“Does he know you’re coming?” Mrs. Barnes asked, knocking me back into the moment.
“Um. No. I just decided.”
There probably should have been more to the sentence than that. But there wasn’t.
“Connor?” she called as we climbed the stairs, her voice high and shrill.
Connor opened the door to his room and stuck his head out. And I felt this huge relief. As if I’d been down behind enemy lines and he was the first guy I’d seen wearing the right uniform. His face softened when he saw me. He must have been relieved, too. But I wasn’t entirely sure why. Or maybe I knew, but I just didn’t have the words for it at the time.
We sat in chairs by his bedroom window, looking out over the front yard and the street. We had our feet up on the windowsill, but we’d kicked off our sneakers so only our socks touched the paint. Mrs. Barnes would’ve had a fit if we’d left footprints on the sill.
I watched him read the letter from Roy. Or, anyway, he was staring at it. There wasn’t much there to read.
He was holding the paper with one hand, his other hand brushing over the top of his hair. It was buzzed—cut so short that it stuck up on top. He seemed to want to play with the fact that he could touch the blunt tips of all those hairs.
We were both wearing jeans and gray crew socks, but his legs were much smaller and more compact than mine. It made me feel rangy and a little awkward. Though, to be honest, I’d begun admiring my own body by that age. Not in any creepy way—just liking the muscles in my thighs and upper arms, and the way I could see my own ribs, but with a sheet of muscle across them, when I stood in front of the mirror.
I was staring at our legs because I didn’t want to stare at the letter, or stare at Connor while he stared at the letter.
“Hmm,” he said.
“‘Hmm,’ what?”
“Sounds like he was trying to tell you he saw something bad.”
“Yeah, but what?”
“No idea.”
“So I’ll just never know?”
“I don’t know, Lucas. Maybe you will. Maybe he’ll tell you in person.”
It was a weird thing to say, and I almost called him out on it. Like, “Right, I’ll just happen to be in Hanoi or Da Nang, and I’ll bump into Roy on a street corner.” He hadn’t meant that, of course. He’d probably meant when Roy came home. But even that sent my brain in a lot of bad directions, because I was beginning to worry that Roy might not be coming home. Not everybody’s brother was making it back. But there was no way I was going to talk about that out loud.
We didn’t say anything for a long minute, and I was bowled over by the silence. Not our silence, the silence in the house in general. I wasn’t used to that.
“It’s so quiet,” I said, my voice a near whisper so as not to ruin it.
“I know,” he said. “I hate it.”
“How can you hate it? It’s wonderful. You’ve been to my house. This is so much better than my parents and all that yelling.”
“At least they’re willing to say things out loud to each other.”
“Yeah, but so loud.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. It wasn’t funny. I could almost laugh at my parents and their battles. Sometimes. But the distance between Connor’s parents was the worst thing in his life. It was killing him, and I was beginning to see it. I just had no idea what to do to help.
I took the conversation in a whole different direction.
“You just been sitting here all day like this?”
“Pretty much,” he said. His voice sounded weighted, like a person carrying too much heavy stuff all at once.
“What do you do when you sit here? Think?”
“Not really,” he said.
“Just sit?”
“Pretty much.”
It didn’t sound like a good sign. It sounded like something I should save him from. If I was a good friend. Which I hoped I was.
“Let’s go somewhere,” I said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Let’s go do something.”
A pause. As I sat it out, I already knew the answer. And why the answer was what it was.
“Nah. I should stay here.”
Connor was afraid to leave his parents alone any more than absolutely necessary. It was something we had never talked about out loud. I doubt it was an actual, logical reason. I don’t think he believed any specific real-world thing would happen while he was gone. It was more of a feeling. Like there was so much unhappiness in that house, and it hurt to look at it, but he didn’t quite dare look away. Like he had to be right here worrying about it to hold the whole situation together. I’m not sure I would have been able to put it into words at the time, and if I had, it wouldn’t have been those words. But I knew it.
“You can go, though,” he added. “I understand.”
So I did. I left him and saved myself. I feel bad about that, but I did.
When Connor’s house didn’t work—and it generally didn’t—I would go out alone into the woods behind my house. Well, behind everybody’s house. This whole little town of Ashby is backed up by undeveloped forest land. It’s dense and hilly up there, and the ground is uneven. It wasn’t someplace where anyone was interested in building a house.
Well . . . with one notable exception. But I hadn’t met her yet.
There wasn’t much
