Don't Leave Me (12 page)

Saturday, after a so-so night in the motel, Chuck got Stan off to work and walked to Wendy Tower’s apartment building to get his car. She was waiting for him outside, leaning on the dented hood, reading a book. Chuck saw the cover when he got to her.
Savage Beauty.

“Serial killer novel?” he asked.

She looked up, smiled. “Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. You know,
I burn my candle at both ends?
”

Chuck said nothing. Stared. Stared at the picture of the poet on the cover of the book. She stared right back at him.

“What’s the matter?”

Chuck wanted to say something but somebody’d stuck a pitchfork in his brain. He put the heel of his palm against his forehead.

“Chuck, what is it?” Wendy said.

Still he could not speak.

“Sit down,” Wendy said, taking his arm and practically shoving him onto the hood of his car. She sat next to him. “You want to come inside?” she said. “You want me to—”

“I’m all right.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“I am. I just . . . thanks for watching the car.”

“Sure, but—”

“I’m fine.”

“Then I’d love to,” Wendy said.

Chuck shook his head like a boxer getting off the canvas. “What?”

“I could use a drive. And so could you.”

“I have to go someplace,” he said.

“That’s the very point of a drive,” she said.

“You don’t want to be seen in this junker.”

“Live dangerously, I always say.”

“I mean, all the way to Beaman. It’ll be––”

“Great. I’ve never been.”

“Wendy––”

“I think you could use the company. Me too.” She stood up from the car and he noticed how nicely her UCLA sweatshirt fit her form. How casual her beauty was. Not savage like the book said. But real in a way he hadn’t appreciated before. Or, to be honest with himself, just hadn’t been able to notice.

“What I’m doing,” he said, “wouldn’t be of interest.”

“Try me,” she said.

Maybe he should. Maybe he needed another set of eyes and ears to help him make sense of things.

More, maybe he needed someone to trust.

“All right,” he said.

He got onto the 101 freeway at Tampa. As he merged into traffic, Wendy said, “How’s your brother holding up?”

“A little restless at night,” Chuck said. “But getting used to fine motel living.”

“And how are
you
doing?”

“Now that’s a complex question.”

“So, how?”

“Maybe you should ask me what the capital of North Dakota is instead.”

“I’m asking about you.”

“Bismark,” Chuck said.

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way . . .”

“All right,” Chuck said. “You don’t know that much about me.”

“I know you’re a good teacher,” she said. “I know you were a chaplain in the military. I know that fits you somehow.”

“Why?”

“Just a feeling. How’d you get into that line?”

Chuck wanted to give her a short answer, a quip, but found himself saying, “I went to seminary because I wanted to know if there were any answers to the crap.”

Wendy said nothing but Chuck felt the nothing as if it was a sharp stick to the side.

“I had a friend, we were in a band in high school. Great athlete, too. He could’ve been the starting quarterback on the team, but he liked music more. So the football guys are getting injured and knee surgeries and all that, but Guy is playing the drums and we’re getting high together and laughing all the time. And then one day he’s eating a burger at Tommy’s over on Topanga when a couple of gangbangers come in, and one of them has a baseball bat. They’re looking for somebody, it was a drug thing gone bad, they thought it was Guy. So they . . .”

Chuck fought back the tears, fought them hard, wasn’t going to let them out in front of Wendy, in front of anybody, the VA doctor could go suck an egg.

Wendy said. “I’m sorry I––”

“No,” Chuck said. “They batted him around and he’s a quadriplegic now. He can’t play guitar anymore. He lives with his mother in North Carolina. Last time I saw him, before he moved, he begged me to help him die.”

He paused, blinked his eyes hard.

“A couple years go by,” Chuck said. “I get a letter from Guy’s mom talking about Guy finding peace, God and all that. I thought, sure. Right. Good for him. My mom used to send me and my brother to Sunday School when we were kids. But that’s about all the God stuff I had. Then I get another letter from Guy’s mom. This time it’s because Guy is dead.”

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Finish this thing, get it over with.

“I was messed up. High all the time. And really, really pissed off at God. But I realized I didn’t know that much about who I was supposed to be pissed off at. So I went to seminary. You know why? Revenge.”

He glanced over and saw Wendy’s confused look.

“That’s right. I wanted to find out enough to know how to be mad at God and let him know it. Then 9/11 happened. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that. Should I be angrier? But I found I wasn’t. I found myself . . . wanting . . . connection. They had this chaplaincy program at the seminary. I went and signed up for it. It was make or break. If I didn’t get some kind of faith through it, I was going to leave. But I got closer, and I graduated, and they made me a chaplain and I went over.”

“Afghanistan, right?”

Chuck nodded. “My first sight of the place, it was like a part of the world where all the color had been sucked out, leaving nothing but browns. God forsaken.”

He paused, gathering the memory, which was one he could still access. “I was in Kabul for a week. I went to visit the children’s hospital. I was told they needed help. I was met by the director of the whole hospital, a doctor named Yousufzai. He wanted me to see. He said, 'Please tell the Americans.’ What I saw were children with broken bones and wounds being held by their parents on plastic chairs, waiting for hours to see someone. And babies lying side by side on warming tables, sometimes all day, crying, as their mothers waited for injections that might or might not help. A place too cold in winter and too hot in summer, with cracked walls and windows. They’ve been promised funds for upgrading the hospital for years, but nothing’s come in. They are understaffed and tired, and can’t do anything. That was my first look at the war’s toll. It was on the children, not the soldiers.”

Silence for a moment. Then Wendy said, “You were . . . your brother said you were . . .”

“I got captured. Worked over. Somebody sliced my neck. I got rescued. Everything about that’s in bits and pieces.”

“I’m sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“This you need to know. I’m a case. A head case. A real head case for the VA until they stopped seeing me.”

“Stopped?”

“I’m pretty rare anyway. Maybe they just don’t know what to do with me. My form of PTSD has a past and a future element. As far as the past, I have what’s called abrasive amnesia. It means there are random places where my memory was sort of wiped out, rubbed down. I can remember some things and not others. Some things I can sort of remember, but it’s fuzzy. And I’ve got foreshortened future. It means I think the future is just this dark thing, no point to it. That’s why a lot of the guys commit suicide.”

There it was. The S word was out. And now a question hung in the air between them.

“I guess I’m just too stubborn to kill myself,” Chuck said.

“I don’t think that’s it,” Wendy said.

Chuck snapped her a look, like,
How could you know anything about it?

“It’s because of your brother,” she said. “You care about your brother.”

She was probably right about that.

Wendy said, “Why did the VA stop seeing you?”

“A problem with the paperwork,” Chuck said. “It happens more times than you care to know, Ms. Taxpayer. My buddy, Royce, has been knocking heads with them, for me and a bunch of other guys. It’s them I’m burned about. I mean, I have my arms and legs. A lot of them don’t.”

They rode in silence for a time.

“One more thing,” Chuck said finally. “You know about my wife, about Julia?”

“Only that she died,” Wendy said.

“I got some news. A little kicker, if you want to call it that.” He paused, feeling his stomach roil as if it was filling with noxious fumes. This was more difficult than he thought, but he pushed himself to say, “I think she was having an affair.”

Wendy said nothing. And he wondered if he should have brought it up at all. What business did he have dumping this on her? But she asked for it, and it needed to be out, all of it, between them, once and for all.

“I think it was with some biker named Thompson,” Chuck said. “That’s about all I know. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“Why?”

“Maybe it was my fault.” He took in deep breath. “Maybe I hid in my PTSD. Maybe I drove her away. Maybe I screwed it all up.”

He looked at her. “And one more thing.”

She waited.

“That book you’re reading. Edna St. Vincent Millay. My wife had one poetry book. She read it a lot. It was a collection. By Millay.”

“Oh,” Wendy said, looking at the floorboard.

“So yeah, it hit me back there.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Not your fault. But now you know. It’s still hard.”

She nodded.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come along.”

“Wish I hadn’t?”

He didn’t know what he wished, or would wish, or would want in the next ten minutes. “No,” he said.