Charlie worked his way into my thoughts, much as I tried to lock him out. It was as if he’d climbed through Hugh’s window and sat watching, and the draft creeping in was his breath. But it wasn’t guilt I felt so much as a sense of having jumped, blind, and bobbed to the surface.
I lay under the covers—a tangle of afghans and quilts smelling of wood smoke—and listened to Hugh’s breathing. His breathing and the night seemed measured by a sort of conversation; the ringing of a buoy answered by a moan. The mattress felt like a bog, our bodies like footprints. Eventually I fell into a half-waking, half-sleeping stew of dream and memories stirred by the wind’s creaking.
I was barely twenty years old again, meeting Charlie for the first time at a Red Cross shelter in Calgary. There’d been a mini-disaster, a gas leak; a tanker truck had spilled its load. A neighbourhood was evacuated, the people put up in a gym. I was volunteering. My job was setting up cots.
The military came to help, though besides making sandwiches there wasn’t that much to do, and still a stocky guy with a moustache rushed over to assist me. We’d stopped for coffee, when, his mouth wrapped around a Timbit, he asked, “Wha’d you think of Sly Stallone—the Eyetalian Stallion? What, you haven’t seen Rocky yet? I’ve seen it twice…wouldn’t mind going again.” And he’d asked me out.
Hugh shifted in his sleep, the mattress sighing like the waves curling just outside. His features looked softer, smoother in the revolving light.
I’d been put off by Charlie’s hair at first, or lack thereof, and his age. He’d seemed at least thirty, though he was only twenty-three. But then I’d had a phobia about people in uniforms, maybe from watching nurses tend to my mom.
While he and I were dating, the Red Cross gave me a job in a blood donor clinic. This was before AIDS. The blood was the easy part, even when bags burst and I felt like Bela Lugosi holding them. But there was something clean about it, healthy, as it went through a centrifuge, being spun into plasma, platelets. It could save people, after all. Accident victims, chemo patients. Except for my mother; nothing had saved her.
The house around me creaked like a ship. Hugh’s mouth twitched in a faint smile.
The blood never bothered me, but the uniforms did. Polyester pantsuits, aqua for inside, navy for outdoors, like the ones worn by Sally Ann folks ringing bells at Christmas. “I’m allergic to polyester,” I’d told the supervisor. “Excuse me?” she’d said, unamused.
I’d stuck it out three whole months when Charlie proposed. His wasn’t the kind of proposal you read about in Glamour. He was being posted, and wondered if I’d like to see the country. “Sure,” I said, with no idea what that meant. By the time I figured it out, Sonny was on the way.
A bun in the oven. Blood. I gazed at Hugh’s sleeping face, the strangeness of his features, their fresh familiarity. The doctors had ruled out more children after my miscarriage. A good thing now. Not that I’d planned any. Thinking up meals had become the extent of my planning, how to serve chicken six ways to Sunday. Which pretty much described base life, I’d learned soon enough after getting married. It didn’t matter where you lived, the fare hardly varied. What differed was the sauce, depending on what spices you added.
Watching Hugh, the soft rise and fall of his chest, my mind flitted then circled back to Charlie. At first, his absence had sharpened my longing. I’d slept with his clothes. A T-shirt scented with deodorant, a ball cap smelling faintly of mowed grass and barbecue. Those first couple of years, when he’d go away on exercises for five or six months at a time, his homecomings were honeymoons, the kind we’d missed when that first posting got bumped up by two weeks.
You can get used to anything, other women would tell me. As if they’d sampled Spam and felt qualified to say, Well, it’s not half bad, once you get a taste for it. Someone compared sex to potato chips; eat one and boom, you’re addicted. It made me think of dogs getting a taste for blood, which reminded me of my old job. Life would’ve been so much easier being hooked on carrot sticks.
But dogs and blood were the least of my worries the first time Charlie left on a tour. I was pregnant and much as I’d have loved an animal for company, he was right; pets were a millstone when you moved.
Charlie got called out again, a week before Sonny’s birth. The only familiar face was the doctor’s. She stitched me up—I was awake, it was a Caesarean done with an epidural—chatting as if over coffee about how hard it must be for guys coming home to an instant family. Instant, like soup mix or pudding.
After that, Charlie’s homecomings seemed different. Less kissing, more pounding in the basement. The last few years, they’d been more like the way you’d feel when you’ve just had something fixed on a car, say, the radiator, and a tire blew. Just when you’d hoped for a smoother ride.
Hugh turned in his sleep, his gentle snore in sync with the groaner rocking out there in the dark. The wind was a soft shush.
I pictured Charlie eyeing himself in the mirror. Once, he’d come home and shaved his head bald as a baby’s. I was almost scared to watch him undress in case he’d shaved his chest, too. By then he’d put on weight, got thicker, softer; his blond stubble began coming in a bristling grey. He’d lost the moustache; until then, I’d never seen him without it. When he shaved, his upper lip was like land cleared for a runway.
Studying Hugh’s face, the hollows of his cheeks washed every few seconds by that watery light, I felt a ghostly regret. What I’d have done, the last few years, for a kiss—a real kiss—the warmth of an embrace. How it had felt watching Charlie watch the news, the latest world crisis, and hear him bark at Sonny to put his bike away. How I’d wondered; who is this guy? He looked and talked like Charlie, left the seat up and the tissue holder empty, like always—but where was he? The guy who’d set up the cots had been hijacked. So what, if women like Sandi still turned to look when he walked by? That thickness of his had built up slowly, like the rings of a tree. Maybe it had started when he became an air technician. Less time on tour, he’d promised. But the choppers were useless without people like him.
Lying there, on the cusp between waking and sleeping, I quit trying to pinpoint who and where Charlie was. He was Sonny’s dad, was all. I imagined a Sea King taking off, then hovering over an ocean. Engaging in some sort of war game, something that made sense to him but meant squat to the rest of us.
My heart lifted with the whistling of Hugh’s breath. Charlie was in his heaven, and I…? Well, being alone had advantages: Cheerios for supper when you didn’t feel like cooking. But more than that, so much more than that, I was floating now, floating as if on a giant Cheerio, a life ring, kicking my feet and swimming.
Tracing Hugh’s ear with my finger, a feathery touch so as not to wake him, safe, I allowed myself a few more memories. Images drifted up like Polaroids. Charlie throwing a Frisbee to Sonny; Charlie cutting the lawn. His washboard ribs as he showered. His arms; Charlie had nice arms. But it was as if they belonged to someone else, and he wasn’t at home in his skin. Maybe I hadn’t been at home in mine, either. I wondered, vaguely, if he missed me, what he might be thinking now, high above the Mediterranean, somewhere under the sun. He wasn’t at home any place but in the tail section of a chopper. And where had that left me?
I lay close to Hugh, my cheek to his chest, breathing in his smell. Pressing against his moist softness.
I thought of the times in bed when nothing had worked, and Charlie’d rolled over, sighing, “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Something in his voice had blamed me. One morning Sonny had been in the living room watching cartoons so loud the walls shook. “Leave him be,” Charlie had said when I threw on my nightie to speak to him. “It’s the noise,” he said, “the fear of interruption.”
“What else is new?” I wanted to say, but put a sock in it instead, as Charlie would’ve said. Put a sock in it, Alex. Listen to your mother.
Now Charlie was a string of vapour, a jet stream. A patch of fog lifting off the horizon.
The dampness in the air deepened, and I moved against Hugh’s warmth. I drifted off and, sometime before dawn, woke feeling faintly sweaty and sick. Easing myself out of bed, I crept slowly upstairs to the bathroom. The floorboards felt cold and slivery. From the little window I watched the waves slap like ink against the breakwater.
Nothing prepared me for what happened next: a blast that rumbled through the floor, shaking the panes. The foghorn split my ears, caught my lungs in mid-breath. It froze the air, its mournfulness bellowing over the ocean, chased by a squealing echo that pierced my brain.
Rattled, I crept down the dank, slanted staircase, my ears ringing as I crawled in again. Hugh’s hair was like a bird’s nest against the pillow. Without opening his eyes he slid his arm around me and we sank together. I’d just gotten comfy when the blast went again.
“Foghorn,” he murmured, pressing my ear to his chest. “Runs on remote.” The steadiness of his heartbeat grounded me, our skins somehow blotting out the noise. But the possibility of drifting off again was wrecked, and we lay whispering. As if the house was bugged, as if Sonny were nearby, might hear and walk in.
“Tell me about yourself,” I breathed, steeling myself for the next blow. Between blasts, the only sound was the waves.
“Nothing to tell,” he said, his voice gravelly as he twisted my hair around his finger. “We moved a lot. My old man sold insurance. Hardly stayed anywhere long enough to start and finish a year at the same school, my brothers and me. Three of ’em—my poor mom. You?”
“One father, one brother. I hardly see them. My mother, um, died when I was five. So you’d know, then—about moving.” I ran my fingertip over the jut of his nose, a motherly sort of gesture, I realized, embarrassed.
“Alex, you mean? Yeah, I can relate, I guess.” He pressed his palm to my ear, stroking my hair away.
“You weren’t born here?” I murmured, just in time. We waited out the noise. “So where’d you grow up, mostly? There must’ve been some place—”
“Out west, sort of,” he said. “Okay. How about you?”
Greyish light had leaked into the room, and there were birds outside the window. Gulls, making an awful racket. My mouth felt woolly, my eyes as if full of sand. Our clothes lay on the floor, my jeans and Hugh’s, a comb sneaking from a pocket, and his wallet.
I shrugged, naked, feeling the silliness of our questions.
His breath was warm, almost salty, as we kissed and he moved on top of me, gently sliding inside. We made love quickly, cosily. No words. His movements a silent praise.
“Hallelujah,” he said afterwards, studying me under the blankets. My body like a stretch of sand at low tide, Hugh combing it. Every bump and curve, as if overnight a new crop of things had washed up.
“What time is it?” I inched myself up, hugging an afghan. It was like something a grandma would knit, itchy and smelly.
“Only early,” he said, kissing my knee.
His watch was on the floor. It wasn’t quite seven.
“Alex’s out like a light, I’ll bet,” he said, reading my mind. “Ten more minutes. It’s Saturday.” He laughed. “Let me at least make you something to eat. Tea and seaweed?”
I imagined Sonny smiling in his sleep, dreaming about some gag on TV. Then, like a video fast-forwarding, an image of Charlie shot by, an image of him shaving. The pair of us in the bathroom, me hogging the mirror to put on make-up. Not just lipstick. Blush, mascara, the whole deal. Sonny liked watching me do my face, said it reminded him of people doing shop windows, those painted decorations. He didn’t like the results, though; he said I looked different, not like his mom at all. Charlie liked me in make-up, though he never said so.
“Stay put,” Hugh said, yanking on his clothes. I snuggled back under the covers while he went to cook breakfast. I could hear him moving around, getting things. Cooking was something Charlie hated doing, unlike those guys who enjoy the novelty of it. He’d never been one for cooking. Or looking. With Charlie the bedside light stayed off. He went for certain spots the way you went to the fridge for milk, though maybe it hadn’t always been like that.
Lying there, the smell of bacon drifting in, I tried to remember when things had changed. Probably when Sonny was an infant and hardly slept out of my arms.
I’d gained weight being pregnant. Maybe I’d been too easy with the way Charlie started treating me—politely, as if nothing had stretched or loosened. Back then he was polite. But it was hard, feeling invisible night after night.
Maybe he’d been seeing someone else. The scent of coffee wafted in, and I thought of Charlie’s captain at the base, who had to be in her forties. But that was a non-starter; aside from tours of duty and search-and-rescues, most nights he’d come home for supper. He’d watch TV with Sonny, unless Sonny nagged him into playing Lego. If he was really tired, he’d close his eyes and pretend to be asleep—a trick from when Sonny was in diapers. Back then, Sonny would crawl onto his lap and peel back his eyelids. Wake up, Daddy.
Wake the fuck up. I’d thought—how many times? Who knows what Charlie had been feeling. Resentment? Anger, maybe, burbling away like a faulty compressor.
I shut my eyes and listened to Hugh out there in the kitchen, singing under his breath. An old Elvis tune: “Love Me Tender”? And I imagined Charlie flying over Avenger Place, seeing me in the yard hanging laundry, and parachuting down. Like a doll attached to a red-spotted toadstool, floating from a cartoon sky. Landing by the fence wearing nothing but his Jockeys and that grim smile.
Hugh appeared with a cup of coffee. Behind him I heard the snap of fat and, beyond that, imagined the roar of wind overhead. I pictured the sky again: empty.
“You okay?” he said, and then: “There’re things that can make a person crazy, Willa. You know what they are, best to just avoid ’em.” He watched me dress. Fastening my bra, I thought of laundry fluttering on a line. Pink panties, socks, and military greens: a shade matching spruce. Camouflage.