We pulled up outside Doris’s house. My mother and I hadn’t talked the whole way. I was seething, and she had something on her mind. I didn’t know what. She said, “Do you want me to wait here for you?”
I said, “No, I don’t know how long I’m going to be.”
“How will you get home?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Walk? But …”
“I’ve done it a thousand times.”
She was afraid. Of what?
“Okay,” she said. “Should I make dinner?”
“I don’t think so. I want to go out with Doris.”
“All right,” she said.
“What’s the problem?”
“Maybe Doris isn’t ready to see you.”
“You know, that’s some fucking thing to say to me.”
“Don’t talk to your mother that way.”
“It’s almost like
“Marlowe …”
I got out of the car and slammed the door. She drove off slowly. I felt like punching a hole in the world.
I jumped up the steps outside Doris’s house, just like I always did, just like I’d dreamt of doing since the day I left home. In that moment, I realized how lucky I was that I had made it home at all. Thousands didn’t. Doris’s mother, Gladys, opened the door.
“Oh, Marlowe!” she said, and she hugged me like I was her own son.
“Hey, Mrs. Moran. How are you?”
She rushed me into the living room to shake her husband’s hand. He was happy to see me too. An American flag was up on the mantel, along with a picture of me, and a prayer tucked into the frame. I almost cried seeing that these people had prayed for me.
After a few seconds of pleasantries, Doris appeared at the top of the stairs and our eyes locked. She smiled, instantly shed tears. I ran to her, and she ran to me, and there, on the middle of that staircase, the loving embrace that I had been waiting for so long had become a reality. We kissed, and only then did I feel like I belonged. Only then did I feel like I had survived the war in Vietnam.
She had been working at the Coleman Building as a typist, just to put money aside for when I came back. I had a savings. We were going to go off and find a place to live, maybe even go to college.
Up in her room, Doris saw that something was upsetting me. She said, “Honey, what’s getting you down?”
I said, “Nothing, just something my mother said. She said you might not be ready to see me.”
“Oh, that’s a terrible thing to say,” said Doris, her voice going way up high. “I’ve never been happier than right now. But your mother … she’s been through a lot, what with your dad and all. But they were acting strangely after you left.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you know how I was always making pies for your mom and dad, and I promised not to stop doing that while you were away? Well, I was doing that. Every Sunday I went over there with a fresh pie, and I talked with your momma in the kitchen, but after a couple of weeks, she said I shouldn’t come around anymore. That it wasn’t necessary, and, well, I haven’t really seen either of them since. When I’d spot them at the market, they’d pretend they didn’t see me, but I know they did.”
I knew it was truth.
“Let’s not worry about that now,” I said. “Let’s go out tonight. Just you and me.”
“Oh, Marley, I’d love it!”
“Great. I’ll pick you up on the bike. If it still runs.”
“God,” she cried, “I’m so happy you’re back.”
We kissed. I buried my face in her hair and whispered, “I want to marry you, Doris.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why God brought you back.”
I walked home. Once I got there, I went right up to my room without saying a word to my mother. Years later she would tell me that she had waited for me in the kitchen with my father’s gun that day. She was going to put me down right when I came in, then take herself out, but she lost the nerve.
I changed into my old clothes and went down to the garage to check out my bike. I removed the tarp, poured some gas into it, checked it out. It still purred, so I took it out and rode around town till it was time to pick up Doris.
That night, she and I made love in the woods, and her body should’ve tasted sweeter than anything I’d ever known, but there was a part of me, a sincere part of my core being, that must’ve died or gotten itself blown out in combat, because everything I did felt a little more cold and dead than it ever had before. I did not yet know about the beast, but something bone-deep inside me felt wrong, alien, sinister. Staring down at Doris, her pale skin glowing white in the starlight, I almost felt like I had to protect her. Not from anything on the outside, some presence among the trees, but from myself. There was this little voice inside of me crying out in alarm. If I was at all intelligent, I would have listened.
Again, I thought of my father, and how I wished he was still around so I could blame him for that dead part inside of me, and hit him hard across the jaw for it.
I got home after two in the morning. My mother was still up, smoking in the living room. She said she needed to talk to me. “About everything,” she added.
“Will that include how you two brushed off Doris while I was gone?”
“Maybe.”
“Great, let’s hear it.”
She stamped out her cigarette and leaned forward on the couch.
I said, “We’re going to get married, you know. That was always the plan.”
“I know,” she responded. “But there’s a lot you don’t know, and a lot you need to understand before you start trying to make a life for yourself, Marlowe. There are things that I need to say to you that I never in a million years thought I’d have to say. This was something your father, God rest his soul, was supposed to speak to you about, but …”
“But what?”
“But he’s not here anymore, Marlowe. You are. And this was never … I don’t know how to do this, but you … you’re not the same man that you were when you left.”
“I know,” I said.
“I don’t think you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here now. What exactly happened that got you sent home, Marlowe?”
I sat down across from her on the other couch. “We were surrounded by snipers. They were picking us off like flies. I thought I got shot, and I blacked out. All the men were dead when I woke up, and I was the only one that made it out of there. I can’t remember what happened, but the brass didn’t want me out in the shit anymore, so they sent me home. Case closed.”
“Without a scratch,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”
“I don’t know.” That was the exact same kind of question the military had asked me. “I’ve tried not to think about it,” I said, grinding my teeth.
“Maybe you should. That wasn’t the only time you’ve blacked out, was it?”
I wanted to ask her how she knew that, but I was too fucked up, too angry. I walked away. If she had told me the truth that night, I think I would have killed myself. I was younger then, more rash. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. Instead, it was still a secret, and bad things were to come. It was that rashness that led me to move out just as quickly as I had moved back in. The way the family had treated Doris in my absence was inexcusable. I didn’t want any part of that household anymore.
