Learning to Stay (35 page)

Back to Brad.

Brad is punching his fist rhythmically against the dashboard. Punch—punch—punch—punch. The dash doesn’t seem to be giving any, but something has to be, and I assume that something is Brad’s bones and flesh and ligaments.

“Brad!”

Punch—punch—punch—punch.

“Brad!”

Punch—punch—punch—punch.

I’m afraid he’s going to pulverize his hand. But before I can decide how to stop him, Jones wiggles out of her collar and leaps into the truck. I watch, amazed, as she grabs his sleeve in her mouth and bites down, not hard but as if to say, “That’s enough, now.” A low, guttural growl comes from her, but it’s clear to me that she’s concerned and not menacing. She tugs backward on his arm until finally he stops hitting the dashboard, until his shoulders slump and start to tremble. Jones lets go of his arm and begins lapping at the tears running down Brad’s cheeks. He wraps his arms around her and buries his head in her. I put the keys in the ignition and close the driver’s-side door, and I walk the rest of the way up Mert’s driveway, feeling once again as if I’m the one at war. I’m shell-shocked from trying and failing to avoid all the land mines Brad brought back with him. I want out. I want to de-enlist.

Stars flicker in the Upper Peninsula’s night sky like a bedazzled piece of cloth, and though patches of hard-packed snow and ice stubbornly
refuse to melt, there’s a note of warmth in the air tonight—a prelude to summer.

I have moved the last of Brad’s things from my car onto Mert’s porch and am wondering if I should throw a tarp over them for the night, when I see Brad walking toward me across the back lawn.

My arms and back ache from hauling boxes, and my mind aches from the events of the day. It’s late and I’m exhausted. So when Brad holds a bottle of beer out to me, I accept. It’s our old ritual, only playing out on Mert’s porch this time. That, and we’re not catching up on our day over a nightcap. I doubt there’s much left to say at this point. Even the will to know about the woman from the coffee shop has left me like a spirit. It mattered so much this afternoon. Now, I’m too tired to care.

I sink to the steps, and though I know I’ll be sore tomorrow, it feels painfully good to sit down.

“I stacked all of your things over there,” I say, nodding to the tower of boxes at the corner of the porch. “Should be everything.”

Brad nods. He worries the label on the bottle he’s holding, tearing off slivers of wrapper that glow metallic in the moonlight.

“There were these kids over there,” he says. His voice is quiet, and if I close my eyes, which I do, it sounds young and husky, like we’re teenagers on a date. Like he’s winding up to kiss me. “They were all mop-headed and dirty, but they were funny kids. Always laughing. Always hanging around the FOB. We’d give them stuff—pencils, soccer balls. They’d want their pictures taken with us. They loved to pose for pictures, those kids. And there was this one; he was hilarious. Probably nine or ten years old. He liked to work on his English with us. He had picked up all this slang from listening to the Americans. Things were always ‘totally’ something—‘totally rad’ or ‘totally fucked’—and he was always ‘jonesing’ for something. He’d come up and say things like, ‘Dude, I have had a totally fucked day and I’m
jonesing for a Coke. Do you have one, please?’ And it was just hilarious—this slang coming from the mouth of a little Iraqi kid with a heavy accent.”

I’m not sure where Brad is going with this, but he’s talking. He’s talking about over there and he’s not yelling, so I don’t interrupt.

“I started calling him Jones. He came around a lot. A quiet kid, not as pushy as some of them. I liked him—we’d talk. I asked him one day why they’re not scared of us—the kids. And he said it was because we were nice to them.” Brad chuckles, but it’s clear the chuckle comes from a place more regretful than happy.

“I don’t think I ever told you this, but I drove the lead truck on patrol a lot of times,” he goes on, stopping briefly to take a sip of his beer, which he hasn’t touched save for the wrapper since we sat down. “We had orders. We knew what we were supposed to do, but I thought it was an urban war myth or some shit—like it happened to a friend of a guy’s sister’s brother-in-law’s high school buddy.” Brad pauses, takes another sip of beer, and shakes his head. “I had guys to think about, you know? Kastor’s wife had a little girl the week before that he’d never seen. Patterson’s mom had a stroke. There were wives and parents and kids. There were orders.” Brad’s voice breaks, cracks like thin, brittle paper. “Those motherfucking Hajis started sending kids out in front of patrols, so they could light the whole fucking convoy up when it stopped for them. More bang for their buck, right?”

Brad laughs at his pun, but I can’t breathe. I’m holding my breath. I’m holding my breath because I know what’s coming and I can’t stop myself from hearing it. And I know that for the rest of my life I won’t be able to stop picturing it.

Now, I don’t want to know why he’s like this. Why he’s angry and jumpy and not himself. Because what am I supposed to do then? It doesn’t change a thing between us. It will only complicate the situation. But I can’t stop him. I’m frozen, dreading what he’s about to say.

“Brad,” I say, my voice hardly audible, “it’s okay. You don’t have to—”

“I saw him, fucking Jones.” Brad is biting his lip. His eyes are closed, but I know that behind those lids, the scene is playing out in vivid detail. “He and this other kid are in the middle of the road, waving their arms. And the CO, in the driver’s seat, says, ‘Here we go,’ and I knew right then that this shit was real. I saw the whites of their eyes. I saw their faces when they realized we weren’t going to stop. I felt the fucking wheel jerk.”

I shudder. My stomach lurches. I feel like I might be sick. But I have to ask: “Why?” I whisper. “So why Jones? Why her name?”

Brad’s eyes are squeezed shut. He looks like he’s in physical pain. “Because her—her I could save,” he finally whispers.

Brad is crying now—crying and shaking his head back and forth, as if he doesn’t want to believe what he’s saying. As if he can’t comprehend it. He drops his head into his hands. His fingers claw at his hair. “The fucking wheel jerked right out of my hands,” he says. “Oh God, they were just kids, E. What were they doing there, those stupid fucking kids?”

Brad looks up at me, his eyes wild, pleading. He’s motionless, but his face writhes.

He is waiting for me to judge him. He is waiting for me to recoil from what he’s done—to recoil from him.

I pull him to me and hold him as his whole body shakes. My own breath is thick and jagged in my chest. I rock him, saying, “Shhhh. Shhhhh,” in his ear. How many times have I done this in the past months? Too many. And this is just one memory—just one day out of the hundreds that he spent there. How many others does he have stored away, tucked into the hard, dark places inside him, guarded with faulty locks?

His hands claw at my shoulders. I drop my nose into his hair. It
smells fresh and woodsy, like a copse of ferns after a hard spring rain. Oh, this man I love—this beautiful, broken man. He is my home, my other half.
“Was,”
a voice inside my head says. I shake my head. No, my Brad is in there somewhere, held captive by demon memories of the awful things that he’s seen and done. Can I really leave him like this? Can I really leave him at all?

Brad gives in to my arms. His body is limp as he says, “Oh God,” over and over again like the saddest prayer you’ve ever heard.

I rock him until the night air loses its warmth and clouds crawl across the stars. Until his body stops shaking and mine starts to. Until he whispers, “Don’t go.”

And though I’m not sure if he’s asking for right now or for good, I say, “I won’t.”

The light inside the little apartment is gray when I wake. Jones raises her head and eyes me with half-raised lids. She slept in a Superman pose between Brad and me last night, staking a claim on her part of the bed, possibly on Brad. This same scene—a husband and wife asleep in bed together, dog between them—has likely played out in hundreds of thousands of homes across the country last night. The normalcy of it overwhelms me.

Brad’s arm is draped over me and his breath is warm and rhythmic in my ear. His face is serene. He looks younger and more handsome than I’ve taken time to notice—the dark waves of hair that roil every which way, his cut jaw, the model-high cheekbones, and those full, full lips of his. I drink him in with those two words, “Don’t go,” echoing in my ears, and desire ignites in me like a pilot light. The muscles of Brad’s arm are lean and defined, and his skin looks faintly sun-kissed. The need to reach out and touch him, to feel that skin under my fingertips and my palms, to run them over his face and down his chest and down, down, down over the rest of him, swells until it almost overtakes me. But he is still Brad, and for fear of startling him awake, I know that I can’t touch him. The
swell hardens into a dull ache.
There will be time for that. We have time
.

I slip out of bed and walk to the sink for a glass of water. Like Mert’s, Brad’s kitchen sink is under a window that looks out toward the tree line, and behind it, miles and miles of forest. The sun is just starting to creep up over the treetops and even inside, I can smell the air outside, heavy with moss and pine and all things fresh and new after a long winter. It’s a smell unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived, the reward—the payoff—in these parts for enduring seven months of cold and more snow than almost any other place in the lower forty-eight states. I had forgotten this smell after so many years in southern Wisconsin, and looking out over the lush landscape outside the window and inhaling a whiff of that freshness, I think to myself how nice it is, this place.

Brad stirs behind me and I’m jolted back into the present, where it feels as though Brad and I are balancing on the thin lip of an overhang. One of us could fall, or the other. Or we could both take a step back from the edge before it’s too late.

It’s too late for the old us. I know that. The Brad and Elise of those first weeks, those first years—I don’t even recognize them. They’re like people you knew in high school and can’t quite picture anymore. The us that we knew is gone, but could there be a Brad and Elise of the future, too? Two days ago I would have said no. Now, I’m not so sure. And after seeing the effect Jones has on Brad, and the way he opened up to me last night, which felt like some sort of exorcism—an indication that things could someday get better—there’s a little voice inside me, which I’m trying hard to ignore, chanting, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“You’re still here.”

I turn to find Brad sitting up in bed, scratching Jones behind the ears. Jones flips over like a fish, offering Brad her belly and wiggling back and forth. He smiles at her, but when he looks back up at me,
that smile fades. His question isn’t coy or flirtatious. It’s as though he really is surprised to see me still standing in his apartment.

“Shouldn’t I be?” I ask. As soon as the words leave my mouth I regret letting them free.

“That’s your call,” he says. His voice is flat. The guard that he let down last night is back up.

I nod, slowly, if only to acknowledge that he said something. My heart constricts in my chest.

“Maybe this is a conversation best saved for after coffee,” Brad says. He nudges Jones, who springs to her feet. He pushes the covers back and stands up, pulling on pajama pants that hang low on his hips, abdominal muscles undulating above them. He looks divine, and that hard ache inside me pulses. But when he turns around to fish a sweatshirt from his dresser, I see the jagged pink scars across his back, some as big as candy bars and one as long as a ruler, and the ache tilts toward nausea. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the sight of them. I wonder if I’ll have to.

“You could still stand to light that thing at night,” I say, nodding at the woodstove.

“I’m going to right now,” Brad says. A hint of a smile plays at the corner of his mouth, but something has shifted. I feel as though we’ve woken up next to each other after a first date—as if we’ve just met.

Brad feeds a couple of logs into the stove and lights it. Then he places a teakettle on top. While he works—grinding coffee beans, scooping rounded spoonfuls into a French press, and readying two mugs, I dress in the same jeans and shirt I had on yesterday, since all my clothes are still in Brad’s other room, in Mert’s house. I sit down on the bed. I wrap my lower legs and feet in a blanket that I have to nudge from under Jones, who’s still stretched flat out on the bed. I lean back against the headboard and let my eyes fall closed.

When the kettle whistles, Brad pours water over the grounds,
waits a few minutes, and presses the plunger on the coffeepot. He brings me a mug, and the coffee inside is black with a glossy sheen of oil on top. It smells strong and smooth all at once. I wrap my hands around it, trying to channel some of its warmth. Brad sits down opposite me, his back against the footboard. Jones settles in next to him, laying her head on his lap.

“So,” he says, stroking Jones’s ears, “what’s your plan?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”