I looked at his truck and back to him. “Can you not get in?”
He sighed heavily and shook his head. I could see the frustration emanating from his body. He seemed like someone on the brink of losing a very carefully crafted control. So different from the man standing in my hallway minutes ago and sitting calmly in my car on the drive over. His breathing was dancing the line of composure and chaos. In my twenty years on this earth, I’d come across many a frustrated man. Why did this one spark my curiosity so uniquely?
“My keys are supposed to be here on my tire. But I’ll find my way back, it’s cool.”
“I’m so late to this thing I have to do, but honestly—”
“The dinner? I don’t think you should be any later than you already are,” he cautioned.
So he was paying attention.
“Yeah, the dinner. I can’t take you back before . . . but maybe I can call my dad and cancel. It’s not like—”
Kael interrupted me. “It’s cool, for real.”
I couldn’t just leave him here. There were barely any cars parked in the lot, and I couldn’t see other soldiers walking or standing guard anywhere. I really didn’t want to leave him stranded.
“Why haven’t you left yet?”
I opened my door and got out of the car. “I don’t know. I feel bad,” I replied. “It’s a long walk back. Do you have another set of keys somewhere? Or a friend who can come help you?”
“All my friends are in Afghanistan,” he said.
My chest burned.
“Sorry,” I said, leaning my back against my car.
“For what?”
We kept eye contact until he blinked. I quickly looked away.
“I don’t know. The war?” It sounded so stupid coming from my mouth. An Army brat apologizing to a soldier for a war that had started when they were in kindergarten. “Most people wouldn’t have asked me, ‘For what?’”
Kael’s tongue grazed his bottom lip; he tucked it between his teeth. The parking lot lights above us clacked on, buzzing, breaking our silence.
“I’m not most people.”
“I can tell.”
The lights shone through the windows of the barracks across the street, but it didn’t seem like he lived there. That meant he was either married or higher-ranking than his age would suggest. Soldiers below a certain rank could live off-post only if they were married, but I couldn’t imagine that a married man would be sleeping on my chair right after a deployment. Besides, he wasn’t wearing a ring.
I was checking out his ACU jacket for his rank patch when I saw his eyes on me.
“Are you coming with me, Sergeant, or are you going to make me stand in this parking lot until you call a locksmith for your car?” I looked at the patch on his chest, his last name stitched in capital letters: Martin. He was so young to be a sergeant.
“Come on.” I put my hands up, begging. “You don’t know me, but this is what will happen if I leave you here. About five seconds after I drive away, I’ll feel guilty, and I’ll obsess over it the entire way to my dad’s. I’ll imagine you getting hit by a car or passing out or something. Some awful death scenario, and then by the time the dinner is over it’ll be worse. Way worse.” I rolled my wrist in a circle and looked him right in the eyes.
My mouth was dry. I was talking a lot, and not slowly. It didn’t seem to annoy him and I wasn’t even getting that little bubble of fear of rejection from basic contact with other humans like I usually did. I continued, more animated.
“I’m talking apology texts to Elodie, who’ll be stressed because she worries about everyone, and then we’re talking the guilt level of stressing out a pregnant woman, and good Lord, who knows what will happen to the baby?”
“The Lord,” he said randomly. I studied the scar in his eyebrow as he spoke. It was small but somehow made his look more interesting.
“What?”
“You said, ‘Who knows what will happen.’ So, I answered you.” He didn’t smile, even when I nearly cackled. I covered my mouth with my hands to keep my laughter in.
This guy was the kind of funny everyone wanted to be. The kind who could just say random stuff like “the Lord” and it was effortlessly funny. He was probably never awkward, and he seemed like he knew he was good at humor. He didn’t physically show it, but I could hear it.
“Are you always funny?” I asked him.
He shook his head, looking away from me. I stared at him, but he didn’t let up or look at me.
“Anyway, I’ll have to drive around trying to find you if you haven’t made it back yet. It’s messy, Kael, and probably easier if you just get in. I’m sure my dad’s called me at least five—”
“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in mock defeat. I nodded, smiling in my victory, and you know what? He almost smiled back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
No matter where we were stationed, my dad always chose to live within the gates of the post, in the housing that was offered. From both of the Carolinas, down to Georgia, to Texas. I didn’t mind it so much when I was young, because the small handful of friends I had lived very close by, but as we moved, then moved again, and again, it got old fast. I started to hate the groomed cul-de-sacs, all the American flags and impeccable yards, and the lines of cars at each gate every single time we left the post. The older Austin and I got, the more we hated it. But our dad loved his Army life: the commissary and the PX convenience store, both tax-free, and the company where he worked every day just down the street. He felt empowered in this domain, but as Austin and I grew up, we started to feel trapped.
Austin and my caged feeling was nothing compared to our mother’s. When we were younger, she was alive and bright with the excitement of a new place, a new environment every time we moved. But as the weeks went by she would begin to pace around the new house, picking at little things, rearranging the dolls in her open glass cabinet, to introduce her own bit of chaos to the pristine quarters my dad expected her to maintain. She was always up, up, up or down, down, down. There was never an in-between.
There were these hours of madness that seamlessly morphed into days of lunacy. They began in small stretches of mornings when the curtains were never opened, lunches weren’t packed, and my dad yelled about the empty coffeepot or the laundry left in the dryer for days. My mom would start to smoke again on the porch, staring at the replicated identical houses on the street. When it got really bad the couch turned into her bed and Austin and I knew better than to comment on our parents’ sleeping in separate parts of the house. We also sort of enjoyed the peace that came with their distance.
As I stared at the road in front of me, Kael’s quietness allowed me to continue thinking about the slow unraveling of Mrs. Fischer the First. Her decline was subtle, with each episode lasting only a few days and mostly peaking when my dad was at work. She had two personas for most of our life, and we watched her switch gears in an instant from military wife to a woman falling apart: the paranoia, the anxiety, the messiness of her ashtrays on the porch, and the stains on her clothes. By the summer after eighth grade, her mania had completely taken over. She woke up later and later, took fewer showers, stopped dancing, and even stopped pacing. She would stare at the wall in silence for hours, and even her fairy tales turned sinister and eventually burned out.