The Survivor Read online

  The young man who dragged himself to shore stands sheepishly at the outskirts of the cluster. Wrapped in a towel, the woman turns to thank Nate, providing his first full glimpse of her. Her lips are big, almost too big, and the shape of her mouth leaves them between a sneer and a smile. She has creamy white skin and a turned-up nose with a scattering of freckles across the bridge that seem out of place, like they’ve showed up to the wrong party. Her blond hair is cropped tight, short enough to be daring. Her features carry it off, but then Nate thinks they could carry off anything. One flash of that quick, wide grin and he’d not notice if she were wearing a Carmen Miranda hat piled with produce. She has her original, factory-issue breasts—a rarity in Los Angeles—and her body is lean, slim-hipped. Usually he gravitates to girls with a little more meat on their bones, but he is quick to realize that there isn’t much sense in comparing her to anyone who came before.

  She introduces herself as Janie. Hovering off Nate’s shoulder, Charles stage-whispers, “Dude, she’s hot,” once again narrating the thunderbolt obvious.

  Nate offers his hand. “Nate Overbay.” And they shake, which feels a bit ludicrous given that their bare bodies have spent the previous fifteen minutes glued together.

  At once Janie’s date is by her side, asking Nate, “Can I give her a ride home? Or you gonna handle that, too?”

  Nate thinks, Now would be a really good time to not say anything.

  She and the guy begin to argue, Janie offering apologetic glances at Nate until the scene grows uncomfortable. Nate retreats from the commotion, Charles berating him all the way back to their crappy Westwood apartment for not getting her number. Lying awake that night, Nate realizes that Charles was once again dead-on and resigns himself to a lifetime of regret.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Nate and Charles are eating Mama Celeste microwave pizza and watching Melrose Place when the doorbell rings. Nate answers and finds Janie outside, double-checking an address she has scrawled on her palm. Her short, wet hair sticks out at all angles, fresh from a shower, and she smells of lavender. Before he can figure out how to talk, she says, “I can’t stop thinking about it. How you pulled me out of the water.”

  She has the faintest trace of a lisp, just enough to keep him in mind of her mouth, those lips shaping themselves around each word, however imperfectly.

  Nate’s heart beats a double-time rhythm. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you either.”

  “I tried,” she says, agitated. “I thought about all the things I probably wouldn’t like about you. All the stuff we’d fight about if we ever actually were together. How you really aren’t that good-looking.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because of my boyfriend.” Her hands tug at the back pockets of her jeans. A one-shouldered shrug. “Ex-boyfriend now.” She lifts her fingers to the echo of a bruise around his eye where her skull cracked him in the surf.

  They step into a kiss, and Charles’s voice floats from the other room, “Dude, hurry up. Heather Locklear’s in a frickin’ nightie.”

  * * *

  Janie and Nate are instantly inseparable. That weekend they sit cross-legged on his bed, nose to nose, engulfed in conversation about their childhoods, and, as is apt to happen, they start making out. He begins to move her horizontal, then stops himself.

  She looks up, those lashes framing her large blue eyes. “What?”

  “I can’t decide if I want to have sex with you or keep talking to you.”

  “That,” she says, “is the finest compliment I’ve been paid in all my twenty years.”

  Inevitably, sex wins out. They lie facing each other afterward, breathing hard, Nate’s cupped hand tracing the flushed dip of her side. Her straw-colored bangs are now dark, sweat-pasted to her forehead. “What do you think about seeing other people?” she begins tentatively. “I know a lot of guys get weird around commitment.…”

  “Commitment?” Nate says. “I love commitment.”

  Charles goes from scorned buddy to third wheel to joint best friend. Janie studies biology and French nearby at Pepperdine, but when she and Nate are apart, the half hour between campuses feels like a transatlantic separation. They are still young enough to pine as though pining were an Olympic event. Though they see each other almost every day, they pen indulgent letters, drunk on bad poetics. “Jesus H.,” Charles says, uncrumpling a rough draft he lifted from Nate’s trash can, “you’re turning into a Celine Dion song.”

  On the occasions when Janie is dressed up and doesn’t turn heads in a restaurant or bar, Nate is surprised. Yet this makes her somehow more special, that she is not as arresting to everyone, that her grace and manner put a hook in his limbic system as if she were designed for him and him alone.

  They are engaged within three months.

  * * *

  She hails from Wisconsin, a normal childhood and family, with antecedents she calls Gammie and Papa. “What if your dad doesn’t like me?” he asks, and she laughs. “He won’t like you.” Their circle of friends, however, is thrilled; they are the first to take the leap. They tell and retell their origin story, embellishing it by degrees, and he knows that by their fiftieth anniversary it will involve his rescuing her from a tidal wave in a tropical monsoon. Every time she gets to the rescue, no matter what company they’re in, she takes his hand and quotes him back to him: “‘Stop fighting,’ you told me. ‘I got you.’”

  They marry by spring. After the Olive Garden reception, exhausted and half drunk on bad Chianti, they collapse on the hotel mattress, Janie kicking off her heels, her white sundress unzipped. “Okay, Husband,” she says sleepily, “we have to consummate this thing.” That laugh. “You on top?”

  Nate mumbles, “I would if I knew which direction that was.”

  “Give you a hundred dollars.”

  “I’m a grand, minimum.”

  “We have to. Or it’s not legal.”

  “Right.”

  “And I might change my mind here.”

  By morning they are legal. They honeymoon at Nate and Charles’s apartment, since they blew all their money on the fifty-person affair and their night at the Santa Monica Holiday Inn. Someday, they vow, when they have money, they will go to Paris for a makeup honeymoon, but until then they will always have Westwood. They spend their time drinking root-beer floats in bed and studying for midterms. It is like playing house without the house.

  “Would you like Eggos in bed, Wife? On our finest paper plate?”

  “Thank you, Husband. That would be delightful.”

  A week later she crawls under the sheets with him and announces, “We are having a baby.”

  All around him the world seems to pull itself into wonderful alignment. He blinks back emotion. “Are you sure?”

  “The pee stick doesn’t lie. And five of them certainly do not.”

  They move into a closet-size apartment of their own. Janie swells, her tiny frame accommodating near-impossible proportions. A former Boy Scout, Charles buys a pager for Nate. He is in Abnormal Psych when it goes off; her water has broken. Everything is a blur between Franz Hall and the delivery ward. She is growling and clawing the sheets, and when she takes his hand, she nearly crushes the bones of his fingers. “Look at me,” he says. “I got you.”

  That night they crowd into her single hospital bed, a threesome. Two days later the infant remains Baby Overbay. As Nate steers Janie out in a wheelchair, the pink bundle in her lap, she says, “We’ll name her after the first thing we see when we make it outta here.”

  Nate slows as they near the nurses’ station. He says, “And how is little Garbage Can sleeping?”

  Janie snorts, covers her mouth. “You know, it’s been hard ever since Homeless Guy started teething.”

  A passing grandmother in the elevator gives them a dirty look, but they can’t stop laughing. “Cat Ass really got your eyes,” Nate says through tears.

  Still laughing, they push past automated doors into daylight. Janie gazes up a
t the brilliant blue sky, and her breath catches in her throat.

  “Cielle,” she says.

  * * *

  They settle back into their tiny Westwood apartment. Charles brings a beautiful gift—a wooden stepstool with Cielle’s name carved out, each letter a colored puzzle piece. They study, parent, juggle schedules, and somehow graduate. Nate starts a corporate job with a department store as a buyer of men’s suits. Janie enrolls in nursing school.

  A month before Cielle’s third birthday, he manages a VA home loan, the incipient Paris re-honeymoon fund is happily reapportioned, and they get luckier than anyone could expect with a two-story bank-repo fixer-upper in a great part of Santa Monica. When they pull up in a U-Haul, Janie stops midway across the front lawn, crying with gratitude.

  At night and on weekends, he slaves on the house, putting in floorboards, repainting, replacing iron pipes with copper. Every few months they mark off Cielle’s height on her door jamb, the lines stacking up. One Tuesday morning Janie shakes him awake early and they sit in horror, clutching hands, watching footage of those 767s crashing into the towers again and again and again. Janie casts a dark glance through the open doorway to the laundry room, where his camouflage field jacket hangs drying from his last drill weekend. Upstairs, Cielle’s bedroom door opens, and he rises silently to get her.

  In the blink of an eye, Cielle is seven, her dark hair taken up in pigtails. The week after her birthday, they go for a long-overdue family portrait at Sears. Despite the photographer’s entreaties, they can’t get Cielle to focus. Isaac at school has introduced her to armpit farts, so every pose is bookended with: “Didja hear?”

  Janie: “No.”

  “How ’bout now?”

  Finally Nate swings Cielle upside down until she’s red-faced from giggling, and the three of them topple over onto the plush blue mats, Janie sitting behind Nate, propping him up, Cielle squeezing her in a side hug, all three of them captured in the flash with indelicate openmouthed laughs. After a family vote, the glossy portrait goes above their mantel. That night he and Janie read The Lorax to Cielle, then go downstairs, drink red wine, and watch The West Wing. He rubs Janie’s feet and catches her looking at the portrait and shaking her head, and then they both crack up.

  Nestled in the warmth of the couch, his wife’s feet in his lap, his daughter soundly asleep overhead, he appreciates how their life is a quiet kind of spectacular, a bubble of bliss insulated from the horrors of the outside world.

  In three days’ time that bubble will pop.

  Chapter 6

  Standing with his ROTC battalion in neat formation on the pristine green lawn of the Los Alamitos Training Base, Nate senses a new kind of sharpness in the air. At his side, Charles casts him a wary eye and says, “There’s no free lunch.”

  Sure enough the sergeant appears, grimacing beneath his patrol cap, and paces before them with the ramrod posture of a man who has seen too many war movies. “We’ve known this was coming for a long time now, gents. Yesterday I got the order that we’re going to the Fight. We’ll be deploying for an eighteen-month rotation.”

  Nate closes his eyes. He thinks of the family portrait above the mantel, Janie reclined on the couch with her feet in his lap, the Lorax lifting himself up, up, and away by the seat of his pants.

  He tells Janie immediately, of course, but they wait for the weekend for him to break the news to Cielle. At bedtime she shifts beneath the covers and fixes her serious gaze on him. “I wanna go with you.”

  He forces a smile, though it feels plastic across his face. “It’s a long flight, honey.”

  “Will there be snacks?”

  Nate swallows around the bulge in his throat. “I’ll miss you.”

  “If I go with you, you won’t hafta miss me.”

  He stays with her until she falls asleep, and when he slips from her room, he finds Janie just outside, sitting in the hall. He offers a hand, and she wipes her nose and rises like a lady, and they head back to their bedroom.

  * * *

  The battalion is deposited on an air base in the middle of nowhere, positioned for missions into rural towns. In the Sandbox heat dominates every waking minute. The thermometer regularly creeps to 120; some days Nate pictures it making a cartoon bulge. The soldiers hump an unreasonable amount of gear—ammo and water, flak jackets and helmets, M16s and Beretta M9s coated with PVD film to withstand the sand, which rises into yellow-orange dust storms at the slightest provocation. Grit gets in their guns, their sweat; it turns the collars of their green-and-khaki ACUs to sandpaper. Nate’s rucksack frame digs into his shoulder above the flak jacket, buffing the skin to an angry red. The moisture-wicking socks don’t wick. No matter how much he drinks, he still pisses bright yellow.

  A few weeks in, while sweeping a house, they come upon a retarded man-boy shackled to an outhouse. The weathered soldiers joke and laugh, and Nate, who has lost his breath at the sight, realizes that he will need to navigate a steep learning curve to make it here.

  Somehow, despite it all, Charles’s optimism remains undiminished. He is one of the rare few for whom war is not hell. On patrol he is laid back, deals easily with the locals, and has a sixth sense for snipers.

  The months blend into a single sun-baked episode. They get shot at and do some shooting, mostly returning fire at sand dunes and heaps of rubble. They play policeman and janitor and try to avoid getting blown up by IEDs, car bombs, and booby-trapped corpses.

  During morning formation one day, it is announced that their eighteen-month deployment has been extended to twenty-two months. That night Nate takes a very long shower. He buys an AT&T card at the PX and heads to the phone center. The booths are lined wall to wall, as in a prison, with hard wooden chairs. In the stall he is assigned for his ten-minute allotment, someone has scrawled, IF THE ARMY WANTED YOU TO HAVE A WIFE, THEY WOULD’VE ISSUED YOU ONE.

  Janie’s voice trembles when she hears him, as it always does. “Still alive?”

  “I think so.”

  “Cielle keeps calling you on her play phone, having conversations with you. She sits there dialing and dialing.”

  His mouth is too dry to swallow. “Can I talk to her?”

  “Of course. Hang on.”

  Some rustling, then Cielle says, “Knock-knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Smell mop.”

  Nate smiles. “I won’t do it. I shall not. I shall not be fooled.”

  Cielle giggles. Then her tone shifts. “Why can’t I ever call you?”

  “It’s hard to get through here, baby. I have to call you.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Zachary C called me Thunderthighs when I went up to write on the board, and everyone laughed. He had to say it all loud.”

  According to Janie, Cielle has been eating at a steady pace in the seventeen months since Nate’s deployment. His guilt mixes with rage. He wants to cut off Zachary C’s head and feed it to jackals, but all he can do here, in a prison-size phone booth on the far side of the world, is say, “I’m sorry, baby.”

  “That’s okay. I drew you a picture at school. Come home and see it?” A pause. “Daddy?”

  “I can’t, baby.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too far. But I will.”

  “Promise? Promise you’ll come home?”

  He pictures her first beach trip—soggy diaper, pink suit, floppy hat, her standing against the backdrop of the waves, clear as a Kodak—and feels a mounting pressure behind his face. He thinks of his mother at the end. Her mouth, rimmed with cold sores, sipping ice water through a straw. The weight of her absence in the house. How his father crawled into a bottle and evaporated. And he saw himself at Cielle’s age, alone at the kitchen counter, eating Cap’n Crunch for dinner.

  “Yes,” he tells Cielle. “I promise.”

  * * *

  The next morning he is awakened by Charles at oh-dark-hundred. They’ve been tasked with finding a
guy possessing critical information, who, judging by the photograph, is not exactly distinctive in appearance. Charles is not worried about the mission, however; his biggest concern is his mother’s cookies, which arrived yesterday in a care package. Charles does not want to eat the cookies but is too respectful to throw them away. He owes much to his mother, not least his irrepressible good nature. A single parent, she lavished her only child with endless love and support. But while Grace Brightbill is a world-class mother, she is a terrible baker. Conflicted, Charles carries her package down the hall as if he has been burdened with the custody of a holy relic.

  Rubbing his eyes, Nate trudges outside to where their convoy patrol waits in the dark, the men stuffed into Hummers. The interpreter, a bone-skinny teenager with sleepy eyes, wears a too-big helmet, a threadbare rucksack left by someone from a previous rotation, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The shirt features the Adidas trefoil logo across the chest and, written beneath in the appropriate font, ABIBAS. The ’terp smiles at Nate and Charles, showing a sideways front tooth, and says, “What up, niggahs?”