The Time Keepers

Chapter 38

CHAPTER 38 Pittsburgh, 1969

J ACK DIDN ’ T SLEEP AS PEACEFULLY AS HE THOUGHT HE WOULD that first night at Becky’s apartment. He woke up with night sweats, his heart pounding. The noise outside her window, which was just harmless college students tossing a couple of beer bottles on the street, set off all the adrenaline in his body. He found himself bolting forward in Becky’s bed, his eyes wide open and his hands instinctively grabbing for a rifle that, of course, wasn’t there.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Becky asked him as she sat up and rubbed his back. Naked from the waist down, her silhouette in the moonlight brought him back to reality.

“Nothing, just a bad dream.” He rubbed his eyes.

She tried to pull him back to her, but his body hadn’t quite settled yet. A thin blanket of perspiration covered his skin. Becky had left the window half-open and the early-autumn breeze entering the room sent a chill over him.

Jack left the bed and went to the bathroom, returning a few minutes later with a glass of water that he put down on the nightstand, next to a portrait the two of them taken when they were in Atlantic City right before he left for Camp Pendleton. He settled back in bed, facing the photograph, remembering that afternoon when they held hands on the boardwalk and had eaten cotton candy, how he later kissed her on the pier, Becky’s hair whipping in the salt air.

The boy in the photograph now looked like a stranger to him.

“Try to get some sleep,” she repeated, this time wrapping her arms around him. “You’ll need your rest for tomorrow.”

He lay motionless and Becky curled into him, her warm breath on his neck. He was surprised how much he wanted to wiggle away from her. He had craved the chance to be intimate with her again, but now he felt restless. Although he knew he was safe in her apartment, his body struggled to relax. His body could not relinquish its adrenaline, its need to constantly be on high alert. When a car rumbled, he thought it was a possible mortar shelling. When the radiator hissed, he imagined a VC under the bed. He wanted his rifle next to him because it had become like another limb for him. Without it, he felt unprotected and unsafe, despite him knowing full well he was in a sleepy college town outside Pittsburgh, as far away from Vietnam as one could be.

To calm himself he tried staring at the photograph of the two of them, the wide smiles on their faces. He couldn’t help but notice how his eyes looked in the picture. People had always told him that he had beautiful eyes. Pale blue with flecks of gold, Becky used to say that was what first caught her attention when they were back in high school. “They glint,” she told him. “Like they’re smiling at me.” She looked at him deeply and touched his face that first time they kissed behind the bleachers. “And with those thick curls,” she said, her fingers running through his hair.

“I’m the one supposed to be doing the complimenting,” he answered sweetly as he dipped in for another kiss.

“Can’t a girl tell a man he’s good-looking?” She giggled.

He’d spend the rest of the night contemplating the boy he saw in that portrait by her bedside. The difference in his expression is what now haunted him the most. He envied the carefreeness, the levity in his expression. And he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever feel that way again.

He buried his mother in a graveside ceremony. The mourners consisted of just he, Becky, and a handful of her friends, and those who knew her from the diner. She had waitressed there for as long as he could remember, but he had no idea she was so well loved by her customers. The woman with the permanent smile who pours you coffee and remembers if you like your toast with extra butter or with strawberry jam holds a special spot for some people, especially the lonely ones who breakfasted at a counter each morning rather than at home with a family. His mother’s boss, Walter, who had always been kind to both of them over the years and generous with a Christmas bonus or an envelope of extra money on her birthday, also came to pay his respects.

“Your mother was a good woman.” Walter opened his arms and gave Jack a hug. “Don’t you look smart in your uniform, son. She’d have been so proud.”

Jack had dressed in his full Marine Corps regalia for the funeral. The blue-and-red jacket with his new medals, the blood stripe pants and white rimmed cap. As he buttoned his jacket and looked at himself in the mirror, he felt the full weight of the uniform. The protective shield that enabled him to put up a barrier between his grief and his responsibilities as a son.

He’d bury his mother with his shoulders back and without letting his emotions take over him. Like the marine he now truly was.

That afternoon, as he watched his mother’s coffin be lowered into the ground, he couldn’t think about all the other things that were being buried along with her. Her voice, her laugh, her concern for his well-being. He had always wanted to be the son who looked out for his mother, to protect her as she had for him. For almost all his life it had just been the two of them.

Becky, in a simple black dress and gloves, had driven them to the cemetery. Her bright orange VW Bug puttered through his childhood town, the streets familiar and unchanged. Jack didn’t have the urge to speak, and Becky let the silence wash over them, her hand every now and then reaching over to touch his cheek when they idled at a traffic light.

At the intersection of Main Street and Hanson Avenue, he looked outside the window of the passenger seat and felt his throat tighten at the site of the Dairy Queen, where his mother used to buy him a soft serve cone with the few extra dollars she had from her tips. He almost made Becky stop the car so he could do something that threaded his heart to her before he said goodbye. It was silly, an ice cream cone … but somehow it symbolized everything to him. All her devotion and her personal sacrifices.

Had he thanked her all those times? He wasn’t so sure now. He knew he told her he loved her, but had he actually ever sat down and thanked her for how she raised him on almost nothing? He knew grief was part of burying a loved one, but was guilt also? He suddenly felt like he had been a terrible son.

Becky, sensing Jack was lost in thoughts of his mother, gripped his hand and squeezed it.

Her quiet was one more thing he loved about her. Silence was its own form of language. And Becky sensed this. Her touch was a comfort. It replaced the need for words.