Toward the Sound of Chaos (7 page)

Jake

I
t’s
been two days since I left Ellie’s house, and I ain’t seen hide nor hair of her
and Spencer. Course it don’t help that I missed my run yesterday, because when
I left Elle standing on her front porch I did somethin’ I haven’t done in a
real long time. I went and got real familiar with a bottle of whiskey. I wound
up passed out on my living room floor, and when I woke I opened another bottle
and it fucked me harder than the first had.

After
every tour of duty, I lost myself in the bottle a little more when I returned
home. The last time, I almost didn’t make it back out. My buddies were dead. My
family was dead. I had nothing to keep me warm but the night terrors that
grabbed me by the throat each time I closed my eyes and the visions that
wouldn’t go away whenever they were opened.

When
Olivia had introduced me to Nuke, I’d quit drinkin’. I had someone who was
depending on me and I wasn’t gonna screw that up, but right now, it’s too much.
Too much everything. Too much hurt, too much desire, too much fear, and too
fuckin’ many feelings. Elle calls to me like a siren to a sailor, but I can’t have
her, so I’ve turned away and listened to a different siren song. Even now I can
practically taste that deep, dark molasses flavor rollin’ over my tongue, and
I’m fixin’ to quench this thirst because whiskey won’t say no to me. It don’t
care about my scars or that I’m damaged goods. All it cares about is that I
keep drinking.

Miserable
and wet, Nuke and me head for home, crossing the footbridge over the duck pond.
It’s been repaired since I was here last, and aside from the deep gouges in the
tree where Ellie’s car had been it all looks good as new. That’s pretty typical
of this town. If something’s broke, you fix it. Wish that applied to people,
too.

I
begin makin’ a list in my head of the good things that happened during the past
three days, and then I tell my brain to shut the fuck up, ’cause it don’t
matter.
None of it matters
. I don’t know what I was thinkin’, waitin’
here on a woman I hardly know.

Stupid.

I
have nothing to offer her. Nothing but a broken man, an empty house, and a dog
that deserves a much better life than the one he’s been given.

She
does too. That’s why I have to walk away, because having me in her life will only
cause her and her son misery. And she deserves better than that.

Jake

Two
years ago

P
ain
is everywhere. Blood is everywhere. My skin tingles; every nerve ending in my
body feels like a live wire. Desert sand cakes my face. My ears ring, a
constant keening scream that won’t let up. Beyond that, I hear their muffled
voices speaking words I don’t understand, and that’s the crux of this whole
thing. I don’t understand: why I’m here, why we were targeted, why my Lance Corporal’s
head isn’t still attached to his body.

I
blink. I’m no longer outside, but hanging suspended from a rope in the ceiling.
Black eyes meet mine. They study me as if I were an animal in a cage. There is
no joy in this for him. I am simply a means to an end. It’s the others who take
great delight in my suffering. But I will not break.

“I
am a United States Marine,” I mumble.

Laughter.

My
muscles cramp and spasm from keeping the agony locked inside. I won’t let them
hear me cry out. I will not scream. I will not give them that.

My
whole body jerks as the man strikes me again, the barbed wire biting into my
flesh. Warm blood flows down my ruined back, and I imagine it must look
something like a rushing river over rapids made of flesh, sinew, and even bone.
If they bleed me much more, there’ll be nothin’ left. With a smile on my face,
I slump forward against my rope restraints and wait.

Jake

I
don’t know how I wound up here, soaked to the skin and scratching at her door
like a wild animal, desperate to get in. In a way, I guess that’s true. I do
feel wild. Completely out of control. Consumed. By her, by the liquor I’ve been
making love to these past few days, and by the thought of sinking myself balls
deep inside her.

I
glance down at the puddle I’m leaving all over her front stoop. From beyond I
hear footsteps. The lock turns, and when she pulls the door back, I fall in a
heap over the threshold and into her arms. I go down like a sack of shit.
Fitting, really. I didn’t mean to pull her down with me though.

“Jake?
Oh my God, are you okay?”

“No,
angel.” I grunt. “I ain’t okay.”

“You’re
soaking wet,” she mutters, coming up on her knees and leaning over me. “Did you
walk over here in the rain? Have you been drinkin’?”

I
don’t answer. Instead, I let the reek of whiskey on my breath and from the
pores of my skin be my reply.

Ellie
sighs. “You sit tight. I’m gonna get you a towel and then you’re going to come
inside.” She gets to her feet and turns to leave, but I reach out and grab her
ankle. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic, but it’s the only thing I can do to get her
to stop because my jaw feels wired shut and I ain’t ever been much good with
words anyway. “Jake, you need to get dry.”

“Stay.”

“The
rain’s coming in. Let me go get a towel, and we’ll talk.”

“I
don’t wanna talk. I just want to be near you.”

“Alright,”
she says softly. She reaches over and closes her front door. The wind howls
against it and I curl into myself, all the while keeping a tight grip on her
ankle. “Where’s Nuke, honey?”

“I
had to lock him in the bathroom.”

“Why?”

“I’m
having all kinds of thoughts, angel,” I whisper. “All kinds of thoughts.”

She
smooths a cool hand over my fevered forehead. I flinch, but she continues to
touch me, seemingly unafraid of what I might do. “About what, Jake?”

“About
you and Spence. About me and how I shouldn’t be here.”

“How
you shouldn’t be here in my house? Or how you shouldn’t be here at all?”

“I
can’t breathe. That house is so damn quiet, and yet all I can hear are the
screams. Their screams.”

Her
hand stills against my hair. “Whose screams?”

“They
did inhumane things to us, Elle. I could have lived through all that, I coulda
never broken, but I couldn’t handle the screams or the silence that followed
the gunshots. That’s the shit that eats away at me from the inside out. The
torture was nothing compared to waking up every day knowing you could end it
all if only you had the guts to pull the trigger.”

She
shifts closer and pulls my head into her lap. “Shh. You’re safe now. You’re
home.”

 Tears
run down her cheeks but she pays them no mind. She just continues to stroke my
forehead. Her fingertips trace the creases at the corners of my eyes, over my
cheeks, and along the line of my jaw. I don’t pull away from her. Instead, I
close my eyes and settle into her touch, allowing her to share a little of the
pain that burdens me. I know it’s selfish. She has pain enough of her own; I
can see it in her eyes. It’s not fair of me to ask her to bear more. This woman
isn’t even mine. I haven’t even kissed her yet. I won’t take that next step
with her because she deserves better.

She
deserves a real man. One who can protect her, not one who shows up at her door
in the middle of the night, drunk and falling apart in front of her. Not one who’s
ugly inside and out, who won’t take her and worship every inch of her beautiful
body because he’s sick at the sight of his own. She deserves a man who’ll take
care of her, who can give her and Spencer everything, enrich their lives and be
present and supportive at the end of a long day, and I can’t be that man
because I’m broken.

 I
gave everything I had to the Corps, and when I came back from that desert
alone, scarred and forced to bear the evidence of their hatred of us upon my
flesh forever, there wasn’t even a slither of the old Jake Tucker left over.

I
got nothin’ left to give, and Ellie Mason, this angel who walked into my life
and turned it upside down, this woman who saves me every single day and doesn’t
even know it, she deserves everything.

And
I am nothing.

Ellie

“
M
amma,
wake up.”

I
open my eyes and see Spencer’s boring into mine again. For a moment I think I’m
still dreamin’ or I have a serious case of déjà vu, because I feel as if I’ve
lived this moment before. “Mamma, Jake Tucker’s sleepin’ on our couch.”

Well,
maybe not this exact same moment
.

I
shoot up out of bed and throw on my robe. I’d meant to wake Jake early so he
could leave before Spencer knew he was even here. Major parenting fail, because
now my eight-year-old looks like Christmas has come early this year.

“Why
is Jake Tucker on our couch?” he demands, following me into the bathroom where
I pee, wash my hands and brush my teeth as if a tornado’s chasing me.

“Because
he came over late last night.”

“Why?
That’s not the same,” Spencer says. He doesn’t get angry or annoyed about it,
he’s just stating the obvious, trying to sort it in his head.

“He
needed a friend to talk to.”

“Well
why didn’t y’all wake me?”

I
smile at my son. “I guess we just got to talkin’.”

I
try and fix my hair, but it’s unruly this morning and won’t stay down without a
ton of hairspray, so I pull it all up on top of my head in one of them top knot
thingies, which I have to say pains me immensely. As a hairdresser who takes
great pride in her work, the top knot is like the crazy cat lady equivalent of
just givin’ up. It’s an offence to all my years of studying cosmetology, but
then, I don’t normally have a man sleeping on my couch this early either, and I
don’t know what the heck to do so to hell with fixin’ my hair.

“Is
the same changing now?” Spencer asks quietly.
The same
is what he calls
the routine; he doesn’t like words that have a “roo” sound to them, and I guess
it’s the simplest way he can name the order of the motions we carry out every
day.

I
turn away from the mirror, recognizing that I’m being somewhere else when my
child needs me to be present, and I squat down to his level. “No, Spence, the
same is not changing, but would it be so bad if it did?”

He
frowns. “The same wouldn’t be the same then.”

“That’s
true, the same would be different, but we’d have a new same, and new isn’t bad,”
I say. Spencer’s brow furrows and he fidgets with the neck of his pajama top
where the tag should be, a sure sign he’s getting agitated. “New isn’t bad,
Spencer. It’s just different, and it’s okay to experience different.”

I
think it’s enough talk of change for one morning, so I tell him to run to the
kitchen and pull out the green bowl he likes to use on Thursdays while I change
into a floral print dress. I’ll have to fix myself up later because I have
clients today, but for now I just really need to tackle the man sleeping on my
couch.

***

“If
you boys are about done; I can drop you off before I take Spencer to school?” I
say, interrupting the male bonding session that’s going on in my living room. Despite
how perfect a day it is after last night’s storms, we had an awkward start.
Jake shoveled grits and bacon in his mouth—more than likely to avoid talkin’
about last night—I pretended that I wasn’t weirded out at having a man sleep
over, and Spence ate his Cheerios in stunned silence as he watched a real-life
Marine eat at the same table. After that, Spencer pulled out all of his toy
trucks to show Jake. He about floored me when I told him that he’d miss the
beach if he didn’t hurry up and he just shrugged and said, “We’d go tomorrow.”

I’m
not sure if Jake knew how monumental a thing that was, but he’d raised his brow
and glanced at me when Spencer had said it, so I was going to take a wild guess
and say he understood.

“You
don’t have to take me home,” Jake says, his eyes meeting mine. “My legs work
just fine.”

“Are
you crazy?” I shake my head and check Spencer’s school bag has everything he
needs in it. “How many miles is that?”

“A
little over two.”

I
blink in surprise.

“Give
or take,” he says sheepishly.

 “Well,
two miles or not it’s still too far after walking here in the rain last night.
So as long as you don’t mind entertaining Spencer for a few minutes more while
I get his lunch packed, I’m taking you home.”

“No,
ma’am. I don’t mind at all.”

“Stop
calling me ma’am,” I warn him.

“My
mamma’s kinda bossy,” Spencer whispers, and I chuckle to myself and head into
the kitchen.

“Can
you keep a secret?” Jake asks, and my ears prick up. I may have even stopped
rummaging through the pantry in order to hear him better. “That’s what I like
about her.”

I
don’t catch my son’s response, because I’m too busy floating away on a cloud.

 Twenty
minutes later, I wave to an especially grim Mr. Williams and buckle Spencer
into his seat. I’m just about to open the driver’s side door when I’m
intercepted by Jake. He muscles in, closer than I thought he’d be comfortable
with, and holds his hand out.

“What
are you doing?” I ask.

“Let
me drive.”

I
frown. “It’s my car.”

“Yes
it is.” He leans closer. “But you drive like a crazy person.”

“I
do not.”

“Yes,
you do.” The corner of his mouth tips up in a grin, and it’s so hard to
reconcile this playful and—if I’m not mistaken—flirty Jake with the tortured
man who’d crawled through my door last night. I am glad to see him doin’ better
though. “I’ve been hearin’ this clunk, clunk every time you start it up at the
beach. I’d like to take a closer look at that, but first, I wanna get a feel
for how she drives.”

“Jake,
I don’t need you to fix my car.”

He
leans closer to my ear and whispers, “Angel, just do as you’re told for once.”

God,
but he is good.

I
swallow hard. His gaze glued to my throat as it bobs and then travels up to my
lips. Jake moves closer still, the toes of his boots meeting my ballet flats,
his right side flush with mine from thigh to hip. I draw in a shallow breath
and tilt my chin up as he leans in.

“Eww,
gross. Are you two gonna kiss?”

And
then my eight-year-old ruins it all.

I
exhale too loudly and drop the keys in Jake’s palm, his face gone hard and
serious as he shifts back, giving me room to move away. I walk around to the
passenger side of the car and climb in as Jake folds his large frame into the
driver’s side and adjusts the seat.

He
slides the key into the ignition and the engine chokes to life. Jake cants his
head, listening intently. He hits the gas pedal a few times and I hear it, the
clunk,
clunk
he’d mentioned a moment ago.

“I
don’t know how I didn’t notice that before,” I say, amazed that he’s managed to
hear it in the past. He gives me a tight smile. His previous playfulness is
gone, and I’m beginning to wonder what I did wrong.

“Can
you bring this baby by my house later today? I want to take a look under the
hood.” He peels out of the drive. He’s a very cautious driver, sticking to the
speed limit, stopping when the light is amber and triple checking his side
mirrors as he navigates the early morning traffic at the intersection.

“I
can’t. I have clients all day.”

“Then
I’ll come to you,” he says, as if that settles it.

“Are
you a mechanic?”

“I
helped Frankenstein our trucks in Afghanistan, and my granddaddy taught me how
to restore old vehicles.” He never takes his eyes from the road as he tells me
this. “We built a couple cars from the ground up. I know enough.”

“Frankenstein?”
I ask.

“Yeah,
we were pretty hard up for parts, so we’d pull them from Humvees that’d broken
down and stitch ’em back together, so to speak.” His eyes glint with excitement
as he talks, and I have to wonder if he hadn’t lived through the hell he did,
whether he’d still be serving time in the Corps. Some men just live for war,
even long after they’ve left it. I know that from Mr. Williams. “We had a
couple of broke-down trucks get stranded on a goat track up in the mountains
that our Sergeant Major had ordered us to go get. It’d been raining for days; the
ground was just mud and slush, and that was the scariest firefight I ever found
myself in. We couldn’t see a damn thing.”

I
shiver and goose pimples break out all over my body. As Jake tells us this I
watch Spencer’s eyes grow wider and wider, and I can see he wants to hound him
with questions, but he’s likely cataloguing the information away in his mind so
he can order his thoughts properly and not get tongue-tied. I’ve seen him do
this a number of times when Mr. Williams has talked about his time in the
Marines.

“It
sounds terrifying.”

“At
the time it was.” He grins at me like a madman. “But nothin’ ever made me feel
more alive than bein’ shot at.”

“I’ll
have to take your word for it,” I say.

Jake’s
face falls, and he turns his attention back to the road as he turns the corner
onto Sea Cliff Drive.

There
I go putting my foot in my mouth again.

***

Thursdays
are what I like to call Belle days, that’s when any woman who ever held the
title Southern Belle likes to visit Big Bama Hair. My Thursdays are filled with
the saccharine scent of hairspray and Chanel No.5, which really is a nice
change from Cheerios, playdough, and poop.

Miss
Maggie, one of my regulars who’s always up to no good, sits at the basin with
solution on her head as her perm processes and her best friend, Miss Chelle,
sits under the dryer, having her hair set. Virginia—one of my least favorite
clients whom I just can’t seem to shake—sits in my chair, her hair damp fresh
from washing and ready to be cut. I’m midway through fixin’ her a glass of
sweet tea when Jake shows up at the salon door wearing a flannel shirt with the
sleeves rolled to his elbows and a pair of faded Levis that fit snugly in all
the places that count. Nuke is beside him, clearly having forgiven his owner for
locking him in the house last night.

I
swear every pair of panties in the room just disintegrates when he opens the
salon door and says, “Mornin’.”

 He’s
met with a chorus of, “Good morning” from the women in my salon, including
Chelle, who’s eighty-two in the shade and almost completely deaf on a good day
when she’s not under a dryer. I guess she’s real good at lip readin’.

He
nods to the women, looking all nervous and adorable, though that seems an odd
term for a man so hard and so big.
Oh my, I’m gonna need to turn up the AC
to full tilt
.

“Elle,
you mind if I take a look at that car now?”

“Knock
yourself out,” I reply, almost dreamily.

He
stands there a moment longer, expectantly. “The keys?”

“Oh
right, sorry,” I mumble, and set my comb and scissors down on the countertop,
then wipe my hands on my apron to a tune of tittering women. “Just a second and
I’ll grab them for you.” I turn to my clients, singling out Chelle and Maggie. “Y’all
behave.”

“Can’t
hear you, dear,” Miss Chelle replies, cupping her hand to the outside of the
dryer as if it were her ear.

“Hers
is selective hearing,” Miss Maggie tells Jake. I roll my eyes and leave the
room, grab the keys from the hall table, and bring them back to Jake. He holds
his hand out, but I snatch them away at the last minute. “You take good care of
my baby, Jake Tucker. She’s the only one I got, and God knows I can’t afford a
new one.”

“I’ll
be gentle. I promise,” he whispers, leaning in toward me so that I can smell
the cologne on his skin. Memories of cutting his hair, and the tender way he’d
touched me just a few nights ago make my head swim, and I swear I get slapped
upside the head with the stupid stick. I literally have no words for this man.
I think it’s safe to say that everyone in my salon knows I was thinking of
doing a lot more than cutting Jake’s hair. Which is just embarrassing.

He
heads out of the room and closes the door behind him. Nuke, who’d waited
patiently on the front porch, follows him to the truck where he retrieves a set
of tools from the back. I’m so thankful for the fact I work at home, and that
glass paned door I had installed was really a good idea. I just love the view
of my driveway.

“Ooh
that boy has got it bad,” Miss Maggie says.

“Never
mind the boy. Our little Ellie is smitten as a kitten,” Miss Chelle says.

“What?
No. it isn’t like that with us. We’re friends,” I assure them as I pick up my
scissors and comb. Another round of titters ensues.

“Oh
honey, who are you foolin’?” Virginia says, meeting my gaze in the mirror. Her
polished fingernails shine like bloody talons against the pages of the
Southern
Living
magazine propped on her lap. “Friends don’t sleep over at one
another’s houses only to leave at the crack of dawn.”