So Much Pretty (34 page)

Now it seemed like that had all happened to another girl. That mind, that decision, belonged to another girl. He’d go to graduate school and he’d be a teacher or a professor, and she was back home to do god knows what. To fix things. To do what good women do.

Six months into her tour she didn’t feel like telling Shane anything. Didn’t feel like discussing her plans, didn’t have the energy for “when” or “if” or “afterward,” so she just stopped. Reading one less letter, picturing one less face or having one less dream that wouldn’t come true felt like a good decision in the new war economy, the new austerity plan she had instituted in her soul. But Danny was a different story. Danny wrote her letters like dispatches, pretended that home and middle school were war zones and she was on vacation in sunny, exotic Iraq. He was dark, that kid. And strong and smart. And if there was any “when” or “afterward” it belonged to him and she would make sure he got it.

She looked out the window of the cab as they passed through empty streets, the remains of snow on yellowed green and muddy lawns and houses strung with colored and white and blinking lights. Outside Lourdes Church a nativity scene rose from a puddle, the camels knee-deep in murky water. Red bows and candy canes decorated the streetlamps, and the place rang with quiet. Quieter than anything she’d experienced in fifteen months.

Lauren watched the rain on the window and started at the sound of the cab driver’s voice.

“Don’t you guys usually come into Drum on a military flight or a bus or something?”

“Well, yes sir, that’s often the case. I could see why you’d think that. However I came into Fort Lewis in Washington.” Lauren pushed the earnest lilt of hick into her voice. “I’m unna be seein’ my folks today after quite some time.”

“You’ll make their Christmas.”

“Yes sir, I sure do hope so.”

The cab driver nodded knowingly and looked at her again in the rearview mirror. She smiled back at him. Straight teeth and smooth skin and kind dark eyes.

“I got a nephew over in Afghanistan,” he told her.

“Is that right?” Lauren asked, leaning forward and resting her arms on the front seat. “Who’s he with? What unit?”

Lauren wanted the streets of her hometown and silence to be her only welcome, but she talked to the driver instead. Words, stories, expressions, the lax, entitled way of soft civilian life. She was making him feel at ease and proud of his sister’s kid. And she heard that voice that she couldn’t stand coming out of her mouth. Some kind of camouflage in itself. The constricted encouraging tone of a liar. The modesty and gentleness and ignorance, the unassuming pose. It was a linguistic costume for a woman who’d never really felt these things in her life. But she was patient enough to listen, to know it was important for the cab driver to speak.

He answered her and she began talking quickly. Felt herself suddenly animated when she’d intended to say nothing, to see the town, feel the pull of the streets and the homey memory of places she’d driven past with Shane on their way to park somewhere where they could sink down in the seats and talk and kiss. This place held her life. It was an empty cup, an empty clip, a place from which she’d slipped, but it still fit her form. She surveyed the uneven sidewalks she’d raced down as a girl, the yellow diamond signs of the dead-end streets that led to the river where she’d played with Holly at the edge of the abandoned, graffiti-tagged industrial park. They skateboarded on the smooth concrete of the loading docks, gliding down the slope of the ramps and up into the arc, the cradle, of the half pipe. In that place they were alone and alive, and sometimes set small fires to let the flames hypnotize them. Stood sweat-worn and thirsty after exerting themselves, dropping wooden matches onto piles of newspapers and scrap wood. 

They watched the fire grow until they almost couldn’t put it out. Gauging their abilities against its size, the direction of the breeze, the time of year, what some boy had said at school. When Holly would move to snuff it Lauren would hold her back, make her wait for the feeling, the rush and strange false calm of watching it grow and then the panic that it was not their fire anymore. She’d wait for the quick efficient intake of breath, the flooded dilated feeling in her chest, before they’d dash to stamp it down, or in worst cases blanket the flames with their sweatshirts and jackets. Lauren always made sure it wasn’t smoldering before she left, taking the feeling of terror and virtue with her like the good girl she was, the good girl she’d always been.

Afterward they didn’t talk about these fires. About how they were learning to be patient with fear. How there was no such thing as undoing, and that putting out a flame didn’t mean it hadn’t burned.

•    •    •

By the time she got out of the car at Shane’s she felt like she was floating, still watching herself from outside. She ran up the narrow back stairs and pounded on the door while cold rain cooled her face and hair. It was lovely after all the dust and heat, after the feeling of ash in the air settling on skin; the hot granulated ground turned to powder kicked up and blown against lips, into her mouth and nose and anyplace sweat-soaked and exposed, whipping in a sharp crackling static against her glasses and the heavy ceramic plate strapped high and tight across her breasts, there to protect the soft flesh of organs beneath her rib cage and to keep the estuaries of blood inside of her, instead of bursting and pouring over the dry ground.

Rain was a relief. To shiver a luxury. That feeling of hovering not so strange beneath the gray diffuse light of the quiet Watertown sky, low close clouds and no smoke, no sound, no sun beating and burning her flat. She waited, looking around the small, square muddy plots of land that made up the back yards of the neighborhood. Kids next door had spray-painted a marijuana leaf on the plywood backboard of their garage basketball hoop, and plastic toys were strewn across their driveway, left there before the snow—or brought out now in this false spring.

The yellow checkered curtain covering the back window moved, and Shane’s face stared blankly for a moment while she smiled. Then he gasped and shouted her name and the chain slid, the lock clicked, the door swung open, and he rushed out onto the narrow concrete step to hold her, bent down around her, squeezed her, and she pushed herself against him to feel all of his body and so she wouldn’t see surprise or sadness on his face. She closed her eyes, kissed him on the mouth and he held her tight to his chest, crushed their thighs together, and she felt his warm skin, the flood of pleasure and joy and safety to be in his arms. He put his hands on her shoulders, her arms, her back, as if making sure she was all there. Then she stood on his long feet and walked him backward, until they were in the low-ceilinged kitchen.

“Is your mother home?”

He laughed. “No. She’s over at Patrick’s.”

“Can I have some?” she asked.

He raised his eyebrows slowly and grinned at her. “Sure,” he whispered, then put his hands on her shoulders and pushed her back so he could look into her face, look for something, some explanation. She met his eyes and smiled because he was so pretty and because she didn’t want to worry him.

He said, “You know, I’ve been calling your dad for the past six months to find out if you’re okay.”

“Did you find out?” she asked, and he made a short breathy sound and stared at her, his eyes wet and shining with relief. He hadn’t changed, didn’t look a day older than when they were in high school. Still had those beautiful teeth, the flushed and hollow cheeks and full lips and long straight nose, his wavy messy hair and his little wire-rimmed glasses; the white T-shirt and stupid sweater vest, the way he filled out his jeans, all the things that gave her that hollow hungry feeling in her stomach and constricted her breath.

He looked overwhelmed and like he was trying to be careful with her, but that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She moved close to him again and inhaled his scent. Put her hands at the base of his spine. Feeling his body made the hair on her neck stand up, made her heart restless. She wanted to bite him through his shirt, she wanted a mouthful of his skin. When her hands touched his belt she could feel his breathing change.

“Well?”

He was trembling slightly when he picked her up and she wrapped her legs around him. He walked quickly upstairs, slammed his bedroom door open with her back and kept walking until he pressed her into the metal-framed twin bed that creaked and cradled their weight. He put his lips on her. She tasted him, held his face, his head, her hands in his hair.

“You’ve been haunting these sheets,” he whispered against her cheek. She didn’t want him to talk. She grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head and was crushed at once by how beautiful his chest was. How familiar and gentle. His long thin torso, smooth skin and the subtle ripple of muscle, a body like water, no knots that rose or cuts in flesh. No tattoos. Not frozen solid beneath the skin of his stomach and chest, but strong and supple. He touched her with his soft hands, his long fingers on her face and in her hair, and his smell was so clean, unspoiled. He unbuttoned her camouflage top, pulled up the T-shirt beneath, tore at her pants, and then stood before the bed looking down at her.

“Take this off,” he said, “take all of this off, please. Take it off.”

Her body had changed. Her skin was tanned, taut, her shoulders and back, her hips. And she could feel just how different she was built now that he was seeing her, touching her. Her stomach and legs, everything like an animal now. She felt his desire for her war body, almost curiosity at her hardness, and then she watched his face as he saw the rest of the tattoos, saw his look of distress and then hunger. He ran his fingers over her arms and legs, and she felt the difference between her inked and bare skin, the desensitized numbness of the black bands on her shoulders, biceps, forearms, thighs. His strength and delicacy and smell were overwhelming and everything he was doing was beyond familiar. A taste she’d forgotten she loved drew her into her body, and then out into nothing but breath upon breath.

When it was over her head was clear and she got up and put her clothes back on. Left her hair unpinned and hanging tangled around her shoulders. Shane smiled and she looked at his relaxed face, his high and hollow cheeks, lips swollen from kissing. Lauren heard the sound of the rain on the windows, felt the gutted, senseless floating feeling again, and she wanted to be outside with cold water on her face.

He asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

She bent down to lace up her boots and felt no air in her lungs with which to answer him. Couldn’t make her voice work. Felt that if she spoke at all some understanding she had with herself, a thing with its own logic and language would come undone. She took a breath and found her camo shirt buried in the blankets at the foot of the bed, looked at him again, at his long legs, the curve of muscle and vein at his hip bones, and smiled.

“I have to be back to Swarthmore by next Thursday,” he told her. “Otherwise I’m around. I could even put off going for maybe another week.” He said eagerly, “Maybe we could go somewhere.”

She didn’t say anything—kissed him on the cheek and began walking downstairs. After a few seconds Shane got up and followed her in his bare feet, buttoning his jeans as he walked.

“Lauren, baby,” he said, and his voice was placid and gentle like his body. “Are you okay?”

She looked at his face and did not like what she saw: the concern and confusion and, worst of all, the pale light of his eyes searching her.

“You okay?” he asked her again, holding the back of her hand against his lips as she stood at the door.

She gave him a quick nod, smiled. She needed to get outside. “I’m good,” she told him as she walked down the back steps. “I’m good.”

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