This Is Home

by Lisa Duffy

  “Go where?” I hear, and Jimmy steps around, suddenly in front of me.

  His shoulder-length hair is gone, his body lean and muscular compared to the last time I saw him.

  “You remember Libby,” Flynn says, and Jimmy claps him on the back playfully.

  “Don’t be a moron. I might have been drunk a lot, but I wasn’t blind. Of course I remember.” He leans in and kisses my cheek, his breath warm and fresh. I swallow hard, the memory of my crush flooding back.

  He’s wearing a crisp T-shirt, not a wrinkle on it, his pants fitted and clean next to Flynn’s baggy gym shorts, the tanned skin of his head showing under his blond crew cut.

  He eyes Flynn’s hair, loose under a hat turned backward, and raises his eyebrows. The couple on the couch catches his attention. He shoves the coffee table with his foot, and they look up at him through heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Get out,” he says, and they untangle from the couch and slip out the door, like they know what might happen if he has to ask twice, the sour smell of body odor lingering after they pass.

  Jimmy slams the door after them. “Damn roommate’s druggie friends. Sorry about that. I’d move out if I wasn’t leaving soon anyway. Come out to the back porch—it’s quiet out there.”

  The music turns on again, pulsing and loud.

  He leads us to a doorway behind the couch, and we walk into a bedroom, bare except for a mattress on the floor and a small table next to it with an open paperback resting facedown. A camouflage duffel bag stands upright in the corner.

  On the far wall, there’s an open window overlooking the porch, the screen missing, and Jimmy steps through it. Flynn starts to follow, but Jimmy swats him away.

  “Ladies first,” he says from outside, and Flynn holds up his palms and gives me a look like I was the one who said it.

  Jimmy puts his hand through the open space, his forearm sturdy and firm under my grip. My knee swipes the edge of the frame as I climb through, making a loud thud, even though I barely feel it.

  “Klutz,” Flynn chides, and Jimmy swipes at him through the window, catching only air.

  “Why do you hang out with this punk?” He leans down, his fingers gently touching my kneecap. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just clumsy.”

  Flynn’s on the porch now, and he opens a second beer. Then tosses one to me.

  “I can get you something else,” Jimmy says when I catch it but put it down beside me, unopened. “Whatever you want.”

  “Libby’s a teetotaler,” Flynn teases. “Beer is beneath her.”

  “You think anyone who doesn’t pass out by the end of the night is a teetotaler.”

  Jimmy laughs, and Flynn shrugs, brings the beer to his lips.

  “Is this porch code or what?” he says, yanking on the iron railing.

  We’re on the second floor of an obviously ancient house, and the rusty structure sways. I lean against the house, wondering what the hell is wrong with Flynn.

  “It’s an old fire escape, you dope.” Jimmy squints at him. “Look at me. Let me see your eyes.”

  Flynn turns a cheek to him, his face slick with sweat even though it’s cool outside.

  “Why? You miss me?” He winks, chugs his beer, crushing the can in his hand, and reaches for another one.

  Jimmy grabs his wrist, and they both freeze.

  The smile disappears from Jimmy’s face, the veins on his forearm bulging under the force of his grip on Flynn.

  Even with the years between them, Flynn is bigger. Thick where Jimmy is lean, maybe a head taller. But Flynn doesn’t move, and out of the corner of my eye, I see him lower his eyes and look away as Jimmy releases his grip.

  Flynn’s phone chirps, and he looks down at it. He raises a finger as though he’ll be back in a minute and disappears through the window. He’s arguing with someone, and I know it’s his girlfriend, the one he said he wasn’t going to see tonight so he could hang with me.

  “What was that all about?” I ask Jimmy after a minute.

  “Let’s just say I know that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The eyes. He’s high on something.”

  “He did just drink two beers in a matter of minutes.”

  “I’m not talking about booze.”

  “What . . . like drugs?”

  He shrugs. “My mother said some prescriptions in the cabinet went missing last month. Flynn’s the only other one in the house.” He looks at me. “You don’t know anything?”

  I shake my head “I barely see him anymore. He’s always with some new girlfriend. But he wouldn’t around me anyway.”

  “A regular Casanova,” he mutters.

  “Well, he’s a Casanova who’s also my ride tonight. I don’t get my license until next week. So he’s cut off when he comes back.” I look back through the open screen, but Flynn isn’t in the room anymore. “Look, you don’t have to stay here with me. I mean, all of your friends are inside. I can just wait here for him.”

  “The only person I know inside is my roommate, and I don’t even really know him. I only heard about this place from an army friend. I guess the landlord is a former vet who rents out rooms for cheap to service guys. My friend didn’t mention that there’s also parties here almost every night. So, if you don’t mind, I’m happy sitting here with you.”

  “I don’t mind. Flynn said you like the army? So far, I mean.”

  “It kind of saved my life. I don’t mean to sound dramatic. I’m not sure if you remember, but I was kind of a fuckup.” A dog barks next door, and he leans over the railing, looks out at the noise.

  “I remember,” I say, and he looks back at me and laughs, and my face burns. “Oh—that was rhetorical, wasn’t it? Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I hope you never saw it firsthand, though.”

  “I just heard about it from Flynn. You were always nice to me when I was at your house.” I leave out that I had a crush on him. He used to seem so much older than me. A senior when I was only in eighth grade. Now, sitting next to him, it’s as though we’re the same age.

  “So how was basic? Is it as bad as all the things you hear about it?” I ask.

  He pauses, thinking about it. “Yes.” He smiles.

  “What’s bad about it?”

  “Everything. But nothing worth talking about.”

  “Come on. My father was in the Guard, but he went to basic so long ago, he doesn’t even remember it. So tell me. I’m all ears.”

  I settle back in the chair and fold my arms. He looks at me and shrugs.

  “Okay. I’ll stop when you start to snore.” He smiles, but starts in the beginning, when he first got to the base.

  His voice is calm, mesmerizing, and he reminds me of Flynn before he became this Flynn, the guy who says stuff like Plural and Teetotaler and Mom in a way that makes me blink back tears.

  I’m not sure how much time has passed when Jimmy looks at his watch, says he better get me home. Enough time for me to realize Flynn isn’t coming back.

  Jimmy climbs through the window and moves the table out of the way, holds his arm out for me to take.

  “Let’s not whack that knee again,” he says.

  A copy of The Things They Carried falls off the table, and I pick it up, hand it to him. “Good book. We had it a couple years ago for summer reading.”

  “I’m playing catch-up. Too much screwing around when I was your age.”

  “I can’t imagine why you’d volunteer to go to war after reading that.”

  He smiles. “I probably wouldn’t have if I’d read it. Let’s hope there’s no tree in my future. No Curt Lemon stories.”

  I look around the room at the bare walls, the mattress on the floor. “My father would approve. He hates clutter too.”

  “I’m just crashing here until I ship out next month. Doesn’t make sense to unpack when I’m leaving again.” He walks through the bedroom and opens the door. The house is crowded, and he looks back at me, holds his hand out behin
d him.

  “Grab hold. I don’t want us getting separated.”

  I reach out, and he takes my hand. We step through the doorway, weaving our way through bodies in the packed living room. The smoke is dense, and a guy in the corner waves to me, puts a can to his mouth. I squint, thinking it’s Flynn, but when he tilts his head back, the light catches his beard.

  A body fills the doorway of the next room, broad and tall like Flynn—the same baseball hat on backward. I drop Jimmy’s hand and walk toward him, trying to catch him before he disappears into the dim room.

  But he moves deeper into the swirl of bodies. I lunge forward, snag the back of his shirt with my fingertips and tug. My shoulders are squeezed between people on either side of me. I yell Flynn’s name, but my voice is lost in the music and laughter and shouting. The guy turns, and it’s not Flynn—the nose too narrow, the lips too full—and his eyes scan over me blankly. He shifts, his profile illuminated briefly under the dome of kitchen light, and then he’s gone, swallowed up by the sea of people.

  Suddenly there’s an arm around my waist, pulling me back. Jimmy grabs my hand again, and we’re through the door and down the stairs, the cool, clean air outside filling my lungs.

  He walks over to a truck parked on the street, and we climb in.

  “Are you okay? I thought I lost you in there.”

  “I thought I saw Flynn. But it was someone else.”

  My head is suddenly pulsing, my vision blurry and my toes tingling.

  “Hey, are you okay? You have goose bumps.” He points to my arm and reaches behind him to the seat. “Here. Take this.”

  He hands me a camouflage jacket, his name printed on the front. I slip it on, the pattern on the jacket firing in my memory.

  “Libby,” Jimmy says, staring at me. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “Sorry. It’s probably just the smoke in the room. I’m kind of dizzy,” I tell him, the picture from Quinn’s apartment filling my head—the guy sitting in a camouflage uniform next to Bent. The one with the movie-star looks. The someone else I thought was Flynn. The one turning away from me in the kitchen, disappearing before my eyes.

  Quinn’s missing husband.

  “Just close your eyes,” Jimmy says after I tell him where I live. “I’ll have you home in two seconds.”

  I listen to him, because suddenly I can’t breathe, and the tequila and smoke and Bent’s Mexican creation are all swirling in my stomach, a small burp filling my mouth with the taste of the margarita. I concentrate on taking slow breaths, in and out, in and out, but it still feels like the longest ride of my life until Jimmy pulls up in front of my house.

  The truck’s not even at a full stop when I thank him and jump out.

  Desiree and Sully are on the path to the backyard and she turns and narrows her eyes at Jimmy’s truck as he drives off. I follow Sully to the backyard, certain I’m going to be sick. There’s some sort of commotion next to me, and I hear my father’s voice, then Quinn’s, but I’m already on the back steps. Quinn’s back door is unlocked, and I rush into the kitchen, shove my head into the sink, the room spinning.

  I’m holding on to the sides of the sink when I feel a hand on my back. Quinn leans in close to me, gets a whiff of my breath and clothes, looks at the back door.

  “Go lie down on the couch. Quick!” She motions for me to go.

  By the time I get to the couch, the room has stopped spinning. A minute later, I hear Bent’s voice in the kitchen and pull the blanket on the couch over me, hoping it will cover the smell of tequila and smoke on my clothes and in my hair and on my breath.

  I close my eyes while I listen to Quinn tell Bent that he should just let me stay put, and it’s perfectly fine for me to crash on the couch for the night. Desiree chimes in that she’s been fighting a virus and I must have caught it, and rest is exactly what I need, and he should just let me be. She sounds so sincere and sweet, so un-Desiree-like, that the room goes silent for a moment and I think she’s blown my cover.

  “Besides, Sully wants to have a beer with you,” she continues. “Or at least that’s the story he gave me when I found him standing outside the house. Frankly, I think he’s stalking me again.”

  Sully says something about how she wishes he was stalking her, and Bent tells them both to shut the hell up. Then I hear Bent and Sully on the back porch, their footsteps heavy on the stairs, their voices growing distant when the door shuts behind them.

  I sit up slowly, my tongue suddenly leather in my mouth. A dull headache pulses behind my eyes.

  I glance at my phone, expecting to see something from Flynn, but there is only a group text with Katie and Erin that I haven’t answered all night, both wondering why I’m not answering.

  Where r u

  Everything ok?

  Libs?

  The floor creaks and I look up to see Desiree standing in front of me, hands on her hips.

  “What the fuck?” she says.

  Quinn rushes in from the kitchen, a worried look on her face.

  “I should never have let you drink that.” She turns to Desiree. “Don’t be mad at her—Bent gave me a margarita earlier—it’s a long story. But the whole thing was my fault.”

  Desiree ignores her. “Who was the dude in the truck? You know . . . the man.”

  “Oh,” Quinn breathes, looking at Desiree and then over at me, her face blank.

  “It’s Flynn’s brother. He was dropping me off. Can I get a glass of water?” I ask Quinn.

  “I’ll get it. Stay right there,” Desiree says, pointing at me, as though I’m prone to disappearing, and stomps into the kitchen.

  “Are you okay?” Quinn asks, her face full of worry.

  “Yeah—I think it was just the Mexican food. I’m fine, really.”

  She waves me away. “Well, I feel responsible. I handled the whole situation poorly. I should’ve just said no thank you!”

  Desiree returns from the kitchen with a glass of water, stands over me, and holds it out.

  “Drink,” she says. “You smell.”

  “It’s just secondhand—you know I don’t smoke.” I take the water and sip it slowly.

  Desiree’s quiet, and I know it’s because she knows she can’t lecture me about smoking. She’s been saying she’s going to quit for as long as I can remember. I’ve told her it’s a gross habit, and she must remember this because she finally stops eyeing me and walks to the middle of the room.

  “Are you moving out or something?” she says to Quinn, looking at the boxes surrounding us.

  “Oh, no. I’m still . . . unpacking.”

  Desiree looks at Quinn with a sideways glance. “Unpacking? You’ve been here like . . . ?”

  “A while. I know. The pregnancy sort of surprised me. But that’s not really an excuse. I don’t know, I guess I didn’t know how long I’d be here . . .” She looks at Desiree, who juts her chin forward, waiting for Quinn to continue.

  “My husband is . . . away.”

  Desiree squints. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “I mean, he’s not here.”

  “Well, I get that. What I mean is—I don’t know what that has to do with unpacking. You’re here. He isn’t. So what?”

  Desiree walks over to a stack of picture frames leaning against the wall, picks one up and looks at the back of it.

  “No time like the present,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “Now?” Quinn asks, looking at her watch.

  “I’ve got a picture-hanging doohickey thing upstairs. Hold on,” Desiree tells her, and walks through the house and out the back door.

  “That’s nice of you to help,” Quinn shouts after her. She looks at me, holds up her hands. “Funny. I actually felt like she didn’t like me for some reason.”

  “I think she doesn’t like me about once a day too.” I stand up, my legs shaky underneath me. “I should go shower while Bent’s outside.”

  “Libby, wait. I . . . um. I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you min
d keeping the baby just between us? I hate to ask you that—I don’t want you to keep secrets from your dad. But it’s just, I need to figure some things out.”

  I nod, and something occurs to me. “Are you not keeping it?” The moment the words leave my mouth, I want them back. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, my cheeks hot. “That’s so none of my business. Forget I asked you that.”

  “No, it’s okay.” Her eyes fill, but she stands up straight, as though she’s fighting against it. “That’s not what I need to figure out. I want this baby more than anything. It’s the only thing that matters.”

  I walk into the living room, pick up the picture with Bent and her husband.

  “Is this him?” I ask, holding it up.

  She nods. “A younger version. That was his first deployment.”

  “Can I borrow this? I don’t have any pictures of Bent overseas. I just want to make a copy. I’ll bring it back, I promise.”

  She nods. “Of course.”

  I study the picture. “It’s weird seeing Bent without the scar on his head.”

  She walks to where I’m standing, looks over my shoulder. “I met your dad for the first time right after he came home. I couldn’t stop looking at that scar. And I remember thinking that as awful and painful as it must have been to have an injury like that . . . that he was still home, you know? Standing right in front of me. I could reach out and touch him. When John kept deploying, I almost hoped . . .” She pauses, shakes her head. “Well, you start to wish for something to bring him home. And keep him home.”

  Quinn takes the picture, looks down at it, and hands it back to me. “Then again, he has to want to be home, right?”

  “Maybe when he finds out you’re pregnant, he’ll stay.”

  She smiles, a sad lopsided thing that’s the opposite of happy. “That’s what I’m worried about,” she says.

  “Isn’t that what you want? For him to come back and stay?”

  “If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said yes. Now, though—it’s not enough. I don’t want this baby to be the only reason we’re together. I wonder sometimes if we would have been married . . .” She pauses, waves her hand. “I was pregnant years ago, and I miscarried. And then John deployed. Something changed for him then. But not for me. I still wanted him, and a baby—a family. Then he came home, and I thought, well, now we can try. But he signed up for another tour. He said it was for the bonuses they were giving. I just kept thinking that he didn’t want to start a family until he was home. You know, for good.” She sits on the edge of the couch, tired, it seems. “I kept waiting, thinking it was a timing issue. But really, I don’t think that’s what he wanted.”