This Is Home

by Lisa Duffy

  But Bent’s here, in front of her. And her husband isn’t. She wants to tell him she’s sorry for this—he’s done so much for her already, and here she is, practically shouting at him—but he speaks before she can get the words out.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything; I shouldn’t say anything. But that look on your face . . . that’s just, you know, not something I can live with. Luke, maybe—I mean John. Sorry. I can tell you’re confused when I call him that.” He clears his throat again. “Anyway. I don’t know how much you know. What John told you.”

  She considers this before she speaks. “I know I brought home a beautiful eight-week-old puppy to give to my husband when he came home from Iraq. I put a bow around the puppy’s neck, and he was the happiest, furriest dog I’d ever seen. And when my husband walked through the front door—John, who loved animals—all animals—looked at that puppy and his face went . . . blank. Like he wasn’t even in the room anymore.”

  She let out a breath, stood up straighter.

  “And John—the John I knew, my husband—was no longer there. He didn’t hold that dog or look at him once in the week that followed. Not once. And one morning, I woke up and John was gone. So was the puppy. Along with the crate. The dog bed. The blanket and toys and bowls and treats—every single trace of him. There was a note on the table that said: Please don’t hate me, but I can’t. John came home later that day. He could barely look at me. I asked him over and over to tell me where the puppy was, but he wouldn’t give me specifics. He just said a friend of his told him about a family with kids, lots of land. And that’s where he brought him. He said it was a good home. A good family. And we never talked about it again.” She crosses her arms over her chest, hugs herself. “That’s what I know.”

  She doesn’t hear Bent breathe in, just sees his chest rise. There are tears on her cheeks. She doesn’t blink or move to wipe them away. The memory of that morning, all those years ago, still raw inside of her.

  Bent gestures for them to sit, but Quinn shakes her head. She needs to hear this now. Standing.

  She knows this is the reason John is gone. These things he could never tell her. Never say out loud.

  “I’m not sure where to start,” Bent says, and chews on the corner of his thumb. He pauses for a moment and shrugs. “I’ll tell you like I found out, I guess.” He tilts his head, holds her eyes.

  “John called me out of the blue one day. Asked me to grab a beer. I met him at Sully’s, and he was wound up. I thought he was on something, but he swore he wasn’t. He said he needed a favor and handed me a picture of this puppy. Cute, just like you said. He tells me he’s got his shots, comes from good stock, and he needs to find him a home. One with kids. He was adamant about that. So, I made a call. I knew some staties up north with families, big pieces of land. One of them said yes, so I gave John the guy’s number and that was that.”

  “They took him? Were they nice?”

  Bent gives her a sad smile. “They are nice. Great people. Good parents. Four or five kids. I get a Christmas card every year. Pup’s in it. He’s big. Always wearing a festive collar. Part of the family, from what I know.”

  He’s quiet now. But there is more. She feels it in the small distance between them. The air thick from what’s left unsaid.

  “We were in Fallujah when I got this.” He points to the scar on his face. “Patrolling some shitty road. John was in the truck in front of me. It was morning—just another day. Nothing special about it. All I remember is looking through the windshield at the bluest sky. And then everything went black.”

  He pauses, backs away from her, disappearing in a shadow near the stairs, where he leans against the railing, as though what needs to be said is easier to get out in the dark.

  “They rolled over an IED and it took out the back of the truck. We got hit too, just not as bad. Some shrapnel came through the windshield and got me. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came to, I was on the ground and John was next to me, crouching over his buddy, a medic next to him trying to stop the bleeding. His friend was missing parts he shouldn’t have been missing. And he was dead—anybody could see he was gone. But John was telling him to hold on. To stay with us.” He clears his throat, shifts his weight.

  “The medic finally called it, moved to the next guy who needed help. There’s blood everywhere. Smoke and the smell of gasoline, but it’s still just another day in Fallujah, you know? The sun’s blazing in the sky, and somewhere there’s a radio playing, as though it’s just a typical day in the life. And on the side of the road there’s this dog, skinny thing—dirty and matted, and well . . . hungry. He walks over to the dead guy, couple feet from him, and he’s standing there, over a puddle of blood, drinking from it. John picked up his rifle and fired. Dog never felt a thing.”

  She doesn’t speak. She’s never heard this story. She remembers the smell of her puppy, the noises it made asleep in her arms. And the anger. The white-hot fury she felt when John sent it away.

  Bent is talking again, and she blinks, his words sharpening in her mind.

  “. . . about a month after John asked me to find a home for your puppy, he calls me again. Drunk. Or high. Maybe both. Not making any sense. Telling me he’s sorry. That he let me down and if he wasn’t such a pussy, it wouldn’t have happened. I’m telling him that’s nonsense, trying to get him to tell me where he is, and he’s just talking in circles. But he keeps coming back to the dog. We’re on the phone for an hour. Maybe more. And finally, he’s spent—I can hear on the phone that he’s just done—slurring and mumbling. He promises me he’s going to sleep, and before he hangs up, he brings up the dog again. Muttering about how it comes to him in his dreams. Haunts him. He tells me he wishes he’d saved it, put his gun down, brought it some water. Some food. Then the line goes dead. I call him back three, four times, but no answer.

  “And I just sit there. I must have sat there for a half hour. Speechless. Realizing I’ve been on the phone with him talking about a damn dog, and we’re not even talking about the same damn dog. He’s back in Fallujah. Trying to stop himself from shooting a dog who’s drinking out of a puddle of his buddy’s blood.”

  Quinn is watching Bent’s mouth, hearing the words. But it’s as though time has slowed, and the world is somehow no longer real. How do you live with someone—sleep, eat, make love—and not know such details?

  She turns and walks up the steps. She can feel Bent follow her. Can hear him calling her name, but her mind is numb, and she just wants to lie down.

  She’s in the hallway when she feels his hand on her arm, stopping her, turning her.

  “Quinn,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

  She blinks. Once. Twice. Until his face comes into focus.

  “Take me sometime,” she blurts, and his eyes flicker over hers. “To the house—with the dog. I won’t bother them. I just want to see him. Just look from a distance.”

  She can see from his face that he doesn’t want to do this. Doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. But he nods.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she says. “I know it must be hard to talk about.”

  “It’s actually not. Once you start talking, it just comes,” he says. “My wife was . . . fragile. That’s probably not the right word. Easily upset by things, I guess. When I first came home, she’d ask me about what happened over there, and I’d start to tell her, and she’d tell me to stop—that it was too much. That I shouldn’t think about it anymore. Move on, you know. So I stopped talking. And now, with Libby—she wants to know everything. I know she’s a kid, and I’m her father, and I try to walk that line between shielding her and babying her.” He smiles, but his eyes are sad, tired. “Just trying to raise her as the type of person that doesn’t crumble under the weight of things.”

  She swallows, doesn’t trust her voice, and takes a minute to compose herself.

  “I’d like to hear it. All of it. Sometime.”

  She leaves him standing in the hallway. Inside, she sli
des to the floor, her arms wrapped around her body.

  She thinks of John’s slow turn away from her. His gradual descent into silence. Into alcohol and pain pills and his lawn chair in the backyard, positioned in the far corner so that it looked out at the abandoned baseball field that was more of a sand pit, dust blowing in his face on windy nights, and the glow from his cigarette bright when he brought it to his mouth.

  She can picture that glow. From where she stood at the kitchen window, that blazing orange tip of the cigarette allowed her to see her husband staring out at absolutely nothing. Her husband captivated by emptiness.

  Now she knows what some of that emptiness looks like.

  It looks like a dog. And a dead friend. And smoke and shrapnel and a puddle of blood.

   7

  Libby

  On Saturday, my phone dings at nine in the morning.

  I think it’s Flynn texting me, apologizing for blowing me off last week. Maybe inviting me to have lunch after his basketball game, like we used to do before he replaced me with his girlfriend of the month. But it’s Desiree.

  Wanna work a kids bday prty today?

  I send her a thumbs-up sign. Helping Desiree with a bowling party at Sully’s isn’t exactly what I had in mind for the day, but she’ll give me cash under the table, and it’s better than helping Lucy paint the hallway.

  How old are kids? I ask.

  There’s barely a pause before her text drops in.

  Enuf with the ?? be ready in 15

  I get out of bed and get dressed. Shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers because Desiree had a fit last time I wore flip-flops to help with a kid’s bowling party. She made me put on a pair of bowling shoes and snapped when I told her I looked ridiculous.

  “How do you think you’ll look when your foot’s a damn pancake?” she said.

  Which I didn’t have an answer for. Desiree might be a lot of things, but wrong wasn’t usually one of them.

  Flynn always says Desiree doesn’t get any credit for being the brains behind Sully’s—but Flynn says a lot of things about Desiree now that he’s decided he’s in love with her.

  He knows better than to talk about her to me, but whenever they run into each other, he always makes some sort of pass at her.

  You’re too young for me, she’ll tell him, and Flynn will answer with some flirty comeback. Not too young to be your man.

  He knocks it off if I stare at him hard enough, but later he hisses that I’m ruining his chances of having sex with an older woman.

  To which my answer is Cry about it. I mean, she’s my aunt.

  In the kitchen, there’s a note on the table that Bent’s working a detail, but he fed Rooster and took him outside already. He’s drawn a smiley face next to his name. A very un-Bent-like thing to do. But he’s been acting strange all week.

  Yesterday I saw him standing at the front window looking down at the street, his body hidden behind the curtain, only his face peeking out, like he was spying on someone outside.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, and he jumped back so fast it made me jump too.

  “Jesus, Libby,” he said, as though I snuck up on him in the dark while he was sleeping instead of walking into my own living room in broad daylight.

  I leaned past him and looked outside, the street empty besides a few parked cars. Then I heard the door close downstairs, and I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Were you just stalking her?”

  “What?” He glanced at me, then pointed out the window. “There was a squirrel on the wire near the attic. I’m trying to see where he’s getting in the house.”

  It could have been true—Bent was known to hang out the window with his BB gun, his eyes trained on where the telephone line met the attic—but there wasn’t a squirrel in sight.

  “How do you know her?” I asked, and he heard the question but didn’t acknowledge it.

  If I could have looked inside his head, there would have been wheels spinning, gears shifting: Bent trying to figure out how much he could get away with not telling me.

  “Who?” he asked, and I didn’t bother to answer, just crossed my arms and waited.

  “I don’t really,” he said finally, and paused until he got tired of me staring at him. “Look, Libs. Her husband and I served together overseas. He’s a buddy of mine.”

  “Then where is he? In Iraq?”

  “Well, no. He’s been back for a while. He’s just, you know, sort of . . . gone right now.”

  “Gone where? Like AWOL? Can’t you go to prison for that?”

  “Not AWOL! Don’t talk so loud,” he whispered, and looked at the floor, as though Quinn could hear us.

  “So he’s, like, missing?”

  “I wouldn’t say missing. I mean, technically, yes, because he’s not here. But he’s not exactly lost. It’s more of a voluntarily missing.”

  “Voluntarily missing? I hate it when you talk in circles. Like he left her? Is that what you mean?”

  He pressed his hand to his forehead like I was giving him a headache. “I mean he’s just, I don’t know. I think it’s just a husband-and-wife thing.”

  I scowled at him. “How did you get involved? Why does she have to come live in our house?”

  He put his finger to his lips. “Libby, shush. She’s had a hard time already without thinking she’s not welcome here. Look. It’s no different than being on the police force. They’re my brothers. When you go to war with someone, they’re your brothers too. That doesn’t stop when you come home. So, I’m just doing what I can to help. And you, you can help out too, you know.”

  “Me? What am I supposed to do?”

  “You can be friendly. Stop calling her a serial killer, for Christ’s sake.”

  “First of all, I told her about the serial killer thing—and for the record, she was calling me the girl upstairs. It’s not like she’s writing me love notes, trying to be my best friend.”

  Bent waved me off, done with the conversation. “I’m inviting her for dinner on Sunday. I want you home. And I want you to be friendly. Got it?”

  I nodded, and he left me standing at the window, staring at the tree with the make-believe squirrel.

  Now, outside, a car horn beeps and I know it’s Desiree, waiting with the engine running. I rush down the stairs, and when I get in and close the door, she hands me a wad of cash.

  “Here. It’s more than usual because you’re dealing with the kids today. I’m in no mood to play nice with a bunch of five-year-olds.”

  Desiree’s rarely in the mood to play nice with anyone, but I just tuck the bills in my pocket and buckle my seat belt.

  “Plus, you deal with the mother,” Desiree tells me. “She’s some big-shot doctor—that’s how she introduced herself on the phone—Doctor so-and-so. I wanted to say, well, I’m Bartender Desiree. I mean, you’re calling a goddamn bowling alley—who gives two fucks what you do for work?”

  She’s dressed in workout gear, probably so she can get her cardio in on the treadmill she has stashed in Sully’s office. There’s a stack of Tupperware on the seat between us that holds all of her food for the day—so she can meet her macros, whatever that means. She says it makes her happy, her obsession with food and exercise.

  I don’t know what to say to that because I’d never put happy and Desiree in the same sentence. Except for maybe when she was younger.

  When I look through the photo albums of Lucy and Bent and Desiree when they were growing up, Desiree’s laughing in every picture. Just a dimple faced, happy kid.

  Then she’s gorgeous in a prom dress—all curves and hips and boobs—with a smile that lights up her eyes, a guy on her arm who’s looking at Desiree, gazing at her really, instead of the camera, as though he can’t take his eyes off of her.

  The only pictures I ever see of Desiree now are the ones in her room, showing her onstage in a bikini and heels. Her hair dyed and skin oiled and leathery. No curves or hips or boobs, just bone and muscle and veins and the whitest teeth I’v
e ever seen, glowing under a smile that looks painted on, it’s so perfect.

  But that girl in the photo album isn’t on that stage. You could hold up those pictures of Desiree—the prom one and the bodybuilding ones—and you’d swear they’re different people. Complete strangers, if you ask me.

  “You’re not just the bartender,” I tell her. “You practically run the place.”

  She snorts. “Tell Sully that. I helped him build this from the ground up. But until we’re married, I’m just the hired help. He could fire me tomorrow if he wanted.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. You know he loves you—he’s asked you to marry him a million times.”

  “And what then? In Sully’s head, we get married and I get pregnant and out comes little Joey or Ginger, and I’m home all day and he pops in now and then to babysit. Do you know he said that out loud, right to my face? Come on, Desi—I’ll babysit all the time.” She drops her voice low, mimicking Sully, and looks at me.

  “That’s just Sully. You know he loves kids. He’s just not up on the lingo. Like that it’s not cool to say you’re babysitting your own kids.”

  She shrugs, as if I might have a point. “Maybe. But he also said he doesn’t want his kids to go to day care. So, I say, ‘Fine—you’re going to watch them when I work?’ I mean, my parents are dead. So are his. And he goes, and I’m not joking—‘Work where? Like keep doing all the part-time stuff you do?’ ” She laughs, but it’s a loud, hysterical noise, and her eyes are a little wild.

  “As if everything I’ve worked for over the last decade—all the training and clients and hours I put in at Sully’s—those are just fun little hobbies I’ve dabbled with until I can be a wife and mother and my life is complete.” She’s out of breath, her face pink. I’m waiting for her rant to continue, but she sighs, rolls her eyes.

  “Don’t get me started—I haven’t even had a fucking cup of coffee.” She turns the car into the lot, parks, and hands me the keys.

  “Take the box out of the trunk and get started on gift bags. I’ll get us breakfast.”