The Survivor

Chapter 7

When the ramp of the C-17 lowers, bringing into sight the wavering black tarmac of the Los Alamitos Army Airfield, a chorus of cheers goes up from the plane’s cargo hold, and Nate spills out with a sea of camouflage into the temperate Southern California air. He spots Janie and Cielle on the runway, waiting behind the sawhorses. Cielle looks bigger, her face round and smiling. She and Janie are jumping up and down, beautiful. He runs to them, and they smash together in a three-way hug. “Welcome home, Husband,” Janie tells him, beaming, and he says, “I missed you, Wife.” But the jubilation quickly recedes, leaving behind a ponderous silence that lasts the car ride home.

Nate walks through every room in the house, the house he loves, trying to make it his own again. It does not feel like he belongs here, or anywhere else. A void has opened up between him and the rest of the world. He reminds himself it has been just seventy-two hours since his sprint across the dunes with Charles bleeding out on his back. How Nate feels here in Santa Monica-it’s just temporary.

When his pacing carries him downstairs, Janie and Cielle are waiting in the family room, bursting with excitement. A large cardboard box sporting an oversize red bow sits on the carpet. Cielle says, “C’mon hurry hurry open it.”

He lifts the lid and peers inside. A rustle of tan fur, and then a puppy head pokes into view. The pup scrambles up his arms into his face, slurping, and Nate holds him, running a hand down the strip of reversed fur on the spine.

Cielle says, “He’s a Rhodesian ridgeback. They used to be lion hunters. He’ll grow up huge, to a hundred pounds. He’s yours, but Mom said I could name him. Wanna know his name? It’s Casper. Like the ghost.”

Janie adds, “They say it helps, I guess. Adjust. A dog. Unconditional love, no conversation.”

Nate squeezes him, smells him, lost in the warmth, the quiet magnificence. He hugs his wife and his daughter, Casper squirming from lap to lap, and for a single moment, he forgets the burden he still carries on his back.

He sleeps fitfully, knowing the task in store for him tomorrow. Back on the eve of his redeployment, a gnawing need drove him to ask his lieutenant if he could serve the death notifications to the families of the men killed on his watch. His request went up the chain and was quickly approved-it was hardly a sought-after job-and he was handed a pamphlet to read on the flight home providing guidelines for Casualty Notification Officers.

It is not until he gets to the front door of the McGuires’ house that he realizes how woefully unprepared he is. Every detail embeds thunderously in his brain-the paint peeling on the door frame, the sudden laxness in Mrs. McGuire’s face at the sight of him, the rasp of the screen against his shoulder as he steps inside. McGuire’s father, a hulking rectangle of a man, creaks the floorboards of the hall and then sits across from Nate, his dry hands cracking at the knuckles when he grips the armrests of his chair. Nate doesn’t remember what he says, but then Mrs. McGuire’s eyes are leaking and Mr. McGuire is asking him something.

Nate musters his voice. “Yes, sir, he died honorably.”

“Was he in pain?” McGuire’s mother asks.

Nate thinks of McGuire gripping his severed leg. The screams. He says, “No.”

Mr. McGuire: “Did you kill the bastard who got him?”

“No, sir.” Nate rises and, as instructed, delivers a small bag with McGuire’s effects. His stomach burns as McGuire’s mother sifts through the contents-a cross pendant, dog tags, a G-Shock watch with a smashed face-and feels the need to say, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a son-”

“Two,” the big man says sharply. “We lost both.” He looks up and away, a distant glint in his eyes. “How’s the war going, son?”

“I hope we’ve turned a corner, sir,” Nate says lamely.

“Yeah, what corner is that?” He snickers at the silence. “We had a name for that corner, too, when I was in the Corps. We called it Clusterfuck Bend.”

Nate cannot think of a response, so he keeps his mouth closed.

“His body?” Mr. McGuire asks.

“It’s been well taken care of. It shipped from Ramstein, full honors rendered at each point of transfer-”

“I don’t give a shit about that. What kind of shape?” A pause. “Well?”

“We didn’t recover his whole body, sir.”

“What’s missing?” Mr. McGuire wets his lips. “Go on, son. If I can take it, you sure as hell can.”

“A leg. And … and … part of his head.”

Mrs. McGuire’s eyes move abruptly to the ceiling.

“Who went down with him?” Mr. McGuire asks.

Nate lists the names, ending with Charles.

Mrs. McGuire says, “You tell their mothers and fathers thank you for us.”

It is a full minute before Nate dares to speak again. Though he has been forbidden to offer any details about the activities surrounding the death, he hears himself start to spill: “It was an IED hidden in a rucksack. Right in front of me. I should’ve gotten to it before it went off. I could have-”

The deep voice cuts him off. “See, son. Now you’re making your problems our problem. Don’t ya think we got enough problems tonight?”

Nate’s entire body is trembling. “Yes, sir.”

“So act like you got some sense in you.” The man’s face has turned ruddy. “Don’t leave us with more to chew on. See, you’ll go on home, eat dinner with your wife, tuck your kids into bed. You’ll move on. We’ll be here. So you think of us from time to time.”

Mrs. McGuire says, softly, “Jim,” and he silences.

Nate looks down into his lap for a long time. “May I please use your restroom?”

She points. “Powder room off the hall there.”

Nate runs the water to cover the sound of his vomiting. He splashes water on his face, dries his eyes with a pink hand towel that smells of floral detergent. Studying his reflection, he vows to learn how to do this better. He squares himself, emerges, delivers the necessary information as best he can, and shows himself out. As he drives away, his sweat-drenched uniform clings to him like a bad dream.

Johnson’s family, next up, is kind and appreciative, and that is all the worse. Then comes Miles’s stepmother, who says, “Well, then,” and closes the door. Bilton’s wife asks Nate to drive her to school to tell her son. The following day begins with a sad meeting in a church basement-stained coffeemaker, cinder-block walls, and unbroken wailing. Tommy K’s mother takes her son’s baseball cap from the bag of effects, presses it to her face, and inhales. By dusk the compounded effect of so much suffering has left Nate utterly void. He welcomes the numbness, because he fears that if he starts crying, he will crack wide open.

Arriving at Charles’s childhood house, Nate realizes he has saved this, the worst, for last. Inside, he sees Grace Brightbill bustling at the sink, a plump, pleasant-looking woman with dyed blond hair cut in a bob. He recalls her pride at every one of Charles’s papers, no matter how bad. The report cards pinned to the fridge by photo magnets of Charles in T-ball. Nate sits in his car, replaying her son’s voice-don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you leave me-and feeling the heat of the explosion, the sand raining down on him. How he himself couldn’t leap for the rucksack.

And so Charles had.

Nate struggles to keep breathing. Self-loathing swells and washes over him, and he realizes he is too craven to proceed. Driving away, he dials headquarters to request that someone else be sent to serve Charles’s death notice. He knows already that this will be a decision he will regret for the rest of his life, but he cannot stop himself from making it.

The next day, depleted and emotionally hungover, he takes Cielle to lunch as promised. She eats ten chicken nuggets and then five more. When she asks for a sundae, he says, “I think you’ve had enough, honey.”

“But I can’t get full.”

As they walk out, a teenage kid accidentally pops a ketchup packet in his hand, and red goo snakes down his wrist, his forearm. All of a sudden, Nate’s face goes hot and he is back in the Sandbox, spinning in the wake of the explosion, his ears ringing. McGuire is there holding his severed leg and-

“Daddy? Daddy?”

He has blanked out completely in the doorway of the fast-food joint. He swallows hard, turns his head from the guy, and says, “Let’s go.”

There are other signs, too, in the weeks that follow. He cannot watch a plane in flight without bracing for it to explode. Despite the mounting bills, he cannot bring himself to go back to his job as a buyer of men’s suits. He and Janie make love with more urgency, as if they’re trying to hold on to something. They talk less afterward, Janie rolling over into a paperback, Nate staring at the ceiling, watching the fan blades spin like the rotors of a helo and reliving those instants confronting the left-behind rucksack. Night after night, lying beside his wife, he changes the dance steps, rewrites history. A thousand times he watches Abibas pause on the dune and stare back at them, then turn and run. Nate looks over at the rucksack. But in this alternate history, he puts his promise to Cielle out of his mind; he unlocks his legs; he leaps.

In the morning when Nate brushes his teeth, he hears Charles’s voice in his head, sees him sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Charles is in his green-and-khaki ACUs and wears his combat helmet, but one thing is different: There is a massive hole blown in his stomach, and he is dripping blood onto the ivory bathroom tiles.

“What the fuck?” Charles says. “It’s indulgent, all this moping and shit. Get over it already. You’re home.”

“I know,” Nate says through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I know that. But I can’t get it from my head into my gut.”

Charles peers through the hole in his stomach wall. He flexes, making the intestines wiggle, then looks up with a pleased smile. Noting Nate’s expression, he assumes a serious face. “Don’t get boring.”

Nate spits foam into the sink, rinses. “Sorry. I’m hung up on killing you.”

“That crap again?” Charles waves a bloody hand. “What could you have done?”

For the first time, Nate actually speaks out loud. “I could’ve jumped first.”

He goes in search of work but inevitably winds up sitting with Casper on the curb by the car wash, watching the vehicles go in filthy and come out spotless, that toxic film reel throwing images against the walls of his skull, corroding him from the inside out. No matter how many times he works and reworks the equation he is locked inside, it is destined to tally up the same-two dead legs, three frozen seconds, threadbare rucksack five feet away.

Nate takes Casper out late when the neighborhood is still enough to mute the noise in his head. One night he arrives home to find Janie swaying on the porch swing. “Maybe you should bring Cielle on your walks. I’m worried about her weight.”

He says, “I’m not home most nights until she’s in bed.”

“Maybe that’s why she’s getting so heavy,” Janie says. “She’s been comforting herself with food since you-”

“I know.” He feels a burn across his face. “I just … can’t clear my head right now. It’s just temporary.”

“Maybe if you were busier…?”

He waves a hand, but the gesture loses momentum. “I can’t buy men’s suits again, Janie.”

“I don’t want you to buy men’s suits. I don’t care about the money. I’ll pick up an extra shift at the hospital if I have to, to cover the mortgage.”

“I will always make sure the mortgage is covered. I just need a little time. I’ve been home five fucking weeks.”

Her face reddens, bringing the freckles into relief. “You know what?” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “We don’t do this. We don’t talk to each other this way.”

He stares at her, and she stares back, unflinching. Agitated, Casper trots to Janie’s side and whimpers until she pets him.

“I can’t reach you, Nate. No one gets through to you.”

“You do.”

“Not anymore.”

Her face holds so much sadness he has to look away.

Janie says, “I know you loved Charles-God, we all loved Charles. But you have to let go of what happened.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

Though he never considered it, the truth is right there, waiting, and it comes out in a heated rush: “Because then I’d be abandoning him. Again.”

She receives this, bracing into the weight of it. She nods once. The breeze blows through him.

“When you were gone,” she says, “Cielle would crawl into bed where you used to lie. How do I explain to her that now that you’re home, you’re still not home?”

He cannot lift his eyes from the porch boards.

Janie says, “You are the only man I want to be with. I feel like I dreamed you up playing ‘boyfriend’ when I was nine. I love you too much for us to turn into roommates. Some couples can do that, maybe. But not us. Doing that with you … It would be worse than not being with you.”

He clears his throat. “You and Cielle are all I want. But I can’t … I can’t find my way back here.”

Janie quotes him to himself: “Stop fighting,” she says. “I got you.”

His mouth is dry. “I don’t know how.”

Silence. The porch swing creaks, Janie’s toes touching the wood as though stirring water. She says, “We build our own cells, brick by brick.”

He thinks of his father shuffling around the house after his mom’s funeral, how he’d blank out in front of the microwave sometimes, staring at the number pad, unable to proceed.

He says, “Maybe this is what I have to do right now.”

She swallows hard, then says, “I have not a thing to say I won’t regret later.”

He walks upstairs into their bathroom, shuts the door, and sits on the closed toilet. A while after, her footsteps enter the bedroom, the sheets rustle, and the light clicks off. Through the thin door, he hears her crying softly, and though he wants to hold her more than anything, he cannot rise, cannot turn the doorknob. His courage is gone; he lost it back in the Sandbox in that goddamned helicopter. He lost it when he made his daughter a promise that he’d come home to her. He thinks back to the day Charles dragged him to the beach, Janie’s cries carrying across the water. Nate was The One Who Had Jumped into the Riptide When No One Else Would. He had borne her to shore. And now he is huddled on a toilet, shuddering, scared to open a bathroom door.

He waits until her breathing grows regular, then sneaks out to slip into his side of the bed.

* * *

Later that night screams awaken him. He bolts off the mattress and his boots sink into burning sand and there is smoke in the air and he is yelling for Charles: “Where are you? Where are you?” The screams keep coming in the dark, and he stumbles and smacks his head into the corner of the wall by the door. Blood streams down his forehead, tacky and hot, and then his eyes are stinging and he lurches through the door, knocking it free of the top hinge and Janie is at his side holding his arm and then he sees Abibas staring with unreadable eyes and he shoves and Janie flies back and hits the wall and he is staggering down the hall, Charles’s blood streaming down his face, bellowing, “Where are you? Where the fuck are you?” and the screams have stopped suddenly but Casper is barking and he fills his daughter’s doorway but she is gone. Janie is behind him, yelling, her cheek carrying a plum-colored bruise and her words flood in: “Stop it! You’re scaring her. You’re scaring her!” and he follows her quaking finger to where Cielle has tried to wedge herself beneath her bed to hide. Janie goes to her and holds her.

He wipes his forehead, and his arm comes away dark. Quietly panicking at what he has done, he says, “No, no. I don’t scare her. I don’t. Do I scare you?”

And Cielle looks out from beneath the dark row of her bangs and says, “Yes.”

His insides crumble. He stands, swaying, mouth ajar. His skin on fire, he retreats slowly into their bedroom, Casper at his heels. Nate washes the blood from his face. Uses Band-Aids to close the gash at his hairline. Finds an instant cold pack in the emergency kit beneath the sink. When he steps out, Janie stands watching, pale, silent.

He says, “I am so, so sorry I hurt you.”

“You didn’t know what you were doing. Cielle was crying. She had a nightmare.”

“It is unacceptable what I did.”

“I know you didn’t mean it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I need to get myself…”

“What?”

“To a place where I deserve to live here again.”

Janie looks away. Her eyes well. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

He can’t find any words. His throat clutches. Desperate for something to do, he cracks the ice pack, but she says, “I’m fine.”

He holds it out. He can barely look at the growing spot of black on her beautiful pale cheek. “Please?”

She lifts the ice pack from his hand.

Casper follows him down the hall. Cielle is tucked in again, but wide awake. He sits at the edge of her bed. Casper curls up in the pink nest she has made for him from an old comforter. He keeps a wary eye on Nate, which shatters Nate’s heart anew. When they are out, Casper will not allow strangers to get between him and Cielle, and that is how Nate feels now-like a stranger.

He says, “I’m so sorry I scared you.”

She says, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.” She stares up at him with her rich brown eyes, and he strokes her nose once with his finger.

“Why can’t it be like it used to?” she asks.

He swallows around the lump inside his throat. “It just can’t right now, baby.”

“Why not? Don’t I get a vote? I never get a say in anything.”

“We don’t always get a say in what happens to us,” he says gently. He kisses her on the forehead, breathes in the no-tears-shampoo scent of her.

He strokes her back until she falls asleep, then goes downstairs to try to catch his breath. As he paces the unlit living room, it strikes him that he is denying himself his wife and daughter as a punishment for cherishing them so much that he couldn’t unlock his legs on that helicopter and leave them behind. He pauses before the family portrait. The three of them falling over, laughing, propping one another up. He vows to get back to that place.

What he’s dealing with, it’s just temporary.

And yet five years pass.

Five years that see further dismantling of the life he knew. Nate’s journey through that time is weightless, stunned, much like his flight from the spiraling helicopter. The point of impact comes in a medical office, from a bearded neurologist with kind, wise features-precisely how one wants one’s neurologist to look, particularly when he’s delivering a diagnosis like this. And Nate realizes that up until that moment, when it came to bad news, he’d never had a sufficient yardstick for comparison.

He drives away in a daze, cloaked in a black cloud of dread. He pictures his mother languishing in her hospice bed, dying by millimeters, her features caving in on themselves. How his father, too, was eaten from the inside, hollowed out like a rubber Halloween mask, the eyeholes empty. As a nine-year-old, Nate had vowed that if he was ever lucky enough to have a family of his own, he would never, ever let it erode like that.

And so he tells no one-not Janie, not his daughter. At all costs he will spare them the suffering he learned all too well in his own childhood. Soon enough he will not be able to control the deterioration of his grip, the drying out of his eyes, the strength of the breath in his lungs. But he can pick a time and a date and a ledge high enough to offer a good view and a long drop.

He just has to do it while he still can.

And pray that nothing interrupts. Like, say, six hooded thugs robbing a bank.

Because then he might find himself sitting on an exam table with a neatly stitched stab wound, alive against his own goddamned will.