Making Faces (33 page)

“
I've seen Saddam's face so much I can see
it when I close my eyes, like it's burned on my retinas,” Paulie
complained.

“
Just be glad Coach Sheen didn't use the
same methods of intimidation during wrestling season. Can you
imagine? Coach Sheen's face everywhere we looked, eyes blazing at
us.” Grant laughed.

“
It's weird, when I try to really picture
his face, or anyone's face, I can't. I try to pull in the details,
you know, and . . . I can't. It hasn't been that long. We've only
been gone since March,” Ambrose said, shaking his head at the
unreality of it all.

“
The longest months of my life.” Paulie
sighed.

“
You can't picture Rita's face . . . but I
bet you can picture her naked, right?” Beans had stopped wrestling
over Jesse's comment about his tongue, and he was wielding it
offensively once more.

“
I never saw Rita naked,” Ambrose said,
not caring if his friends believed him or not.

“
Whatever!” Jesse said in
disbelief.

“
I didn't. We only went out for about a
month.”

“
That's plenty of time!” Beans
said.

“
Does anyone else smell bacon?” Paulie
sniffed the air, reminding Beans that he was being a pig again.
Beans splashed water in his face, but didn't attack. The mention of
bacon had everyone's stomachs growling.

With one last look at the sky, the five
climbed out of the stately pool and dripped their way to their
piled fatigues. There were no clouds in the sky, no faces to
reconstruct in white film, nothing to fill the holes in Ambrose's
memory. Unbidden, a face rose in his mind. Fern Taylor, her chin
tipped up, her eyes closed, wet eyelashes thick on her freckled
cheeks. Her soft pink mouth, bruised and trembling. The way she'd
looked after he'd kissed her
.

“Have you ever stared at a painting so long
that the colors blur and you can't tell what you're looking at
anymore? There's no form, face, or shape–just color, just swirls of
paint?” Fern spoke again, and Ambrose let his eyes rest on the face
that had once filled his memory in a faraway place, a place that
most days he would rather forget.

Bailey and Ambrose were silent, finding new
faces in the clouds.

“I think people are like that. When you
really look at them, you stop seeing a perfect nose or straight
teeth. You stop seeing the acne scar or the dimple in the chin.
Those things start to blur, and suddenly you see them, the colors,
the life inside the shell, and beauty takes on a whole new
meaning.” Fern didn't look away from the sky as she talked, and
Ambrose let his eyes linger on her profile. She wasn't talking
about him. She was just being thoughtful, pondering life's ironies.
She was just being Fern.

“It works both ways, though,” Bailey
contributed his two cents. “Ugly is as ugly does. Becker's not ugly
because of the way he looks. Just like I'm not devastatingly
handsome because of the way I look.”

“So true, my floating friend. So true,” Fern
said seriously. Ambrose bit his tongue so he wouldn't laugh. They
were such dorks. Such an odd little twosome. And he had the sudden
urge to cry. Again. He was turning into one of those fifty-year-old
women who liked pictures of kittens with inspirational sayings
printed on them. The kind of woman who would cry during beer
commercials. Fern had turned him into a blubbering mess. And he was
crazy about her. And her floating friend too.

“What happened to your face, Brosey?” Bailey
inquired cheerfully, switching subjects the way he always did,
without warning. Okay, maybe Ambrose wasn't crazy about the
floating friend.

“It got blown off,” Ambrose answered
curtly.

“Literally? I mean, I want specifics. You had
a bunch of surgeries, right? What did they do?”

“The right side of my head was sheered off,
including my right ear.”

“Well that's okay, right? I mean that ear had
some major cauliflower if I remember right.”

Ambrose chuckled, shaking his head at
Bailey's audacity. Cauliflower ear is what happened to wrestlers'
ears when they didn't wear their headgear. Ambrose never had
cauliflower ear, but he appreciated Bailey's humor.

“This ear is a prosthetic.”

“No way! Let me see!” Bailey bobbed wildly
and Ambrose steadied him before he tipped face-first into the
drink.

Ambrose pulled the prosthetic ear from the
magnets that held it in place, and Fern and Bailey gasped in
unison, “Cool!”

Yep. Dorks. But Ambrose couldn't deny that he
was relieved by Fern's response. He had given her every reason to
run away from him, screaming. The fact that she didn't even flinch
eased something in his chest. He inhaled, enjoying the sensation of
breathing deeper.

“Is that why your hair won't grow?” It was
Fern's turn to be curious.

“Yeah. Too much scar tissue on that side. Too
many grafts. There's a steel plate on the side of my head that
attaches to my cheekbone and my jaw. The skin on my face was peeled
back here and here,” Ambrose indicated the long scars that
crisscrossed his cheek. “They were actually able to put it back,
but I took a bunch of shrapnel to the face before the bigger piece
took the side of my head. The skin they put back was like Swiss
cheese and I had shrapnel buried in the soft tissue of my face.
That's why the skin is so bumpy and pockmarked. Some of the
shrapnel is still working its way out.”

“And your eye?”

“I took a big piece of shrapnel to my eye,
too. They saved the eyeball but not my sight.”

“A metal plate in your head? That's pretty
intense.” Bailey's eyes were wide.

“Yeah. Just call me The Tin Man,” Ambrose
said softly, the memory of nicknames and old pain making it hard to
breathe again.

“The Tin Man, huh?” Bailey said. “You
are
pretty rusty. That double leg yesterday was
PA-THETIC.”

Fern's hand slipped into Ambrose’s and her
feet found purchase on the rocky bottom beside his own. And just
like that the memory lost its bite. He slid his arm around her
waist and pulled her to him, not caring if Bailey gave him grief.
Maybe the Tin Man was coming back to life. Maybe he had a heart
after all.

They swam around for about an hour, Bailey
floating happily, Fern and Ambrose paddling around him, laughing
and splashing each other until Bailey claimed he was turning into a
raisin. Then Ambrose carried Bailey to his chair and Fern and
Ambrose lay out on the rocks, letting the sun dry their clothes.
Fern was wearing the most and was definitely the wettest, and her
shoulders and nose started to show signs of sunburn, the backs of
her pale thighs turning a soft pink. Her hair dried into deep red
ringlets, falling down her back and into her eyes as she smiled at
him drowsily, half asleep on the big warm rock. He felt a strange,
falling sensation in his chest and lifted his hand to rub the spot
just above his heart, as if he could soothe the feeling and send it
away. It was happening more and more often when he was around
her.

“Brose?” Bailey's voice cut through his
reverie.

“Yeah?”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bailey
informed him.

Ambrose froze, the implications clear.

“So you can either take me home pronto, or
you can accompany me to yon forest.” Bailey nodded toward the trees
surrounding Hannah Lake. “I hope you brought toilet paper. But
either way, you're going to have to quit looking at Fern like you
want to gobble her up, because it's making me hungry, and I can't
be responsible for my behavior when I'm hungry and I need to use
the can.”

And just like that the mood was broken.

November 22, 2003

Dear Marley,

I've never written you a love note, have I?
Did you know Ambrose wrote love letters back and forth senior year
with Rita Marsden only to find out Rita wasn't writing them? It was
Fern Taylor, the little redhead who hangs out with Coach's son,
Bailey. In the beginning, Paulie gave Ambrose the idea to use
poetry, but I actually think Ambrose was really enjoying himself
until Rita dumped him and told him it had been Fern all along.
Ambrose doesn't show a lot of emotion, but he was pretty pissed. We
teased him about Fern Taylor for the rest of the year. The thought
of Ambrose with Fern is pretty funny. He didn't think so. He still
gets real quiet if we even mention her name. It got me thinking
that I've never been very good at communicating, and it reminded
how far some people will go to get a message across.

We've been on a rotation guarding some
prisoners before they are transferred out of Baghdad. Sometimes it
takes a few weeks before we have a place to send them. It's amazing
the lengths the Iraqi prisoners go to to communicate with each
other. They make clay by mixing their chai (tea) with dirt and
sand. Then they write little messages on pieces of napkin or cloth
and put them inside the clay ball (we call them chai rocks) and let
it dry out. Then they toss the chai rocks they’ve made into
different cells when the guards aren't looking. I couldn't think of
anything to write today, and that got me wondering if I only had a
little slip of paper to tell you how I feel, what would I say? I
love you seems kind of unoriginal. But I do. I love you, and I love
little Jesse even though I haven't met him. I can't wait to come
home and be a better man, because I think I can be, and I promise
I'm gonna try. So here's your first official love note. Hope you
like it. Grant made sure I used good grammar and spelled everything
right. It pays to have smart friends.

Love,

Jesse

Ambrose stood outside Fern's house and
wondered how he was going to get inside. He could throw rocks at
her window–hers was the one on the ground floor on the back left
side. He could serenade her and wake up the neighborhood . . . and
her parents, which wouldn't help him get inside either. And he
really wanted to get inside. It was one a.m., and unfortunately,
his baker’s hours had screwed up his sleep schedule, making rest
impossible on the nights he didn't work. He didn’t sleep well
anyway – ever. Hadn’t since Iraq. His shrink told him bad dreams
were normal. She told him he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. No
shit, Sherlock.

But it was the need to see Fern that was
messing with his ability to sleep tonight. It had been hours since
she'd dropped him off and taken Bailey home. Only hours. But he
missed her.

He pulled out his phone, a much more logical
option than communicating by throwing rocks or playing musical
Romeo.

Are you awake?
he texted, hoping,
praying her phone was by her bed.

He waited only twenty seconds before his
phone vibrated in response.