Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

changed by the war for the better and eager to make up for lost time.

not the least of which was that she still didn’t know this old man very well, and she was beginning to wonder if anyone besides Cal did—or ever would.

“Murder!” Everett yelled at him. “Murder!”

And so it seems that we have met before And laughed before and loved before But who knows where or when?

and the thought flashed through Cal’s head that they wouldn’t be doing this if Margaret had found out her husband had died, they were only doing it because he was coming home, and wasn’t that strange? A

While they hadn’t come looking for the opportunity, now they couldn’t see the sense in letting it go by. Maybe it was in the nature of last hurrahs, Margaret thought in the darkness of the studio with the echo of the music still in their bodies, that they could be just a little bit reckless.

When they ask you again what happened on the Teague, don’t tell that part about the purser. To anyone, ever.”

“You asked us three times to confirm that he wasn’t among the men picked up by one of the other ships, or among the dead that were recovered.” Once. As far as Felix knew, he’d asked them to confirm both those things once.

That’s when they decided to send him to San Francisco before letting him go home.

Neuropsychiatric. He’d heard stories about that over the past three years. An NP never went away, once it was in your file. It was there every time you went to a doctor at a VA hospital, there if you ever applied for a government job. An NP could be denied his honorable discharge and his benefits. An NP, Felix had heard, could be held in medical facilities indefinitely.

It was so frustrating. Was he not allowed to be devastated? “Isn’t it normal to wish that, given what happened? Just in terms of how simple it would have made everything? Isn’t that a common reaction?”

“The common reaction to having survived a deadly event is to feel grateful you survived it. So that’s our starting point.”

Logic was supposed to fix this. And for all Felix knew, logic would.

Some incredibly—intense—friendships are forged in a war, that’s for certain.

He had a six-month grace period with the IRS as a veteran; after that, all bets were off.

Still, they applauded—and all he’d had to do was spend three years on a ship, almost drown, and go a little crazy.

But with some skillful maneuvering and verbal encouragement they were successful, and that wound up saving her, for a while, from having to explain so many things.

A single bomb two thousand times stronger than any used before, dropped onto a densely populated city in Japan. As many as a hundred thousand people dead in an instant, nearly all of them civilians. In his radio address, Truman called it “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”

A weapon without shape that moved with the breeze and took down every living thing in its path wasn’t warfare. It was extermination.

Calling this new weapon “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe” was, he knew, horseshit. It was a harnessing of the hubris of men.

She didn’t know, knew only that the land of the living was a fractured and smoldering place at the moment, and it was leaking heavily into the other side.

She was tired of wondering if her ability came from God. If it did, it was clearly still up to her to make sure she did something worthwhile with it.

But she did care that Cal didn’t believe. More than she wanted to. It wasn’t just his opinion of it; something in his heart wouldn’t let him believe in it, or even try. Why? Because it took something away from him? Because it touched something he didn’t want touched?

She couldn’t shake the feeling that one day, as unlikely as it seemed, he was going to come around. He would see his way into believing in her—and probably through no action on her part. It was the closest thing to a premonition she’d ever had.

The truth was they cared for each other a great deal—around the things that angered them. And the fight that had sent them to opposite sides of the house so many months ago began, in the weeks after the war ended, to feel like something from another time.

She would remember thinking—with such confidence—that it spoke well of his character.

he was far from his old self. It was as if the war had taken him apart and the Navy had put him back together differently.

He stepped into rooms and seemed to have to wait for his compass needle to align.

The things that we love tell us what we are.

Within a month, the Salts—who hadn’t had any interest in coming to Bonhomie to see their son when he got back from almost dying in the Pacific—called to say they were coming to stay the night.

What came naturally to Margaret was wanting to sleep for more than three hours at a time. Wanting to have long pockets of quiet without the sound of crying. Wanting to feel like her existence consisted of something more than just taking care of two people, one entirely helpless and the other nearly so.

He nodded, and she knew he understood what she was saying: she’d made a choice. She’d had to make a choice.

hands gripping a stroller handle, and between them, a baby: sound asleep, and in question.

Women had the babies, and men, if they felt like it, began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out. Because they had to go to a wife, or to work, or to a war, or to that secret place of stoic brooding all men were given the key to at birth. Had any mother ever had the time for stoic brooding?

Only, they did. Sometimes they left them in baskets.

Unpredictability seemed to Margaret like such a luxury for a child to have. Imagine being unpredictable at Open Arms; how would anything have gotten done?

Ruth’s solution for how to deal with one child was to bring in more. Have his friends over.

that’s what parenting was: endless responsibility.

as he went up that he had no idea how lucky he was—to have everything he had, to have a house, and to have parents who bought him things— “I hate you!”

She was mad enough to step on that dead goldfish— —but in the next moment, she was shocked at herself and misty-eyed.

and noticed for the first time the two swirls coming out of his crown, the pattern like a Van Gogh sky. She kept stroking his head, watching the hair realign itself, inches from her face. So there it was.

Augie was the one who’d given Felix The things that we love tell us what we are.

How he’d gone off to the war hoping to finish the process of fitting into a mold made out of ideals. How he’d come back with a damaged mold.

Teague. In fact, it was as if all versions of Felix Salt had gone down with the Teague except for this one, this carapace of a guy with his eye set on nothing.

I wish you could be present for me, is all. Present for yourself. And—yes, both upstairs and down.”

“All I do is act.”

“Are you attracted to me?” Not are you still, which was a different question. Not were you ever, which was the most frightening question of all. No, hers was clearly the most incisive and important question, as well as the simplest. Are you? The answer was yes, because as much as he’d ever been attracted to any woman, he was attracted to her. And—there was just no predicting these things—his body was suddenly willing to prove it.

The heavier, more harrowing accounts, Felix noticed, were told calmly, almost without emotion. The facts were allowed to speak for themselves.

Why do you think they didn’t want us to pack anything, going over? They knew we were going to be bringing a lot of shit home.”

“I used to think you tuned me out,” Margaret said. “Now, I think you just don’t receive any signals. Yes, I told you that.”