes out for the break. The undertow grips him, sweeping him toward the woman, who sputters and dips from sight. Muscles on fire, he strokes into a forceful current, and then, finally, her rubbery arm is in his grasp. He sweeps her into him, spinning her so her spine presses to his chest. She spits and struggles, and the back of her head cracks his eye. He lets go, and she goes under the green-black surface and bobs up again, choking. He says, “Stop fighting.” He reaches for her arm once more. “Look at me. I got you.” She stares at him, drops clinging to her eyelashes, and it occurs to him that she is quite beautiful. They are being swept along, the backdrop of the beach whipping by, and she gives a quick, youthful nod. He spins her like a dance partner, and she surrenders into him, her muscles going limp. Clamping an arm over her shoulder and across her flat chest, he lets them drift with the riptide, reading the water. Then he paddles, offsetting them slightly from the current. They reach the sand a half mile up the beach, with Charles, two lifeguards, and a cluster of onlookers sprinting to meet them. They both cough water and pant, and she rises first, tugging him to his feet, and then they are helped and dried and checked to the point of claustrophobia.

The young man who dragged himself to shore stands sheepishly at the outskirts of the cluster. Wrapped in a towel, the woman turns to thank Nate, providing his first full glimpse of her. Her lips are big, almost too big, and the shape of her mouth leaves them between a sneer and a smile. She has creamy white skin and a turned-up nose with a scattering of freckles across the bridge that seem out of place, like they’ve showed up to the wrong party. Her blond hair is cropped tight, short enough to be daring. Her features carry it off, but then Nate thinks they could carry off anything. One flash of that quick, wide grin and he’d not notice if she were wearing a Carmen Miranda hat piled with produce. She has her original, factory-issue breasts-a rarity in Los Angeles-and her body is lean, slim-hipped. Usually he gravitates to girls with a little more meat on their bones, but he is quick to realize that there isn’t much sense in comparing her to anyone who came before.

She introduces herself as Janie. Hovering off Nate’s shoulder, Charles stage-whispers, “Dude, she’s hot,” once again narrating the thunderbolt obvious.

Nate offers his hand. “Nate Overbay.” And they shake, which feels a bit ludicrous given that their bare bodies have spent the previous fifteen minutes glued together.

At once Janie’s date is by her side, asking Nate, “Can I give her a ride home? Or you gonna handle that, too?”

Nate thinks, Now would be a really good time to not say anything.

She and the guy begin to argue, Janie offering apologetic glances at Nate until the scene grows uncomfortable. Nate retreats from the commotion, Charles berating him all the way back to their crappy Westwood apartment for not getting her number. Lying awake that night, Nate realizes that Charles was once again dead-on and resigns himself to a lifetime of regret.

* * *

A few weeks later, Nate and Charles are eating Mama Celeste microwave pizza and watching Melrose Place when the doorbell rings. Nate answers and finds Janie outside, double-checking an address she has scrawled on her palm. Her short, wet hair sticks out at all angles, fresh from a shower, and she smells of lavender. Before he can figure out how to talk, she says, “I can’t stop thinking about it. How you pulled me out of the water.”

She has the faintest trace of a lisp, just enough to keep him in mind of her mouth, those lips shaping themselves around each word, however imperfectly.

Nate’s heart beats a double-time rhythm. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you either.”

“I tried,” she says, agitated. “I thought about all the things I probably wouldn’t like about you. All the stuff we’d fight about if we ever actually were together. How you really aren’t that good-looking.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Because of my boyfriend.” Her hands tug at the back pockets of her jeans. A one-shouldered shrug. “Ex-boyfriend now.” She lifts her fingers to the echo of a bruise around his eye where her skull cracked him in the surf.

They step into a kiss, and Charles’s voice floats from the other room, “Dude, hurry up. Heather Locklear’s in a frickin’ nightie.”

* * *

Janie and Nate are instantly inseparable. That weekend they sit cross-legged on his bed, nose to nose, engulfed in conversation about their childhoods, and, as is apt to happen, they start making out. He begins to move her horizontal, then stops himself.

She looks up, those lashes framing her large blue eyes. “What?”

“I can’t decide if I want to have sex with you or keep talking to you.”

“That,” she says, “is the finest compliment I’ve been paid in all my twenty years.”

Inevitably, sex wins out. They lie facing each other afterward, breathing hard, Nate’s cupped hand tracing the flushed dip of her side. Her straw-colored bangs are now dark, sweat-pasted to her forehead. “What do you think about seeing other people?” she begins tentatively. “I know a lot of guys get weird around commitment.…”

“Commitment?” Nate says. “I love commitment.”

Charles goes from scorned buddy to third wheel to joint best friend. Janie studies biology and French nearby at Pepperdine, but when she and Nate are apart, the half hour between campuses feels like a transatlantic separation. They are still young enough to pine as though pining were an Olympic event. Though they see each other almost every day, they pen indulgent letters, drunk on bad poetics. “Jesus H.,” Charles says, uncrumpling a rough draft he lifted from Nate’s trash can, “you’re turning into a Celine Dion song.”

On the occasions when Janie is dressed up and doesn’t turn heads in a restaurant or bar, Nate is surprised. Yet this makes her somehow more special, that she is not as arresting to everyone, that her grace and manner put a hook in his limbic system as if she were designed for him and him alone.

They are engaged within three months.

She hails from Wisconsin, a normal childhood and family, with antecedents she calls Gammie and Papa. “What if your dad doesn’t like me?” he asks, and she laughs. “He won’t like you.” Their circle of friends, however, is thrilled; they are the first to take the leap. They tell and retell their origin story, embellishing it by degrees, and he knows that by their fiftieth anniversary it will involve his rescuing her from a tidal wave in a tropical monsoon. Every time she gets to the rescue, no matter what company they’re in, she takes his hand and quotes him back to him: “‘Stop fighting,’ you told me. ‘I got you.’”

They marry by spring. After the Olive Garden reception, exhausted and half drunk on bad Chianti, they collapse on the hotel mattress, Janie kicking off her heels, her white sundress unzipped. “Okay, Husband,” she says sleepily, “we have to consummate this thing.” That laugh. “You on top?”

Nate mumbles, “I would if I knew which direction that was.”

“Give you a hundred dollars.”

“I’m a grand, minimum.”

“We have to. Or it’s not legal.”

“Right.”

“And I might change my mind here.”

By morning they are legal. They honeymoon at Nate and Charles’s apartment, since they blew all their money on the fifty-person affair and their night at the Santa Monica Holiday Inn. Someday, they vow, when they have money, they will go to Paris for a makeup honeymoon, but until then they will always have Westwood. They spend their time drinking root-beer floats in bed and studying for midterms. It is like playing house without the house.

“Would you like Eggos in bed, Wife? On our finest paper plate?”

“Thank you, Husband. That would be delightful.”

A week later she crawls under the sheets with him and announces, “We are having a baby.”

All around him the world seems to pull itself into wonderful alignment. He blinks back emotion. “Are you sure?”

“The pee stick doesn’t lie. And five of them certainly do not.”

They move into a closet-size apartment of their own. Janie swells, her tiny frame accommodating near-impossible proportions. A former Boy Scout, Charles buys a pager for Nate. He is in Abnormal Psych when it goes off; her water has broken. Everything is a blur between Franz Hall and the delivery ward. She is growling and clawing the sheets, and when she takes his hand, she nearly crushes the bones of his fingers. “Look at me,” he says. “I got you.”

That night they crowd into her single hospital bed, a threesome. Two days later the infant remains Baby Overbay. As Nate steers Janie out in a wheelchair, the pink bundle in her lap, she says, “We’ll name her after the first thing we see when we make it outta here.”

Nate slows as they near the nurses’ station. He says, “And how is little Garbage Can sleeping?”

Janie snorts, covers her mouth. “You know, it’s been hard ever since Homeless Guy started teething.”

A passing grandmother in the elevator gives them a dirty look, but they can’t stop laughing. “Cat Ass really got your eyes,” Nate says through tears.

Still laughing, they push past automated doors into daylight. Janie gazes up at the brilliant blue sky, and her breath catches in her throat.

“Cielle,” she says.

They settle back into their tiny Westwood apartment. Charles brings a beautiful gift-a wooden stepstool with Cielle’s name carved out, each letter a colored puzzle piece. They study, parent, juggle schedules, and somehow graduate. Nate starts a corporate job with a department store as a buyer of men’s suits. Janie enrolls in nursing school.

A month before Cielle’s third birthday, he manages a VA home loan, the incipient Paris re-honeymoon fund is happily reapportioned, and they get luckier than anyone could expect with a two-story bank-repo fixer-upper in a great part of Santa Monica. When they pull up in a U-Haul, Janie stops midway across the front lawn, crying with gratitude.

At night and on weekends, he slaves on the house, putting in floorboards, repainting, replacing iron pipes with copper. Every few months they mark off Cielle’s height on her door jamb, the lines stacking up. One Tuesday morning Janie shakes him awake early and they sit in horror, clutching hands, watching footage of those 767s crashing into the towers again and again and again. Janie casts a dark glance through the open doorway to the laundry room, where his camouflage field jacket hangs drying from his last drill weekend. Upstairs, Cielle’s bedroom door opens, and he rises silently to get her.

In the blink of an eye, Cielle is seven, her dark hair taken up in pigtails. The week after her birthday, they go for a long-overdue family portrait at Sears. Despite the photographer’s entreaties, they can’t get Cielle to focus. Isaac at school has introduced her to armpit farts, so every pose is bookended with: “Didja hear?”

Janie: “No.”

“How ’bout now?”

Finally Nate swings Cielle upside down until she’s red-faced from giggling, and the three of them topple over onto the plush blue mats, Janie sitting behind Nate, propping him up, Cielle squeezing her in a side hug, all three of them captured in the flash with indelicate openmouthed laughs. After a family vote, the glossy portrait goes above their mantel. That night he and Janie read The Lorax to Cielle, then go downstairs, drink red wine, and watch The West Wing. He rubs Janie’s feet and catches her looking at the portrait and shaking her head, and then they both crack up.

Nestled in the warmth of the couch, his wife’s feet in his lap, his daughter soundly asleep overhead, he appreciates how their life is a quiet kind of spectacular, a bubble of bliss insulated from the horrors of the outside world.

In three days’ time that bubble will pop.