Stay

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Her eyes scanned the room. No one spoke. No faces seemed the least bit confused.

  “Good,” she said. “Then I won’t waste your time with that, because you know it, and I hate like hell to talk about it anyway. I’ll just tell you this. If you’re thinking of going out again, don’t. Don’t even mess with it. Just consider that I did the research for you and it still stinks out there. And the addiction problem you used to have hasn’t gotten any better while you were recovering in these rooms. If anything, it’s gotten worse. It’s like you’re in here thinking you have all this insurance, but meanwhile your disease is out there doing push-ups on the porch. You think you can let it out of the box and then put it back in again when you’re ready because you did it the one time, so maybe you get overconfident and think you did that with your own superior will. So you let it out, and then you look at it, and you look at the box, and your disease is like a thousand times bigger than the box, and you can’t for the life of you figure out how you ever got it to fit in there in the first place.

  “I almost didn’t make it back here,” she said, her eyes flickering somewhere close to mine. But no direct hit. “I almost took myself out instead. But I guess that wasn’t what my higher power had in mind for me. I guess the plan is for me to stay around and try to do some good.

  “So all I want to say, and then I’ll pass it along . . . I just want to say it’s a hell of a lot easier to hold on to your seat in this room than it is to give it up and think you can get it back again. If we do get back to the rooms, the wear and tear on our bodies and souls is considerable. And then there are the ones who don’t make it. And I was almost one of them. So take my advice. There’s nothing for you out there.”

  A pause. No one filled it. No one spoke while a person was sharing, and everybody waited to be sure they were really done. Until the sharer passed the torch, so to speak.

  Zoe opened her mouth again. “I want to hear from . . .”

  She pointed directly at my brother. I could see the alarm on his face.

  “I forget your name, son.”

  “Roy,” he said.

  “I want to hear from Roy.”

  A long silence. Like, really uncomfortably long. But no one filled it. It was Roy’s turn to share and that was that. He could say he chose to pass, or he could start talking. But the meeting was not going to go on until he decided.

  “My name is Roy,” he said.

  My body and brain tingled, waiting to see if he would say it.

  “And I’m . . . well, I have no idea what I am. No, I do. That’s not really true. I think I know I’m an addict, but I just don’t want to say it out loud, because then it will be the truth about me and I can never unsay it. And it’ll never stop being true. But I guess I pretty much just said it anyway, didn’t I?”

  He paused. Sighed.

  “I just got back from overseas.” His eyes came up to where Joe was sitting at the far corner of the table. “Like that guy, only my story just about couldn’t be more different from his. No disrespect to him. Just the opposite. He’s the one who deserves the respect. My story is a disaster. There is nothing about me to respect.”

  He paused again. Long enough that I wondered if he’d ever restart himself. Long enough that I found it hard not to shift in my seat. Everybody else seemed to manage to hold still and wait. Then again, they weren’t his kid brother.

  “I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” Roy said. “I really don’t want to do this.”

  But then he did.

  “I didn’t enlist like this other guy,” he said. “You could’ve held a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have gone over there. If I hadn’t been drafted, I mean. And I didn’t get hooked on the drugs the army gave us, either. I hated speed. I wouldn’t even take it. I didn’t tell anybody I wasn’t taking it. I’d just hide it in my cheek and spit it out later. It made me all jangly and nervous, like the top of my head was about to come off. Like I couldn’t make my stomach hold still. Hell, I felt that way anyway over there, all the time. I didn’t need something to make it worse.

  “It was all street drugs for me. Except the word ‘street’ is an exaggeration. Most of the places they had us stationed didn’t even have streets. But you could always get scag, and it was strong and it was cheap. And it was heaven. You could be right in the middle of hell and smoke that stuff and feel like everything was just fine. And I was right in the middle of hell, so that was handy.”

  He stalled again. Everybody waited.

  My stomach knots were twisting into stomach double knots.

  “I hate to say all this in front of my brother. I think he sort of looks up to me. And believe me, he never will again. Not after he hears about this mess. But I guess sooner or later I was going to owe it to him to tell him how it all went down.

  “Okay. Here goes. Man, I hate this.

  “I was smoking all the time. Not just to wind down at night like most of the guys. All the time. Even when I knew there might be enemy fire. I just couldn’t face it any other way. I knew I was a sitting duck, loaded like that. Sometimes I could barely raise my arms, so I wouldn’t have been any too quick to fire back in my own defense. I guess I just got to the point where I didn’t even care anymore. Like I couldn’t even care. I just didn’t have it in me to care. I was scared out of my skin, and I just wanted to go home.

  “What I finally ended up doing, I’d almost done it a dozen times before. Just so I could go home. I just wanted a quick ticket out of there. But I didn’t do it. I mean, until the day I did. Because of the guys. The other guys. I figured I owed it to them to stay. Anything less just seemed so selfish.”

  I got that all-over tingle again. Waiting to hear what “it” was.

  “But then I got this letter from my kid brother, saying he loved me and wanted me to come home safe. He’d never talked to me like that before. I guess war pulls all kinds of stuff out of you that you didn’t even know was in there. Even if you’re not actually over there fighting it. It just takes a toll on everybody.”

  Something came into my head. Something my brother had said to me the first day he was home. After he told me he’d gotten the last letter I sent him. The one he was telling everybody about now.

  Why do you think it all came down the way it did?

  That’s what he’d said to me. And then he’d gone on to avoid telling me how it all came down. I almost thought I knew parts of it, especially after I’d had that conversation about it with Mrs. Dinsmore. But I had not been able to bring myself to ask the details of how it all came down. I guess I figured I had no right to ask. It was his life. If and when he wanted me to know, he would tell me.

  Now he was about to tell me. Now he was about to tell everybody in the meeting.

  I thought, Oh, holy hell, it was all my fault. Whatever he’s about to say, it was all my fault.

  “So, we got pinned down and ambushed, and I was loaded. Really loaded. I was flying. We were taking fire from what felt like every direction, and I could just as easily have passed out as fired back. And then somehow my unit got on top of the thing, and whoever was shooting at us stopped shooting and retreated, and I was alive, and, like . . . entirely unhit. And I still can’t figure that out. I mean, is it true what they say about God looking after fools and babies? Or was I keeping my head down without even knowing it because I was so loaded? I honestly have no idea.

  “The details are just really fuzzy, and not because a little time’s passed. It was fuzzy while it was happening. I just remember I was sitting there on the ground. Afterward. And my rifle, my M16, was on the ground beside my right leg. For some reason that part was clear. That part is, like, tattooed into my brain. I had my right hand on the rifle. And there was a dead guy on either side of me. Both of them were guys I knew. Not like my best friends or anything, but I knew them. I knew they’d been scared, like me, except I think they both handled it better. But maybe I only think that because I’d been on the inside of myself and on the outside of them. But I knew t
hey’d wanted to get home, just like me. And they had parents, and brothers who wanted them to get home. Well, the one guy, I think he only had a sister, but my point is the same. I thought about how their families would get a letter or a call or somebody would come to their house, and then I thought about my own brother, and then what I wanted to do didn’t seem so selfish anymore. I could tell myself I was doing it for him. That might have been a story I told myself, though. I mean, it was true and it wasn’t true. I was just at a breaking point. Even so loaded I could hardly move my arms and legs, I just knew I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  He pressed his eyes against the heels of his hands. Rubbed them hard.

  I thought I was going to explode waiting to hear. Even though most of me already knew.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, dropping his hands to the table again. “This is so stupid. I can’t believe I’m about to tell a bunch of people that I did something this stupid. But I guess this is the place for it, right? Because it was definitely the drugs that made what I did so extra stupid. My life would be so different right now if I hadn’t been so loaded in that moment. But I was, and time is never backing up again, and I’m never getting my foot back, and I just have to live with that.

  “Here’s the part where the scag messed me up. Here’s what I thought I was about to do. I thought I could put a bullet hole through my foot. You know. Just a hole. And in time it would heal. Maybe I’d have to have surgery to sew all those muscles and tendons back together. And physical therapy to walk normally. But I figured it would be enough to get me home. And I’m not saying I thought very clearly about all those details right then, but hopefully you know what I mean. I just figured I could hurt myself bad enough to get home but not enough to totally change my life forever. But it was a really stupid, really loaded set of thoughts. Because here’s what I forgot to consider. It was a point-blank shot. I’d seen bullet holes made by M16s. More than I could count. If I hadn’t seen so many of them, I might not’ve been so desperate to get out of there. But I wasn’t considering that those bullet holes were shots fired from a long distance. They were not point-blank shots. This was a point-blank shot. I was too loaded to understand that it was about to shred my foot so badly that some amputation would be required.

  “And there’s another thing I messed up on. I didn’t take into account that it would be pretty obvious what I’d done. Somehow I thought I’d be scooped up with the other wounded, and that would be that. We’d all be treated as having been injured in the firefight. But I guess the army’s not that stupid. And also it’s possible I might not’ve been the first guy to go to such lengths to get out of there.”

  I sat, listening to an invisible echo of his words around the room. I looked at the faces to see if they were judging my brother. They weren’t. Not as far as I could tell. They were listening. Just listening.

  My brain filled with the image of myself in Connor’s bedroom, holding that gun and box of bullets in my hands. I remembered that feeling—the one where you’d thought you knew, but now that you really knew, it was just a whole different game of cards.

  But my brother was still sharing.

  “So that’s my message about drugs if there’s anybody in this room who needs one. Probably mostly just me, right? I mean, they really make you that stupid.

  “But, you know what? It’s a weird thing to say, but I think if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it. Bad discharge and all. Permanent maiming and all. Because I got home. I might not’ve gotten home if I hadn’t. I think about it sometimes, and I feel bad for the other guys. The ones I left behind over there. I feel like I let them down. And it’s true, I did. But I made this huge sacrifice to get out of there. If they decided it was worth half their foot, they could get out, too. Sometimes I think that. Other times I think I’m the biggest jerk in the world, and I’m not sure which is true. Both, maybe. Maybe both parts of the thing are true. But it’s not like I left them undermanned over there. They’ll just draft somebody else to take my place . . .”

  He trailed off, and his face looked shocked. Like I was watching the blood drain out of it.

  “Oh hell,” he said. “I never thought of that. That’s another thing I get to feel terrible about. I’m not trying to justify myself to you. You can think whatever you need to think about me. Hell, there’s nothing you can call me that’s any worse than what I call myself every day. But I’m just going to say this, and it’s not an excuse. It’s just the damn truth. What did they think would happen? Take a bunch of guys straight out of high school and send them into that hell. Take away everything that was ever familiar to them and tell them to kill and die, to watch their friends dying in horrible ways all around them. We were kids. We thought we were men until we got there, and then once we were there, it was so clear that we were just kids. I know there are plenty of guys who handled it way better than me. But how can you put kids in a situation like that and not end up with a total mess in at least a lot of their cases? It just doesn’t make any sense to think so.”

  He pressed his eyes with the heels of his hands again. I thought he might be crying and trying to hide it. But when he dropped his hands, his eyes were dry. I wondered if he’d cried over there. If the war had used up every tear he’d ever had in him. Or if that was the place where he’d learned not to cry, no matter how bad things got.

  “The reason I haven’t been raising my hand as a newcomer is this,” he said, seeming more settled in his brain. As if he’d come home to the US in his head and could speak more calmly. “Here’s the thing about that. I’m still on a lot of pain meds for the injury. I’m taking them as prescribed now, because I really don’t have any choice. And I know from hearing you all share that you can still call yourself clean if you’re taking necessary meds the way the doctor prescribed them. But I don’t want to do it like that. When I’m really clean, I’ll come in here and say so, and we can start counting my time from then.”

  He stalled again. Looked around the room. He seemed to have just wakened up somehow. He seemed vaguely surprised by everything he saw.

  “Of course I’m totally humiliated because I told you all that,” he said. “And I’m done talking now. I’ll just sit here and let somebody else share and wonder why I said all that. I guess I got tired of knowing it would come out sooner or later. I guess I got to the point where maybe it was easier just to get it over with. Speaking of which, I call on Joe. The guy who served so much more honorably than I did. Who’s probably over there thinking I’m like something disgusting to scrape off the bottom of his shoe. Because if he’s thinking that, I want to go ahead and hear it now. I’m not good with waiting for terrible things to catch up with me. I’d rather just get them over with.”

  He paused, but nobody spoke.

  “I’m done,” he said.

  Everybody in the room said, “Thanks, Roy.”

  Including Zoe Dinsmore. Who I’d temporarily forgotten was there.

  I looked at her and she looked at me. Her eyes held no judgment. Neither did they seem to want to console me. There was something very matter of fact in her gaze. As if she were telling me, “Yes, this is the world, Lucas. I’ve been dealing with it since before you were born.”

  Joe said, “My name is Joe and I’m an addict.”

  Everyone said, “Hi, Joe.”

  He looked right at my brother, who refused to look back.

  “Thanks for your share, Roy. In case you don’t know it yet, you’re not the only person in this room who’s done something stupid behind drugs, and you’re not the only person whose fear got the best of them. So far as I know, there’s not a person in this room who cares what you did when you were out there using. We all mostly care what you’re going to do now.”

  Then he went on sharing about his own situation, and the meeting just moved along. The focus never fell on my brother Roy again.

  It was as if the drama he’d just shared was no better and no worse than anybody else’s drama. Or maybe ther
e was no “as if” about it. Maybe that was just the truth of the situation.

  Zoe Dinsmore came up to us after the meeting. Met us at the door.

  “You boys want a ride home?” she asked.

  But my brother Roy said, “No, thanks. Thanks anyway, Mrs. Dinsmore. My brother and I can take the bus.”

  He didn’t seem to be afraid of her, or avoiding her. I didn’t hear a lot of subtext. It sounded like he just figured we were okay. And maybe like he even enjoyed those little bits of time we spent, just the two of us, making our way back and forth to the meetings.

  But I might’ve been reading that last part in.

  As I followed Roy out the door, I looked at Zoe Dinsmore and she looked at me. And she nodded at me, the way she’d nodded at my brother. A nod to a lot of history. I nodded back. Maybe to acknowledge that it was a huge deal that she’d showed up in the meetings again. And also that it was a huge deal that my brother had unburdened himself and joined the group for real.

  And maybe those two things weren’t even entirely coincidental to one another, though I wasn’t sure where that thought had come from, or if there was anything to it.

  I turned and stepped out into the dusky parking lot, hurrying to catch up with Roy. I was thinking I knew approximately what history Zoe Dinsmore and I were acknowledging with our nod, but what could possibly have transpired between her and my brother?

  I’d been so shocked and saddened and compelled by Roy’s story that I’d forgotten to wonder.

  We walked side by side toward the bus stop.

  “You know her?” I asked.

  “Just a little. I know who she is.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “Don’t you remember my first real girlfriend?”

  He was struggling now on his crutches. I could tell he was tired. Part of me wished he would have agreed to the ride. But then we couldn’t have had this talk. I was torn.

  It was an evening of feeling torn.