A Hard and Heavy Thing (42 page)

“Please,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“And what do you have to be sorry about?” When he didn't answer right away, she said, “Why are you even still here? You shouldn't still be here.”

Was he
still
there? He remembered stumbling up the driveway, letting the screen door clang behind him as he walked into the entryway to ring the doorbell, but that was hours ago. Still awake when he arrived, she had opened the door and looked down at the bottle of vodka in his hands. She had shaken her head when he asked about Nick, looking down at the bottle again. A starving child looking at food. She hadn't even asked why he was wet.

He had talked. He remembered that he had talked, but he couldn't remember what he had said. She had looked tense. He had started crying. Blubbering like a baby was more like it. She had taken the glass right from his hands and had sipped from it before grabbing one of her own.

In the bedroom he now said, “I'm not still here. I'm here again. I thought maybe Nick would be home by now.”

“He's not.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“We don't need to talk about anything.”

He turned around and sat on the floor with his back against the foot of her bed. He put his head in his hands and moaned. As he sat there breathing—deeply in, deeply out—his head filled with static. He knew he had done something terrible. Now he couldn't make a decision, and he didn't know what to say to lead this situation in the right direction. “I'm not myself.”

“That's what everyone has been telling you since you came home,” she said. It came out muffled as she tried to bury herself deeper into her arms and her pillow.

He talked to himself more than to Eris. “I was going to have adventures. I was going to do things. Important things. Good things. This isn't how my life was supposed to turn out.”

“There is no such thing as supposed to.”

He ignored her. “This isn't the person I was supposed to be.”

“Get out.”

What had he done? He tried to remember. They had drunk the rest of the bottle together. She drank fast and she drank well. He had stopped crying at one point and they had begun laughing. Out of the blue—was it out of the blue?—he had asked if she remembered the night before he and Nick had left for the army, the night they kissed. She then looked at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. “What are you talking about?” she had said. Had she smiled? “You know what I'm talking about. The single greatest night of my life,” he had said. “Doesn't ring a bell,” she had said smiling. “Really,” he had said. He had looked into her green eyes and he refused to look away. And she had refused to look away from him. She had giggled.

He shook his head, trying to clear the memory, or to bring it into focus. He stood up and towered over her bed. “This is messed up,” he said. “This here.” He spread his hands out. “This is wrong. It needs to be fixed.”

She sat up quickly in anger, and the sheet fell to her lap. Shadows and hair fell across her face, but soft light played on her breasts showing her dark nipples, perfect and round in contrast to her white skin. She snatched up the sheet again, but Levi still stared, filled with an inexplicable desire for her that tore against his intentions to reconcile, to apologize, to be better than who he was.

“There'd be nothing to fix if you weren't showing up at my house in the middle of the night when he's out working,” she said.

He lifted his eyes up to hers. She looked down at the sheets. “What?” he said. “This isn't my—”

“You're going to somehow fix this by kissing my feet and trying to come onto me again?” With a fiery boldness she looked up again and locked eyes with him. “It's creepy.”

“Again?” he said. “What do you mean, again? I never—”

Or had he? There were more gaps in his memory than details. They had drunk in the living room, smoking and ashing right there in the house. They leaned against each other as they sat on the floor, their backs against the couch. They had held hands. Of that he was sure. “Oh I missed you,” she had said leaning against him. Or she had said, “We missed you.” Did it matter which? At some point, they had kissed. Her lips had felt as soft as he remembered. But now, it was all fragmented. He couldn't remember how it had all transpired.

Here in the bedroom she maintained her eye contact. He felt accused. One more time, Levi fought the confusion that welled within. He surveyed her neck, her shoulders, the shadows across her face, the blazing eyes that reflected the ambient light, and he walked out of the room.

He walked down the hall and stood in the middle of the living room, lost. He looked around and noticed how ordinary the room looked. How normal. How nothing at all indicated that anything unusual had gone on. The beer bottles had been cleaned up. It smelled more like Febreze than cigarette smoke. Who would ever know?

He made a decision. He collapsed on the couch. He resolved to stay.

As tired as he was, his mind was racing, and he didn't dare fall asleep. There was a time when he would have stayed in her bedroom and fought. He would have rationalized. He would have cajoled or pleaded. He would have emerged triumphant. He knew as he stared at the ceiling that his younger self would have never retreated from a battle. He would have stayed in there and told her she had it all wrong; she was misremembering what had happened.

[I know this is painful to read, but I have to tell you.]

He would have made her question herself and everything she knew about herself as long as he came out victorious. But every old soldier knows that sometimes the casualties are not worth the win, and Levi was an old soldier.

He rested with the thought that the couch wasn't an all-out assault, but at least it wasn't an all-out retreat.

He heard her clear her throat, and he looked up. She wore a turtleneck sweater, baggy jeans, and thick woolen socks. Her arms were crossed over her chest. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Someone has to have the courage to do the right thing,” he said.

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'm staying. I'm waiting for Nick and I'm going to tell him.”

“You need to leave. You need to leave right now.” Her voice shook, but it was also hard.

“I'm going to tell him everything. Everything up to and including tonight. I need to tell him.”

“Whatever. Just go.”

“And you'll tell him?” He wanted her to get down on her own knees and plead with him not to. He wanted her to beg him not to say anything. She'd make it right. She was sorry. She'd confess her own sins and take all the blame necessary and be humble and righteous and penitent. He wanted her to swear she'd seek absolution so he wouldn't have to.

“Hasn't he suffered enough? What will that gain? Seriously. And you think he'll take your side about tonight? You think he'll listen to you? Find you blameless?”

“You don't know what we have. We're brothers,” he said. “We've been through war together; we can get through this.” As he said it, and as he heard his words aloud with his own ears, he felt hopelessly stupid. But still, he hoped she would fall on her knees and paw at his chest. He hoped she would pull her shirt off and slide out of her pants and claw at her socks and present herself to him. He hoped she'd lean over him naked, place her hands on his cheeks and turn his face to her and kiss his mouth, his closed eyes, and his forehead as she cried and said she'd do anything at all if he didn't tell Nick that they'd kissed. Anything. She'd do anything.

[But trust me in this: She wouldn't do anything. Nothing. She wouldn't kiss me back. She wouldn't relent. And she wouldn't do anything to hurt you. I'm the one to blame here.]

“I said get out.”

He swung his legs out and sat up.

“Now.”

Everything about her boiled up inside him and he stood up and moved in front of her. She didn't move, though his shoulders heaved and his breath seethed and he felt seconds from exploding in anger. She stared him down and wouldn't relent.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He brushed past her through the house. He closed the front door lightly, not knowing if he'd ever return. He lingered in the vestibule for a moment, and then silently placed his spare key above the door. He winced at the creaking of the screen door that led outside, and he held it so it wouldn't slam.

Levi turned the corner, walked west on Wall Street, and tucked his hands into his pockets to protect them from the early morning chill. He walked from Liberty Street, from the home Eris and Nick had made for themselves, all the way west through the mud puddles in Copeland Park, along the banks of the frigid Black River. He rested on a bench before getting up and making his way to Riverside Park. He found some rocks near the water and sat like he always used to do before he left town years ago.

He thought of nothing. He didn't think of the way the plastic on a Humvee seat bubbled and boiled when licked by flames. He didn't think of the way human skin did the same. He didn't think about the way a nine-millimeter Beretta looks in the mirror when it's pressed against your own temple. Or how before he saw the bullet-hole in Brian's neck just south of Sperwan Ghar, he saw the shock in his eyes—the wide and vacant stare that accompanied the complete and immediate occlusion of his airway, which was born from shock and not pain. The shock was born from Brian's realization that things like this really did happen to you and not the other guy, and this is exactly what it feels like. He didn't think of the screaming. The multitude of screams. The myriad screams. The plethora of screams. The innumerable screams. All the various screams. He didn't think of how, when he was cranking a tourniquet on Brody Gassner's thigh, he wanted to use the tourniquet as a garrote so Brody would just shut the hell up already. He didn't think of Tom Hooper suspended against a backdrop of smoke and flames or of the way Weber's eyes bulged in death. He didn't think of Nick, and he certainly didn't think of Eris.

Levi didn't think of how easy it would be to walk into the water. How many kids in their twenties had simply disappeared into the water there? He'd just be one more. They could hardly even call it suicide. Just another drunk kid stumbling into the river. Happens every year in this town. As comforting as the water seemed, he could not do that to his friends and family. At least not yet. Not that he couldn't walk into the water or end it all, but he couldn't leave without telling Nick everything, without at least giving him a note to tell him why he did it.

The wind bit his cheeks. His ears burned. His toes slowly deadened, and he sat there until he could no longer move them. When he felt sufficiently numb, he stood and walked on wooden legs up State Street until it connected with Third and took him to his apartment downtown.

He smoked a cigarette outside Coconut Joe's, cupping the asthenic cherry against the ever-growing wind. After finishing, Levi trudged up the stairs to the modest apartment above the bar.

The bass music from the club bludgeoned his ears, and the sound of parties and pleasure beckoned to him. He was filled with an urge to lose himself in the drinks and the girls and the music, but for once, he resisted.

He went to the card table and folding chair he had set up in the corner of the studio. He took a black-and-white composition book from the top of a stack of black-and-white composition books, and he opened it to the first blank page. He set the book on the table, and he sat down to complete his confession.

He sat down to do what Nick told him to do.

He sat down to write.

He had to explain things, had to make some sense of everything, had to get it all off his chest. He wrote about Eris. He wrote about Nick. About his dead friends, his family, himself.

He wrote until his wrist grew sore; he took a break to ponder, and then he took up his pen and continued.

He put people in convoys and threw bullets at them, and he wrote people into Humvees with bombs underneath them. It wasn't that hard, because they were only characters, right? He forced young kids to make the worst decisions of their lives and he made them walk into no-win situations with blindfolds on. He put people in trees and threw rocks at them, most of the time not even bothering to get them down—because that's how life
really
worked.

What if?
he thought.
What if Cain never killed Abel?

He wrote about his own tight fingers around the neck of his best friend, his beloved brother, mere seconds from the satisfying pop of a crushed windpipe.

Sometimes he cried. Salty tears plopped onto the white paper, and later, when they dried, left little circular ripples that stiffened the pages; but this was all part of the process, all part of the upheaval. He put into words what he couldn't think about at the river, what he couldn't explain to his dad, and what he couldn't express aloud since he'd come home. He didn't know what good it would do, but at least he was doing something.

When he could no longer think straight and when his wrist was so swollen he could barely move it—long after the club had ushered her patrons home—when the sky turned pink and then blue outside, he adjusted the painter's drop cloths that he used to curtain the windows and he took off his clothes.

He folded them and put them in neat and sorted piles instead of strewing them across the floor as he had done for the past year. He did it consciously as if this action meant he was turning things around. As if caring about a detail was evidence that he was making progress.

As he did when he was a child, he got down to petition the Lord in the old-fashioned way, on his knees, and he said some bedtime prayers. For the first time in a very long time, he asked for mercy, for daily bread, for serenity, and for wisdom.