Anything That Mattered

Mercy Chapter 20

New to Mercy? Start here with the first chapter

Previous Chapter: Maybe She Went Home

Even after 14 hours in his parents’ minivan, gold with rusted rocker panels, Austin was on top of the world rolling into town after boot camp. But then, his standard for top of the world might be pretty low after all the time he’d spent with his face in the dirt at Parris Island. He knew he was a different person now, and so would all his old friends. His swagger used to be a cover for insecurity, but now it was a display of true self-confidence. There was a set to his jaw that made a freckle-faced kid look like a man.

Pencil Art by Katie Chalmers

His mom threw some lame party. She tried. It was kinda painful, actually. She must have bought everything they made with an EGA on it, including paper plates, napkins, and balloons, and she crammed the house with guests. He thanked her, with a faint whiff of condescension, as he ducked out early. She smiled and hugged him with one arm as she held the giant bowl of back-up potato salad with the other, love and pride and a shadow of disappointment in her eyes. He made sure to shake hands with all the old guys she’d invited from the family and church, each one eager to share a sea story of some kind. And he wanted to hear them. In a way. Later. Honor was something he was supposed to prize now, and caring about those who had served before him seemed like the honorable thing to do. He couldn’t admit to himself that he didn’t give a shit. Pounding his cousins on the back, he muttered, “See you later?” to a couple of them. He winked at the nice all-American girls that his mom had invited, just to give them a thrill and make them wonder. Then he was off.

Happy to be back in his own car, he drove out on a back road and laid down some rubber just because he could before hurrying on to Devin’s apartment.

Ah—it was good to be home. There was his parking spot, behind Devin’s car, always backed in in case it needed a jump. Outside apartment 3A was the same ancient whale of a woman, smoking, her oversized brown acrylic sweater crammed beneath a too-small 1970s polyester suit coat. Devin was in 3B, at the top of a set of metal stairs, the same metal stairs Austin had climbed 1,000 times and more in high school with Devin and Jared and Cassie. It seemed so long ago, the way that 2 years can seem when you’re 20.

“Hey, hey, here’s the big-shot Marine,” Devin shouted as he came in. This party, unlike the one he’d come from, was not in his honor, which was one of the reasons he preferred it. Still, at this announcement, everyone looked at him, taking his measure, those who knew him holding it up against the Austin they’d known before and adjusting their expectations. He was a Marine now; he must be heroic or hard drinking or lecherous. He instinctively tried to live up—or down—to each person’s expectations without knowing for sure what they were.

Jared, sprawled on the stained sofa, raised his beer in greeting. Utterly devoid of ambitions, he didn’t give a damn what anyone expected, that lucky SOB. Austin had a steady job and Jared didn’t. He would be sent on adventures, but not Jared, so Jared probably envied him, too.

Devin set Austin up with his own beer and introduced a couple of people. Three or four of them wanted to hear all about boot camp and he was happy to share; it was a debriefing of sorts. Parris Island was like a foreign country to most of them; everything he told them seemed interesting and exotic and unknown, and he was good at making things that had been terrible at the time sound funny.

When the drinking games started, he performed well, as expected. He was a Marine now. Not that he’d been any slouch at it before. He was Austin: The Life of the Party. He would never break from the script he’d written for himself; who would he be then?

The room throbbed and spun and whirled and reverberated. The music was loud, the conversation shallow, and everyone kept up the charade of sociability and pleasure until it popped and fizzled. People began trickling back down the stairs to go home or propping themselves against the wall with throw pillows, dozing. Austin sat on the couch with a fistful of chips, smoking, wondering through the haze if he’d had a good time. In lieu of repairing a tear in the pleather upholstery, Devin had tossed a green fitted sheet over it to keep the stuffing in; it was hanging by one corner now. Austin picked lint balls off of it . . . 11, 12, 13, 13, 16. The quiet after a party is always a different kind of quiet, as if still buzzing with energy. It made Austin restless and discontented. Devin had brought in a pile of blankets and a few of their buddies were snoring on the floor. Now Devin himself came in scratching his t-shirt and yawning.

“Hey man, get some rest. I’m not cleaning up tonight.” The floor crunched under his feet and there were beer bottles on every surface.

Austin jumped, startled. “Yep. Ok.”

“You take the bed, buddy. Welcome home. For a few days, anyway.” Austin got up, his head too fuzzy with drink and exhaustion to resist the offer.

Before Devin could settle on the couch, Austin was back. “There’s a girl in the hall?”

Devin nodded, yawning. “Lacey. You want her?” He offered generously, as if she were a used piece of furniture that he could spare to help a friend.

Austin shrugged, missing the point, and squinted. “But what’s she doing out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think she’s passed out.”

“She’s on some bad shit. Probably got it here.”

“From who?”

Devin looked at him slyly, eyes almost closed, but didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. “Anyway, you know her.”

“Did we go to school with her?”

“Nah man, you are drunk, damn it. She’s kind of old—27, 28? Something like that, I don’t know. Naw, you know, she used to stay here for a while. She was with Brandon. When she wasn’t with everyone else.” Devin snorted. “She was getting clean lately, though. Kinda sad, I guess. I’ll tell you all about it another time, though. Actually,” he exaggerated a yawn, “I don’t know a damn thing about it, really. Goodnight.” Devin rolled over and pulled a coat up over his shoulders, all out of blankets.

Austin scuffed back out into the hall and stared at the woman on the floor. He wasn’t equipped at the moment to make any decisions, but she was half-exposed and looked cold. Under some noble impulse, he fumbled her into a seated position and hooked his arms through hers from behind. He half carried, half dragged her to the bed, carefully avoiding her chest, just like the USMC had trained him to carry a fallen female comrade to safety. He put her on the bare mattress and found the comforter on the floor, tossing it over her before throwing himself down on the other corner.

He couldn’t see when he half woke to someone crawling over him. The door creaked, the bathroom light went on in the hall. She didn’t close the door. He heard the refrigerator door open and close three or four times, too quickly for anything to have been taken out. He heard the clink of a glass, the tap. She came back and threw herself back on the bed as if she had used every last bit of energy.

She was warm beside him. He moved closer to her, cold. And it wasn’t with anticipation or pounding heart, it was just with cold and habit. His head was still fuzzy, he was falling asleep again, but still, he was fumbling with her in the dark.

She was asleep, he could hear her breathing hard, but then she moaned, and then she mumbled, “Who are you? Who are you?” Her hands pushed powerlessly on his chest, and she said, “No. No.” He took her weakness for consent, and anyway, they were half asleep, barely knew what they were doing. She wouldn’t remember tomorrow.

In the morning, she was as far to the other side of the bed as possible when Austin woke up, the sun above the roof of the next building shining through the blinds into his eye. She was still in her little skirt and V-neck t-shirt. Her eyes were closed; he didn’t think she was asleep, but if she wanted to pretend to be, that was fine with him. Austin picked up his pants from the floor, hoping the shower was empty.

Emily, Devin’s current girlfriend, was in the kitchen when he came out 30 minutes later, feeling a little more himself. She worked nights and had probably just gotten home. Austin could hear the clink of bottles in the living room, the crinkle of a garbage bag as Devin cleaned up.

Emily looked up from scrubbing the table, then went back to scrubbing it harder. “Lacey’s gone,” she said.

“Who?”

“Who? Who? The girl you slept with last night, you fucking idiot.”

“Oh . . . it wasn’t like that. She passed out in the hall. She looked cold.”

Emily put a hand over her heart, mocking him, “My hero! Like hell it wasn’t ‘like that’.” She leaned closer and said, “It’s not like she couldn’t tell what happened.”

“I mean, she was there.” He stumbled into a defense that was an inadvertent confession.

“You’re the one who said she was passed out.”

“She woke up later.”

“And what?”

“I dunno.” He shrugged. It was mostly true. Last night was blurry. It was too blurry for anything that mattered to have happened. “I was drunk.”

“You don’t get to do anything you want just because you’re drunk. You know what she said? She said it didn’t matter, that it was nothing that hadn’t happened before, she said she didn’t have anything left for you to take. She . . .” Emily bit her lip, lowering her voice, “She asked me for clean underwear.” Emily’s voice caught. To hide it, she stuck her head into the living room and shouted shrilly, “Vacuum!”

Austin, who had been pouring himself a bowl of cereal, paused to put his hand on Emily’s shoulder consolingly, “You softie. Girl like that don’t care about asking for panties. That’s the least of her problems.”

“You’re wrong,” Emily stated, pouring his cereal back in the box and spilling half of it. “She was so, so embarrassed. Stop thinking you know shit about ‘girls like that.’ And get out of my house. Now. Eat breakfast at home, or at Dunks, or nowhere, I don’t care.” Austin went back into the bedroom without looking at her, without looking at the bed, and grabbed his jacket and keys. She stood in the doorway, almost shouting, “I said now!” He held up his jacket but was silent.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said to Devin as he passed through the living room. “Gimme a call.”

Devin nodded and made a gesture that was halfway between a wave and a salute.

It was cold. The door of the sedan screeched as he opened it. He slammed the car into reverse and just escaped hitting the dumpster—good thing he wasn’t driving Devin’s Jeep.

He needed sleep, and his parents’ house was the best place for that; he wasn’t excited to go there, but he was too tired to think of a better option. He was too tired to think about Emily and what she’d said.

He hoped his mom wouldn’t be up, but then he realized it was already 10:30 a.m., so maybe she’d be out running errands. Her car was in the yard of the modest ranch they’d lived in since he was 9.

She was at the table with coffee, and she smiled as soon as he opened the door. “Look what the cat drug in! I didn’t know if we’d see you today.” Love and pride and joy that he was home was spilling through cracks in her normally sardonic demeanor. “Aunt Dot wants you to come over tonight. Says she needs to fatten you back up.”

Austin smirked and nodded.

“Look at this!” She showed him a thread on one of the town’s Facebook pages with his picture smiling off of it, captioned: “Couldn’t be prouder of this fine young man. The newest proud Marine from our own city, Austin Campbell.”

A string of comments followed:

“Love this guy!”

“I had Austin in Boy Scouts, great guy, one of our best.”

“Nice to see a local kid with a future.”

“JB, is this THAT Austin? (Wink emoji)”

“OMG :O”

“My dad might be the oldest Marine in Scottsville, wishes you all the best.”

Austin glanced at it. “Nice.”

“You want some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’m going to get some rest.”

“Ok,” she said, too brightly. She worried about him; he knew that.

At last, he was horizontal again. He buried his head in his pillow. Emily’s anger flashed through his mind, and he laughed to himself. “As if anything that mattered could have happened last night. Anyway, what do people go to parties for?” He had already almost forgotten, he told himself, while he shivered and pulled a heavy blanket of unmet expectations up over his shoulders and tried not to remember the girl’s icy toes touching his leg last night.

Next Chapter: Brushing Shoulders

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