The Charlotte Chronicles (20 page)

She turns slightly and in the small space she makes in the movement, his arm slips in. As deftly as any SEAL, he cut me out. She moves into his embrace, burrowing her face into his chest as if she is freezing and he is her only source of warmth. Another two steps and they are in the street. He holds up his hand like a traffic cop, and everyone obeys him. I’m slack jawed and frozen at this spectacle, just like the cars. I give myself a hard shake and put my feet in motion only to get my toes nearly run over by a passing car. Because he’s done holding traffic back. Before I can take another breath, they are in a sports car that costs more than Cabby and I will earn from our U.S. government paychecks in ten years, combined.

“That was smoother than a SEAL at a bar full of Trident fuckers,” Cabby observes.

“You should shut the fuck up.”

“
I
f this is stalking then
I can see why women are creeped out. I’m creeped out,” Cabby says.

We’re parked across the street from a restaurant where Charlotte is having lunch with her male friend. The one that Cabby calls smooth and whom I am privately referring to as
the fuckstick who is sitting too close to my girl
.

“No one asked you to come with.” If he touches her arm again, I am getting out of this Jeep and ripping his hand off.

“She knows you’re here. Women have this intuition.”

“Cabby, is your whole world broken down into male and female categories?” I ask impatiently.

He pauses for a minute. “Yes? Mostly because I think in sexual terms. Females have the pussy and we have the cock. That seems like a clear delineation.”

“There are other places to stick your dick, and the fact you only know of one speaks to your bankrupt imagination.”

He’s unmoved. “So this is Charlotte? You hardly ever talk about her. I’ve heard plenty about your parents and famous athlete Nick, but this girl? You’ve said maybe twenty words, tops, in all the years I’ve known you.” I ignore him, but that doesn’t stop him from continuing. “You’re going to have to talk to get her back. Chicks like the talking. Consider me practice.”

He places his hands under his chin and flutters his eyelashes at me. If I don’t say something, I’m going to have endure a barrage of Cabby-style complaints, questions, and theorizations. And he’s not wrong. I do need to explain myself, but I don’t even know how to begin.

I lean my arm against the car door, not taking my eyes off of her. “Charlotte is the best part of my life. The best part of me. I grew up with her. She’s Nick’s best friend and was mine from the moment she was born. Mine to protect. Mine to love. Only I failed in that. When she was fifteen she was diagnosed with a form of cancer. There was a tumor growing in her head. She’d been vomiting and complaining of headaches. Her dad took her to the doctor who said she should have a CT. The CT showed this giant ball pressing against her brain stem. Another two weeks and she’d have been dead.”

“But she’s fine now. Very fine,” Cabby murmurs the last part to himself, likely remembering the vision of windblown Charlotte on the Coronado beach.

I clench my fists. I can’t prevent people from looking. It’s going to drive me crazy, but Cabby is a good friend. I’d have to talk to my dad about how he deals with this. “So she almost died but didn’t. . .” he prompts.

“She got better, but she was still sick a lot. Her parents started talking about sending her away for treatment.”

“Away from Chicago? There’s better treatment than there?”

“Some of the best doctors are working in these posh resorts where you can do experimental shit without the government wagging its finger at you. There’s this clinic in Switzerland where all the rich people of the world send their kids to be treated. Mostly, though, it was to get Charlotte away from me.”

“Her parents disapproved?”

“Not for the reason you think. Charlotte was getting sicker. She wasn’t eating, and she was tired all the time. I thought—I don’t know what I thought, actually—but I helped her hide the sickness, and one day she collapsed at a party that I had brought her to. She was sent away afterwards.”

But not before I took her virginity. Not before I made her a thousand promises—none of which I kept.

Cabby could only look at me with raised eyebrows.
You done fucked up, boy
, his expression said.

I nod in agreement. “Everything I did after she left made things worse for her. Her mom basically said that she couldn’t trust Charlotte with me, and she was right because after Charlotte left, I started partying hard. Before I’d always been careful because I was semi-conscious of the fact that Nick and Charlotte looked up to me. With Charlotte gone, I drank a lot and put myself in some shitty situations. I ended up getting on film with two other girls—seriously, Cab?” I can see he wants to ask me details, but my repressive look shuts him up. He pretends to zip his mouth shut. “The video was sent to Charlotte. She said she forgave me.” I shake my head. “She deserved someone better than me. I’d hoped she would forget me.”

Cab looks thoughtful. “But she wrote you letters for years. Those aren’t the actions of someone who has forgotten you.”

“I know,” I sigh. Charlotte and asshole are done with lunch. He’s signaling to the waitress for the check. “I tried not writing back. At first it was easy because we were in basic and then there was a lot of training. I volunteered for the shitty posts and assignments no one wanted. I signed up for BUD/S. After I graduated, there was more training and we’ve been in and out of one conflict after the other. I thought she’d stop, but she never did. Not until the end.”

“What made her stop?”

“Shit.” I give a bitter laugh. “Suffering six years of assholishness.”

“Her last letter was three ago? Why pursue her now?”

“Remember the journalist we rescued in Iran six months ago?”

“Yeah.” Cabby fell silent. We’d found her in the desert rail thin, beaten on nearly every part of her body below the chin. The internal wounds weren’t visible, but we all knew they existed. “She broke Ford. He’s never been the same.”

Ford was a team member that moved on to DEVGRU, an elite counter-terrorist joint task force. He was the teammate that looked at me in disgust when I told him the girl I loved was alive and well. Cabby was right, though. Saving her turned him mean and hard and full of regret because he’d been on a team that tried and failed to rescue her six months earlier. If he went on to save a hundred more people, he’d still fault himself for failing that first time.

“I told her she was the bravest person I’d met. She pinned me to the side of the helicopter with those pale green eyes of hers and said that just getting up and facing tomorrow was the biggest act of bravery for many people and that it would be her hardest challenge. Surviving wasn’t brave, she said. It was living that was brave.”

“I tried to leave Charlotte alone, but I can’t. I’m not good enough. Or I’m too damn selfish. I don’t even know how to begin making it up to her, but this half-life I’ve been functioning with just isn’t worth it. I’m putting everything I have into winning her back. If I fail, at least I can comfort myself that I tried when I’m old and alone.”

I fall silent, exhausted from my confessions. The waitress brings out two cocktails and not the check as I’d thought.

Cabby glares at them. “They’re having the longest lunch in mankind just to fuck with us.” He’s probably right. “I can tell you what I won’t be doing when I’m out.”

“What’s that?”

“Cop work. This is boring as hell, and I’m even somewhat entertained by the soap opera of your life. It’s like Shakespeare threw up all over you.”

“You always surprise me when you pretend like you read.”

He flicks me off. Cabby’s mom is an English teacher and he’s better read than most of the officers on the team. The man likes fucking poetry.

They linger over their drinks, completely trolling Cab and I. Finally, when it’s almost time for the dinner crowd to show up, they climb into his fancy car again and speed off to Fashion Valley, the mall where I’d stopped to look at wedding rings.

“In or out?”

I grunt. “Not shopping. We’ll wait.”

But Cabby gets out of the Jeep anyway.

“Where are you going?” I call after him.

“I’m here. Might as well pick up some stuff.”

Cursing, I jump out and race to catch up. I don’t want to take the chance that he’s going to approach Charlotte and screw things up for me.

We go into a men’s store, and Cab starts talking up a sales clerk while I stand at the door looking for Charlotte. Much to my surprise she comes barreling toward me, carrying a package and a fierce expression.

“Here. You want to see me again?”

I take the package. “You know I do.”

“You owe me nine years of letters. Get writing.”

She stomps off to where her friend is waiting for her, threads her arm through his elbow, and they disappear into the crowd. I’m stunned motionless.

“What you got there?” Cabby asks.

I look in my hands. It’s a box of . . . stationary? She bought me a box of heavy paper edged in navy blue. And I start laughing. It’s either that or cry, and SEALs do not cry.

I howl as Cabby leads me out of the store and out of the outdoor shopping complex. I’m still howling when he shoves me into my Jeep. “You keep up that creepy ass laugh and I’m going to punch you in the face.”

Wiping away the moisture my laughter has generated in my eyes, I direct Cab home.

“You giving up on her?”

“Nope. She gave me an opening, and I’m busting through.”

Dear Charlotte,

Basic is about tearing you down until you’re in pieces so they can rebuild you into the machine they want you to be. The machine obeys orders without thinking. The machine can pick up and assemble its gun in under ten seconds. The machine can stay awake and be observant for more than forty-eight hours. The machine can trek twenty miles carrying a pack of one hundred and fifty pounds. A machine feels only for his fellow machines and no one else.

BUD/S training takes it even farther. BUD/S stands for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. SEAL is always in all caps or everyone on my side of the wall believes you are talking about the slimy flipper set. BUD/S is a six month course where older SEALs try to kill you. The easiest parts of training are when you’re underwater, with your hands and feet restrained, while you pick something up with your teeth. It’s the easiest because no one is yelling that you’re a shitstain motherfucker who is letting your teammates down. They actually are yelling, but you can’t hear them under the water. It’s when you break the surface that their glorious words of encouragement pound into your head.

Strong men break down in BUD/S but not me. Not because I’m more brave or strong or capable than the guy standing next to me or the guy at the end of the line, but because I’ve learned that focusing on the moment allows me to forget about the past. Under the water and bound like a pig is no big deal. Carrying a boat on my head? No problem. Lying on the beach with the tide crashing over my head, replicating the sensation of drowning repeatedly? A day with kittens. Thinking about you? More painful than a knife to the gut. So I don’t think about you. I push you aside. I’m weak, you see, so much weaker than you.

If I start thinking about you, I start missing you, and then I want to leave. Not only do I want to leave, I want to abandon everyone here. Screw AWOL. Who cares if I serve time in the brig so long as I can see you? But then the other memories creep in. The ones where I almost killed you by hiding your sickness from your parents. The ones where I was stupid and careless and drank too much while you were gone. The ones where I did kill your spirit by allowing myself to be videotaped with two girls.

In my sane moments, and I don’t have many of those, I know that others would refer to this as “victim blaming.” But it’s not so much that those chicks violated me, but that I allowed myself to be used as a weapon against you. That’s what gets me the most.

I know you were hurt, and I didn’t respond right. I guess I’d hoped if I ignored it that it would go away. When I ran away to the Navy, I tried to bury my past by becoming the best sailor they could craft. Maybe I’ve achieved that. Maybe I haven’t. I don’t feel like a success because I’ll never be complete without you.

It killed me not to answer your letters. At first, I didn’t write because I thought you would move on, find someone else to make you happy, but whenever your letters mentioned another male fondly, I went crazy in my head. Sorry about Paul. I’m sure he was a nice guy. I’m glad he helped you learn to weld. Sorry I used Nick to keep track of you.

I was so messed up, Charlotte. And I can’t say that I’m not messed up now, only that I can’t function without you.

What I realized a few months ago, while facing down another brave woman, was that I didn’t give you enough credit. I was utterly and inexplicably selfish. But I sold myself on the idea that everything I did was for you. I completely bought into this lie. It became my life.

I stayed away for your sake.

I was silent for your sake.

I broke it off for your sake.

But really it was for me. I didn’t write back because it was easier to pretend like you and I didn’t have feelings and promises. I charged back in whenever I felt my position was threatened. When the time came for me to return to you, I lied to both of us that it was better for us to be apart.

I told myself that you needed protecting and that I had failed in that position. I couldn’t keep you from getting ill. I couldn’t keep you from moving to Switzerland. I couldn’t keep the girls off of me. I couldn’t do any of these things. Worse, when I became a sailor and then a SEAL, I had more failures than successes. More people died than we saved. More people were killed than rescued. I was worthless as a protector. I was a machine, nothing more. Trained to aim, shoot, fire, reload. Again and again.

I told myself you deserved better than me because I was merely a bunch of broken bits called man. I underestimated your ability to love, your ability to cope. I took the decision from you. Made it for you like I was better, smarter, wiser.

I am none of those things.

Perhaps I knew this and hid fearing that you would see what kind of frail, jacked product you were getting in return.

This letter is a mess of words, a jumble of thoughts. Maybe there’s not a coherent sentence in the above paragraphs. There is only one thing you need to know. I have never stopped loving you. You have always been first in my heart even when my actions didn’t convey that message.

I come to you, on my knees, beseeching you for forgiveness to give me one more chance to show you that I am a man worthy of your heart. I will spend the rest of my days proving to you with my body, with my heart that I am the Nathan of the Charlotte and Nathan that we were meant to be.