Something Like Normal Read online

  Jesus, this is awkward.

  My family has never been especially good at warm and fuzzy. My mom’s thing was always ferrying us to practices, supplying juice boxes at halftime, and sitting in the stands at every game. Even rainy days she’d be there, huddled under her green-and-white umbrella. Dad’s displays of affection came after a win, accompanied by a manly pat on the shoulder and an I’m proud of you, son. It’s been a long time since I got one of those. And Ryan… when I was seven and he was six, our grandpa gave me a Korean war G.I. Joe for my birthday. It was meant to be a collector’s item, but Pops said I should play with it, enjoy it. Sometimes I did, but mostly I kept it on top of my dresser because I thought it was cool. One day, Ryan took it without asking. When I complained to my dad, he told me to quit whining and let my brother play with the G.I. Joe. Ryan pulled the arm off. That pretty much sums up our relationship: I have it. He wants it. He gets it. He ruins it.

  Even so, shouldn’t it feel good to be with them again? Why do I feel closer to a group of guys I’ve known less than a year than I do my own family?

  “Did you get all the packages I sent?” Mom asks, passing me the serving dish of mashed potatoes.

  After she accepted that I was going to enlist with or without her blessing, she pursued being a Marine Mom with the same enthusiasm as being a Football Mom. She registered on a bunch of Internet USMC parent websites, slapped a yellow magnetic Support Our Troops ribbon on her SUV, and went insane with care packages. Between church groups, the different “any service member” organizations, and parents, it wasn’t unusual for a guy to get fifteen care packages at once. Getting mail was like Christmas, sitting there cross-legged on the ground opening presents. And my mom usually sent me quality stuff—instant heat packs, a coffee press and gourmet beans, and a solar shower that was stolen by one of the Afghan National Army soldiers before I even had a chance to use it.

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” I was pretty terrible at keeping in touch, but in my defense, we were cut off from the outside world for the first couple of months we were there. Then we got a satellite phone and were allowed to call home every couple of weeks, but only for about five minutes at a time. During one call I suggested she could probably cut back on the dental floss and paperback mysteries and send some school supplies for the kids who would mob us, begging for everything. “The kids went nuts for the pens and crayons.” Water. Candy. Food. Pens. I don’t know why, but they loved pens. “I’m, um—sorry I didn’t call much.”

  Her eyes widen. Probably because I’ve never been in the habit of apologizing.

  “Well, we figured you were probably busy,” she says.

  In Afghanistan, that was true, but I have no excuse for boot camp or infantry school. She sent me tons of letters and I never answered any of them. I called her on the first day of boot camp and recited the words fastened to the wall beside the phone: This is recruit Stephenson. I have arrived safely at Parris Island. Please do not send any food or bulky items to me in the mail. I will contact you in three to five days by postcard with my new address. Thank you for your support. And that was about it. Aside from that handful of five-minute phone calls, I haven’t talked to her for more than a year.

  “Ellen always called me after she got a letter from Charlie,” Mom says. “So I knew you were okay.”

  At boot camp we did everything in alphabetical order, so the two other recruits whose names I learned first were Lee Staples and Charlie Sweeney. One of them was always in front of me or behind me, depending on the whim of our drill instructors. Staples bugged me because he cried after we got our heads shaved. I mean, okay, I can see how it could be considered degrading because it strips away one of the things that sets you apart from everyone else, but what-the-fuck-ever. It grows back. Anyway, when they finally let us get to sleep that first day, after being awake more than twenty-four hours straight, Charlie and I were assigned to the same rack—Stephenson on the top bunk, Sweeney on the bottom. We were stripping down to shorts and T-shirts when Charlie said, “Hey, Stephenson, I heard if you go to the Buddhist church services on Sundays, they let you sleep.”

  “I heard,” I said. “If you claim to be Jewish, you can go to Sabbath services and still have time off on Sunday.”

  Charlie laughed. “I like the way you think.”

  I’m not going to tell you I knew right then we were going to be friends, but he wasn’t a whiner like Staples. I don’t know why it was Charlie who became my best friend. It’s not one particular reason I can identify. I had his back. He had mine. Period. Somehow I guess Charlie’s mom and mine became friends, too.

  “We’re so proud of you.” Mom’s eyes get watery and my dad nods in agreement, which makes me wonder if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse can be far behind.

  “So what was it like over there?” Dad’s eyes glow with something I haven’t seen in years. At least not while he was looking at me. “Did you kill anybody?”

  He’s curious. Who wouldn’t be? But how do I answer that question? Yes, I’ve killed, but it’s not like picking off bad guys in a video game. The first time I shot someone, I thought I was going to puke, but I couldn’t because we were in the middle of a firefight and I couldn’t stop shooting. I won’t tell my dad that. Not at dinner. Not ever.

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” I say.

  His pride fades as his eyes narrow. “Why? Do you think you’re too good—”

  “Travis, did I tell you?” Mom interrupts him. “There’s an organization in Tampa that’s been collecting school supplies for the kids—”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear about your little pet project, Linda,” Dad cuts in. I’m surprised to hear him talk this way to my mom. No matter how bad things got between him and me, he’s always been good to her.

  “No, Dad,” I say. “I don’t think I’m too good to tell you about Afghanistan. I just don’t want to talk about killing people at the fucking dinner table.” Not waiting for his response, I turn to Mom. “And I do want to hear about your project.”

  Her eyes flicker nervously toward my dad. He makes a wide-armed shrug and rolls his eyes. His Super Bowl ring flashes on his hand, a huge reminder that he is a Winner.

  “I was just—” Mom stumbles over the words, the light gone from her eyes. “I was just going to say that I’ve talked to them about starting a branch here in Fort Myers.”

  “That’s really cool.” I smile at her. The begging kids were okay at first because they were scared of us, but after a while they were grabby and demanding. I don’t tell her that, though. She seems pretty excited. “The kids go crazy for that stuff. Pens, paper, soccer balls, and those beanbag animal dolls—they lose their minds over those things.”

  “May I be excused?” Ryan balls up his napkin and drops it on his plate. “I’ve got a, um…” His gaze meets mine for a split second before sliding nervously away. A date. He has a date with Paige. “I’m meeting up with some people.”

  “Maybe Travis would like to go along,” Mom suggests.

  “I’ll pass.” The image of me riding shotgun with my brother and my ex-girlfriend almost makes me laugh. “I’m wiped out.”

  Ryan shoves away from the table and the three of us spend the rest of the meal in a silence thick with things unsaid. The only sound is the clinking of silverware against the plates. I hate that a year wasn’t enough separation to keep my dad from getting under my skin, and I hate that I let him make me feel fifteen all over again. When it’s finally over, I go to my room and lock the door.

  We got back to Camp Lejeune a couple of weeks ago and had to have a post-deployment health assessment to take care of any physical problems we developed in-country—primarily skin problems from washing in muddy canals, acne from having a constantly dirty face, bug bites, and a few guys had lingering coughs from chest infections. The evaluation is also supposed to gauge our mental wellness, but that’s a joke. We say everything is okay because the fastest way to wreck your career is to admit it’s not. So I
didn’t tell anyone about my recurring nightmare. I only told the doctor I was having trouble sleeping and he prescribed me some pills.

  They rattle as I pull the amber bottle out of my bag and dump three tablets into my hand. I swallow them dry, then ease myself to the floor and let the world fade away.

  Chapter 2

  A loud bang jolts me awake and I reach for my rifle. For a couple of seconds I panic because it’s gone, then I remember I’m in Florida and my rifle is in the armory in North Carolina.

  “Travis! Travis!” My mom is pounding on the door and she sounds frantic. I unlock it and she launches herself at me, nearly strangling me in the process. “Oh, thank God. You’re awake.”

  Something wet trickles down my bare chest. She’s crying. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “You’ve been asleep for sixteen hours.” She catches a shuddering breath. “And your door was locked. I thought—I was afraid you overdosed.”

  There are moments—thousands of them during the course of every single day—when I’m swamped with guilt that I came home alive and Charlie didn’t, but I don’t have a death wish. I scrub my eye with the heel of my hand, dislodging sixteen hours’ worth of crust. “I was just exhausted.” I pat her awkwardly on the back. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a while. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Wiping her tears on the back of her hand, she surveys the nest of blankets on the floor. “Is something wrong with your bed?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time sleeping on the ground.” There were nights we slept in holes in the ground. Other nights, we slept in abandoned compounds. Our patrol base was an abandoned schoolhouse with holes in the roof and birds in residence in the ceiling. “I’m not quite used to a bed yet.”

  She sits down on my bed. “Do you want a firmer mattress or—What happened to your legs?”

  “They’re, um…” I look down at the fading red welts that circle my ankles and creep up my calves. “They’re flea bites.”

  “Flea bites?” She looks horrified.

  “Yeah, well, after a while everything gets really dirty,” I explain. “And the people over there have mud-walled courtyards around their houses where they keep their livestock. Sometimes we’d sleep in there.”

  Charlie’s mom sent him a flea collar once that he strapped around his ankle, but it didn’t work. We called him Fido for a while after that, but he’d just bark and go, “Devil dog! Oorah!” which would crack us up every time.

  “You slept with—” Her hand comes up to her mouth. “I can’t—I don’t even know what to say.” Her eyes fill again.

  Afghanistan sucked. In the summer we sweated our balls off in the hot sun. In the winter we had to battle hypothermia. It was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life, even colder than when we lived in Green Bay. Poisonous snakes. Scorpions. Flies. Fleas. Sandstorms. Knowing that every time we left our patrol base, someone was going to shoot at us. I don’t miss it exactly, but it feels as if I’ll never be fully at home here again. “It wasn’t so bad.”

  “There’s a party tonight at the Manor.” Ryan pokes his head into my room after another uncomfortable family dinner of awkward small talk and things left unsaid. I’m unpacking my bag. The dresser drawers, I discover, are empty—apparently Mom didn’t keep everything the same. Before, she was always nagging me to dress nicer and was embarrassed that I bought clothes at the Salvation Army. She probably had a field day throwing away all my ratty T-shirts and jeans with holes. Doesn’t matter. None of them would have fit.

  “You interested?” Ryan asks.

  The Manor is a dilapidated rental house on the beach that’s part commune, part concert venue. My friend Eddie Ramos has been living there since graduation, but we’ve been partying there since we were freshmen. I’m not sure I’m ready to see my old friends yet, but I don’t want to spend the evening watching military crime shows with my parents. Not only because it’s always a Marine who ends up dead on those shows, but because I can’t take another uncomfortable minute in their silence. I don’t know what’s going on with them. I always thought they were solid. “Yeah, sure.”

  Ryan dangles the car keys from his fingers. “Wanna drive?”

  I snatch them. “Meet you at the car.”

  Outside, I lower myself into the driver’s seat of the red VW Corrado that used to be mine and run my hands along the steering wheel. The faint scent of pot mixed with McDonald’s brings back memories of all the hours I spent with this car—working on it, driving aimlessly around Fort Myers with friends, messing around with Paige in the backseat. I found the car on the Internet when I was fifteen and bought it with my own money. Did all of the work on it, too. It bothers me a little that Ryan felt entitled to appropriate the car after I left, but I’ve never said anything. I wasn’t using it. Now… it doesn’t really feel like mine anymore.

  Ryan drops into the passenger seat and the scent of cologne overwhelms the car. I cough and roll down my window. “Damn, Rye, did you bathe in that shit?”

  “Paige likes it,” he says. “She bought it for my birthday.”

  My eyebrows hitch up. “She did?”

  He nods and when he gives me a cocky grin, I see the chip in his front tooth from the time he wiped out at the skate-park. There’s so much wrong with this conversation, I don’t know where to begin. Paige hated when I smelled like anything but me.

  If Kenny “Kevlar” Chestnut were here right now, he’d theorize in his Tennessee drawl that chicks are naturally attracted to the scent of badass. He’s a wiry little guy with bright red hair and a lower lip constantly bulging with Skoal. We call him Kevlar because he’s the only one in our squad who could stomach the pork rib MRE, so we figure his stomach must be lined with Kevlar. He talks real fast, as if he doesn’t get all the words out at once, they’ll disappear. He talks shit about girls, even though he has zero experience and even less game. Charlie never let him get away with it.

  “I call bullshit, Kenneth,” he said once, after Kevlar claimed he had sex with a University of Tennessee cheerleader. “You’re just a red-haired little bast—”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Kevlar gets all huffy when we make fun of his hair or call attention to the fact that he is the smallest guy in our platoon. “Solo’s got red hair, too.” Mine is closer to brown than red, but he thinks including me in his affliction will lend him credibility.

  I laughed and dropped my arm around his shoulder. “The color of your hair is irrelevant when you’re as handsome as me.”

  The memory brings both happiness and pain. I squeeze my eyes shut and inhale a deep breath.

  “You okay, bro?” Ryan brings me back to the moment. “This whole thing with Paige isn’t—”

  “Messed up?” I look over at him, with his shaggy hair and the shell necklace he wears because he thinks it makes him look like a surfer, and his face is as earnest as I’ve ever seen it. He really likes her. “Completely, but—” I cut a cross in the air the way the priest does at church, and start the engine. “You have my blessing.”

  We haven’t even gotten out of our development when I notice a lot of play in the clutch as I shift from gear to gear.

  “How long has the clutch been like this?” I ask.

  “Like what?” Ryan says.

  “Burned out.”

  “It seemed okay to me.”

  I let out the clutch and the car stutters as it accelerates. “Okay? You work at a fucking VW dealership.”

  “I’m not a mechanic.”

  “You don’t have to be a mechanic to know when your clutch is messed up.” I’m probably angrier than I should be. I know how to replace a burned-out clutch, but it’s the principle of the thing. There was nothing wrong with the car when I left. This is classic Ryan. And my car is Korean war G.I. Joe.

  He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t say anything at all. He just looks all butthurt—like I’m the bad guy—and then turns his face toward the window.

  As we head toward the beach I notice the differences in the landsc
ape of the city. New businesses that weren’t there last year. Old businesses that are gone. It’s like a whole chunk of time has just… disappeared. The songs on the radio are different. The faces on the celebrity tabloids at the airport newsstand were people I didn’t recognize. There’s even a new American fucking Idol.

  We pull up in front of the Manor, and I guess I’m expecting it to be different, too. Except the white cottage with the crooked porch steps never changes. There’s a beer can on the porch railing that’s been sitting there as long as I can remember. Even on the rare occasion someone decides to clean the place, no one ever touches the beer can. It’s become art.

  “Trav, dude, where you been?” The first person to greet me is Cooper Middleton, half-baked and heavy-lidded, a halo of pot smoke around his dirty blond head. He’s sitting in the same saggy lawn chair he was sitting in the last time I was there. Maybe he’s been there the whole time. With Cooper, it’s not implausible. He graduated with me, but as far as I know he’s never had a job—unless selling weed counts.

  “Afghanistan.”

  He looks off into the middle distance for a moment, a ghost of a smile on his face, and I can tell he’s somewhere else. “Oh, yeah… sweet.”

  The living room is a mosh pit, all the thrift store furniture pushed up against the walls to make room for dancing, and a band—made up of some of the people who live at the Manor—warms up in the dining room. As I walk through the house, people reach out to me, shaking my hand and welcoming me home. Instead of feeling welcome, I feel hemmed in, like at the airport. Jittery. Freaked out at being in the middle of a crowd without my rifle.

  “I need a beer,” I say to no one, and my trigger finger flexes as I press my way through the crowd to the kitchen. Paige is perched on the counter, a plastic cup and cigarette in the same hand, gesturing widely as she talks to a group of girls. Paige has an opinion about everything and sometimes she will not shut up. But her black hair is marble shiny and her plush lips are stained red from whatever she’s drinking, so who cares what she’s saying? Her eyes break away from her friends and meet mine. I feel the magnetic pull and have to remind myself she’s not mine anymore.