Something Like Normal(46)

If I were naked, I’d feel less exposed than I do right now. But I tell her the truth. “No.”

Harper doesn’t say anything as I dry off and wrap the towel around my waist. She just waits until I’m done, then takes my hand like I’m a little kid. I hope she’s leading me somewhere good, because I’ve had about as much as I can take. My insides feel hollowed out and empty. I’m tired. Of everything.

We’re at the entrance to the hotel when I remember my uniform. “I forgot my…” I stop and look back, but the lounge chairs are empty. Shit.

“I took care of it.”

“Oh.” She’s only being nice to me because I’m a fucking mess. “Thanks.”

We don’t talk in the elevator up to our rooms. I just stare at the floor until the bell rings and the doors slide open. Harper never lets go of my hand, but it doesn’t feel like other times when I’ve held her hand. Right now it’s a lifeline.

“Did, um—was Charlie’s mom upset that I left?” I ask as she slides the keycard into the lock on my door.

“She understands, Travis,” Harper says. “I understand.”

Even after all that time in the pool, my eyes start watering again. I grind the heels of my hands against them, but this time I can’t keep the tears at bay and I hate myself for breaking down.

She closes the door behind us and puts her arms around me. I bury my face against her neck and everything inside of me comes out in ugly, choking sobs that I’ve never heard before. No matter how rough my dad was on me, or how hard things got in boot camp, or how scared I was in Afghanistan, I never cried. Ever. And I know I should be embarrassed, but this is Harper, who doesn’t try to tell me everything is going to be okay. She stands there and keeps me from drowning.

Until it’s over and I’m quiet.

If it’s possible to feel beyond empty, I feel it. I’m a Travis Stephenson–shaped space that needs to be filled in.

“Are you hungry?” It’s a strange moment for Harper to ask that question, but I guess it makes sense. There was a dinner at the memorial service and I missed it. Also, I can’t hang on to her forever. Even though I kind of like the idea of that.

“Not really.”

She pulls back a little and looks at me. “Why don’t you put on some dry clothes? I’ll go change and—I don’t know. We can watch a movie or talk or whatever.”

On any other given day, I’d pin my own assumptions to the word “whatever” and let it get me hot and bothered. At the moment, though, her definition of “whatever” is good enough for me. “Yeah, sure.”

While she’s gone I pull on a pair of clean shorts, then flop down on the bed and start flipping through the TV channels. My eyelids feel heavy. They slide down like window shades, fly back open once, then close.

I’m walking down a road in Afghanistan with my fire team. Charlie is out in front, and Moss and Peralta are somewhere behind me. The street is deserted. Even the dogs have scattered. Something is about to go down. The hair on the back of my neck rises and dread slides down my spine.

A bullet smacks into the wall beside me. I’m saved by only five inches of air. I duck into a doorway as another shot cracks through the air and I see Charlie fall on the road.

“Charlie’s hit!” I don’t know if I’m yelling or if it’s someone behind me, but I hear it in my head, so maybe it’s me.

Crouching, I run toward my friend, the bullets buzzing past me. Pause. Fire. Run again. Although Charlie isn’t more than ten or fifteen meters away, the distance takes forever.

“Charlie. Buddy. Hang on.”

I yell for a corpsman and try to stop the bleeding, but it’s not stopping. Blood covers my dirt-caked fingers as I try to find the vein and the ground around Charlie’s head turns to dark mud.

“Solo.” His fingers clutch uselessly at my sleeve.

Another round of AK fire peppers the ground around me, puffing up dust. A bullet grazes my upper arm and it feels like I’ve been smacked with a baseball bat. Moss moves out in front of us, laying down suppressive fire with the automatic weapon.

“Hang on, Charlie,” I repeat. “You’re going to make it. You can do this.”

Except he doesn’t make it.

His eyes are blank as they stare up into the Afghan sky and his chest has stopped moving. A bullet zings past and I don’t even have time to think about what just happened. I drop to my belly in the bloody dirt, my shoulder burning like fire. My eye to my rifle sight, I see him—the Talib in the black turban with an AK pointed at me.

I line him up. And then I kill him.

I sit up, awake, with my heart whizzing around in my chest like a bottle rocket, and Harper standing at the foot of my bed. I lift my hands to check for blood, but I know it was a dream. The trouble with this dream, though, is that it’s true.

“It was our fault,” I say. “Charlie’s and mine.”

She sits cross-legged on the bed, facing me. Her dress is gone, replaced by her faded red shorts and a Clash T-shirt. Her feet are bare and for the first time I notice that her toenails are painted red.

“We were operating out of an old yellow schoolhouse, and nearly every time we went outside the wire, we were ambushed,” I say. “Even when you’re expecting an ambush, you never know when or where it’s going to go down. So most times we’d be walking along some dirt track somewhere, they’d start shooting at us, and we’d end up waist-deep in a muddy canal for the next five or ten minutes, shooting back. They’d run away, we’d chase them, they’d blend into the population, and we’d be left pissed off and wet, with no prospect of a hot shower when we got back.”