Her eyes are full and she puts her fingers over her mouth as she smiles. I stand there for a moment, looking out at the crowded room. It’s as if all of St. Augustine turned out for this. Family. High school friends. Ex-girlfriends, maybe. Someone here has to be more qualified to make this speech than I am.
“I, um—I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what I was going to say and now that I’m here, I still have no idea,” I say. “The things that keep coming to mind are not really appropriate, like his fondness for Miss November, or the time he put… Yeah, never mind about that.”
I clear my throat and look for a spot in the back of the room, so I don’t have to see tissues and tears. Instead, I see Charlie. He’s leaning against the wall like he’s waiting to hear what I’m going to say about him. Like he’s waiting for me to tell his truth.
“The thing is, Charlie was just… When I first met him, I thought he was a complete motard—ridiculously motivated to be a Marine, you know? Because he’d volunteer for anything, and who does that? But then I realized that’s who he was. He attacked life so he wouldn’t miss out on anything, and if I can tell you one thing about Charlie that you don’t already know it’s that he went out of this world as bravely as he made his way through it.”
My eyes search out Charlie, but he’s gone.
I look at his mom.
“He was the person all of us should be, but most of us aren’t. And if I could have taken his place to buy him a little more time in the world, I’d have done it. I’m sorry I couldn’t.”
Ellen shakes her head and I know she’s telling me I don’t have to be sorry, but how can I not be? How can it be okay that I’m here and Charlie isn’t? I step away from the podium and my empty seat is right there. But when Charlie’s mom comes up to introduce Peralta, I quietly excuse myself to her.
And I leave.
Chapter 14
Harper says my name as I leave the room, and even though I’m being disrespectful for walking out in the middle of the memorial service, I don’t stop. I can’t stop. Because my eyes are watering and I’m afraid I’m about to lose my shit. I walk fast, my shoes making sharp taps on the sidewalk as I head toward the hotel. My hands clench and unclench at my sides. I suck in large lungfuls of air and release long breaths. I need to get away from downtown St. Augustine, where tourists are still roaming the streetlamp-lit sidewalks, blissfully unaware that Charlie Sweeney is dead.
I take a shortcut down a side alley that leads to the back entrance of the hotel. Heading for the pool, I work open the clasp on the collar of my uniform. The pool deck is empty in the fading light and all the lounge chairs are lined up in a straight row with fresh towels folded on the ends. I drop the heavy jacket on one chair and my trousers on another as I strip down to my boxers. Leaving my socks balled up at the edge of the pool, I dive in.
As I churn through the water, my breath and brain work in tandem and I don’t have to think. I only count my strokes—one, two, one, two, one, two—until the muscles in my shoulders burn and the sadness, the rage, I feel is under control. I have no idea how long I’ve been in the water or how many lengths I’ve swum when I stop. The sky has faded from dusk to dark—so I know it’s been a long time—and Harper is standing at the edge of the pool, holding a towel.
My arms shaking from the exertion, I haul myself out of the water and stand there on the pool deck, dripping water everywhere. As she wraps the towel around my shoulders, her eyes meet mine. “You okay?”
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.