The Falling, page 6
Yikes.
I swiped under my eyes. The mascara on my lower lashes had left little flakes of black across the top of my cheekbone. I was pale. Abnormally so. I slapped and pinched my cheeks a little and sucked in my lips and counted to ten. It was what the girls my age were doing on Instagram and getting thousands of views doing so. It worked, but I looked way too frazzled for this evening. I should have finished styling my hair. I turned to scan my backseat, hoping to find one of my gigantic cloth scrunchies. I had at least two in my car at all times. Minimal time spent, with the illusion of effort. I watched as Kael stuck his hand under the metal sheet above his front tire and felt along the surface. He tried to call someone else and I finally found a white hair tie and pulled half of my hair up. A lot of loose pieces of my wavy hair came down. I messed with them a little, and then put gloss on my lips. I glanced at my reflection one last time, and when Kael hung up the phone, I closed the mirror.
The more I watched him, standing there in the dark, pacing around with his iPhone going back and forth from his pocket to his cheek, the more I felt uneasy about this whole situation. I thought Elodie’s excitement over his arrival might be her loneliness getting the better of her—someone familiar taking the place of the husband she missed so much. She was so lonely lately that some days she cried all night. This Kael guy was the closest person to her husband, and I was the closest friend she had, so I needed to be on guard with him, making sure he was not just spying on his buddy’s pregnant wife. Soldiers did that more often than you’d think.
I was about to Google Clayton County and his license plate number when he opened my car door and leaned down, totally dominating the space, or lack of, between us. I leaned away from him; it almost felt like I had to.
“You can go,” he told me.
I didn’t know him well enough to decipher what he was really thinking. It almost felt rude. I wanted to challenge him, to taunt him for being locked out of his car, but I was about to piss myself; I was already late and had no room to be snarky. But I was curious about this soldier.
I looked at his truck and back to him. “Can you not get in?”
He sighed heavily and shook his head. I could see the frustration emanating from his body. He seemed like someone on the brink of losing a very carefully crafted control. So different from the man standing in my hallway minutes ago and sitting calmly in my car on the drive over. His breathing was dancing the line of composure and chaos. In my twenty years on this earth, I’d come across many a frustrated man. Why did this one spark my curiosity so uniquely?
“My keys are supposed to be here on my tire. But I’ll find my way back, it’s cool.”
“I’m so late to this thing I have to do, but honestly—”
“The dinner? I don’t think you should be any later than you already are,” he cautioned.
So he was paying attention.
“Yeah, the dinner. I can’t take you back before . . . but maybe I can call my dad and cancel. It’s not like—”
Kael interrupted me. “It’s cool, for real.”
I couldn’t just leave him here. There were barely any cars parked in the lot, and I couldn’t see other soldiers walking or standing guard anywhere. I really didn’t want to leave him stranded.
“Why haven’t you left yet?”
I opened my door and got out of the car. “I don’t know. I feel bad,” I replied. “It’s a long walk back. Do you have another set of keys somewhere? Or a friend who can come help you?”
“All my friends are in Afghanistan,” he said.
My chest burned.
“Sorry,” I said, leaning my back against my car.
“For what?”
We kept eye contact until he blinked. I quickly looked away.
“I don’t know. The war?” It sounded so stupid coming from my mouth. An Army brat apologizing to a soldier for a war that had started when they were in kindergarten. “Most people wouldn’t have asked me, ‘For what?’”
Kael’s tongue grazed his bottom lip; he tucked it between his teeth. The parking lot lights above us clacked on, buzzing, breaking our silence.
“I’m not most people.”
“I can tell.”
The lights shone through the windows of the barracks across the street, but it didn’t seem like he lived there. That meant he was either married or higher-ranking than his age would suggest. Soldiers below a certain rank could live off-post only if they were married, but I couldn’t imagine that a married man would be sleeping on my chair right after a deployment. Besides, he wasn’t wearing a ring.
I was checking out his ACU jacket for his rank patch when I saw his eyes on me.
“Are you coming with me, Sergeant, or are you going to make me stand in this parking lot until you call a locksmith for your car?” I looked at the patch on his chest, his last name stitched in capital letters: Martin. He was so young to be a sergeant.
“Come on.” I put my hands up, begging. “You don’t know me, but this is what will happen if I leave you here. About five seconds after I drive away, I’ll feel guilty, and I’ll obsess over it the entire way to my dad’s. I’ll imagine you getting hit by a car or passing out or something. Some awful death scenario, and then by the time the dinner is over it’ll be worse. Way worse.” I rolled my wrist in a circle and looked him right in the eyes.
My mouth was dry. I was talking a lot, and not slowly. It didn’t seem to annoy him and I wasn’t even getting that little bubble of fear of rejection from basic contact with other humans like I usually did. I continued, more animated.
“I’m talking apology texts to Elodie, who’ll be stressed because she worries about everyone, and then we’re talking the guilt level of stressing out a pregnant woman, and good Lord, who knows what will happen to the baby?”
“The Lord,” he said randomly. I studied the scar in his eyebrow as he spoke. It was small but somehow made his look more interesting.
“What?”
“You said, ‘Who knows what will happen.’ So, I answered you.” He didn’t smile, even when I nearly cackled. I covered my mouth with my hands to keep my laughter in.
This guy was the kind of funny everyone wanted to be. The kind who could just say random stuff like “the Lord” and it was effortlessly funny. He was probably never awkward, and he seemed like he knew he was good at humor. He didn’t physically show it, but I could hear it.
“Are you always funny?” I asked him.
He shook his head, looking away from me. I stared at him, but he didn’t let up or look at me.
“Anyway, I’ll have to drive around trying to find you if you haven’t made it back yet. It’s messy, Kael, and probably easier if you just get in. I’m sure my dad’s called me at least five—”
“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in mock defeat. I nodded, smiling in my victory, and you know what? He almost smiled back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
No matter where we were stationed, my dad always chose to live within the gates of the post, in the housing that was offered. From both of the Carolinas, down to Georgia, to Texas. I didn’t mind it so much when I was young, because the small handful of friends I had lived very close by, but as we moved, then moved again, and again, it got old fast. I started to hate the groomed cul-de-sacs, all the American flags and impeccable yards, and the lines of cars at each gate every single time we left the post. The older Austin and I got, the more we hated it. But our dad loved his Army life: the commissary and the PX convenience store, both tax-free, and the company where he worked every day just down the street. He felt empowered in this domain, but as Austin and I grew up, we started to feel trapped.
Austin and my caged feeling was nothing compared to our mother’s. When we were younger, she was alive and bright with the excitement of a new place, a new environment every time we moved. But as the weeks went by she would begin to pace around the new house, picking at little things, rearranging the dolls in her open glass cabinet, to introduce her own bit of chaos to the pristine quarters my dad expected her to maintain. She was always up, up, up or down, down, down. There was never an in-between.
There were these hours of madness that seamlessly morphed into days of lunacy. They began in small stretches of mornings when the curtains were never opened, lunches weren’t packed, and my dad yelled about the empty coffeepot or the laundry left in the dryer for days. My mom would start to smoke again on the porch, staring at the replicated identical houses on the street. When it got really bad the couch turned into her bed and Austin and I knew better than to comment on our parents’ sleeping in separate parts of the house. We also sort of enjoyed the peace that came with their distance.
As I stared at the road in front of me, Kael’s quietness allowed me to continue thinking about the slow unraveling of Mrs. Fischer the First. Her decline was subtle, with each episode lasting only a few days and mostly peaking when my dad was at work. She had two personas for most of our life, and we watched her switch gears in an instant from military wife to a woman falling apart: the paranoia, the anxiety, the messiness of her ashtrays on the porch, and the stains on her clothes. By the summer after eighth grade, her mania had completely taken over. She woke up later and later, took fewer showers, stopped dancing, and even stopped pacing. She would stare at the wall in silence for hours, and even her fairy tales turned sinister and eventually burned out.
“You think I’m funny?” Kael’s voice drew me out of my memories of my mom just as a knot in my chest was beginning to move up toward my throat.
He was eyeing the green light above us. I pressed the gas.
“What?” I faltered, clearing my throat. I was reliving my childhood while he was still on a question I had asked him. My chest was aching, and focusing on his cool voice and his steady eyes helped fade the image of my mom.
He turned his body toward me. I kept my attention on the road. We drove past a Subway and it reminded me of my brother always craving their cookies when he was stoned.
“People don’t usually ask other people if they’re funny. It kind of ruins the joke,” he said, and stared out the window.
I gave him an annoyed look. “Do you want me to apologize for asking you about your humor? Is this a thing?” I turned onto the main road and tried to figure out where I was.
“No. Not a thing.”
“Okay, so we’re going to my dad’s house and not only am I late, which he hates, he’s kind of . . .” I exhaled, trying to pinpoint such a complicated man with one word. “He’s sort of—”
“Racist?” Kael asked.
“What? No!” I felt a little defensive over his question, until I turned toward him and saw the look on his face. It said that he figured that was what I was going to say and that I couldn’t find a tactful way to say it.
I didn’t know what to think about that.
“He’s not racist,” I told Kael as we drove. I couldn’t think of anything my dad had ever said or done to make me believe he was. “He’s just kind of an asshole.”
Kael nodded and leaned back in his seat.
“This dinner will drag on longer than it should. Too much food for three people. Too much matching cutlery, too much everything.”
Kael nodded again. Ugh, his silence here wasn’t helpful. He wasn’t prepared for my father.
I made sure to stay on the main road, really the only route I could navigate without getting lost in the sprawl of Fort Benning. We were less than five minutes from my dad’s house. But I was more than half an hour late. It would be fine. I was an adult, and something came up. They would get over it. I repeated that to myself and began to concoct an excuse that didn’t necessarily involve a stranger staying at my house.
My phone vibrated in the cupholder between us, and I reached for it the moment I saw that it was Austin calling. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d returned one of my calls.
“I’m going to get this, it’s—” I didn’t finish explaining to Kael.
“Hello?” I spoke into the phone but got only silence.
I lifted it from my cheek. “Damn it.” I’d missed the call. I tried to call him back, but he didn’t pick up. I hated feeling like I let him down by missing a call or not being there for him, even though he had no problem ignoring my calls and casually treating me like an inconvenience.
“If you see the screen light up, tell me. The sound doesn’t always work.” I looked down at my phone and Kael agreed with a nod.
“Another broken thing,” I swear I heard him say. But when I asked him what he’d mumbled, he shrugged.
I turned onto my dad’s street and tried to spend the last two minutes of the drive conjuring up an achievement, or something I could stretch to sound like one. I would need something to talk about after the scolding for my extreme tardiness. My dad always asked his darling wife and me the same questions. The difference was, it only took her planting a flower bed or going to someone else’s kid’s birthday party to get praise, when I could save a small village and he would be like, That’s great, Kare, but it was a small village. Austin once saved a slightly larger village and Estelle created two villages.
It wasn’t healthy to compare myself to his new wife or to my brother—I was self-aware enough to know that. But the way he cosseted her still bugged the hell out of me. And then there was the fact that Austin was my dad’s doppelgänger, and I was my mom’s. We were twins, but he looked like him and I looked like her. This worked out better for my brother than it did for me; to my dad, I was a copy, and a constant reminder of my mother.
“We’re almost there. My dad’s been in the Army a long time.”
Kael was a soldier; he wouldn’t need more of an explanation. He nodded beside me and looked out the passenger window.
“How long have you been in?” I asked.
I heard him swallow before he spoke. “Little over three years.”
“And you’ve already deployed?”
He nodded. “Twice.”
I was curious to know more, to ask him if he liked being in the Army, but we were pulling up in front of my dad’s house.
“We’re here,” I warned him. “It’s like a whole fiasco. Three courses. Lots of small talk and coffee after. Two hours, minimum.”
“Two hours?” He blinked.
“I know. I know. You can take my car if you want to skip it, as long as you pick me up later.”
“No, dinner’s cool. Anything else I should know?”
“My dad doesn’t do strangers. We could lie and say you’re my brother’s—Austin’s—friend? He’s my twin.”
“Austin. Got it.” Kael opened the passenger door and leaned down to talk to me while I was still in my seat.
I checked my hair in the mirror. It was almost dry. The air was thick with humidity and it showed. I wiped away the little black specks of mascara under my eyes.
I grabbed my phone. Austin hadn’t called back. The pounding guilt was there again for not answering the call. It was only one call, I reminded myself.
“I’ll tell you, however awful you think it’s going to be, it’s gonna be worse than that.” The more I thought about it, he probably should have stayed in the car. I didn’t even know him and he wasn’t exactly friendly—but neither was my dad.
“Mhm,” I thought I heard him say. I looked up as the passenger door shut. The reality of just how bad an idea it was to bring a stranger to Tuesday dinner was sinking in.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I was fidgety, wiping my hands on my legs. I always did that when I was nervous. We walked up the sidewalk as the little solar light trail was turning on with the sun going down. The house was brick, recently power-washed, and clean as always
“I’ll do the talking,” I said to Kael, as we approached the door. “Let me explain why we’re late. Why I’m late.” Then it dawned on me who I was talking to. A soldier wouldn’t have a problem being quiet, especially not this one.
I really could have used a shot of tequila, or some magic pill to get rid of the race of thoughts tearing at my mind. Distracted by my anxiety, I started to knock on the white wooden door, then realized what I was doing, opened it, and took my shoes off, suddenly mortified that Kael could see I didn’t have matching socks on. He politely took his boots off, setting them next to my little sneakers.
“One of the many rules in this house,” I whispered to him, and he nodded, looking me in the eyes instead of around the room.
He followed me into the kitchen, which was filled with the aroma of honey and cinnamon, and what might have been ham. It smelled like a holiday.
“Hey! You made it. I was getting a little worried . . .” Estelle greeted me like she usually did. Fake. Whether it was excitement or worry, it was all fake.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I had to stay behind a little at work, um . . . and then I was helping Elodie’s friend. I mean, Austin’s friend. Well, he’s sort of everyone’s friend.” I turned to introduce Kael. I was clearly freaking the hell out and we had been in the kitchen for maybe thirty seconds, max.
Estelle wasn’t doing the best job, either, at hiding her surprise over the extra body in the room. “Oh, well . . . hey. Hi! I’m Estelle.” Her big earrings shook with her head, and I found myself sort of using Kael’s body as a shield from her.
My dad was seated at the head of the table when Kael and I entered the dining room. He might have been reading the Army Times or listening to the radio, but no, he was sitting in his king chair in silence. Just waiting. His confused look turned to stone as he stared at us in the entryway. I took him in, sitting there with his craggy face and sparse white hair. It was really thinning now. So was his papery skin. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family turned to snow early. It looked beautiful on the women—at least it did in photographs—but I secretly hoped I would take after my mom, as I always had. She was eternal summer.
