Casualties (6 page)

“You keep it. See you in the morning.”

Robbie watched him back the Suburban down the driveway. He watched until the darkness extinguished the last flicker of red from its taillights. He made the joint last as long as he could. Then he went upstairs to bed.

—

He woke up screaming. He rolled off the narrow bed onto the planks of the old pine floor and lay there in the dark trying to breathe, trying to remember where he was.

“Robbie? Robbie, you all right up there?” His great-grandmother's worried voice brought him back. He lifted his head. His mother's old room at the top of the house, right under the peak of the roof. He didn't remember the room being so small; he used to like the way the eaves slanted over the bed, but now it seemed like the ceiling was pushing down on him.

“Robbie?” Big Ruth was trying to yell, but her voice kept giving out.

“Sorry.” He thought he shouted, but he couldn't hear his own voice over the pounding of blood in his ears. He pulled himself up and stumbled to the door. Light rimmed the door to his great-grandmother's bedroom at the bottom of the stairs. He heard a bed creak as if she were trying to get up. What if she fell?

“Sorry, BR, sorry,” he yelled again, louder so she would hear. “Just a dream.”

The creaking stopped. Her voice quavered up to him. “You okay there?”

He began to shiver. His skin was slick with sweat; the night air was making him cold. He wanted warmth. He wanted light. He didn't know what the hell he wanted. “No worries,” he called back. “I'm good. Just a dream.”

She didn't answer right away. Robbie waited, half wishing she wouldn't believe him, wishing somehow she could be the woman he remembered from years ago when he was a kid awake at night, missing his dad. She'd know. Somehow, she'd know. She'd come to his door in the old plaid bathrobe that used to be his great-grandfather's and look at him through her crazy glasses. “I'm heading to the kitchen for some cocoa. Could use some company.” Now he heard only an old woman's voice, tired and uncertain.

“All right then. See you in the morning.”

A few seconds later, the light clicked off in Big Ruth's room. A rage that Robbie didn't understand flared inside him. She was leaving him up here in the dark. In a few minutes she'd fall asleep. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept more than an hour or two in a row. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been alone for this long. He didn't know how to be alone.

He wheeled around and ran his hands along the wall until he found the light switch. The eaves cast shadows over the narrow bed and the sheet he'd dragged to the floor with him. He needed a drink. He found the bourbon he'd hidden in his backpack. As the familiar
burn worked its way down his throat, he remembered what they'd told him in Kuwait, where they tried to figure out who was ready to go home and who needed a little more time to “transition.”

“Civilians aren't going to know what to do or say,” the major told them as a chaplain passed out little notebooks, as though they were in grade school. “You can always talk to the book.”

“Talk to the book,” Korder had sneered. They'd taken the little journals to make it look good, then tossed them. Now Robbie started looking around his mother's old room. He yanked open the drawers in the maple dresser and Ruthie's old desk, looking for a scrap of paper, anything he could write on. He found an old composition book with his mother's name printed across the front in schoolgirl letters:
Ruth Nolan, 11th Grade.
The first ten pages were filled with lists and check marks. Robbie flipped past them to clean pages. He grabbed a pen rolling in the top drawer and began to scribble. He couldn't keep ahead of the thoughts pouring out of the hole where they'd been breeding while he was in country. The girl's eyes. A piece of Garcia's bone stuck to his jacket. Things he'd done. Things he'd failed to do. They swarmed through his brain until he had to throw the pencil down and get out. They drove him out of the little room at the top of the stairs, back out onto the front steps of the farmhouse where he listened, rigid, alert, to the whispers and scufflings of the night. He kept his eyes trained on the perimeter of the yard and smoked one cigarette after another until dawn finally broke over the mountain.

Later, when the sun warmed the morning air, he took one of Kevin's old dirt bikes up the logging trail to the sugar shack. On his sixth birthday, Kevin had brought him up here and told him all about the days when Mo, Big Ruth's husband, used to make syrup. There was no floor; the old boiling pan was rusting outside, a chunk of roof was gone. It was the right size for a kid, though. Kevin had helped him fix it up. They used to come here after fishing. His dad had come, too, until he got married again.

The bike engine vibrated beneath Robbie as he straddled it, looking over his old haven. The shingled roof sagged, but his uncle had been watching over the place. A patchwork of fresh replacement planks and old weathered wood around the sides showed some kind of ongoing care. Robbie once had begged Ruthie to let him live in New Hampshire. A mistake. What was he, eleven? She'd kept him in California most of that summer, and after that he'd only come for short visits. A bit of familiar carving over the door caught his eye. He looked closer and saw it was the sign, shaped like a fish, that Kevin made him when he was little. It was covered with tree mold, but he could still make out the letters, dingy, hand painted:
Rob's Bait & Fly Shop.

That night, he moved his pack and his booze into the sugar shack. If he woke up screaming, no one would hear him.

A couple of days later, it was morning and the air coming in the window smelled like rain even though the sun was already climbing. Big Ruth sat across from Robbie at the old oak table in front of a cold piece of toast and lukewarm tea. She wore a sweater the color of a peacock's feathers, all blues, greens, purples. Her pants were red. The older she got, she'd told him, the more color she wanted in her life.

He lifted his can of Coke as if he were toasting her and said, “Nice feathers today, BR.” She beamed at him as he sipped his soda.

“Vonnie called yesterday,” his great-grandmother said. Her tone was cautious, hopeful. “She wants to bring the kids over.” Robbie's calm began to thin at the edges. She wanted some kind of family reunion. He hadn't seen his stepmother or his half siblings in years, although both Justin and Luanne had written letters to him in Iraq. He'd wanted to write back but never could come up with the right thing to say.

“'Kay,” he said to his great-grandmother, although he wasn't
sure it was. He just wanted the warmth he was feeling to keep going. He wanted to please her.

She gave him another big smile, which made her bridge slip a little. She pushed it back with her hand, and Robbie looked down so she would think he hadn't noticed. He picked up his fork and scraped the last of some scrambled eggs off his plate.

“You still look hungry. Let Kevin scramble you some more eggs,” she said.

“You always said I looked hungry even when I was a fat slob,” Robbie told her. He reached for his can of Coke.

“You were never fat! I never understood why it was a crime to eat. I miss it now.” She gestured toward the half-eaten toast on her plate. “I eat more than this and the gas just about kills me and everyone else.”

Robbie caught Kevin's eye from across the kitchen. His uncle, slouched now against the sink with a mug of coffee in his hand, grinned and shook his head. Time seemed to slip for a few seconds. Any minute now Ruthie would come down the stairs and start telling him to put on sunscreen and bug spray if he was going to go fishing all day.

The desire to see his mother seized him. When he was a kid she'd show up on a morning like this in a baggy T-shirt and shorts, looking for a cup of coffee that was never strong enough for her. She never used to bother with makeup in New Hampshire, or her contacts. Her hair, a deeper red than Kevin's, swung in a ponytail back then. His uncle might tug it gently as he passed by. Only he could get away with it. Just as Big Ruth was the only person who could tell his mother to sit down and expect that she would.

Robbie used to love seeing her sit like a child across the table from him, as she read a paper or magazine or one of those files she always had with her. She looked like she was pretending to be an adult, the way he used to when he grabbed his great-grandmother's glasses and put them on to make everyone laugh. Remembering his mother this way made his chest go soft inside.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket but stopped when he saw a text from her, all in capital letters:
WHEN R U COMING? R U OK?
He looked up to see Big Ruth's eyes wide now, and eager, like a kid's.

“You calling your mom? Tell her to get herself out here so we can all be together again.” She looked so hopeful that Robbie almost said yes, but if he called Ruth now, she'd know he'd lied to her about his leave.

He shook his head at his great-grandmother. “Just a buddy,” he said. The softness inside him turned to guilt. His thumbs tapped out another lie:
all ok. Cll u sn.
The guilt thickened inside him. He got up without finishing his soda and told Kevin he'd meet him behind the house, where they were going to chop some wood.

Over the next few days he chopped nearly two cords of wood. He believed at first that working his body to the point of exhaustion would help him sleep. He looked for opportunities to chop, dig, and haul just to feel the sweat stream down his skin and smell the night's booze leach out his pores. He craved the emptiness that followed when he was too spent to think. For a little while he could sit still and let whatever surrounded him fill him up. Sometimes it was Big Ruth's voice as she rocked next to him on the porch of the farmhouse, or the smell of oil and hot metal in his uncle's shop, or the gentle sucking of the brook as it bubbled unhurriedly between his ankles. In those moments he sensed something like the sanctuary he'd dreamed about in the desert.

The stillness fled with the daylight, though. Shadows fell across the mountain and sank into him. The night loomed and with it came the desire to escape even the people he'd traveled two days on a bus to find. Their attempts at conversation sounded like demands in a language he no longer spoke. As they went about their quiet evening routines, he found himself watching and realizing with every passing minute that he was the foreigner here.

The worst was when his father's second wife, Vonnie, brought
the kids over to see him. Their size shocked him. In his mind, they were still toddlers, the only beings in his life who had ever looked up to him. Now his half brother, Justin, was eighteen and as tall as he was, his legs sticking out of a pair of long gym shorts, his soccer shirt flapping like a wind sock. Luanne, his sister, was a year younger but looked like an adult to him.

“Cool tattoos,” Justin said the first time they came by. Robbie, who'd taken his shirt off to mow the lawn, found it and pulled it back on. Luanne showed him the brownies she had brought, and he took one even though all he wanted was a beer. Vonnie gave him a hug and immediately began to talk about the early days when his dad was still alive and all of them were little. She worked hard to get the conversation going, like she was blowing on kindling, trying to coax a flame into a fire. It was just easier to sit there and listen, or pose with Justin and Luanne for pictures that they took with their phones and loaded onto Facebook while he watched. Justin grabbed a soccer ball out of their van and began to kick it, glancing at Robbie from time to time. “Lookin' good,” Robbie told him, but he didn't get up to kick it around with him. He was glad when they left.

They came back for dinner two nights later, and he steeled himself with a six-pack of Bud. They almost made it through before Justin started asking the questions he'd probably wanted to ask from the minute he heard Robbie was back in Gershom.

“You were a machine gunner, right?”

“Yup.”

“You kill anybody?” Niblets of corn stuck to his lips. His eyes, Robbie noticed for the first time, were the same deep brown he saw when he looked at his own face in the mirror.

“Stop it, Justin,” Vonnie said. “Eat your corn and leave your brother alone.”

Robbie looked down at his plate. The smell of the meat made him sick.

“I bet you did.”

“Justin—” Vonnie's voice sharpened. Robbie wasn't sure if she was trying to stop Justin from asking or him from telling. When he looked around the table, he saw his brother, his sister, Kevin, Big Ruth, and Vonnie all looking at him. He pushed his chair away from the table. “Gonna smoke,” he said. “I'll help with the dishes later.”

“That's okay, honey. We'll do—”

But he didn't wait to hear any more. He heard the screen door slam behind him. Outside the sun settled on the rim of low mountains to the west. A mosquito bit him on the neck, but he didn't slap it. He burned through one cigarette, then another. Then he headed for the dirt bike. Justin came to the door and yelled to him. Robbie just waved as he revved the engine. He guided the bike down the driveway and roared toward the sugar shack.

—

When he returned the next morning, stinking and hungover, it was nearly ten. Kevin had gone to the shop and Big Ruth was alone.

“Sorry about last night,” he said. His words sounded thick in his own ears. He sank into what had become his regular chair but avoided looking straight at her.

His great-grandmother reached across the table for his arm. “No need for that.” She kept her hand there until he looked at her. “I want you to go get something for me.”

A job to do; he felt steadier.

“Go get your book.”

No.

“Go on, go get it. It's still in the same place.”

No.
He stood up, though. Slowly he left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the landing that separated his mother's old room from the one Kevin used, first when he was a boy and now when he looked after Big Ruth. The blanket chest was at the end of the landing, wedged back under the eaves. This was where Big Ruth kept what
she called the “Nolan Family Records.” He dropped to his knees in the smothering heat of the upstairs and opened the chest. He pawed through photographs, baby shoes, old report cards, a book report Ruthie had done in eighth grade marked with a huge red A+, pictures of Kevin's first car, a wedding picture of their parents whom he'd never met, crayoned drawings by all of them for his great-grandmother's “refrigerator gallery.” Finally, he saw it, the old brown vinyl book Big Ruth called “The Story of Robbie.”

He wished he could climb back into the skin of the child he'd been. When he was five, he couldn't wait to see what she'd added and go over the story behind each picture. Even when he'd been a teenager pissed at Ruthie, more pissed at himself, he'd gone looking for the book. It seemed to hold him between its covers, his small past and all the possibilities that still remained on those blank pages.

He opened it now. In the first picture, Ruthie held him up like a prize she had won. She was laughing into the camera, her cheek pressed to his so that his infant mouth lolled like a drunk's. He crouched on the floor ignoring the sweat streaming down his face. He looked at his mother's smile.

“Did you find it, son?” Big Ruth's voice sounded from the bottom of the stairs.

“I found it,” he said.

—

That night the book lay open on the floor of the sugar shack next to a crowd of empty beer bottles and a pint of bourbon. Robbie lit a joint he'd rolled from Kevin's stash, inhaled, and held his breath while he looked again at the snapshot of Ruth holding him as a baby. He exhaled, deliberate and slow. Then he wedged his fingernail beneath the edges of the photograph and extracted it from the fasteners at the corners. He placed it on the table next to the snapshot of his boot camp graduation portrait.

These showed the good times, the blank-slate days. The first one
was taken before he'd made any mistakes. The second one was taken when he'd started over. Brand clean, as his great-grandmother used to say. The Marines scraped the fat and laziness off him. He rose like a fucking phoenix from the ashes of his old self.

He wanted to turn back the clock and see his mother the way she'd looked on graduation day. Those big old sunglasses came off. Her whole face opened up like a door swinging wide on a sunny afternoon. He swore he could feel her surprise and relief blowing toward him from the middle of all those parents, girlfriends, and babies crowded onto the stands at the parade grounds. Later, she hugged him tight tight tight. Everything was forgiven: the drugs, the fights, the struggles. His enlistment. He wasn't her problem anymore. He was no one's problem.

His throat ached thinking about it. He reached for the bourbon and held the bottle to his lips for a few seconds before he realized it, too, was empty. “Fuckin' shit,” he grumbled, and hurled the bottle across the one-room shack. He started to get up to see if there were any more beers cooling in the brook outside, but the drawings stopped him.

He squinted at the wall directly in front of him. Half of it was in shadow but he could still make out the tracings of fish he had caught over the years. Faded pencil outlined his first brookie, his first smallmouth bass, his first perch, all drawn on paper cut from brown shopping bags. Each bore a few lines of information: type of fish, size and weight, where and when caught, the fly or lure used. His uncle Kevin's blocky lettering or his father's sloppy scrawl marked the early ones. Robbie had been old enough to trace and label the last few by himself. His were better than the others. He'd sketched and shaded in the scales and fins. The fish in his drawings seemed to be moving in the shadows, as if they were underwater poised to dart behind a rock.

This was who he used to be, the kid who thought this little bit of New Hampshire was paradise. All he ever had to do was show up
and his great-grandparents would break into smiles. Uncle Kevin would grab him and take him up the mountain. They'd be fishing or fiddling with engines or checking out some new kittens before his parents unpacked the car.

He never understood why his mother hated the place so much. She and his dad had grown up here. If they had just stayed in Gershom, maybe they wouldn't have gotten divorced. And if they hadn't gotten divorced, maybe his dad would still be alive and his little brother and sister would be Ruthie's children, not Vonnie's. All it took was one thing to be different to change everything that came after, like in that movie Garcia always used to talk about.