Something Like Normal(3)

I shoot upright on the floor, my eyes open and my body on alert, but my brain is still in the hazy space between nightmare and awake. My mother is shaking me. My hands curl around her wrists, squeezing until she cries out in pain. “Travis, stop!”

I let go immediately and just sit there, blinking, my heart rate going crazy. I’m shaking a little. Mom smoothes her hand across my forehead the way she did when I was small and had a fever. “It’s only a dream. Let it go. It’s not real.”

I’m fully awake now and I know she’s right. It’s not real. This nightmare is a patchwork of my worst fears. But my imagination wraps itself in this quilt of horror whenever I sleep. I haven’t averaged more than a couple hours a night for weeks.

As my heart rate drops back to normal, I watch her rub her wrists. I could have broken them. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It’s okay.” She looks at me sadly. “I wish I could erase whatever troubles your dreams.”

Except the past can’t be rewound and this is the life I chose.

I didn’t have a noble purpose in joining the Marines. I didn’t do it to protect American freedom and I wasn’t inspired to action by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was in grade school then, and the biggest priority in my life was any bell that signaled it was time to leave school. I enlisted mostly because I wanted to escape my dad, who’d made my life hell since I quit the football team at the end of sophomore season.

I hated football. Not because I wasn’t good at it or because it wasn’t fun, but because I hated the way it took over my life. Dad signed me up for Pop Warner Tiny Mites when I was five. So while other kids were learning to ride two-wheelers, I was practicing my receiving. It was fun when I was little—the game was still a game—but as I got older, I hated the pressure. I hated that run-through-a-woodchipper feeling I got after he’d critique my game films. But what I hated most was that in practically every reference to me—in newspapers, game commentary, post-game TV recaps on the local news—was a reference to him. I was never just Travis Stephenson. I was son of former Green Bay Packer Dean Stephenson. Sophomore year he started talking about scouts and college ball, and all I could think about was how I was going to be stuck living my dad’s dream. So when the season ended, I quit. He went ballistic, and I became a nonentity.

The day I turned eighteen—three days after I graduated high school—I went to the Marine recruiter’s office and signed up. More or less. The process is more involved than simply signing your life over to the US Marine Corps, but the result is the same: four years of active duty, the next four years in ready reserve. It might not make sense to want to go from a lifetime of coaches yelling in my face to a drill instructor yelling in my face, but I figured it couldn’t be that much different. Except that at boot camp I wouldn’t be son of former Green Bay Packer Dean Stephenson. I’d just be me.

Mom cried when I told her because, in her mind, enlistment meant certain death in a foreign country. She begged me to enroll at Edison State instead. “I know you didn’t get the best grades,” she said. “But you can take the basics until you decide on a major. Please, Travis, don’t do this.”

My dad just looked at me for a long time, his mouth a tight slash across his face. It was a familiar expression. One reserved for me. In his world, where winning is everything, he had no use for the kid who refused to play the game. If I had picked up another sport, he might have forgiven me. But I didn’t and neither did he.

His laugh was whip-crack sharp. “Remember the motorcycle you were going to rebuild? Or the band you and your friends were going to start? Or, wait—how about the promising football career you threw away like it was garbage instead of your God-given gift? How long, Travis, do you think you’ll last at boot camp before you want to quit that, too? You don’t have the discipline it takes to be a Marine.”

As if he knew any more about being in the military than I did.

Three weeks later, I shipped and didn’t come back. Until now.

I can admit now it might not have been one of my smarter decisions, but I didn’t want to go to college and I didn’t think I was going to end up in Afghanistan right out of infantry school. I figured I’d be assigned to a base or sent off to Okinawa. Thing is, I’m a good Marine. Better than pretty much anything else I’ve ever done. So even though the Marine Corps has moments of extreme suck, I don’t really regret my choice.

“Trav.” Mom taps at my bathroom door as I’m doing up the last button on a blue-and-white-striped shirt I found hanging in the closet. It’s either Ryan’s or something my mom bought before I left, hoping I’d wear it. The sleeves pinch at the elbows when I bend my arms, but I wore the same desert cammies for seven months. My fashion sense has atrophied. “Dinner in five minutes.”

I wipe the steam from the mirror. I went for so long without seeing myself that my face still kind of surprises me. It feels like I’m looking at a stranger. Someone who is smaller than I imagined, although not small at all. And the guy in the mirror is not wearing a combat uniform or body armor. Without them, I don’t feel much like myself, either.

The scent of roast beef greets me in the hallway, and I swear if Paige were standing naked in front of me, begging to get back together, I’d pass her by to get to the table. The closest we came to a home-cooked meal in-country was the time some of the Afghan National Army soldiers roasted a whole goat, which we ate with a local rice dish and Afghan bread. We had chicken from the village bazaar a couple of times, too, but mostly we ate MREs. Which is short for Meal, Ready-to-Eat. Or, as we usually called it, Meal, Rarely Edible.