The Survivor

been home five fucking weeks.”

Her face reddens, bringing the freckles into relief. “You know what?” She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “We don’t do this. We don’t talk to each other this way.”

He stares at her, and she stares back, unflinching. Agitated, Casper trots to Janie’s side and whimpers until she pets him.

“I can’t reach you, Nate. No one gets through to you.”

“You do.”

“Not anymore.”

Her face holds so much sadness he has to look away.

Janie says, “I know you loved Charles-God, we all loved Charles. But you have to let go of what happened.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

Though he never considered it, the truth is right there, waiting, and it comes out in a heated rush: “Because then I’d be abandoning him. Again.”

She receives this, bracing into the weight of it. She nods once. The breeze blows through him.

“When you were gone,” she says, “Cielle would crawl into bed where you used to lie. How do I explain to her that now that you’re home, you’re still not home?”

He cannot lift his eyes from the porch boards.

Janie says, “You are the only man I want to be with. I feel like I dreamed you up playing ‘boyfriend’ when I was nine. I love you too much for us to turn into roommates. Some couples can do that, maybe. But not us. Doing that with you … It would be worse than not being with you.”

He clears his throat. “You and Cielle are all I want. But I can’t … I can’t find my way back here.”

Janie quotes him to himself: “Stop fighting,” she says. “I got you.”

His mouth is dry. “I don’t know how.”

Silence. The porch swing creaks, Janie’s toes touching the wood as though stirring water. She says, “We build our own cells, brick by brick.”

He thinks of his father shuffling around the house after his mom’s funeral, how he’d blank out in front of the microwave sometimes, staring at the number pad, unable to proceed.

He says, “Maybe this is what I have to do right now.”

She swallows hard, then says, “I have not a thing to say I won’t regret later.”

He walks upstairs into their bathroom, shuts the door, and sits on the closed toilet. A while after, her footsteps enter the bedroom, the sheets rustle, and the light clicks off. Through the thin door, he hears her crying softly, and though he wants to hold her more than anything, he cannot rise, cannot turn the doorknob. His courage is gone; he lost it back in the Sandbox in that goddamned helicopter. He lost it when he made his daughter a promise that he’d come home to her. He thinks back to the day Charles dragged him to the beach, Janie’s cries carrying across the water. Nate was The One Who Had Jumped into the Riptide When No One Else Would. He had borne her to shore. And now he is huddled on a toilet, shuddering, scared to open a bathroom door.

He waits until her breathing grows regular, then sneaks out to slip into his side of the bed.

* * *

Later that night screams awaken him. He bolts off the mattress and his boots sink into burning sand and there is smoke in the air and he is yelling for Charles: “Where are you? Where are you?” The screams keep coming in the dark, and he stumbles and smacks his head into the corner of the wall by the door. Blood streams down his forehead, tacky and hot, and then his eyes are stinging and he lurches through the door, knocking it free of the top hinge and Janie is at his side holding his arm and then he sees Abibas staring with unreadable eyes and he shoves and Janie flies back and hits the wall and he is staggering down the hall, Charles’s blood streaming down his face, bellowing, “Where are you? Where the fuck are you?” and the screams have stopped suddenly but Casper is barking and he fills his daughter’s doorway but she is gone. Janie is behind him, yelling, her cheek carrying a plum-colored bruise and her words flood in: “Stop it! You’re scaring her. You’re scaring her!” and he follows her quaking finger to where Cielle has tried to wedge herself beneath her bed to hide. Janie goes to her and holds her.

He wipes his forehead, and his arm comes away dark. Quietly panicking at what he has done, he says, “No, no. I don’t scare her. I don’t. Do I scare you?”

And Cielle looks out from beneath the dark row of her bangs and says, “Yes.”

His insides crumble. He stands, swaying, mouth ajar. His skin on fire, he retreats slowly into their bedroom, Casper at his heels. Nate washes the blood from his face. Uses Band-Aids to close the gash at his hairline. Finds an instant cold pack in the emergency kit beneath the sink. When he steps out, Janie stands watching, pale, silent.

He says, “I am so, so sorry I hurt you.”

“You didn’t know what you were doing. Cielle was crying. She had a nightmare.”

“It is unacceptable what I did.”

“I know you didn’t mean it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I need to get myself…”

“What?”

“To a place where I deserve to live here again.”

Janie looks away. Her eyes well. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

He can’t find any words. His throat clutches. Desperate for something to do, he cracks the ice pack, but she says, “I’m fine.”

He holds it out. He can barely look at the growing spot of black on her beautiful pale cheek. “Please?”

She lifts the ice pack from his hand.

Casper follows him down the hall. Cielle is tucked in again, but wide awake. He sits at the edge of her bed. Casper curls up in the pink nest she has made for him from an old comforter. He keeps a wary eye on Nate, which shatters Nate’s heart anew. When they are out, Casper will not allow strangers to get between him and Cielle, and that is how Nate feels now-like a stranger.

He says, “I’m so sorry I scared you.”

She says, “It’s okay, Daddy.”

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.” She stares up at him with her rich brown eyes, and he strokes her nose once with his finger.

“Why can’t it be like it used to?” she asks.

He swallows around the lump inside his throat. “It just can’t right now, baby.”

“Why not? Don’t I get a vote? I never get a say in anything.”

“We don’t always get a say in what happens to us,” he says gently. He kisses her on the forehead, breathes in the no-tears-shampoo scent of her.

He strokes her back until she falls asleep, then goes downstairs to try to catch his breath. As he paces the unlit living room, it strikes him that he is denying himself his wife and daughter as a punishment for cherishing them so much that he couldn’t unlock his legs on that helicopter and leave them behind. He pauses before the family portrait. The three of them falling over, laughing, propping one another up. He vows to get back to that place.

What he’s dealing with, it’s just temporary.

And yet five years pass.

Five years that see further dismantling of the life he knew. Nate’s journey through that time is weightless, stunned, much like his flight from the spiraling helicopter. The point of impact comes in a medical office, from a bearded neurologist with kind, wise features-precisely how one wants one’s neurologist to look, particularly when he’s delivering a diagnosis like this. And Nate realizes that up until that moment, when it came to bad news, he’d never had a sufficient yardstick for comparison.

He drives away in a daze, cloaked in a black cloud of dread. He pictures his mother languishing in her hospice bed, dying by millimeters, her features caving in on themselves. How his father, too, was eaten from the inside, hollowed out like a rubber Halloween mask, the eyeholes empty. As a nine-year-old, Nate had vowed that if he was