The Survivor

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 at 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.”