Losing Her (6 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t really want to be reliant on public transportation, but at the same time I don’t think we’re really going to stay up here, and it’s not like we’re not used to finding our way around. Compared to the last six months this is luxury,” I said, falling to the couch we picked up on clearance. It was hideous and too short for either of us to lie on comfortably, but it was cheap, and they delivered it.

“I know. Is it strange that sometimes at night I have a hard time going to sleep because it’s too quiet now?”

I understood him all too well. On the ship there was always some sort of noise, whether an advisory, an announcement, a creak, a person yelling, someone walking above you, there was always something.

Jameson opted to get another job. After being on the ship where the breaks were far and few between, he got restless. He landed a job with a local construction company, and it wasn’t long before I headed out to work with him.

I tested out of three classes and filled my class load in an attempt to make up for the two missed semesters. With having a direction again, everything felt more comfortable. I knew what I wanted and how to get there, and my determination and focus set in.

Jameson turned out to be a math genius, something I never knew. The guy got numbers the way I could deflect a punch. He brushed it off, explaining that all his life he had to deal with numbers from going over projections of what their farm would produce in crops, to income, to planting, watering, and wages; it was all about numbers.

Six months later, Jameson arrived home with a flyer and an anxious glint in his eye. I didn’t bother asking him what kind of grand scheme he was masterminding, I didn’t have any interest in being a part of it. I was buried in trying to memorize Latin for a Biology final after covering a shift I should have declined on the new construction site we were working.

He stood in front of the small, rickety table I was seated at. We’d found it on the side of the road and took it home only to realize two of the legs were busted. After re-attaching them with copious amounts of super glue and nails, we set it up. Then we learned that either the table legs were different lengths on each side, or the apartment slanted. I think it was both.

We’d used an empty cereal box and folded the cardboard up several times to get it thick enough to slide under two of the legs to keep it from rocking each time you sat down.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what’s going on?”

I looked up from my study guide, and shook my head.

“I found a new place for us to live!” he cried, ignoring my attempt to ignore him.

“We have a place to live.”

Jameson rolled his eyes, and slammed a neon green flyer to the table. He jabbed his finger to it multiple times, obscuring the words. “It’s within walking distance to campus.”

I stopped. I had been so sick and tired of public transportation that the idea of being able to walk to school had me ready to move in with a basement full of meth heads.

“I called and the dude says he wants to meet us. We’re supposed to be there in an hour.”

I raked a hand over my head, knowing I should object because I needed to study for my damn final, but I was too tempted to get two hours of my life back on the days I went to school.

“Let’s go!” Jameson called, slapping the table several times with his palms.

We headed out to the bus stop with Jameson grumbling about wasting four hours of his day for what would have only been one if he had his own car. I don’t know why we lived so damn cheap, but neither of us seemed to want for much after having nearly no space of our own while on the boat. Even our old apartment felt pretty nice.

We arrived in town and walked four blocks in the wrong direction before I ripped the flyer out of Jameson’s hands and turned us back around. Jameson was great with numbers, but he was shit with directions, something I had committed to learning soon after moving to California.

The house was small but clean and well tended to on the outside. Jameson practically ran as we headed to the front door and knocked.

When the door swung open, a guy with curly brown hair looked at us before holding out his hand. “Landon Turner. Is one of you Jameson?”

Jameson accepted his hand and streamed through the introductions. Originally, I’d thought, who gives that information when you open the door? What if we hadn’t been Jameson?

“So are you both going to school here?” Landon asked, taking a seat on a folding chair in the living room. His furniture was sparser than ours.

“Yeah, we just wrapped up crabbing season,” I answered, glancing at his arm as he pulled his shirt sleeve up, revealing a heavily tattooed forearm.

He nodded a couple of times and then looked between us. “I heard that’s tough work.”

“If you don’t like sleeping and enjoy smelling like a rotting corpse, it’s a dream job,” Jameson said.

Landon’s eyes had been focused on me, but they flickered to Jameson and rose ever so slightly, like he wanted to smile but didn’t want to reveal anything, which had me instantly wondering what in the hell he was hiding.

“Do you go to school?” I asked, feeling out where to start my line of questions that would uncover his secret.

Landon’s eyes settled back on me, and then he lifted his chin in a silent yes.

“How come you’re looking for roommates? Are you from here?” I continued.

“I just got released from the armpits of hell. I’ve been in Afghanistan for the last three years. Before that, I grew up in Florida.”

“Decided you wanted to cool down?” Jameson asked, his tone light with the joke.

“You should feel how cold it gets in Afghanistan during the nights.”

“If it’s anything like being out on the ocean, I think I’ll keep my ass here.” Jameson’s voice was still friendly, but I could tell by his expression he was concerned he’d said something inappropriate.

Again, Landon’s eyes looked like they were smiling, though he wasn’t at all. I could feel Jameson watching me, obviously a little uncertain of the guy as well. I kept my attention trained on Landon, though, waiting to catch the details he was hiding.

He nodded a couple of times. “There’s no drugs in the house. I also don’t tolerate big parties. If you want to have a chick over that’s fine, but I don’t want their shit in the bathroom.”

His eyes roamed to Jameson for an instant then back to me as he finished. I could see something behind his eyes that haunted him, and it gave me the chills. I had no idea what it was, and I didn’t want to. I couldn’t decide if he was trying to manipulate us in some weird way, or maybe he had some desire to play a screwed-up mind fuckery game with us. Either way, I had no intention of staying.

“Sweet. When can we move in?” Jameson asked.

Landon didn’t even turn to Jameson to acknowledge his question. “I’m not some sort of crazy psycho.” His eyes squeezed at the corners, and for a brief second I could see a flash of emotion across his face. He hid it as quickly as it came, and pulled the sleeve of his shirt up on his other arm. My eyes searched the dark splotches of ink covering it.

“What branch of the military were you in?” I asked.

“Marines.”

“What happened?”

Landon stared at me for a long moment, waiting for me to retract my question. Then he released a long sigh. “One of my best friend’s, my brother, was killed by a bomb. For a while it made me hungrier to fight, but then I realized I was doing it to seek revenge, not to create peace, so I left.”

My eyes focused on his forearm again, noticing a set of dog tags wrapped around the distinguishable eagle and globe.

“You already knew that, huh?”

I looked back to his face and his guard seemed to lower a bit. He wasn’t pissed like some people get when they realize I’m testing them. He seemed almost comforted by the fact. I didn’t find it nearly as assuring that he was trying to test us, but I knew from experience, living around military families, what demons and nightmares some face after war.

“I moved up here because my girlfriend from home came up here to go to school. When I got out, I followed her like a lost puppy. She forgot to mention in her letters that she moved up here with another guy.” He shrugged dismissively, but I noticed his fists clench, revealing it was still a sensitive subject. “I don’t need a house to myself. I’ve been with my brothers so long, I thought living alone would be peaceful, but it’s boring as all hell.”

My arms crossed instinctively over my chest and my head nodded to Jameson as I maintained Landon’s attention. “You knew he was Jameson.”

Landon’s lips finally cracked into a smile. “Facebook.”

I shook my head and smirked. “We’ve got a piece-of-shit couch, but it won’t fit all of us. We’ll probably want to get something bigger.”

Landon shrugged in return. “I’ve been sitting on cots and sand for three years. I’m pretty easy to please.”

We still had two weeks until the end of the month, but we used an old truck Landon had acquired and moved our things out that weekend.

I’d always been told that I studied people. I did. I watched them to learn their signals. It started as a need for self-preservation with my brothers. By the time I had hit ten, I almost always knew when one of them was about to blow their fuse and lash out. Watching people became a habit, and I learned how to read others so I didn’t only hear their words, I heard their intentions.

Landon was a prodigy at reading people, though. Sometimes it was disturbing what he could read from just watching you, especially when you didn’t know he was. He never spoke much about his time in the service, or what he saw and experienced, but I know for a while he had some pretty shitty nightmares that would wake all of us up.

The first time he had one it scared the hell out of me. I thought someone had broken into our house and was murdering him. I jumped out of bed and nearly fell, tripping over my blankets, as I stumbled and grabbed my aluminum baseball bat that I kept leaned against my bed and went running down the hall.

When I opened his bedroom door, holding the bat propped over my shoulder, ready to swing, I saw Landon thrashing around on his bed alone. Jameson stumbled over a few seconds later, holding a large butcher knife from the kitchen, looking terrified.

“Nightmares,” I whispered.

“Shit!” he replied quietly, letting out a deep breath. Jameson slept like the dead, so I knew Landon’s cries were as loud as I’d imagined.

He didn’t have them every night, usually two or three times a week. I knew not to wake him up, but it ate at me like acid each time I woke up hearing his cries.

One morning when it was just the two of us, we sat at our dining room table—which required less cardboard folds at the house—quietly eating our bowls of cereal.

“Do you have any brothers or sisters besides your military family?” I asked.

“Yeah, I have two little sisters, twins.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah, they’re seventeen. It’s probably a good thing I’m so far away, according to their Facebook pages, they like to date.” Landon’s eyebrows rose as his head shook. “What about you?”

“Two older brothers. My oldest brother’s married and has three kids and is about to have another. He lives in Arizona. My middle brother just got a job and moved back to Arizona too. That’s where I grew up until we moved to California.”

“Is it as nice there as they show in the movies?”

“California?”

Landon nodded.

“Yeah, I mean, parts of it are. My mom lives like thirty minutes south of San Diego. It’s nothing like LA. Where she is, it’s a lot more relaxed and less fake. It’s also a lot cleaner.”

“Are you ever going to go back? Or are you like Jameson, and you’ve blacklisted it?”

“No, I’d like to go back eventually.”

“Eventually?” Landon’s hand slid across his jaw as his head cocked to the side. “Are you hiding from something?”

I then proceeded to tell him about my dad, going back to memories I thought I’d erased, while feeling emotions I hadn’t experienced in several years. He listened to me long after we finished our cereal, way past when my American Lit class started.

When I was done, Landon told me about the shit he endured and saw in Afghanistan and how much it still disturbed him. I’d known that something troubled him and assumed it had had to do with war, but hearing him recount his time over there, I understood why his screams were so loud.