Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 16 - Unc

Photo by Lucho Morales on Unsplash

“Long Range LaGrange done did again, boy, I tell you what!” Jeremy’s bunkmate hooted upon entering their quarters.  

It was just after dawn and Ethan Rodriguez glistened, soaked with sweat, his undershirt stuck to his skin.  He was all high energy and emotion.  It radiated off him like a fever from the events of that night.  

“Number twenty-three,” Jeremy said and looked down at his empty hands. 

“Twenty-three, boy!” Rodriguez echoed loudly and slapped Jeremy repeatedly on the back.  “My man!”

“Hooah,” Jeremy answered unenthusiastically.  

Rodriguez shot upright, eyebrow raised.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

“What?”

“Hooah, like you just farted out last night’s broccoli, man.”

Rodriguez crossed his heavy arms against his chest and stared down at Jeremy.

“It’s my birthday,” Jeremy said.

“What?  How’d I not know this?”

“I guess I didn’t tell you.”

“Son, that ain’t right.  How old?”

“Twenty-three.”

“What!” Rodriguez jumped backward, hands on his head like some weird dance step.  “Kill number twenty-three on your twenty-third?  Dude, you need to play the lottery today.  My boy is defying odds!”

“Can’t get a ticket in Iraq.”

“Someone’s going to be winning your Mega Millions tonight then, boy,”  Ethan said.  “Better not be Saddam, I tell you what.”

“He’d have a tough time cashing it in.”

“Well, we need to celebrate this or something, man.” 

Ethan hit play on the boom box next to his bed and heavy bass and electronica filled their tiny room.  Rodriguez danced his ridiculous dance, fists together, arms moving in a circle, hips swirling in the opposite direction.  This was his victory dance, even when victory was questionable.  But they’d made it through another heavy night of combat so Jeremy let Ethan do his thing.  

He sat on the bed, hair wet and a towel wrapped around his waist.  He’d just showered but could already feel the sweat coming back up through his pores.  The piece of paper brushed up against the exposed skin of his thigh. Jeremy picked it up, silently folded it closed and slipped it under his pillow.  It was a letter from David back home, writing to ask Jeremy to be his best man that summer when David planned to marry some girl named Olivia whom he just met at college.  

LaGrange boys could certainly be hasty.  Their folks must be livid.

Jeremy had once asked the same of David, to be his best man, but that marriage never happened.  It, too, was a quick courtship, but everything fell apart almost as soon as he proposed when his fiance’s ex-boyfriend showed up with a bottle of wine at her backdoor one night and she figured nothing bad could come of that.  Instead, all sorts of bad followed and Jeremy ran.  He ran from his parents, he ran from Beatrice and her stupid ex-boyfriend, and he ran into the Army and kept running right until he ended up in the desert on the other side of the world.  A girl broke his heart and Jeremy broke everything he saw after that.  

The only thing that didn’t break was his connection to David.  No matter what Jeremy did, David refused to let his brother go.  

At the start of the whole Gulf War mess, before CNN turned it into a non-stop reality show for the folks back home, Jeremy met Ethan Rodriguez right after boot camp.  They were both assigned to the 3^rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 2^nd Armored Division (Forward) of Task Force 1-41 Infantry.  

Ethan and Jeremy learned to drink together the first two years back when they were stationed stateside before deployment to Kuwait was even a possibility.  In every hole-in-the-wall bar they could find, first at Fort Benning in Georgia before transferring to Carson in Colorado then back east to Fort Jackson near Columbia, if they were on leave, Ethan and Jeremy were drinking.  He liked to think it was all for fun, to numb away all that lead him there.  But nothing that could numb it entirely.

Fort Jackson was his favorite pre-war station as it brought him back closer to his brother.  Though David was almost two years younger, their childhood had always been on equal ground.  They traded clothes back and forth right down to their socks and underwear, and any fights they had were usually over petty things like who controlled the remote control or got the last bowl of Honeycomb cereal.  

Their entire childhood revolved around the bedroom they shared, even during the year after Jeremy graduated from high school as he struggled to decide what to do with his life.  When Jeremy met Beatrice, he figured marriage would be a good path and they’d find answers together.  There’d be a new Mrs. LaGrange, and maybe this one would be more understanding of Jeremy’s lack of direction than the one who’d brought him into this world.

Despite their pretentious-sounding last name, the LaGrange family didn’t come from massive wealth.  At the same time, their family didn’t want for much.  Their parents were providers, that’s what they were good at, but their ability to nurture sons wasn’t something in which they ever showed much interest.  In later years, especially after Jeremy saw how involved David and Olivia were in the lives of Mark and Rosie, he realized just how little actual parenting he and David received.

Growing up they were solidly middle class, with a mother who occasionally did accounting work for her own parents’ printing company and a father who traveled weekly, crisscrossing the country and living primarily in airplanes and hotel rooms.  David and Jeremy were accustomed to reheated chicken and frozen vegetables, sitting at the small, round kitchen table while their mother smoked cigarettes and drank iced tea and watched them eat. 

It was so unusual for their father to be home on any given weeknight that, when he was, family life was strained.  They walked closer to the hallway edges on those days and cleaned the kitchen as quietly as possible.  The radio in their bedroom was always played two notches lower than when their father was on the road. 

But there were times when everything felt normal and fine for the LaGrange family.  When they each learned to drive, first Jeremy and then David, their folks bought them each a used car to get back and forth to their minimum-wage jobs.  The family also owned a second home, more modest, on Lake Hazelton, which had belonged to their maternal grandparents before them.  Time there on summer weekends was usually peaceful, but not always.  

Along with the lake house they inherited upon his grandparents’ deaths, they also took possession of a sporty eight-seater fishing boat, bright yellow with a dark brown racing stripe painted sharply on both sides.  David and Jeremy would take the boat far from the view of their parents and, once out of sight, would turn and swerve in sharp cutting circles, the edge of the boat nearly scooping up water like a bucket. 

The second summer after he graduated from high school, the family went to Lake Hazelton for the Fourth of July weekend.  Jeremy told his parents of his intentions to marry Beatrice and they used no restraint in showing their disapproval.

“We got married too young,” his mother told him.  “We don’t want you to have to struggle like we did.”

“What about college?” his dad barked.  “I thought this was supposed to just be a gap year!”

On their third day at the lake, Beatrice called and told him what happened the night he’d left.  

“It was all meaningless,” she cried into the phone.  “I still love you.  It was meaningless.”

Jeremy thought he could forgive her and even told her as such.  But the hole in his heart after that phone call just kept burning so deep and so black and so consuming that Jeremy was sure it would eat him alive right there on the spot.

That night, long after everyone else had fallen asleep, Jeremy lay in bed with eyes that refused to shut.  While David snored lightly in the twin bed next to his, Jeremy was jittery and needed to move. He slipped out from between the sheets and slid into his shorts.  

Barefoot and bare-chested, he made his way to the small kitchen with the antiquated wood cabinets all stained with heavy lacquer that protected them from the constant humidity at the lake.  He wasn’t hungry, but opened the refrigerator anyway and stared inside at the bottle of pickles, the mayo, and the other sundries that were always present and plentiful at the Hazelton lake house.  Sighing heavily, he gave the refrigerator door a slight nudge and, as it began to shut, the last beam of light from inside flickered across the boat keys that were tossed on the counter earlier that evening. 

Jeremy squinted and looked out the window.  Scattered lights were still on inside homes along the periphery of Lake Hazelton, but the lake itself sat dark and still.  Without thinking, he opened the refrigerator again, stole two cans of beer, and snatched the keys up into his hand before escaping through the screen door and down to the dock.

Even in the middle of the night, the North Carolina summertime air was hot and sticky.  Jeremy climbed aboard and put the two cans into cupholders before stepping back onto the dock.  He untethered the ropes from their moorings, gave the boat a slight push, and hopped back aboard.  The boat continued to slide away from shore silent as a leaf on the water and once it drifted a good twenty feet away, he cranked up the quieter trolling motor and reversed away from the dock.  Back at the house, all the windows were black.  Jeremy cracked open one of the beers, took a heavy swallow, and let the main outboard engine roar to life before veering toward the center of Lake Hazelton.  He made his way, lights off, far from his family’s lake house.   

Upon reaching the middle of the lake he killed the motor and let the boat drift once more.  He grabbed a towel and climbed towards the seats in the boat’s bow, spread the towel on the floor, and lay down.  As the boat bobbed beneath him, Jeremy gazed upon the black sky above, speckled with endless constellations, and imagined it was swallowing him whole. Before he even opened his next beer, the gentle rocking of the boat lulled him into a deep slumber.

Photo by Tim Umphreys on Unsplash

When he opened his eyes a few hours later, dawn had already broken pink and orange and glorious, another North Carolina summer morning.  Yet it wasn’t the sunlight that woke him, but the sound of feet clomping on the deck and stopping right next to his head that still rested on the towel.  A man stood directly above him and it took a moment for Jeremy to realize what was happening.  He bolted upright and scurried back away from the man.

“You pass out last night?” the man said.  

He wore sharply pressed khaki shorts and an equally ironed khaki shirt with a gold badge on his breast pocket that gleamed in the morning sun.  His hiking boots were polished a dark brown and his white socks were pulled tight over his calves, right up to his knees.  

“I fell asleep,” Jeremy said.

The man snatched the empty beer can out of the cupholder next to the captain’s chair and looked at it thoughtfully.  

“Fell asleep or passed out drunk?”

“I just had the one.” 

Jeremy looked over and saw another boat tethered to his own.  The words “Wildlife Officer” were neatly printed on the boat’s side in bright green. Another man dressed in the same khaki uniform stood watch behind the wheel.  

While the game warden who woke him commandeered his boat and followed Jeremy’s directions back to the LaGrange lake house dock, the other officer followed close behind.  By the time they arrived, both of David and Jeremy’s parents were already waiting on the shore, hands on their hips and furious.  

They were unrelenting after that night.  Even after Jeremy told them things were off with Beatrice, they never showed an ounce of compassion.  

“Good,” his mom said. “I didn’t like her anyway. She wasn’t a nice girl at all.”

“You’re out,” their dad said.  “Time to man up and quit acting like a spoiled baby.  Stealing my boat in the middle of the night?  Getting drunk with lights off?  Someone could have crashed into you.  Are you trying to kill someone?  Do you want to kill someone?”

They kept talking but Jeremy had already started to shut down.

The Army soon followed.

Years later, when he returned back to Charlotte the summer David married Olivia, he’d hoped his time in the military and multiple tours in the Gulf would have somehow appeased his parents.  But after that night he borrowed the boat and was brought home by the wildlife officers, it was as if his parents had given up all hope for him.  They were more acquaintances than family now.

That was not the case with David.  And Olivia — an only child — relished having a brother in Jeremy.  In the early years of their marriage, there was always an extra plate at the table for Jeremy.  He joined them on trips to Nags Head where they lost track of how many times they rented the same two-bedroom condo over the years.  When Jeremy made the commitment to hammer through an electrician’s training program and just make a go of it, David and Olivia let him live rent-free in their spare bedroom for the better part of a year.  

He mourned with them when no children came and was exuberant when, after years of marriage, the miracles of Mark and Rosie came into their lives.  He didn’t know it was possible to love two little creatures as much as he loved Mark and Rosie.  He never missed a school play, soccer game, or birthday.  He was the fifth member of their family, and that was more than enough for him.  He’d do anything for any of them.  

He never met another woman who he was willing to risk his heart on. By the time he hit his forties, he was fairly certain it would never happen anyway.  When he hit fifty, he embraced eternal bachelorhood entirely.  He had David and Olivia, Mark and Rosie.  What more could he want or need? 

When the twins were three, David and Jeremy’s father finally died.  A few years after that, the Lake Hazelton property was sold along with most of the other possessions their parents had accumulated over the years.  Neither David nor Jeremy wrestled with an ounce of sentimentality in letting it all go.

Their mother moved into an assisted living facility where no one expected her to live for too long, given the fact she’d smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes each day right up to when they moved her into the Carolina Acres home.  When she found out she’d have to quit smoking to live there, she was unrelenting in the fury she directed at them, particularly her oldest son.  

“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me like this after all I did for you,” she said to Jeremy on the day they unloaded her remaining furniture.

She lasted ten more years, and was happy there with many friends, though she’d never admit it to her sons.

When she died the previous summer, it was Jeremy’s idea that he and David take some of their unneeded and unwanted inheritance and go on the kayaking trip of a lifetime.

“We’re both pushing sixty,” Jeremy had said.  “It’s now or never, literally.”

Throughout the fall and winter, they planned for the trip to Minnesota in the late spring.  

And now David was dead for almost a month and Jeremy couldn’t stop the endless rattling in his brain that kept him up at night with the same words, over and over and over: 

“It should have been me.”

It sometimes felt like Jeremy had once again taken up residence at David and Olivia’s house.  Though his house was only fifteen minutes away, whenever he left David and Olivia’s, a part of him wondered how long it would be before his absence would give Olivia, Mark, and Rosie time to start realizing that Jeremy should have died instead of David.  

That would never happen, though.  Rationally, he knew that.  He was as certain of their love for him as he was of them.  

And because of that, he’d do anything if he could go back in time and take David’s place.  If he could go back to last fall and never even suggest that damned kayaking trip.  He’d do anything to erase the pain that was swallowing them all alive.

It was just past midnight as he sat in Olivia’s kitchen.  His sister-in-law and his only niece and nephew were asleep upstairs.  

He wondered how things would have been different had he not fallen asleep on the boat that night decades before.  Would his parents have still rushed him out the door?  Would he have still joined the Army and gone to war?  Would he have cared as much about Mark and Rosie, so much so that he could honestly say he’d give up his very life for either one of them?

And Olivia, too, this woman who loved his brother perhaps even more than he did.  And now Jeremy was responsible for taking David away on that trip and letting him slip away into the water.

Did he still have a purpose here, in this family?  Even with David’s sudden passing, life wasn’t slowing down.  Mark and Rosie’s graduation was three days away, and they all feigned excitement for that day, planning a celebratory party that would bring the same people into the house that had been there the month before when David died.  

The twins both planned to attend their parents’ alma mater.  No one said anything about postponing those plans.  Would Olivia stay in this huge house by herself after that?  Would she perhaps move to Columbia to be closer to her kids?  Would that leave Jeremy here in Charlotte completely alone?

“Unc?” Mark suddenly said from behind him.  Jeremy jumped in the darkness.

“Sonofa!” Jeremy said in a hushed whisper.  “Scared the crap out of me, dude.”

“What are you doing up?”

“You know.”

“Yeah.”

“I heard thunder,” Mark said.  

“That’s weird.  Weatherman said clear skies all week.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mark said, taking a seat at the table. “Graduation’s outside so we’ve been checking.”

The house suddenly vibrated.

“See?” Mark said.  

“Weird.”

Above them, they heard the creaking of Olivia’s bed, followed by the light patter of footsteps as she made her way to the bathroom.

“Woke up your mom, sounds like.”

The sky lit up outside and then was followed immediately not by a rumble, but a crash so loud that images of Iraq shot through Jeremy’s mind.  Through the ceiling above them, they heard Olivia cry out in surprise at the noise.

“Yeah she’s definitely awake now,” Mark said, grinning. His smile was the same as David’s had been.

Rosie came into the room next, a blanket draped over her shoulders.

“Y’all quit making so much noise,” she joked.

“I thought it wasn’t supposed to rain this week,” Mark said.

“Obviously they got that wrong,” said Rosie.

“You know,” Jeremy said.  He got up and peered up at the sky through the window.  “Look. It’s not raining at all.”

There was another blinding flash and simultaneous thunderclap, both happening so suddenly that they all jumped again.

“Great day!” Jeremy said, nearly tripping over the table as he tried to get away from the window.

“That felt like it was right above us,” Rosie said.

At that moment, Olivia screamed in her room above them, and her screaming didn’t stop.

“Mom!” Mark said and ran for the stairs.  

The sight of Mark at that moment made Jeremy shiver.  The way his hair was parted like David’s, and even the angle of his shoulders and the way he scurried upstairs was so like his brother that for a moment Jeremy felt like his brain had skipped a beat and that maybe David wasn’t gone after all.

Rosie followed quickly behind her brother.  Jeremy paused at the bottom of the stairs.  

Outside, lightning flickered like a strobe light and the thunder didn’t so much crack and dissipate as much as it exploded and kept roaring louder and louder.  It felt like the hair on his arms was standing on end.

When Jeremy appeared in the master bedroom doorway upstairs, the twins each held Olivia by one of her arms, struggling to pull her backward.  Jeremy couldn’t understand what he was seeing. The bedroom wall, the one with the large picture window that looked out to the woods behind their home, was no longer there. In its place was an unexplainable wall of black.  

“What the hell is that?” Mark yelled. 

Jeremy could barely hear his nephew over the roar coming from all around and even inside that blackness. It felt like his chest was being pulled into the room like a magnet.

“Stay with me!” Olivia called out over the roar.  She wrestled her arms out of the grips of her children and wrapped them around Mark and Rosie’s shoulders, pulling them towards her.  They collapsed on the floor just feet away from the door, bracing themselves against the feet of the bed. They were frozen in place, both by fear and something else.

“Unc!” Mark yelled. “What’s happening?”

“What is that?” Rosie screamed.  She turned back to Jeremy with wide, terrified eyes and couldn’t stop repeating her cries.  “What is that?  What is that?”

Not only the floor and walls around them, but the very air they breathed was vibrating.  Jeremy’s vision blurred and darkened.

Olivia held her children closer, but not as tightly as she wanted to.  She tucked their heads under her chin.  She wanted to clutch onto them so hard that she could pull them right into herself again.

Jeremy fell to the floor behind them and swallowed them into his massive bear hug.

“That’s not lightning!” Jeremy yelled.  He could barely see anything now.

The windows shattered then, and the walls collapsed.  

Where they should have seen rain and lightning, perhaps the trees behind the house, they instead only saw blackness in the space where the wall had been just seconds before, and the blackness was growing closer.

“I’m so sorry!” Jeremy called out, but for what, he wasn’t sure. David, their childhood, Iraq, the children.  Every thing and every one in every time.  So much regret.

“David!” Olivia cried, though she knew her husband wasn’t there.  The children nestled their heads against their mother’s neck and cried out for him, as well.

“Daddy!” Rosie screamed.

Olivia thought at that moment, as unexplainable chaos erupted all around them, collapsing the very walls into a foreign black nothingness, that all sense had suddenly left the world.  In a split second — a mere blip of thought — she imagined how lovely it would be to pull both of her children into her very womb and to carry them within her once again, to be forever connected, never out of reach, never where they could be harmed or taken away from her.  

The roar grew so loud that it was all they could hear, and that unknown blackness that made all four of them feel like their minds were crumbling away suddenly wasn’t in front of them, but all around them, and even inside of them.

Olivia’s last thought was that she couldn’t imagine living the rest of her life without David, and she couldn’t bear the thought of ever losing her children, as well.

But at that moment, something was happening she couldn’t even begin to comprehend, and the darkness swallowed all of them completely. 

And in that darkness, Mark and Rosie ceased to ever exist.

Photo by Cai Carney on Unsplash