Something Like Normal (13 page)

Chapter 14

Harper says my name as I leave the room, and even though I’m being disrespectful for walking out in the middle of the memorial service, I don’t stop. I can’t stop. Because my eyes are watering and I’m afraid I’m about to lose my shit. I walk fast, my shoes making sharp taps on the sidewalk as I head toward the hotel. My hands clench and unclench at my sides. I suck in large lungfuls of air and release long breaths. I need to get away from downtown St. Augustine, where tourists are still roaming the streetlamp-lit sidewalks, blissfully unaware that Charlie Sweeney is dead.

I take a shortcut down a side alley that leads to the back entrance of the hotel. Heading for the pool, I work open the clasp on the collar of my uniform. The pool deck is empty in the fading light and all the lounge chairs are lined up in a straight row with fresh towels folded on the ends. I drop the heavy jacket on one chair and my trousers on another as I strip down to my boxers. Leaving my socks balled up at the edge of the pool, I dive in.

As I churn through the water, my breath and brain work in tandem and I don’t have to think. I only count my strokes—
one, two, one, two, one, two
—until the muscles in my shoulders burn and the sadness, the rage, I feel is under control. I have no idea how long I’ve been in the water or how many lengths I’ve swum when I stop. The sky has faded from dusk to dark—so I know it’s been a long time—and Harper is standing at the edge of the pool, holding a towel.

My arms shaking from the exertion, I haul myself out of the water and stand there on the pool deck, dripping water everywhere. As she wraps the towel around my shoulders, her eyes meet mine. “You okay?”

If I were naked, I’d feel less exposed than I do right now. But I tell her the truth. “No.”

Harper doesn’t say anything as I dry off and wrap the towel around my waist. She just waits until I’m done, then takes my hand like I’m a little kid. I hope she’s leading me somewhere good, because I’ve had about as much as I can take. My insides feel hollowed out and empty. I’m tired. Of everything.

We’re at the entrance to the hotel when I remember my uniform. “I forgot my…” I stop and look back, but the lounge chairs are empty. Shit.

“I took care of it.”

“Oh.” She’s only being nice to me because I’m a fucking mess. “Thanks.”

We don’t talk in the elevator up to our rooms. I just stare at the floor until the bell rings and the doors slide open. Harper never lets go of my hand, but it doesn’t feel like other times when I’ve held her hand. Right now it’s a lifeline.

“Did, um—was Charlie’s mom upset that I left?” I ask as she slides the keycard into the lock on my door.

“She understands, Travis,” Harper says. “I understand.”

Even after all that time in the pool, my eyes start watering again. I grind the heels of my hands against them, but this time I can’t keep the tears at bay and I hate myself for breaking down.

She closes the door behind us and puts her arms around me. I bury my face against her neck and everything inside of me comes out in ugly, choking sobs that I’ve never heard before. No matter how rough my dad was on me, or how hard things got in boot camp, or how scared I was in Afghanistan, I never cried. Ever. And I know I should be embarrassed, but this is Harper, who doesn’t try to tell me everything is going to be okay. She stands there and keeps me from drowning.

Until it’s over and I’m quiet.

If it’s possible to feel beyond empty, I feel it. I’m a Travis Stephenson–shaped space that needs to be filled in.

“Are you hungry?” It’s a strange moment for Harper to ask that question, but I guess it makes sense. There was a dinner at the memorial service and I missed it. Also, I can’t hang on to her forever. Even though I kind of like the idea of that.

“Not really.”

She pulls back a little and looks at me. “Why don’t you put on some dry clothes? I’ll go change and—I don’t know. We can watch a movie or talk or whatever.”

On any other given day, I’d pin my own assumptions to the word “whatever” and let it get me hot and bothered. At the moment, though, her definition of “whatever” is good enough for me. “Yeah, sure.”

While she’s gone I pull on a pair of clean shorts, then flop down on the bed and start flipping through the TV channels. My eyelids feel heavy. They slide down like window shades, fly back open once, then close.

I’m walking down a road in Afghanistan with my fire team. Charlie is out in front, and Moss and Peralta are somewhere behind me. The street is deserted. Even the dogs have scattered. Something is about to go down. The hair on the back of my neck rises and dread slides down my spine.

A bullet smacks into the wall beside me. I’m saved by only five inches of air. I duck into a doorway as another shot cracks through the air and I see Charlie fall on the road.

“Charlie’s hit!” I don’t know if I’m yelling or if it’s someone behind me, but I hear it in my head, so maybe it’s me.

Crouching, I run toward my friend, the bullets buzzing past me. Pause. Fire. Run again. Although Charlie isn’t more than ten or fifteen meters away, the distance takes forever.

“Charlie. Buddy. Hang on.”

I yell for a corpsman and try to stop the bleeding, but it’s not stopping. Blood covers my dirt-caked fingers as I try to find the vein and the ground around Charlie’s head turns to dark mud.

“Solo.” His fingers clutch uselessly at my sleeve.

Another round of AK fire peppers the ground around me, puffing up dust. A bullet grazes my upper arm and it feels like I’ve been smacked with a baseball bat. Moss moves out in front of us, laying down suppressive fire with the automatic weapon.

“Hang on, Charlie,” I repeat. “You’re going to make it. You can do this.”

Except he doesn’t make it.

His eyes are blank as they stare up into the Afghan sky and his chest has stopped moving. A bullet zings past and I don’t even have time to think about what just happened. I drop to my belly in the bloody dirt, my shoulder burning like fire. My eye to my rifle sight, I see him—the Talib in the black turban with an AK pointed at me.

I line him up. And then I kill him.

I sit up, awake, with my heart whizzing around in my chest like a bottle rocket, and Harper standing at the foot of my bed. I lift my hands to check for blood, but I know it was a dream. The trouble with this dream, though, is that it’s true.

“It was our fault,” I say. “Charlie’s and mine.”

She sits cross-legged on the bed, facing me. Her dress is gone, replaced by her faded red shorts and a Clash T-shirt. Her feet are bare and for the first time I notice that her toenails are painted red.

“We were operating out of an old yellow schoolhouse, and nearly every time we went outside the wire, we were ambushed,” I say. “Even when you’re expecting an ambush, you never know when or where it’s going to go down. So most times we’d be walking along some dirt track somewhere, they’d start shooting at us, and we’d end up waist-deep in a muddy canal for the next five or ten minutes, shooting back. They’d run away, we’d chase them, they’d blend into the population, and we’d be left pissed off and wet, with no prospect of a hot shower when we got back.”

Harper watches my face and I know she’s wondering if I’ll lose it again. I won’t.

“The day Charlie was killed, though, it was different,” I continue. “Charlie and me… we saw this little kid with a cell phone. A lot of times local guys would use their phones to tell the Taliban our position. So we saw this kid, but we didn’t say anything because he was just a little boy, you know?”

Harper nods, but I don’t know if she can understand. He was one of the kids in the crowd when we handed out soccer balls and beanbag dolls just a day earlier. He’d bounce up and down with excitement every time we gave stuff away, like it was the first time anyone had ever given him anything. He once tried to grab a whole handful of pens from me. How could
that
kid be suspicious? Except we should have been suspicious when we saw him with a cell phone. We should have reported him to Peralta.

“A few minutes later, we were ambushed,” I say. “Charlie was shot and while I was trying to stop the bleeding, I got hit.”

Her eyes widen and move to the fading red scar on my upper arm. Moss bandaged it up before we carried Charlie’s body back to the base. The wound wasn’t bad enough to send me home or anything, and I went back out on patrol again the next day.

My throat goes dry.

“I couldn’t save him,” I say. “I failed him twice. And I never told anyone.”

The official report says I risked my own life in an attempt to save that of a fellow Marine, sustaining a bullet wound and killing an enemy combatant in the process. It sounds a lot more heroic on paper than it was, though. Especially because when it happened I remember rage, not bravery.

“The thing is…” I stop and run my hand across the top of my head, trying to find the right words. “Charlie’s dead and I’m still alive, and I don’t think I deserve to be.”

“Do you think he’d agree?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “He’d probably tell me to stop being an idiot.”

Harper’s smile is so gentle and sweet. “Sounds like good advice to me,” she says.

I laugh a little. “Knowing it and doing it are two different things. I don’t—I don’t know if I can.”

She crawls up to sit beside me, takes the remote, and presses the button for one of the premium movie channels. “Maybe you should talk to someone,” she says. “Someone who can help you, I mean. A professional.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

The movie is one of those ’80s Brat Pack types about a poor girl in love with a rich boy who doesn’t know she’s alive. Not my type of film, but Harper wriggles her way under my arm and rests her head against my shoulder, and suddenly I couldn’t care less what’s playing on the television screen.

“Hey, Harper,” I say. “About what happened with Paige—”

“Let’s not,” she says, her eyes fixed on the TV screen. “Just consider it strike two.”

“That’s pretty forgiving of you.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t really want to kick you when you’re down, but mostly for some crazy reason”—her face tilts up and she gives me this shy little grin—“I think you might be worth it.”

I nod. “I totally am.”

She laughs and elbows me in the ribs. “So.” She settles back to watch the movie. “Do you want to do anything special tomorrow?”

I want to suggest something cheesy and touristy—like the Fountain of Youth or the wax museum—and the words are right there in my mouth, waiting to be spoken. But exhaustion crashes over me before I can let them out. I wake just before sunrise to find myself spooned up behind Harper, her ponytail tickling my nose. Something I’m not ready to name works itself under the grip of Charlie’s death and loosens it, and keeps the nightmares at bay when I fall back asleep.

Chapter 15

Harper wakes up and for a moment, before she opens her eyes, I feel—strange. As if last night was a one-night stand and I should bail before we have to speak to each other. Except that makes no sense because we didn’t have sex and I fell asleep with my face against the top of her head. I might have even drooled in her hair.

It’s just—I’m embarrassed. She’s seen a side of me I don’t really know. And I guess that could be considered a good thing—because I trust her with it—but it doesn’t stop the flash of panic that she’s seen too much.

Then her eyes open and she blinks, her face scrunched up with sleepiness, and the weirdness dissolves. After that, she smiles and my brain dissolves.

“Hey.” Her voice cracks with the first word of the day.

“Hey back,” I say, my voice low beside her ear. She shivers. I love that.

“Have you been awake long?” Harper asks.

“An hour, maybe.” My fingers find bare skin where the bottom of her T-shirt has inched up and slide my hand underneath. Her skin is warm from sleep. The tiny catch in her breath makes me grin.

She shifts to kiss me. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Just didn’t.” My thumb grazes the underside of her breast—and my cell phone rings. “Shit,” I say against her mouth.

Harper laughs. “You should get that.”

“Probably,” I agree, kissing her as the ringing continues. “But I don’t want to.”

My mouth still on hers I reach for the phone on the bedside table. She pushes me away so I can answer. “This better be good,” I say.

“Well, good morning to you, too.” Charlie’s mom pretends to be offended, but I can hear the laughter in her voice. “I didn’t wake you, did I? I wanted to catch you before you had breakfast so you and Harper could join us at the house.”

I look at Harper in my bed, her hair all crazy from sleep, and I do not want to have breakfast with Charlie’s mom, but it would be impolite to refuse. “Yes, ma’am, we’ll be right over.”

As I scribble down the address, Harper doesn’t wait for me to tell her where we’re going. She scrambles out of bed and heads for her own room, leaving me with the prospect of yet another cold shower.

“That’s the place, right there.” Harper points from her side of the Jeep at a squatty purple house with yellow trim and flower boxes full of red flowers. It should be an antiques shop, or where someone’s grandma lives, but a painted sign hanging from the front porch roof and bordered with white Christmas lights says it’s the home of Sweet Misery Tattoos. I park along the curb in front of the shop.

Bells jingle on the front door handle as I open it for Harper and we’re in a living room that’s been converted into a waiting room with an old leather couch, a cash register counter filled with body jewelry, and a coffee table full of tattoo magazines. A wooden curtain with an image of the Buddha on it hides the studios and a rope across a set of stairs bears a sign that says
Family, Friends, & US Marines Only
.

“Travis, is that you?” Charlie’s mom’s voice drifts down from upstairs, along with the scent of breakfast sausage. “Come on up.”

The upper floor is a converted apartment with a small kitchen area, where Jenny is crumbling the sausage over a row of flour tortillas, and a living room loaded with religious paraphernalia. Mexican Guadalupe candles, Buddhas, the Hindu goddess chick with all the arms. There’s a velvet Jesus painting hung above the couch. I wonder how she has the time for all those deities—and which one of them claimed Charlie. I imagine him hanging with a big-bellied, laughing Buddha—like the little version he carried in his pocket for luck. It had a worn spot on the side from being rubbed.

Today his mom is channeling her inner pirate with a red-and-white-striped shirt and her dreads tied up in a skeleton-print bandanna. She smothers Harper and me with patchouli-scented hugs that make me sneeze. She’s smiling, but I recognize the sadness around the corners of her eyes. “How are you today, Travis?”

“I’m good,” I say. “I, um—wanted to apologize for walking out of the service last night. It was rude and I’m sorry.”

She takes my face in her hands. “You have nothing to apologize for, my darling. Your path is your own and you had to follow it.”

I reach into the pocket of my shorts and pull out Charlie’s death letter. When we found out we were assigned to a unit being deployed to a war zone, it was suggested we write last letters home—just in case. We made a deal that if one of us was killed, the other would deliver the letter in person. I don’t know what Charlie’s letter says. I’ve been tempted to read it, but I never did. “I also need to give you this.” I hand Ellen the letter. “I didn’t read it.”

She tucks it in her pocket without reading. “Are you hungry?”

I haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, so yes, I’m seriously hungry. Concave hungry. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Then sit,” she says. “I’ll make coffee.”

Harper and I sit at the scarred wooden table while Ellen brews coffee. She babbles about how she only buys a certain brand of fair trade beans from Ecuador and armchair quarterbacks the way Jenny assembles the breakfast burritos, all the while some crazy Sufi pan flute music—which Ellen claims is supposed to be soothing—warbles in the background. They’re laughing and joking, and although Charlie is gone, they’re happy in a way my family can never seem to manage. We’ve never had a meal like this, unless you count the time Mom and I ate Harper’s shrimp recipe at the kitchen island with Aretha Franklin singing about a chain of fools. I can see why Charlie was so close to his mom.

“Hey, um—I’ll be right back,” I tell Harper, my chair scraping on the wood floor as I push away from the table.

I go back down the stairs to the empty tattoo shop and dial my mom’s number on my cell phone.

“Travis.” My name comes out like she’s been holding her breath. “How are you?”

For so long I’ve lied to her, either to keep from having to talk to her or to keep from having to tell her the truth. “I guess I’m doing okay,” I say. “This thing with Charlie has been pretty tough and, I don’t know—I think I need to talk to someone. I need help.”

“Would you like me to set up an appointment for you?”

“Yes. Please.”

“I can set you up with my therapist,” she says.

I don’t know what to say to this. My mom is seeing a therapist? I run my hand over my head. “Hey, um, Mom, I’ve gotta go because we’re having breakfast with Charlie’s mom, but I wanted to tell you—” I don’t remember the last time I said the words. “I, um—”

The line is silent for a moment as my mom waits for the words, but then she finishes it for me. “I love you, too, Travis.”

When I get back upstairs, breakfast is on the table and Harper is telling Jenny and Ellen about her plans for college. “I’m starting second semester, so I can save up a little more money,” Harper says. “I qualify for financial aid, but I want to have some extra cash and maybe buy a car.”

I always thought that her dad probably did okay as the host of a morning radio show—they’re local celebrities—so I’m surprised that she needs financial aid.

“My dad and his on-air partner, Joe, offered to take a syndication deal so I’d have the money for tuition,” Harper says, reading my mind. “And, God, you have no idea how badly I wanted to say yes, but I’d hate myself if they did it just so I don’t have to pay back college loans, you know? My dad put himself through college, so I guess I can do it, too.”

Charlie’s mom claps. “I applaud your industry, Harper, and for taking responsibility for your future.”

Harper blushes. “I, um—thanks.”

After breakfast, Jenny asks Harper to help her with the dishes, while Ellen asks me to go to the shop with her. “I want to show you something,” she says as I follow her down the stairs and through the bamboo Buddha curtain. She strips off her shirt, revealing a plain gray sports bra, and turns around so her back is to me. On her upper back, near her shoulder, is a Celtic cross with Charlie’s name woven into the knot design. Inked beneath are his birth and death dates.

Not knowing what else to say, I tell her it’s cool. I mean, it is cool—for a tattoo.

“I designed it myself.” She tugs her shirt back on. “I still have the stencil if you’d like one.”

Most of the Marines I know have tattoos. Ski has a massive back piece of a Marine field cross and the names of his friends who died in Iraq. Kevlar went out right after boot camp to get the
Death Before Dishonor
tattoo. Even Moss has a meat tag. It’s the inked equivalent of a dog tag so in case a Marine gets his legs blown off by a roadside bomb—because we keep one dog tag in our boot—his body can still be identified. I’ve never wanted a tattoo, but Ellen’s face wears a hopefulness that makes it impossible to refuse. “Yeah, sure.”

“Take off your shirt and sit.”

I do as she says and watch while she prepares, filling tiny plastic cups with ink and putting new needles in her tattoo machine. “Music?” she asks.

“Anything but that Sufi crap.”

She smiles and presses a remote control. The Clash spills through the speakers. Nice.

“Charlie used to say that, too. He’d say, ‘Mom, why can’t you listen to normal embarrassing music like Celine Dion or Journey or something?’” She drops her voice and she almost sounds like him. It makes me laugh. She rolls her stool up behind me. “I don’t know if this will hurt, but I suspect your pain threshold is high enough that it won’t.”

“Okay.”

The tattoo machine begins to buzz and when she touches it against my skin, the sensation is like someone pulling my arm hairs over and over. It’s not pleasant, but there are many things more painful than this.

“While we’re on the subject of my son,” Ellen says. “You apologized at the memorial service for not being able to save Charlie, but please, don’t do that ever again. Not to me, or anyone. My son died out of his time, but that doesn’t mean you have to carry a lifetime of guilt.” She pats my shoulder with a latex-gloved hand. “Release it. Let it go.”

I can’t say the guilt just goes away, but I do feel as if I’ve been given permission to stop playing the endless
what if
… game in my head.

“And while I have you trapped here under the needle—” Charlie’s mom doesn’t wait for me to say thank you. “The other thing you need to know is how much your mother loves you. Almost every time we spoke on the phone, she was on her way to the one store in town that sells the most comfortable socks or the warmest undershirts or your favorite candy.”

The tattoo machine goes silent as she loads the needles with more ink.

“I can’t tell you that losing my son didn’t unravel me,” she says. “But the last thing he told me before he was killed was that he loved me. It brings me comfort to remember that. Travis, there is no one in this world your mother loves more than you. Not your dad. Not your brother. You. If anything were to happen, she would be—”

“I know.”

“Be gentle with her.” Again, she pats my shoulder. “And thus endeth the lecture.”

She works in silence for a while, until Harper and Jenny come downstairs. Harper stands behind me for a moment or two, watching, then sits on a second stool, pulling it up in front of me until her knees are touching mine. “I like it.”

“Good.”

“Harper, I’d be delighted if you’d let me give you a tattoo,” Charlie’s mom says. “Whatever you want.”

“I appreciate the offer,” she says. “But one is enough for me.”

Wait. What? Harper has a tattoo?

“You have a tattoo?” I ask.

“Yep.”

I’ve seen her in a pair of shorts and a bikini top, so there aren’t many places she could have hidden ink—which kind of turns me on. As much, you know, as I can be when I’m being repeatedly jabbed with needles. “Why haven’t I seen it?”

Harper laughs. “Because I haven’t shown it to you yet.”

“Can I see it later?”

“I’m not going to talk about this right now.” Her face goes pink, so her tattoo must be in a really good spot. “Forget about it.”

Behind me, Charlie’s mom chuckles as she draws the ink lines on my back. Just forget about it? Not when my imagination is taking me to many interesting body parts. “Is it a turtle?” I ask.

“Good guess,” Harper says. “But no.”

“Chinese symbol?”

She scrunches her nose. “Ew.”

“Does it have something to do with Charley Harper?”

“Possibly,” she says, but she fights a smile that tells me it does.

“Nice choice,” Ellen tells her over my shoulder. “I love tattoos that have some originality behind them. Don’t get me wrong, my bread and butter comes from tramp stamps and tribal bands, but there is nothing better than doing a custom piece or a design that took some reflection.”

“What is it?” I ask Harper. I googled Charley Harper once. His style was a little cartoonish and he specialized in nature. Especially birds.

“You’ll find out when you find out.”

When Ellen finishes, she swabs the blood and ink off my skin, then hands me a mirror so I can see the reflection. As far as tattoos go, it’s a good one. “Thank you,” I say. “For everything.”

She tapes a bandage over it and after I pull my shirt back on, she gives me a hug. “Thank
you
for offering up your skin just to humor me,” she says. “You might find a tattoo a much easier way than guilt to carry Charlie with you.”